The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A New England Legend (16 page)

The Professor of Criminal Law could endure no more of this. “I must go,” he said to the Writer. “Do you understand? I must go!” The Writer nodded. They rose and went out very quickly. Outside in the corridor, the reporters were waiting.

“Did he grant a stay?” one of them cried.

The Professor of Criminal Law shook his head. He and the Writer walked on outside into the sunshine where the picket line still moved. The Writer turned to his companion and shook hands with him.

“Well,” the Writer said, “this is the world we live in. There is no other that I can be sure of. I am glad to have met you. I will remember having met you, and your courage.”

“I have no courage,” the Professor of Criminal Law answered plaintively.

Then the Writer went back to the picket line, all he could do now, and began to walk again, and the Professor of Criminal Law moved with heavy steps toward the offices of the Defense Committee.

Chapter 11

E
VEN BEFORE
four o'clock on August 22nd, there were people at Union Square in New York City, hundreds of people, some of them standing quietly in little groups, some of them walking about slowly, and still others moving as if they were looking for something not easily found; and the police were there too. On the rooftops around the square, police had set up observation posts and machine gun nests, and the people in the square, looking up, could see the figures of the police silhouetted against the sky, and the blunt, ugly gun muzzles pointing down at them. People looking up wondered, “Well, now, what do they expect?” Already, there was a thematic silence in the place; did they expect that out of here, out of Union Square in New York City, an army would begin to march to Boston to free Sacco and Vanzetti?

And even if the police thought of anything as crazy as that, they should have realized that it was too late. It was Monday afternoon already. Even a man's heart would have to fly quickly to reach Boston before midnight.

It was shortly after four o'clock that the square began to fill. Strangely, women came first, many of them; no one understood why that should be. They were mothers and housewives, plain working class women for the most part, poorly dressed, with the dry, hard hands used for the whole sustenance of life. A good many of them had their children with them, some two or three little children whom they led by hand, some smaller children carried in arm—and the children knew that there was no pleasure out of this particular pilgrimage. When the women arrived, two small, informal meetings began, with the speakers standing on boxes, but the police moved in quickly and dispersed those meetings.

At a little after four o'clock, large groups of workers began to arrive in the square. Already in the square were hundreds of fur and hat workers who had laid down their tools for this day in protest and sympathy, and now there moved among them, mixing with them, Italian laborers who had gone on the job at seven in the morning and left it at four in the afternoon. Straight from work they came to Union Square, carrying their lunch pails, hot and tired and dirty with the day's labor. They came in groups of four and seven and ten, off this job and that job, and at half past four, a meeting began among them. The police moved toward this meeting, but other workers also moved toward it; and it suddenly became too big and the police left it alone.

A group of merchant seamen came into the square, Irish and Poles and Italians, half a dozen black men and two Chinese, and they kept together as they moved through the thickening eddies of people. They came to where two women stood weeping, and then they halted in a sort of embarrassed and impotent respect. Not far from them, an evangelist fell upon his knees and cried out, “Brethren and sisteren, let us pray!” A few people gathered about him, but not many. Then up to the square, around Broadway from Fourteenth Street, came a cavalcade of three long, open police cars, carrying the big brass from the Center Street station. They got out and looked at the square. Then they put their heads together and had a meeting of sorts; then they drove their cars into West Seventeenth Street, where they formed an off-limits command post. A dozen policemen guarded the cars, which were loaded with riot guns and tear gas grenades.

The policemen on the rooftops watched with interest as the square filled up. At first, looking down, they saw individual men and women standing here and there; the changes which followed seemed, from high above, mechanical in nature and as inevitable in process as a chemical transformation would be. Suddenly individuals were grouped; no signal was given, no one was seen to move; it happened in silence—and in the same silence, the clumps of men and women fell together into three or four masses. All around the square were clothing factories; by five o'clock the workers poured out of them onto the street, and almost in minutes Union Square had been turned into a connected sea of people—and yet it had only begun. The ladies garment workers walked from uptown; the furniture and paper workers pressed into the square from downtown below Fourteenth Street, and from the publishing houses and printing places on Fourth Avenue, other streams flowed toward the square. Hundreds became thousands, and the restless, searching movement of people halted. Now it became a mass of mankind. And a noise went up from it, a muted, wordless, inchoate noise that began like a whisper of angry prayer.

Any one of the policemen upon the rooftops would have been insensitive indeed not to have felt a certain awe at the manner in which so many thousands of people had come together, not to have wondered—at least a little—what force two poor, condemned men could exert to call out such love and concern. Yet even if they wondered about this, the whole world stood between them and the people below, the connection being derivable only from the bandoleers of machine gun bullets that lay heaped here and there. The policemen were for the most part church-going men, but it did not occur to any one of them, as it did to an Episcopalian minister down below among the people, that when Christ was taken by the soldiers of Pilate, then somewhere in the city of Jerusalem, the plain working people had come together like this, to hope and pray that out of their unity and strength, something would come.

The Episcopalian minister had never before in all his life been to anything like this, never to a demonstration of working people, never to a mass protest meeting. He had never walked on a picket line or felt the impact of a wave of horse-mounted police swinging their long riot sticks, or heard the chatter of a machine gun searching haphazardly for people's lives, or felt the stinging pain in his eyes of tear gas, or covered his head with his hands to save his skull from the pounding clubs of hate-maddened police. His life had been a very sheltered life, but in that way it was not greatly different from the lives of thousands of middle class Americans—yet this thing had reached him, too. Like so many others in America, he had gone out of himself and joined with the suffering of millions, through the two condemned men in Massachusetts, and day by day, his understanding of what was happening in Massachusetts deepened. Today, unable to bear the thought of being alone, unable to endure the waiting, he had walked downtown to Union Square—where he found so many companions to walk the hill of Calvary together with him.

Now he felt not less sadness, but more peace. He moved through the crowd. Some looked at him curiously, he was so different from them, in his clerical dress, with his pale, thin features, his graying hair, and his almost delicate manner of motion; but he did not mind this, nor was he disturbed by their stares. It surprised him somewhat that he could feel so much at ease among them, and it also terrified him a little that he, thinking of himself as a man of God, had already spent almost three-score of years in places where these people never came. How that could have been, he did not really understand—but he would, in time.

He looked at the people around him and guessed at what they did to earn their daily bread. Once when he stumbled, a Negro with a sleeveless leather jacket smelling of paint and varnish, helped him to his feet. He saw a carpenter with all his tools, and a woman who wore a crucifix touched his arm tenderly as he moved past. A group of women wept quitely and they spoke to each other in a tongue foreign to him. He heard many tongues spoken here, and wondered again at the strange and varied quality of these people, about whom he knew so little.

Then someone stopped him and asked him would he lead a prayer. That was the last thing that had been on his mind when he turned his steps to Union Square, but how could he refuse prayer? Full of fear and trepidation, he nevertheless nodded and said he would. He pointed out that he was an Episcopalian, as perhaps few of these folks here were, but nevertheless, he would lead the prayer if that was asked of him.

“It doesn't matter,” they said. “Prayer is prayer.”

His arm was taken, and he was led through the crowd, and then he was helped onto a platform from where he looked down upon an apparently endless sea of faces.

“God help me,” he said to himself. “Help me now. I have no prayers for this. Never was I in a church like this, and never did I see such people before. What will I say to them?”

Nor did he really know until he began to speak. Then he found himself saying, “… whatever our strength is, take from it and give it to the two humble and good men in Charlestown Prison, so that they may live and mankind may be redeemed.…” But when he had finished, he knew it was wrong; from a person of faith, he had become a man of fear and questioning, nor would he ever again be as he was before.…

And still the square filled. Clerks and street car conductors and weary-eyed dress finishers and bakers and operators and mechanics—they moved into Union Square in a silent procession, apparently without end. Many left, but many more came and took their places, and the great sea of humanity seemed to exist motionless and unchanged.

Word of it went to Boston. The New York Defense Committee for Sacco and Vanzetti was only a few blocks from Union Square. The people who worked there had worked for days without sleep or rest, and now, in their agonizing weariness, they took excitement and comfort from the masses of people in the square, and sent word of it to Boston. “Tens of thousands,” they cried over the telephone, “are pouring into Union Square. There never has been a protest like this. Surely it will be understood there.”

They were not alone in thinking that there had never been such a protest as this. Through a window that over-looked one part of Union Square, a man had watched the people come, and he too had the strange feeling that he was witnessing something new and terrible and wonderful—something never quite equaled before in all the mighty demonstrations of American working, people. This man was able to watch the square from his own office, and he had spent the afternoon in his office waiting for a number of others who were to come and meet with him. Like himself, they were trade unionists. He was at the window looking down at Union Square at half past three, when the first one of the group scheduled to meet in his office that day, a leader in the organized needle trades in the city, joined him.

The man at the window—whom we can call the Chairman—turned around, smiled with immediate pleasure, and offered him his hand. They were old friends. Since his childhood, the Chairman had worked in his own industry, first at the most menial type of work as floorboy and delivery boy, and then as an operater and cutter as he learned the trade. Now he was a leader in his union, a man of growing influence and importance in organized labor in the city of New York. He had a comfortable office and he could look forward to a pay check more often than not. In spite of these fortunate circumstances that had come so lately, he remained very much as his friends had known him, simple, direct, and filled with eager and unabating enthusiasm. He was not tall, but gave the impression of height, and was solidly built, with a square and pleasant face; and in the warmth of his movements and the directness of his gestures, there was something so amazingly simple that most people found it quite irresistible. Now the Chairman took the needle trades leader by the shoulders and steered him to the window, pointing out over the square.

“Look at that! Isn't it something to see!” he cried.

“Yes—I suppose so,” the needle trades leader answered. “It's also August 22nd.”

“That doesn't mean the fight is over.”

“No? What then? What do we do with a few hours left?”

“Delay the execution somehow. Get twenty-four hours—that's enough. With that much time, we make our plea again to the Federation leaders. There's only one thing that will save Sacco and Vanzetti, but it will also save us—and the American labor movement.”

“And what is that?”

“A general strike.”

“You are dreaming,” the needle trades leader said, almost angrily.

“Am I? Then this is one dream that will come true.”

“And suppose there is no delay in the execution?”

“There must be,” the Chairman insisted.

“I would not talk to the others about a general strike—because it's a dream. It can't be done, and if we should call for it, we cut ourselves off.”

“Then you would let them die?”

“Am I killing them? But our dreams won't save them.” He pointed to Union Square. “There we are—all that we can do now. Pick up the phone and plead with the Governor of Massachusetts, but don't dream about general strikes. The men who can make such things have sold out, five times over, sold themselves and their workers, and the unions that would lead a general strike have been smashed and washed clean in blood. Don't dream any more.”

“I'll still dream,” the Chairman answered, and with that he fell silent, apparently immersed in his own thoughts.

For a while now the two of them stood watching the demonstration below in wordless attention. Presently they were joined by a rank and file leader of the Italian construction workers in the city. A steel worker who had been fighting ten years to organize the union in Gary, Indiana, and who had come into the city only this morning, also joined them, as did two copper miners from Montana. The two copper miners had arrived in New York a couple of hours before. They were both fairly young men, with dry skin and long, hard faces, pocked all over with cinder specks. All the distance from Butte they had come by rail, riding in box cars, in gondola cars, and sometimes on the rods underneath the cars; and in this fashion they beat their way into New York, perhaps not completely on schedule, but not too long after they had promised the Chairman that they would be there. They shook hands with him warmly, studying him all the while with frank curiosity, for they had heard much of him, yet had never seen him before. The Chairman, however, knew, them well by reputation, and knew the story of how for five years they had been trying to organize the copper and silver miners of the mountain states. They had learned in a hard school, and had emerged from it, as needs be, hard men.