Boston by Upton Sinclair

Author:Upton Sinclair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

CHAPTER 14

JUDGE FURY

I

Four times each day the prisoners made their march down the middle of the street, accompanied by military escort. Four times each day the jury made a march, from their hotel to the court-house, at noon to a restaurant and back, then to the hotel in the evening: twelve “good men and true,” with court officers preceding and following, the aged foreman toddling at their head—he was to die within three months. It was a heavy strain upon old men, to sit for six hours a day in a crowded courtroom, in suffocating midsummer heat. The judge mercifully said they might take off their coats, but their Puritan consciences required most of them to be uncomfortable.

Seven weeks their semi-imprisonment lasted; the bored victims got to know one another too well, and when they were tired of playing cards they sought refuge in the daily newspaper. They were not allowed to read about their own case—the sheriff cut it all out of the papers; but they read about a court up in Boston, where Charles Ponzi was being punished for having made five million dollars without permission of the Federal Reserve Board. The financial wizard’s digestion had been wrecked by the ordeal of law, so the papers explained, and he had to be taken out to a restaurant each day, to get his diet of little neck clams and cream of tomato soup.

And then the story of Mishawum Manor, where the emperors of the moving picture world had been entertained by naked young ladies dancing the highland fling! Who could have invented more delicious material for the beguiling of bored jurymen? The Hearst newspaper put it on the front page each day: the romantic life story of “Brownie” Kennedy, the “madame” of this roadhouse; the number of husbands she had deserted, the millionaires she had plundered and ruined; details about the “champagne and chicken supper,” the hugging and the dancing, and how the guests had disappeared to the rooms upstairs, so that at one time there was nobody to eat the chicken or drink the champagne. Later they were reassembled, much in déshabille, and the young ladies—names, addresses and prices all given—were flinging their very highlandest, when a flashlight went off and a photograph was taken of the scene. Most of the guests were too drunk to know what this meant; when they woke up next afternoon, they paid a thousand dollars for “entertainment and breakage,” and thought that would be the end of it—just as if they had been at home in Hollywood.

But no, this was a pious Puritan community; and presently the emperors of moving pictures were receiving letters informing them that several of the young ladies who had been hired for the party had husbands, and these husbands were threatening suits for the desecration of their wives; furthermore, some indignant moralist had carried the story to the district attorney of Middlesex County, and that official was greatly shocked. Middlesex is sacred territory, because it contains the city of Cambridge, home of Harvard, the center of the center and hub of the hub.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.