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

  Nevertheless, he saw how a little girl sleeps. There is a singularity in this; in the whole world, nothing else is just like it. A little girl who is not yet seven years old is, in her sleep, the model for all the dreams of angels men have dreamed. This little girl lay with her dark hair spread out above her, her arms outflung, and her face reposeful in its tranquil innocence. Not even a bad dream seemed to disturb her early on this morning. She had her fill of bad dreams already in the past, and perhaps she had dreamed them all out. She had dreamed of an electric chair; she dreamed of it in her own childish way.

  She saw, in her dream, a chair with a great frame of electric lights over it, so the whole chair glowed and sparkled with brilliance, and in this chair her father sat, Nicola Sacco. This creation of her childish mind was the result of all her terrible grappling with the vague and frightening two-word image that seeped into her consciousness, heard surreptitiously, heard by accident, heard from other children who used it in mockery. It never occurred to her, of course, to inquire as to the particular ethics of a State which pays no heed to a little girl in relation to a thing like an electric chair.

  Hunger strike was just as difficult for her to comprehend, and her dreams had taken other forms for this awful thing. She dreamed of being hungrier than she ever actually was in her real waking life. Once when she was dreaming such a bad dream of overwhelming hunger, she woke up, weeping. That was a night when her mother had not been with her, and her brother Dante rocked her in his arms and comforted her and tried to explain to her that this image which she had evoked was not how such things really happened.

  “See,” he said to her, “I have a letter from papa which tells all about it.”

  Then he promised to read her the letter the following day, and of course he did so. She sat with her legs bent and her knees tucked into the circle of her arms, while her brother read the letter her father had written. Thus he read:

  “My Dear Son and Companion:

  “Since the day I saw you last I had always the idea to write you this letter, but the length of my hunger strike and the thought I might not be able to explain myself, made me put off all this time.”

  “The other day, I ended my hunger strike and just as soon as I did that I thought of you to write to you, but I find that I did not have enough strength and I cannot finish it at one time. However, I want to get it down in any way before they take us again to the death-house, because it is my conviction that just as soon as the court refuses a new trial to us they will take us there. And between Friday and Monday, if nothing happens, they will electrocute us right after midnight, on August 22nd. Therefore, here I am, right with you with love and with open heart as ever I was yesterday.”

  “If I stopped hunger strike the other day, it was because there was no more sign of life in me. Because I protested with my hunger strike yesterday as today I protest for life and not for death.”

  “Son, instead of crying, be strong, so as to be able to comfort your mother, and when you want to distract your mother from the discouraging sourness, I will tell you what I used to do. To take her for a long walk in the quiet country, gathering wild flowers here and there, resting under the shade of trees, between the harmony of the vivid stream and of the gentle tranquility of the mothernature, and I am sure that she will enjoy this very much, as you surely would be happy for it. But remember always, Dante, help the weak ones that cry for help, help the prosecuted and the victim, because that are your better friends; they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all and the poor workers. In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved.”

  “Much I thought of you when I was lying in the deathhouse—the singing, the kind tender voices of the children from the playground, where there was all the life and the joy of liberty—just one step from the wall which contains the buried agony of three buried souls. It would remind me so often of you and your sister Ines, and I wish I could see you every moment. But I feel better that you did not come to the death-house so that you could not see the horrible picture of three lying in agony waiting to be electrocuted, because I do not know what effect it would have on your young age. But then, in another way if you were not so sensitive it would be very useful to you tomorrow when you could use this horrible memory to hold up to the world the shame of the country in this cruel persecution and unjust death. Yes, Dante, they can crucify our bodies today as they are doing, but they cannot destroy our ideas, that will remain for the youth of the future to come.”

  “Dante, I say once more to love and be nearest to your mother and the beloved ones in these sad days, and I am sure that with your brave heart and kind goodness they will feel less discomfort. And you will also not forget to love me a little for I do—O, Sonny! thinking so much and so often of you.”

  “Best fraternal greetings to all the beloved ones, love and kisses to your little Ines and mother. Most hearty affectionate embrace.”

  Your Father and Companion

  “P.S. Bartolo send you the most affectionate greetings. I hope that your mother will help you to understand this letter because I could have written much better and more simple, if I was feeling good. But I am so weak.”

  Even though the little girl did not understand all of the letter, and even though her brother mercifully omitted some, enough remained to bewilder her. Out of this bewilderment, she tried to form a few words of her own to send him.

  The turmoil of thought injected by this, hardly began to settle, when she received her own letter, addressed to her, with this salutation: “My dear Ines.” And then her father went on to talk to her. Each word of the letter meant that her father was talking to her. These were his words:

  “I would like that you should understand what I am going to say to you, and I wish I could write you so plain, for I long so much to have you hear all the heart-beat eagerness of your father, for I love you so much and you are the dearest little beloved one.

  “It is quite hard indeed to make you understand in your young age, but I am going to try from the bottom of my heart to make you understand how dear you are to your father’s soul. If I cannot succeed in doing that, I know that you will save this letter and read it over in future years to come and you will see and feel the same heart-beat affection as your father feels in writing to you.”

  “It was the greatest treasure and sweetness in my struggling life that I could have lived with you and your brother Dante and your mother in a neat little farm, and learn all your sincere words and tender affection. Then in the summer-time to be sitting with you in the home nest under the oak tree shade—beginning to teach you of life and how to read and write, to see you running, laughing, crying and singing through the verdant fields picking the wild flowers here and there from one tree to another, and from the clear, vivid stream to your mother’s embrace.”

  “I know that you are good and surely you love your mother, Dante, and all the beloved ones—and I am sure that you love me also a little, for I love you much and then so much. You do not know, Ines, how often I think of you every day. You are in my heart, in my vision, in every angle of this sad walled cell, in the sky and everywhere my gaze rests.

  “Meantime, give my best paternal greetings to all the friends and comrades, and doubly so to our beloved ones. Love and kisses to your brother and mother.”

  “With the most affectionate kiss and ineffable caress from him who loves you so much that he constantly thinks of you. Best warm greetings from Bartolo to you all.

  Your Father”

  While he talked to her, she closed her eyes and tried to see his face and the motion of his lips, and the twinkle that had sometimes appeared in his eyes even when she saw him in prison.

  That, however, was in the past. By the calendar of grown-up people, it was only a few days in the past, but by this little girl’s own passage of time and her own calculations for estimating the passage of time, it was a long, long whi
le in the past. Now on this morning, she slept peacefully and gently with the dreams, with the memories, bitter or sweet.

  “Please go away,” the mother pleaded with the reporter.

  The young man looked at the two children again, and then he left. He was not able to remain any longer. He left, and walked away down the road and tried to compose in his mind the little bit that he had seen in such a manner that it would make a story. He was plagued and troubled by many, many things that had come into his consciousness all of a sudden and that were in large measure beyond his understanding.

  Never before had he felt the necessity to comprehend what motivated a poor fish peddler and a hard-working shoemaker who were both of them anarchists or communists or something of the sort. Such people came from elsewhere into the edge of his world. They embarked upon motion, and that motion might end in violent death or prison or starvation or the electric chair; but such an ending was expressly reserved for such people. It was no part of his own world and no business of his conscience.

  Now it had abruptly become a part of his world and the business of his conscience. He had once taken a girl on a date and boyishly boasted to her of the many experiences that a newspaper man had. This was without question such an experience as he had boasted of. Would he ever tell this experience to anyone in such a boastful, boyish way, he wondered? Certainly, if he could tell it to anyone, then he could make a story of it as he now had to.

  But what would the story be? He sensed somehow vaguely and to a degree tragically, that a story beyond any he had ever discovered or told, lay in the tranquil and beautiful faces of the sleeping children. His education told him that “Dante” was the name of an Italian poet, even though he had never read Dante the poet. But he wondered how the Italian shoemaker had come to name his little girl Ines. Such wondering was replaced by the realization that this child must have been born and seen her time of life and growth, all of her time of life and growth, during the seven years which Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had spent in prison. This realization came as a most profound shock to the newspaper man, and indeed moved him more than anything which had happened to him that morning.

  He was different, and he would never again be as he had been before. Bitter change had begun to fester. He had come too close to death—and thereby too close to life—and it had taken his youth from him.

  Chapter 4

  AT TEN MINUTES to nine, on the morning of August 22nd, the Professor, who was also one of the noted lawyers of the Commonwealth, crossed the lawn toward the Law School building where he would conduct the sixth and last lecture of the series he was giving for the summer session. It was the first time he had ever taught in the summer session, and all through the uncomfortable summer weeks, he found himself torn between a desire for a real vacation in the mountains or at the seashore, and a feeling of relief that he could, after all, be here in Boston, seeing, watching and observing the final developments in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti.

  Only rarely did he allow himself to admit, even to himself, how much this case meant to him; and this was because there was a certain danger in admitting this fact—even to himself. When, however, he was provoked by one thing or another into accepting the Sacco-Vanzetti case as a central force in his present day to day existence, his anger at certain forces would become almost uncontrollable. This, perhaps, disturbed him more than anything else. Ever since he had been a young man, he had set his face solidly and determinedly against uncontrollable anger in any situation.

  Yet on this special and tranquil and particularly tragic morning, his anger was present, but latent, like a steel spring compressed within him. Only the evening before, he had heard that the President of the University where he taught, who was also the head of an advisory committee inquiring into this case, had connected him with it in a singularly unpleasant fashion.

  The President of the University had referred to him, the Professor, as “that Jew,” and had gone on to say that there was a little more than met the eye in the eagerness of Jews to leap to the defense of “two Italian communists.”

  There was nothing either new or particularly revealing in the knowledge that the President of the University did not like Jews. Ever since he had come to the university, the Professor had been acutely aware of the fact that the President of the University had a most pointed dislike for Jews. It must be added that the President of the University practiced an equal dislike for most other minorities of the United States; if his dislike for Jews was more frequently and sharply expressed, it was only because the gates of the university could be less easily closed against Jews than against certain other groups.

  The Professor, hurrying across the lawn, was acutely aware of all these things—just as he was most acutely aware of his own appearance.

  That awareness rode him with a spur, constantly pricking his sensitivity. All things that the President of the University was, this Professor of Criminal Law was not. The Professor was not a Yankee; he was not even a native-born American; and he was neither blue-eyed nor aristocratic in his bearing. When he spoke, a trace of foreign accent clung to his speech. His dark, piercing, narrow eyes hid themselves behind heavy glasses, and his big head hung loosely from his shoulders. Even if he could have exorcised his own awareness of his appearance, life in Boston in 1927 would not have permitted it.

  “Very well,” he said to himself this morning as he crossed the lawn. “I march forward as a Jew. Now, this Jew will do a brave or a stupid thing and deliver his last lecture of a series, and the subject will be the case of Sacco and Vanzetti.”

  This decision, which he had made the evening before, comforted him and also fed fuel to his anger. It was common knowledge on the faculty of the university that the brilliant, penetrating and devastating essay which this Professor had written in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, and had caused to be published, was hotly resented by the President of the University. Not only did the President consider the Professor’s action unwise; but he felt that in taking this action, the Professor of Criminal Law had taken a position, personally as well as publicly, in opposition to the position of the President. The President of the University had his own philosophy of the situation. From his point of view, he saw the power of two naked and disarmed agitators who waited for their death, yet were able to arouse half the world in their defense. This mysterious power terrified him. He could not have comprehended that the Professor of Criminal Law, with whom he was so annoyed, saw nothing of the sort in the two agitators, no such power, but only two terribly forsaken men who waited for their doom.

  As the Professor entered the Law School building on this morning, he found’ three reporters waiting for him. They immediately asked him whether it was true, as was rumored, that this, his last lecture in the Williams Series, would be devoted to the Sacco-Vanzetti case?

  “It is true,” he snapped at them, neither cordial nor expansive.

  “Would you care to make any statement, Professor, regarding this lecture or the findings of the special advisory committee?” They referred to the committee headed by the President of the University—and appointed by the Governor, to inquire, as a board of last resort, into the Sacco-Vanzetti case.

  “I have no statement to make,” the Professor retorted. “If you wish to hear my lecture, you may come into the lecture room. I will not bar the doors to you, but I have no statement to make.’”

  The invitation was a generous one, and they followed him into the lecture room. Already, some three hundred students had gathered, an almost complete attendance. His lectures were very well attended for a summer course. It was the same incisiveness and ironical wit that made him so feared and disliked by some, that also won him admiration from others.

  “At any rate,” he thought to himself as he took his place on the podium, “the students do not abhor me.”

  He leaned upon the speaker’s stand and let his eyes flow over the eager young faces. This lecture hall was one of those old fashioned classrooms built in the amphithea
ter style. He stood at the bottom of a pit, and around him, climbing all the way up to the ceiling in the rear, were rows of students sitting on the old benches, their pads out and ready for notes, some of them with their chins cradled in their hands, their eyes earnest and eager.

  At any rate, he reflected, he had never committed the sin of dullness, and if he had an unyielding penchant for destroying himself, he did at least evoke some excitement from life in the process. Perhaps the President of the University, who had always so carefully eschewed excitement, found that as irritating as the other qualities the Professor exhibited. Now, however, it did not matter; for in all the Professor’s thinking about the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, and his own position in relation to this case, he had come to a number of most important conclusions.

  At first the Professor was faced with the question of taking a position on the case, any position; a position which said that the two were guilty; a position which denied that the agitators were guilty; or even a position which granted that perhaps certain incidents of the trial were regrettable. For months and months, he had grappled with this tantalizing and disturbing question, whether or not to take a position, whether or not to face the danger of being linked with reds and possibly being called a red himself, and finally, out of his grappling and soul-searching, there had come the determination to inquire into the facts of the case in the fullest possible manner.

  He remembered well when he had reached his initial conclusion and made his initial decision, because implicit in that first conclusion was all that flowed from it. His inquiry had been a careful and exhaustive one. He might have intended to dip into the case of Sacco and Vanzetti with only casual interest; the actual result of his decision was to immerse himself in it, and thereby face the need for a second critical decision, asking himself, “Are they guilty, or are they innocent?”