Jailbird (22 page)

I held Mary Kathleen’s hand.

Nobody had ever told her he loved her before.

I was wearing a suit and a necktie, and so were most of the men there. We wanted to show that we were as decent and sober citizens as anyone. Kenneth Whistler might have been a businessman. He had even found time to shine his shoes.

Those used to be important symbols of self-respect: shined shoes.

Whistler began his speech by making fun of his bandages. “The Spirit of Seventy-six,” he said.

Everybody laughed and laughed, although the occasion was surely not a happy one. All the members of the union had been fired about a month before—for joining a union. They were makers of grinding wheels, and there was only one company in the area that could use their skills. That was the Johannsen Grinder Company, and that was the company that had fired them. They were specialized potters, essentially, shaping soft materials and then firing them in kilns. The fathers or grandfathers of most of them had actually been potters in Scandinavia, who were brought to this country to learn this new specialty.

The rally took place in a vacant store in Cambridge. Appropriately enough, the folding chairs had been contributed by a funeral home. Mary Kathleen and I were in the first row.

Whistler, it turned out, had been injured in a routine
mining accident. He said he had been working as “a robber,” taking out supporting pillars of coal from a tunnel where the seam had otherwise been exhausted. Something had fallen on him.

And he went seamlessly from talk of such dangerous work in such a dark place to a recollection of a tea dance at the Ritz fifteen years before, where a Harvard classmate named Nils Johannsen had been caught using loaded dice in a crap game in the men’s room. This was the same person who was now the president of Johannsen Grinder, who had fired all these workers. Johannsen’s grandfather had started the company. He said that Johannsen had had his head stuck in a toilet bowl at the Ritz, and that the hope was that he would never use loaded dice again.

“But here he is,” said Whistler, “using loaded dice again.”

He said that Harvard could be held responsible for many atrocities, including the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, but that it was innocent of having produced Nils Johannsen. “He never attended a lecture, never wrote a paper, never read a book while he was there,” he said. “He was asked to leave at the end of his sophomore year.

“Oh, I pity him,” he said. “I even understand him. How else could he ever amount to anything if he did not use loaded dice? How has he used loaded dice with you? The laws that say he can fire anybody who stands up for the basic rights of workers—those are loaded dice. The policemen who will protect his property rights but not your human rights—those are loaded dice.”

Whistler asked the fired workers how much Johannsen actually knew or cared about grinding wheels. How shrewd this was! The way to befriend working people in those days, and to get them to criticize their society as brilliantly as any philosopher, was to get them to talk about the one subject on which they were almost arrogantly well-informed: their work.

It was something to hear. Worker after worker testified that Johannsen’s father and grandfather had been mean bastards, too, but that they at least knew how to run a factory. Raw materials of the highest quality arrived on time in their day—machinery was properly maintained, the heating plant and the toilets worked, bad workmanship was punished and good workmanship was rewarded, no defective grinding wheel ever reached a customer, and on and on.

Whistler asked them if one of their own number could run the factory better than Nils Johannsen did. One man spoke for them all on that subject: “God, yes,” he said, “anyone here.”

Whistler asked him if he thought it was right that a person could inherit a factory.

The man’s considered answer was this: “Not if he’s afraid of the factory and everybody in it—no. No, siree.”

This piece of groping wisdom impresses me still. A sensible prayer people could offer up from time to time, it seems to me, might go something like this: “Dear Lord—never put me in the charge of a frightened human being.”

Kenneth Whistler promised us that the time was at hand for workers to take over their factories and to run them for the benefit of mankind. Profits that now went to drones and corrupt politicians would go to those who worked, and to the old and the sick and the orphaned. All people who could work would work. There would be only one social class—the working class. Everyone would take turns doing the most unpleasant work, so that a doctor, for example, might be expected to spend a week out of each year as a garbage man. The production of luxury goods would stop until the basic needs of every citizen were met. Health care would be free. Food would be cheap and nourishing and plentiful. Mansions and hotels and office buildings would be turned into small apartments, until everyone was decently housed. Dwellings would be assigned by means of a lottery. There would be no more wars and eventually no more national boundaries, since everyone in the world would belong to the same class with identical interests—the interests of the working class.

And on and on.

What a spellbinder he was!

Mary Kathleen whispered in my ear. “You’re going to be just like him, Walter.”

“I’ll try,” I said. I had no intention of trying.

The most embarrassing thing to me about this autobiography, surely, is its unbroken chain of proofs that I was never a serious man. I have been in a lot of trouble over the years, but that was all accidental. Never have I risked my
life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.

People who had heard Kenneth Whistler speak before begged him to tell again about leading the pickets outside Charlestown Prison when Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. And it seems, strange to me now that I have to explain who Sacco and Vanzetti were. I recently asked young Israel Edel at RAMJAC, the former night clerk at the Arapahoe, what he knew about Sacco and Vanzetti, and he told me confidently that they were rich, brilliant thrill-killers from Chicago. He had them confused with Leopold and Loeb.

Why should I find this unsettling? When I was a young man, I expected the story of Sacco and Vanzetti to be retold as often and as movingly, to be as irresistible, as the story of Jesus Christ some day. Weren’t modern people, if they were to marvel creatively at their own lifetimes, I thought, entitled to a Passion like Sacco and Vanzetti’s, which ended in an electric chair?

As for the last days of Sacco and Vanzetti as a modern Passion: As on Golgotha, three lower-class men were executed at the same time by a state. This time, though, not just one of the three was innocent. This time two of the three were innocent.

The guilty man was a notorious thief and killer named Celestino Madeiros, convicted of a separate crime. As the end drew near, he confessed to the murders for which Sacco and Vanzetti had been convicted, too.

Why?

“I seen Sacco’s wife come here with the kids, and I felt sorry for the kids,” he said.

Imagine those lines spoken by a good actor in a modern Passion Play.

Madeiros died first. The lights of the prison dimmed three times.

Sacco died next. Of the three, he was the only family man. The actor portraying him would have to project a highly intelligent man who, since English was his second language and since he was not clever with languages, would not trust himself to say anything complicated to the witnesses as he was strapped into the electric chair.

“Long live anarchy,” he said. “Farewell, my wife, and child, and all my friends,” he said. “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. “Farewell, Mother,” he said. This was a shoemaker. The lights of the prison dimmed three times.

Vanzetti was the last. He sat down in the chair in which Madeiros and Sacco had died before anyone could indicate that this was what he was expected to do. He began to speak to the witnesses before anyone could tell him that he was free to do this. English was his second language, too, but he could make it do whatever he pleased.

Listen to this:

“I wish to tell you,” he said, “that I am an innocent man. I never committed any crime, but sometimes some sin. I am innocent of all crime—not only this one, but all crime. I am an innocent man.” He had been a fish peddler at the time of his arrest.

“I wish to forgive
some
people for what they are now
doing to me,” he said. The lights of the prison dimmed three times.

The story yet again:

Sacco and Vanzetti never killed anybody. They arrived in America from Italy, not knowing each other, in Nineteen-hundred and Eight. It was the same year in which my parents arrived.

Father was nineteen. Mother was twenty-one.

Sacco was seventeen. Vanzetti was twenty. American employers at that time wanted the country to be flooded with labor that was cheap and easily cowed, so that they could keep wages down.

Vanzetti would say later, “In the immigration station, I had my first surprise. I saw the steerage passengers handled by the officials like so many animals. Not a word of kindness, of encouragement, to lighten the burden of tears that rest heavily upon the newly arrived on American shores.”

Father and Mother used to tell me much the same thing. They, too, were made to feel like fools who had somehow gone to great pains to deliver themselves to a slaughterhouse.

My parents were recruited at once by an agent of the Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron Company in Cleveland. He was instructed to hire only blond Slavs, Mr. McCone once told me, on his father’s theory that blonds would have the mechanical ingenuity and robustness of Germans, but tempered with the passivity of Slavs. The agent was to pick up factory workers, and a few presentable domestic servants for the
various McCone households, as well. Thus did my parents enter the servant class.

Sacco and Vanzetti were not so lucky. There was no broker in human machinery who had a requisition for shapes like theirs. “Where was I to go? What was I to do?” wrote Vanzetti. “Here was the promised land. The elevated rattled by and did not answer. The automobiles and the trolleys sped by heedless of me.” So he and Sacco, still separately and in order not to starve to death, had to begin at once to beg in broken English for any sort of work at any wage—going from door to door.

Time passed.

Sacco, who had been a shoemaker in Italy, found himself welcome in a shoe factory in Milford, Massachusetts, a town where, as chance would have it, Mary Kathleen O’Looney’s mother was born. Sacco got himself a wife and a house with a garden. They had a son named Dante and a daughter named Inez. Sacco worked six days a week, ten hours each day. He also found time to speak out and give money and take part in demonstrations for workers on strike for better wages and more humane treatment at work and so on. He was arrested for such activities in Nineteen-hundred and Sixteen.

Vanzetti had no trade and so went from job to job—in restaurants, in a quarry, in a steel mill, in a rope factory. He was an ardent reader. He studied Marx and Darwin and Hugo and Gorki and Tolstoi and Zola and Dante. That much he had in common with Harvard men. In Nineteen-hundred and Sixteen he led a strike against the rope factory,
which was The Plymouth Cordage Company in Plymouth, Massachusetts, now a subsidiary of RA
MJAC
. He was blacklisted by places of work far and wide after that, and became a self-employed peddler of fish to survive.

And it was in Nineteen-hundred and Sixteen that Sacco and Vanzetti came to know each other well. It became evident to both of them, thinking independently, but thinking always of the brutality of business practices, that the battlefields of World War One were simply additional places of hideously dangerous work, where a few men could supervise the wasting of millions of lives in the hopes of making money. It was clear to them, too, that America would soon become involved. They did not wish to be compelled to work in such factories in Europe, so they both joined the same small group of Italian-American anarchists that went to Mexico until the war was over.

Anarchists are persons who believe with all their hearts that governments are enemies of their own people.

I find myself thinking even now that the story of Sacco and Vanzetti may yet enter the bones of future generations. Perhaps it needs to be told only a few more times. If so, then the flight into Mexico will be seen by one and all as yet another expression of a very holy sort of common sense.

Be that as it may: Sacco and Vanzetti returned to Massachusetts after the war, fast friends. Their sort of common sense, holy, or not, and based on books Harvard men read routinely and without ill effects, had always seemed contemptible to most of their neighbors. Those same neighbors,
and those who liked to guide their destinies without much opposition, now decided to be terrified by that common sense, especially when it was possessed by the foreign-born.

The Department of Justice drew up secret lists of foreigners who made no secret whatsoever about how unjust and self-deceiving and ignorant and greedy they thought so many of the leaders were in the so-called “Promised Land.” Sacco and Vanzetti were on the list. They were shadowed by government spies.

A printer named Andrea Salsedo, who was a friend of Vanzetti’s, was also on the list. He was arrested in New York City by federal agents on unspecified charges, and held incommunicado for eight weeks. On May third of Nineteen-hundred and Twenty, Salsedo fell or jumped or was pushed out of the fourteenth-story window of an office maintained by the Department of Justice.

Sacco and Vanzetti organized a meeting that was to demand an investigation of the arrest and death of Salsedo. It was scheduled for May ninth in Brockton, Massachusetts, Mary Kathleen O’Looney’s home town. Mary Kathleen was then six years old. I was seven.

Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested for dangerous radical activities before the meeting could take place. Their crime was the possession of leaflets calling for the meeting. The penalities could be stiff fines and up to a year in jail.

But then they were suddenly charged with two unsolved murders, too. Two payroll guards had been shot dead
during a robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts, about a month before.