The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A New England Legend (10 page)

“At three o'clock,” the Minister of Labor continued, “I had a brief meeting, at the suggestion of the Ambassador, with one of the under-secretaries. This under-secretary informed me that you could be fairly certain that the execution would be carried out. He said he realized that the whole question of this pending execution placed
il Duce
and his government in a most difficult position. He wished me to assure you that all parties fully appreciate the sensitivity of your position and the exceedingly delicate nature of it. He added that important people were most outspoken in their admiration for the manner in which you have dealt with it.”

“You see!” the Dictator cried, emphasizing his words by pounding his clenched fist upon his desk. “You see what would have come had I followed the advice of the bull-headed pigs who know only one thing—a communist is a communist. These men have the castor-oil mentality.”

He had coined a phrase as of the moment, and he smiled in spite of himself. Both the minister and the secretary also smiled. It was really a very good and pungent phrase.

“The castor-oil mentality,” the Dictator repeated. “However, you do not unify a nation with a castor-oil mentality. Is it only communists who are concerned with the fate of those two red bastards? I tell you, no. I tell you, the indignities and the wrongs suffered by Sacco and Vanzetti are an affront to every Italian who loves his motherland and who cherishes liberty! Thereby, the people will understand that their leader is not insensitive to the sufferings of any Italian anywhere. The honor of Italy is sacred. You are certain that this under-secretary was telling the truth?”

“I am absolutely certain,” the Minister of Labor answered. “Furthermore, at this moment a delegation from the town of Villafalletto waits upon you, and earnestly and humbly requests an audience. Villafalletto, as you know, is the town in which Vanzetti was born. His family still lives there. However, I believe that two of the delegation are from Turin.”

“You have taken their names?” the Dictator asked, his manner changed, his anger gone and now replaced with a fatherly benevolence.

“We have their names and finger prints, and already we have started an investigation of them, of their associations and of their backgrounds. When they leave here, they will be under surveillance twenty-four hours a day.”

“Very wise and exceedingly competent,” the Dictator nodded. “A lack of thorough technical competence is a curse of our people, and I am pleased to see such understanding displayed on your part. Be certain of one thing—that when a delegation is assembled and travels hundreds of miles to see me, there are communists somewhere in the picture. Every person on the delegation is touched with the rotten filth of communism. Remember that. Now I will see them.”

When the delegation entered the great office of the Dictator, he rose from his desk, walked slowly around it, and advanced to meet them, both hands outstretched, his dark eyes filled with sympathetic understanding of what faced Italy on this day; and in his countenance, sorrow appeared to mirror their own grief. The delegation was led by an old man who, it was plain to see, had worked with his hands all his life.

The Dictator extended his own hands to greet this old man, and remained for a moment in deep silence. The old worker who led the delegation took his written plea out of his pocket and unfolded it carefully. While the others stood behind him, their caps in their hands, he read hesitantly and not without fear, in a trembling voice, the following message:

“A thousand peasants and working people of Italy have gathered together in the town of Villafalletto, where Bartolomeo Vanzetti was born. We have met together in the memory of a good and gentle Italian, who is unjustly doomed to die. We resolve that we will do all in our power to prevent his death; whereupon, we humbly send a delegation of our members gathered from the villages around Villafalletto, as well as from the city of Turin, to plead with
il Duce
that he may intervene with the government of the United States to prevent this unspeakable legal murder. We know the power of
il Duce's
voice, and we humbly and respectfully urge that his voice be raised to ask clemency for two sons of our working class, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.”

When the old man had finished reading, his rheumy and tired eyes filled with tears, and he groped in his pocket for a handkerchief to dry his cheeks. Unquestionably, he had a personal relationship to the doomed men.

When the Dictator suddenly embraced the old man, everyone in the room was visibly moved by the impulsive action. Half of the delegation were weeping when they left the office, and as the Dictator reseated himself behind his desk, he himself was not unmoved. Still caught in the spirit of the occasion, he called for a stenographer, and dictated the following press release:

“
Il Duce
has communicated with the President of the United States in a plea that the lives of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, both of them of Italian origin, may be spared. He has called upon the President of the United States to take this step in view of cementing relations between Italy and the United States, within the framework of warm friendship existing between these countries for so many years.”

“The President of the United States, acknowledging
il Duce's
message, has conveyed his intense regrets that, due to the system of government prevailing in the United States, this matter would have to remain in the hands of the State government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. While the President of the United States recognizes the sincere interest and deep concern of
il Duce
in this matter, he regretfully announces that he has no power to intervene.”

When he had finished with this message, the Dictator pointed out to the Minister of Labor that it must coincide with a statement from Washington, and that his confirmation should be obtained before his own statement was released to the press. The Minister of Labor assured him that no difficulties would lie in the path of such a desirable conclusion to the affair.

All this had acted as a catharsis, and the pall of gloom lifted from the Dictator. In another twenty minutes, he was able to leave his office for his bedroom, and suddenly the day, the future, all the circumstances of his existence, had once again become bright and joyful.

Chapter 8

B
EGINNING
in the morning of August 22nd, the picket line had been moving back and forth in front of the State House. The size of this picket line varied. When it began for today, there were no more than a handful of persons who defiantly and self-consciously moved along the sidewalk, walking silently in those very early hours of the day. A little later, when people began to hurry by to their work, the size of the picket line increased; and there was a brief interval around noontime when it was swelled by many men and women who joined it for fifteen minutes or a half-hour before they in turn went back to their jobs.

But even apart from this, the picket line had increased substantially by ten o'clock, and by this time, dozens of policemen had taken their places on the scene, spreading out—in effect, surrounding the picket line and attempting to give an impression of sturdy defenders of the people meeting a dangerous menace. First there were only city police; then the city police were reinforced by state police; then a car parked about a block away, four men with tommy guns sitting inside of it, ready if the occasion arose; although what possible occasion could call them into action, no one on the picket line was able to say. The actual purpose of the massed police and semi-military preparations around the picket line was more to intimidate than to defend; and in this process of intimidation, the police were not wholly unsuccessful.

For three or four days, people concerned about the Sacco-Vanzetti case had been coming into Boston from all over the United States. When the final decision was made by the Governor of the Commonwealth that Sacco and Vanzetti must go to their death at midnight of August 22nd, it seemed to many people in many parts of the United States that they themselves could hear the low but bitter moan of anguish that arose out of Boston. This was felt by an amazing variety of people. Physicians and housewives and steel workers and poets and writers and railroad engineers, and even ranch hands riding on their lonely work in the far, far west, shared this peculiar and fearful intimacy with the lives and the hopes and the fears of. Sacco and Vanzetti. Execution is as old as mankind, and unquestionably the number of those who were innocent but went to their death, was great; yet never before in this land had an impending execution affected and shaken so many people.

In Seattle, Washington, the day before August 22nd, a Negro Methodist minister preached a sermon on the case of Sacco and Vanzetti. He began his sermon by recalling an experience he had had in the state of Alabama as a little child. Such experiences were common enough to Negroes born and raised in the South for a particular chord to be struck among his listeners; and the preacher went on to tell how, in the little town where he had lived, a cry for blood had filled the air. A poor, foolish, hysterical woman raised the cry that she had been raped; and then all the hounds of hell began to gallop at full pace. Even though he was just a little boy at the time, this Negro minister had consciously watched a web of circumstances tighten around an innocent man until finally the innocent man was lynched. The preacher now recalled the inevitability of these circumstances, and the anguish and suffering of the man trapped by them.

“What do I see in this case of Sacco and Vanzetti?” he asked from his pulpit. “I try to talk to you, my flock, as a man of God, which is not an easy thing. But I must also talk to you as a black man. No more can I shed my skin then I can shed, here in this life, my soul. I have been thinking a great, great deal about this case of Sacco and Vanzetti, telling myself that a Sunday would come when I could no longer keep silent and I would have to preach my sermon on it. I do not delude myself into believing that one sermon spoken by one voice will really alter the awful fate that awaits these two poor men. Neither can I delude myself into believing that my own silence should be justified by this understanding.

“Last night, I talked with my wife and my children of Sacco and Vanzetti. The five of us sitting there, all colored people whose crust of bread has at times been bitter indeed, found ourselves weeping. Afterwards, I asked myself why we had wept. I recalled that there have been those historians recently who claim that they cannot find spelled out in history, proof of the passion of our Lord, Jesus Christ. How foolish these people are! They seek for evidence of one Christ and one crucifixion, when the history of that time tells the story of ten million crucifixions. Yesterday I and my people were slaves in bondage; and two thousand years ago, there was an angry slave called Spartacus, who led his people against their bondage, and told them to rise up and make themselves free. When he was defeated, six thousand of his followers were crucified by the Romans. Who, then, will say to me that history makes no mention of the passion of Jesus Christ?

“And will someone a thousand years from today seek vainly in the pages of history to discover and reveal the passion of Sacco and Vanzetti? Will they ask for chapter and verse—and if they should not find it, say that the Son of Man never died for us? This I asked myself, and when I had asked myself this, a bleak sadness came over me, my heart became heavy, and when I stared into the darkness, looking for light and for a pathway, none appeared. Then I had to say to myself,
You are a man of little faith and less understanding
, and I had to berate myself and become angry with myself, for in so short a time I had forgotten that I and my wife and my three children all wept because these two Italian immigrants must die, because a web of circumstances had closed about them, and no force in the whole world seems able to save them. If out of this, I see only the darkness, then indeed I have ceased to believe either in God or in His Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ.”

“But always, the glimmer of light appears somehow out of the darkness. I wanted to preach a sermon, and I asked myself, who will I preach to?” In my mind's eye, I saw my congregation sitting in their pews, and I looked upon them in a way I had not looked upon them before. I had never said to myself before that I preach to plain working people, to hewers of wood and drawers of water. I tried to think of them only as people—and what need to define them as working people? Yet my own people are working people—are they not? I see now that you wipe your eyes. That is right. And in due time, you will weep; for the passion of Sacco and Vanzetti is your passion and mine. It is the passion of the working people of our time, whether their skin be white or black. It is the passion of the poor driven Negro of my childhood, who was hanged up by his neck by a mob of screaming, hate-driven men. It is the passion of a working man who goes from place to place, pleading that someone will buy the power of his hands, because his wife and his children are hungry. It is the passion of the Son of God, who was a carpenter.

“We are a patient people. With what effort we learned our patience, I cannot possibly estimate—for how does one measure blood and tears and heartache? But we are a patient people, and slow to anger. Yet now I do not know whether this is a virtue or a fault? They have said now that Sacco and Vanzetti must die in a few days. I do not know what our duty is, so few of us and so far away. There was one man, Peter, who could not see his Lord and companion taken, whereupon he drew a sword and smote with it. Then said Jesus unto Peter,”

‘“Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which my father hath given me, shall I not drink it?'

“Long did I ponder upon these words, trying to dispute with something within me which said,
No, this is not enough
. I have no answers. My heart is filled with sorrow, and I come to you with my sorrow to ask that we pray together for these two men.They will die for us.…”