The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A New England Legend Read online

  “Well,” he said to himself on this particular morning, “it’s no use going on thinking that way. Here’s today which had to come, and in time it will be over. The thing to do is to get about it and see that everything is all right and make things as easy and comfortable as they can be made.”

  He finished dressing, and decided that he would take a look at the death house before he had his breakfast. He walked across the yard and was greeted by the captain of the guards, and even by a trusty or two who were already about their work. The morning life of the prison he ruled had begun. Metal doors clanged open and rolled shut. Prisoners came by, pushing hand trucks full of laundry. The clatter of pots and dishes, a whole bustle of activity, went on around the kitchen and bakery doors, and already, corridors were being mopped, swabbed down, washed with gray lye-impregnated water. At this time of the morning, a little past seven o’clock, the prisoners were going to their morning meal. The Warden heard the regimental tread of their feet, the chopping sound of half a thousand men moving in rhythm, of a thousand leather shoes slapping the concrete. A little later, the sound of trays and spoons came to him through walls and along cell blocks. His ears were marvelously tuned to all the various sounds and noises of the prison, for these were the sounds and noises of his life. In that sense at least, his dream was most deeply true. He lived his whole life in jail.

  Now he came to the death house. He chose Vanzetti to speak to, and that was natural, for it was never difficult to speak to Vanzetti. He walked up to Vanzetti’s cell, rubbing his hands together, cheerful, brisk, business-like, determined that he would not make any funereal occasion out of this, but would go at it straightforwardly and directly, with no fuss or bother.

  Vanzetti, who had been sitting on his bed, fully dressed, rose to meet the Warden, and they shook hands gravely.

  “Good morning, Bartolomeo,” the Warden said. “I am very pleased to see you looking well. I am, indeed.”

  “Perhaps better than I feel.”

  “You couldn’t be expected to feel very good. In your place, no one would feel very good.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Vanzetti nodded. “I don’t suppose that you think too much before you say something like that, but that doesn’t change it. It remains a very true thing. So often, there are things that you say in such a fashion without thinking too much about them, and they remain very true and very direct.”

  The Warden observed him with interest. The Warden understood that if he himself were in Vanzetti’s place, he could not have behaved in this way. He would have been very afraid, very frightened, his voice would have choked up, his throat would have tightened, his skin would have become wet, and he would have trembled from head to foot. The Warden knew himself, and he knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt, this was the case with him; but it was not the case with Vanzetti. Vanzetti seemed quite calm. His deep-set eyes looked at the Warden appraisingly. His heavy mustache added a quizzical note to his appearance, and his strong, high-boned, melancholy face seemed to the Warden no different from what it had been at any other time.

  “Have you seen Sacco yet this morning?” Vanzetti asked the Warden.

  “Not yet. I will see him a little later.”

  “I am worried about him. He is very weak because of the hunger strike. He is sick. I worry a good deal about him.”

  “I worry about him, too,” the Warden said.

  “Yes, of course. Anyway, I think you should see him and speak to him.”

  “All right, I’ll do that. What else would you like me to do?”

  Suddenly, Vanzetti smiled. He looked at the Warden suddenly as a grown, mature man would smile at a child.

  “Do you really want to know what I would like you to do?” Vanzetti asked.

  “What I can do,” the Warden answered. “I can’t do everything. Whatever I can do, Bartolomeo, I will be very happy to do. Today you have some privileges. You can have whatever you want to eat. You can have the Priest whenever you want him.”

  “I would like to spend some time with Sacco. Can you arrange that? There is a great deal that I want to say to him, but somehow it has never been said. If you can arrange for me to spend some time with him, a few hours, I would be very grateful for that.”

  “I think that can be arranged. I will try. But don’t be disappointed if it can’t be.”

  “You must understand, it is not because I am stronger or braver than he is. Perhaps I am able to give that impression. But the appearance is a superficial one. Inside, he is as strong as I am, and braver than I am.”

  “You are both very brave and good people,” the Warden said. “I am terribly sorry that all this has to happen.”

  “There is nothing you can do about it. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Anyway, I’m sorry,” the Warden said, “and I regret it. I wish it could be different.”

  The Warden didn’t want to talk any more. There was nothing more he could think of saying, and he also realized that this kind of talk was having a profoundly upsetting effect upon him. He asked Vanzetti to excuse him, explaining that today was a day when he had a great many things to do, more than he would usually have. Vanzetti appeared to understand.

  When the Warden sat down to breakfast—usually he ate a fairly large breakfast, but this morning he had no appetite at all—he was struck with the conviction that today, as had happened several times in the past, indeed, only a week ago, the execution would be postponed; and neither Sacco nor Vanzetti would die. He realized that even if this did happen, there would still be the execution of the thief, Celestino Madeiros; and while that would be painful and unpleasant, it would certainly not be as upsetting to his nerves as this particular business with Sacco and Vanzetti.

  Having made this observation to himself, the Warden felt a good deal better, and the more he speculated on the possibility, the more it seemed that this would be the case. His whole demeanor changed. He became cheerful, and he smiled for the first time that morning as he observed to his wife that, in his opinion, the execution would be postponed.

  He was the sort of man who had, over a period of years, suppressed his own excitement, for the particular events of his life gave no joy to excitement, and little fulfillment to anticipation. His wife, therefore, was rather surprised at the eager note in his voice and at the certainty with which he made this pronouncement. She asked him an obvious question,

  “But why should they postpone it any further?”

  The answer to this question, which leaped immediately into his mind, gave him reason to pause and to consider the entire proposition. He had intended to say, “The execution will be postponed because it is quite obvious to anyone who knows anything about this case, that these two men are innocent.”

  But he hesitated to say this, even to his wife. He was unwilling to place himself directly on record with such an observation. He had said too many times that questions of guilt and innocence were not for him or for any warden to decide; therefore, he reviewed some of the aspects of the case, and reminded his wife that there were a number of reasonable doubts as to the guilt of the two men.

  “But how can anyone survive this kind of thing?” his wife wondered. “For seven years it has been going on like this—death and reprieve, death and reprieve. I don’t know but that it wouldn’t be better to finish with it. I couldn’t live that way.”

  “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” the Warden said.

  “I don’t understand,” his wife went on. “Everyone connected with this thinks so well of these men.”

  “They are very nice men. You would have to go a long distance to find two men like them. I can’t explain it. They are very nice and very gentle men. They are very quiet, very polite. There has never been a harsh word from either of them. They are not angry at me. I asked Vanzetti about that, and he explained that he understood, and so did Sacco, that it wasn’t my fault, what had happened to them. Vanzetti feels that anger is wasted unless it is directed in the right place.”

 
“That’s what makes it so strange,” his wife said.

  “Why is it so strange? This is just the way it is. They are very nice.”

  “Anarchists,” his wife began, “are supposed to—”

  “Neither of us knows anything about anarchists when you come right down to it,” the Warden interrupted. “This has nothing to do with their being anarchists or not being anarchists. I don’t know much about anarchists or communists or socialists. Sacco and Vanzetti may be all three. They may be soaked in evil from head to foot. All I am saying is that you don’t notice this when you talk to them. Whenever you talk to them, you come away saying to yourself that these are two men who never, under any conceivable set of circumstances could have committed murder. Anyway, not the kind of murder that they have been accused of committing. That kind of murder is the work of cold-blooded gunmen who shoot down men as if they are dogs. These two men are very different. I don’t know just how to put it, but these two men are very tender toward life. They couldn’t kill in just that way. Now mind you, I am saying this privately. I say this off the record. If I don’t know a murderer, who would?”

  “There are all kinds of murderers,” his wife reminded him.

  “Well, there you go. There you are. I don’t blame you. It’s like everybody else. You have to keep asking yourself how this can happen to someone who is innocent. When you come right down to it, that is the thing, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” his wife agreed.

  “Well, I went to see Vanzetti this morning, and there he was, just as calm and quiet and as pleasant as if today was like any other day.”

  At this point in their conversation, they were interrupted by a prison guard who told the Warden that Madeiros was screaming with hysteria, and would the Warden’ permit the physician to use a few grains of morphine? The Warden excused himself to his wife, wiped his mouth hurriedly, and went along with the guard. They passed by the infirmary and picked up the physician, and the three of them went to Madeiros’ cell. When they were still quite a distance from it, they heard the screams, which increased in volume and intensity as they neared the cell.

  Madeiros was in the death house, very close by to both Sacco and Vanzetti. In order to reach his cell, the Warden had to pass the cells of both these men; but now he did not bother to peer into the little windows of the death cells to see what the two men were doing.

  Madeiros himself lay upon the floor of his cell, his body twitching and writhing spasmodically. In his case, there was a history of epilepsy, and this was not the first fit of this kind he had undergone since being in prison. The Warden tried to speak to him, but he was beyond hearing; he screamed and beat his hands upon the stone floor. A mixture of blood and saliva ran out of his mouth, and the sight of him and the sound of his screaming made the Warden quite sick.

  “Now, now, it will be all right,” the Warden tried to tell him. “Just take it easy, and here we are and you are not alone any more and it’s going to be all right and you might as well calm down and take it easier than this.”

  “It’s no use to talk to him,” the physician said. “The best thing for me to do is to give him morphine. Do you agree to that?”

  “Well, go ahead,” the Warden said. “What are you waiting for? Go ahead.”

  He and the guard held Madeiros while the doctor injected the morphine. In just a few minutes the young man’s body relaxed; the hard cords of his muscles began to loosen, and his screaming turned to sobbing.

  The Warden left the cell. He felt sick to his stomach. His previous certainty that there would be a delay in the executions today as there had been in the past, now disappeared, and instead, he felt quite sure that today they would go through with it. This was only the beginning of a terrible day. It was only eight o’clock in the morning. He didn’t see how he was going to get through the rest of a day like this.

  Chapter 3

  IT IS SURPRISING how suddenly people became curious about Sacco and Vanzetti and wanted to know something about them, who they were and what they were like. It is also surprising how few people knew about them before the time came for Sacco and Vanzetti to die.

  The year 1927 was a strange year, a year for news; and the headlines in the daily press came hard and furious and one on top of the other. It was the midst of the best of all possible times, and Charles A. Lindberg flew the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, one man alone, so that the Baltimore Sun was able to cry out, “He has exalted the race of man.” Peaches Browning and her aging husband, Daddy Browning, also exalted the race of man, and then Chamberlain and Levine flew the ocean, and Jack Dempsey fought Sharkey before he was defeated by Gene Tunney.

  Sacco and Vanzetti, however, were either communists or socialists or anarchists or deeply subversive elements of one kind or another, and there were many newspapers through out the country that printed never a word about them until the time came for them to die. Even the great journals in Boston and New York City and Philadelphia carried only an occasional line about the case. It had been so long since the case began!

  “After all,” these newspapers could have said in their own defense, “the Sacco-Vanzetti case began in 1920, and here it is 1927.”

  The imminence of death made a shoemaker and a fish peddler eloquent; their very silence was eloquent. From early in the morning, very early indeed, on the 22nd of August, the sound and the smell and the scent and the feeling of death were in the air. It would seem, indeed, more than passing strange that in a world where so many hundreds and thousands died unsung and unwept, the death of two agitators and a common thief would make such a commotion and grow into a thing of such tremendous importance. As curious as that was, it was nevertheless the case, and people had to take note of it.

  All the newspapers knew what their headlines would be on the following morning, but they needed more than headlines. A reporter, thereupon, went this morning to the place where the family of Sacco lived. Here was the mother of two children, the wife of Sacco. The reporter had been told that many people were interested in Vanzetti, but even more were interested in Nicola Sacco. The case of Nicola Sacco was one of human interest, and anyone who missed that was a fool. Here was Sacco, only thirty-six years old as he stood at the edge of the great, yawning gulf of predetermined death—being one of those singled out to know the very moment of his departure from the earth. The newspaper man was informed that, according to the simple thoughts of millions of simple folk in this country, Nicola Sacco left behind him great riches, for he was a family man.

  Sacco had a wife and two children. His wife’s name was Rosa. The boy, who was almost fourteen years old, was named Dante. The little girl, who wasn’t yet seven years old, was named Ines. The reporter, given to understand that here was a human interest story of the highest type, was instructed to see the mother of Sacco’s children. He must find out how the mother felt and how the children felt.

  This particular assignment did not please him, and that was not an extraordinary thing; for even if this reporter had been as hard as flint, such an assignment would not have been an easy one to contemplate. But he had his job to do, and he went on it early, for a complete beat, a story that no one else would have before him, knocking at the door of the place where Rosa Sacco lived, at eight o’clock in the morning.

  The mother came to the door and opened it and asked him what he wanted. He looked at her, and he had a rather unusual reaction.

  “My God!” he said to himself. “Isn’t she beautiful! Isn’t she one of the most beautiful women I have ever laid eyes on!”

  It was very early in the morning. Her hair, tied together hastily, was uncombed, and she had no paint or rouge on her face. Perhaps she was not as beautiful as the reporter felt. He had been prepared for something else. She astonished him with the simple directness of her brown eyes, the awful tranquility of her terribly sad face. Like a cup flowing over, sorrow filled her and poured out. This morning, in the eyes and imagination of the reporter, the grief equated itself with beauty; and thi
s was so disturbing that the reporter experienced an enormous urge to run away. But that was the terror of suddenly revealed truth. His trade was not to deal with truth, but still and all, his trade fed him. Whereupon, he stood there and pursued his inquiries.

  “Please go away,” the mother said. “I have nothing to say.”

  He tried to explain to her that he could not go away. Didn’t she understand that here was his job, and that possibly his job was the most important in the whole world?

  She did not understand that. She told him that her children were still asleep. Speaking painfully, each word embedded in grief, she begged him not to wake the children.

  “I don’t want to wake them,” he said in his defense. “Of all things, I have no desire to wake your children. Can’t I come inside for a moment?”

  She sighed and shrugged and nodded her head and let him come inside.

  The first thing he saw in that house were the sleeping children. Afterwards, it struck him that they were all he saw. He was a very young man, and he was not supposed to have sensitivity to the children of an Italian shoemaker. He himself was a Yankee American, and the child of real honest-to-God Yankees. Not only had he been born in Boston, but his grandfather had been born in Boston, and his great-grandfather had been born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and his great-great-grandfather had been born in Salem, Massachusetts.