CHAPTER 6

The Flown Arrow: The Aftermath of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case (1932)

Five years ago this month, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were killed in the electric chair in Massachusetts.1 The case had taken seven years; it has become public property, so that no one in the country was free of it; it had been argued and pled in so many different ways, and so widespread an activity had become concentrated on the case that the burden belonged to the world. There were those who believed during the seven years of trial and imprisonment that the accused were innocent. There were others who were convinced when the court records, the testimony of psychologists, the letters of Sacco and Vanzetti themselves were made public. But some were never convinced; and among these were their judge, Webster Thayer, President Lowell of Harvard and his investigation committee, Governor Fuller of Massachusetts, President Coolidge, and the laws of Massachusetts and the United States.

Sacco and Vanzetti were murdered; a few days after, the Boston Herald said, editorially: “We have an idea that the case will soon be over, and that the public here and abroad, of every shade of opinion, will accept the result, and forget about it. The whole affair will then pass into history, not again to be heard from . . . The arrow is flown.” All of the conservative publications were hoping for some quiet after the protest. There was in New England an idea that the execution was the end. The Boston Evening Transcript reprinted a cartoon showing an oil-skinned, rugged sailor standing squarely on a wharf, holding a great volume of “The LAW of Mass.” under his arm, haloed with black clouds that darkened the background and were split only by a set of sprawling capitals, that informed the reader that they were the “Storm of Anarchistic Propaganda and Intimidation.” The title of the cartoon was “Weathered.” Massachusetts stood bravely on the shore, back turned to the sort of propaganda that made Vanzetti say to the court: “Not only am I innocent of these two crimes, not only in all my life I have never stole, never killed, never spilled blood, but I have struggled all my life, since I began to reason, to eliminate crime from the earth.”2

They were condemned, virtually, on charges that claimed that, whether the witnesses were perjured or not, the men seemed conscious of their guilt when they were arrested. At that time, they were living the way they always had been; they had not received the money it was claimed they had stolen at Bridgewater and Braintree; but they did not seem to enjoy being forcibly arrested on a charge of murder. During the seven years spent in jail, Sacco and Vanzetti prepared themselves for a death that would immediately mark them as signal victims of prejudice and fear. Their death on August 23, 1927, began their career in history.

The execution set loose a volley of condemning comment that riddled the pride of Massachusetts. It is true that a few of the old guard were left to set up headlines; papers like the New York Times with its streaming “Parade of 150 Sympathizers,” “Four Final Legal Pleas Made to the Governor that Failed to Delay Execution of Death Sentence,” showing its feeling through a split veil of conservatism, were typical. The Evening Transcript continued its policy of toadying to tradition by telling of how a magistrate sentenced a man to two months in the workhouse for distributing Sacco-Vanzetti literature, but even here a touch of irony may be found in the story of the sentencing by Judge Thayer of brothers who had admitted thirteen burglaries to thirteen years in jail. Sacco and Vanzetti, with widespread denial of their guilt, received death.

Immediately after the execution, Arthur Garfield Hays, the well-known labor defense lawyer, took test cases of six arrests to the Supreme Court.3 The arrests had been made during the processions in front of the Charlestown jail, and among the victims were John Howard Lawton, the playwright, Professor Ellen Hayes, of Wellesley, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. They were representative of the group of radicals and intellectuals who had come to Boston from all over New England, and from the eastern and middle-western states to add their demonstrations in protest. This publicity was capitalized by hostile critics. George A. Bacon of Springfield, Massachusetts, said in a speech that day that “well-meaning but dangerous intellectuals caused hysteria.” The Impero of Rome blamed the anarchists and revolutionaries for the death of the two men, as did the German communists.4 These European sympathizers had hoped during the imprisonment that the two men would be freed by intercession, by the Governor, the President, or the Supreme Court, but Coolidge was silent, Governor Fuller was silent, the Justices Holmes, Taft, and Brandeis, who might have spoken then, were silent.

Silence was more effective, perhaps, than speech, immediately after the execution, but it was impossible in the face of such an outrage. The American Legion was planning to march through Paris, and expected lines of French citizens, eager and proud along the roadways. L’Humanité printed this statement before they arrived: “Do the Fascists of the American Legion want to be welcomed in Paris as the assassins of Sacco and Vanzetti?”5 No capital between Bern and Mexico City was allowed to go without extra police protection. Men do not do this sort of thing for murderers, with no conviction of their heroism.

There were other reverberations immediately after the fact. In the American Year Book for 1927, the statement was made that “in the opinion of many besides the Socialists, Sacco and Vanzetti had not been proved guilty of the crime for which they were sentenced, but were being victimized for their activity as labor radicals.” The Harvard Progressive covered the front page of their first issue, in 1929, with an article entitled “President Lowell Should Explain.” Magazines that were voices for the country spoke: Current History, The Living Age, The Nation, The Outlook, The New Republic all protested. Dr. Meiklejohn wrote an article, “In Memoriam.”6 Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote “Fear.”7 There was an anthology of poems for Sacco and Vanzetti compiled, which included the opinions of the strongest of living poets in a volume called America Arraigned!8 The Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee had published regularly broadsides and defenses, and mourned the crime that must fall on the country.9 Upton Sinclair wrote the novel Boston that commemorates them.10 The play Gods of the Lightning followed, by Maxwell Anderson and Harold Hickerson.11 John Dos Passos’s book Facing the Chair, written before the execution, was given wider circulation.12

But Governor Fuller said, “Thank God it is all over!”13

. . . . the executioner threw the switch

and set them free into the wind

they are free of dreams now

free of greasy prison denim

their voices blow back in a thousand lingoes singing one song

to burst the eardrums of Massachusetts.

Make a poem of that if you dare!14

And why should we, now—why should we five years after the deed, care, or stop in the year of 1932, pausing to inquire after these two men? They are dead, and wise men do not harbor rancor against the killers of the quiet dead. They are dead, and there are better and more pleasant things to do than mourn. . . . and we have our own dead to bury, and it is hard enough to face the beautiful without being reminded of death. And why do we stop in what we are doing to remember these, and prophesy?

Two days before the electric current was switched through the strapped legs, they said, for a world that might or might not listen, “Only two of us will die.”15 Vanzetti wrote to Sacco’s son, in the English that he had learned so masterfully in jail, “If we will be executed after seven years, four months, and seventeen days of unspeakable tortures and wrong, it is for what I have already told you; because we were for the poor and against the exploitation and oppression of the man by the man.”16

People do not forget, we, in our optimism, say. John Haynes Holmes, in the introduction to America Arraigned! said, “‘Massachusetts, there she stands!’—triumphant, scornful, contented, bloody . . . But deeds like this live on . . . A work of violence and horror, like that achieved upon Sacco and Vanzetti, disrupts the cosmic order . . . There are millions of men who will never forget, until Sacco and Vanzetti are justified . . . So will the story become a legend through all future time—the names Sacco and Vanzetti, the perpetual symbols of victorious martyrdom.”17

That is not quite true, patently. Our cosmic order, we say, has been disrupted by more important things: the price of wheat, the fall of stocks, sickness and death closer to us than these deaths. We want no martyrs, we want no legends. The law decided and the law is as fair as any of us could be. And anyway, time passes, people forget.

People forget editorials like the one in the Evening Transcript that was called “The Only Possible End,” and tried to justify the verdict liberally, seeing the force of public opinion, seeing the questions raised, and saying that nothing else could have been done. “It would have been lynch law . . .” and then, suddenly, explaining all their rationalizations away with one stroke, adding, “We could not do less without trampling on all our traditions.” That explains the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and has explained it ever since the court records were published: six volumes of searching questions and answers that showed inadequacy, stupidity, confusion.

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote for The Outlook an article called “Fear,” a week after the execution. She was wise. She did not mention the names of the murdered. She said that Massachusetts and New England and America would not be anxious to mention two certain names, that the fear of death was lodged a little deeper in our hearts after two certain deaths had been accomplished. She said that there would be quiet now for a little time as America considered what had been done, that the children of the generation would be more anxious to inquire than the generation itself of the executioners. She said that there was a dull external quiet, now, and no word spoken of two dead: “And the tumult is in the mind; the shouting and rioting are in the thinking mind.”18

Five years are gone since the month they lived in the death-house, and the days drew in. The headlines of their death notices were, with clumsy irony, placed next to 1927 advertisements of evening dresses that proclaimed that those styles were “sponsoring black for evening.” Today’s headlines are different. The Boston paper has, in that same place, “Guard White House as Radicals March.”19 Maybe the two were prophets, those mad Italians, who allowed themselves to be drawn into the web of American freedom!

The State capitol has a government building with a gold dome which is bright over the city.20 And there is a library in which information may be found, in which there are books kept that record even this thing.21 And people walk in the streets, and are no busier than other people in other streets this year, and may be stopped and asked whether they remember this far-gone incident of the lives of the two foreign-born who were called criminals and killed. There was one who worked in the library, a young man who surrounded himself with legal documents, and ran up and down among the records, who remembered the case. He thought that it happened a long, long time ago. He said, “Oh, I don’t know—I can’t tell—yes, I know about it, but I don’t want to have anything to do with it.” There was an old man who sat in the sun in front of the library doors, and slowly tamped the tobacco down into his pipe with a thumb, and put up his face to the sun. He said, “I don’t remember it,” and when it was called to his memory, he said, “I don’t like to form opinions. Yes, now I remember it, but I don’t think anything about it. What should I think about it?” There is a back section of town, with churches that have rawly painted figures on their walls, and restaurants, and fruit stores. An Italian in a fruit store remembered Sacco and Vanzetti, but what could one do? he asked—the government kill them, it is awful, it is no right, but what to do? Yes, what to do. There are Greeks serving in restaurants who never heard of this case, who know only Greeks, who like their own business. In front of the Capitol is a park that is cool and green and absorbent of the sun, and people rest, protected by the State.22 A worker reads a book, covered with a newspaper dust cover, and, from the fineness of the type, on law or economics or philosophy. There are two children playing at his feet, and he looks a little bit like Vanzetti, the same deep eyes, the droop of the mustache. But he looks up, and you recognize him for a central European, from some Slavic country, and you know before he answers that he will not remember. A woman, neat-boned, pale with native paleness, walks across the cement. She remembers, but it was a long time ago, there was mention in the papers, but people did not talk about it much, she cannot see how it should affect anyone now. Five years is a long time. You turn away. A dark, intent young man with a briefcase comes up the road. He is an English student, a friend of Ralph Cheyney’s and Lucia Trent’s, who compiled the anthology America Arraigned!, so that he will be prejudiced, he says, but he thinks the trial was terribly, terribly biased. But then, he says, he is English and a friend of Ralph Cheyney’s, and how can he say, fairly? There is a postman who grins and thinks he ought to be interested, for he was born not ten miles away from the scene in Massachusetts, but, to tell the truth, he ran away from school to join the Service, and he was in the Service during the trial, so how could he know anything about it? He got his job as postman from the points he had from the Service, and he’s pretty glad he did run away, after all, but he doesn’t know. Strikes? Oh, yes, there’s a big theatre and moving picture strike going on now—a little disturbance—one bomb thrown—some smoke-bombs—nothing serious—yes, the bomb-throwing is bad, but it’s those foreign reds again . . .23 People in gas stations remember the names. Some people think that the case was used as a means to glorify two who never deserved any glorification.

But in a book review published this month, a review of modern poetry, the reviewer says, “As far as I can make out, much of this stuff seems to trace back to one Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who appears to have lived and written, in 1927 or thereabouts, some major poetry.”24

The arrow has flown. It has lodged in our flesh, and we feel, deep in this body of our strength, the split wound that the deaths of men like Sacco and Vanzetti enlarge in America.

The case never meant the death of two men. That does not signify in a country whose president remarked that “men are cheaper than timber.”25 The deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti mean continuance of the existence of class against class, country against country, brain against brain. Their case is the symbol of the “vs.” sign. And the old form, which so many would have it is the best, used to substitute U for V.

Not that these men were ever against the country, were ever unpatriotic, in any broad sense of the term. They always were disappointed that they hoped too high for America, expected too much of a land that promised freedom. They were for something that was a generalization of American principles, basically American idealism. But their beliefs do not enter into any discussion of the merits of their case. The upholders of the two were not anarchists, but other philosophers, writers, preachers, radicals. Their death convinced many people that the country was ploughed under too deep in tradition. The Baltimore Sun, a respectable newspaper, said, “Every man whose name stands out today in American history as a power in the land began as a radical.” (And then goes on to cite the honored examples of Lincoln, Jackson, Wilson.)26 “. . . True, Czolgosz and Guiteau also were radicals as well as assassins. But their intellectual feebleness, not their radicalism, made them criminals. What this country needs is not exclusion of radicalism, but bigger and better radicals.”27

The passion and death of Sacco and Vanzetti are continued in this country. The slightest evidence of foreign prejudice, prejudice against color, race, creed, will regenerate such hatred. In crises like the Manchurian situation, the imperialist war hysteria will rise and overflow, wrecking our judgment.28 Fear of propaganda that might rock the stability of our conditions—however shaky they might be of their own accord—will motivate action as murderous as this. There are cases to parallel the Sacco and Vanzetti case today. Mooney and Billings age in prison in California for no crime upheld by clear witnesses other than their own avowed freedom of thought and speech.29 Nine Negro boys are condemned to be killed in Alabama on a charge of assault which is obviously false in the eyes of very many, enough to raise serious doubt in any free community.30 Vanzetti said that the Mooney-Billings case and his own were no more different than two drops of water.31 And five years have passed since Sacco and Vanzetti died.

The strikes in New England, the Lawrence disturbances, the theatre strikes, have not changed fundamentally from the uprisings of five years ago.32 Differences of thought are blamed now as much as ever before on differences in birth. No matter how many books are written about the influx of foreigners in New England, there will always be letters such as the one in the Hartford Times claiming that, since the writer’s ancestors were born in Ireland and came here two generations ago, marrying Irish stock, that he should be recognized as “Irish, but an American citizen.” Race vanity persists; false pride in birth persists strangely in a place that is having all sorts of barriers broken down continually. And five years have passed since Sacco and Vanzetti died.

While these feelings are handed down; while boundaries of birth and thought, mountains and rivers, divide us from each other; while Sacco and Vanzetti die, Mooney and Billings grow old, races are excluded, the Scottsboro boys are killed; while the struggle for balance lasts, the arrow has not flown.33 Not that there should be no charity, no mercy. But that we should see the blindness and stupidity, and set these broken things apart, and rectify. This is the breakdown of justice, that these things should not be accomplished. And five years have passed since Sacco and Vanzetti died.

(Housatonic, 1932)