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

  “It has been urged that a crime of this kind must have been committed by professionals, and it is for well-known criminal gangs that one must look; but to the Committee, both this crime and the one at Bridgewater do not seem to bear the marks of professionals, but of men inexpert in such crimes.”

  Such was the President’s summation, after his Committee had heard the evidence. This he had signed—just as one signs a death warrant. Why was he afraid now, when he had played the executioner then with such certainty?

  “Why am I wanted here?” the Professor of Criminal Law repeated. “To be scolded? To be asked for a resignation? I will not resign. To be Jew-baited? I will not be Jewbaited.”

  “You are insufferable, sir. Get out of here!” the President of the University cried.

  “You are an old man, but Sacco is only thirty-six years old, and Vanzetti is not yet forty. There is death all over you, old man, death and hatred.” And with that, the Professor of Criminal Law turned on his heel and walked out.”

  Behind him, he left a room fixed and riveted in silence and with no motion except the trembling of the old man who had name and wealth and honor and position and was now as bankrupt as a man could be, frightened and heavily aware of death. But for the Professor of Criminal Law, there was no victory either. He had been able to say what he pleased because his position was strong; he was wrapped in a mantle of righteousness; but how much had he himself left undone and unsaid? Did he even understand with any sort of clarity why these two must die? Or was that something he was afraid to challenge with understanding?

  Chapter 6

  AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK, reinforcements came rolling up to Charlestown Prison, and people who saw this had the impression that a small war had begun and these troops were hurtling out to meet the enemy. There were armed men sitting in cars, motorcycles with tommy gunners in the side cars, and a searchlight truck able to produce a beam that could cut through fog and nightfall for fully three miles. With sirens screaming, this cavalcade rolled up and halted before the prison; and the Warden, who had been told earlier that trouble might be expected and that reinforcements were on their way, went out to greet them, and eyed them most dubiously.

  When the chief of the state police had first called the Warden and said that, acting upon instructions of the Governor, he was sending additional forces to the prison, the Warden replied querulously and with a good deal of annoyance.

  “What kind of trouble?” the Warden wanted to know.

  They did not say what kind of trouble. They had no way of knowing what kind of trouble. It just seemed that there was trouble in the making, and that they ought to be prepared to meet it.

  “Well, if you feel that way about it, I suppose that’s your feeling and you have got some basis for it,” the Warden said to the chief of police, thinking to himself that there was plenty of trouble and would be a good deal more before this bitter day finished; but not that kind of trouble. What did they think, the Warden wondered? Did they think that an army was coming to blast through the prison walls and take out the two anarchists? In his own thoughts, the Warden was somewhat defensive about Sacco and Vanzetti. He had come to believe that he was possessed of an area of knowledge about the condemned men denied to the average man and woman; and he knew very well what mild and quiet people these poor devils were. That was such knowledge as grew inside of a prison and nowhere else. The Warden could think back to many years of learning how mild and quiet some people were, people whom the whole outside world condemned with one voice.

  Now he went outside to talk to the captain of the state police, who headed up the semi-military detachment; and the Warden told him sourly that he could use his own judgment in stationing his men here and there—wherever he saw fit.

  “What kind of trouble do you expect?” the captain of the state police asked him.

  “I don’t expect trouble,” the Warden snapped. “Not your kind of trouble, anyway.”

  Then he went back to his office, leaving the captain of police to say to a lieutenant, “Now what in hell is eating him? You’d just think he had some call to take our heads off!”

  The Warden returned to his office, his face as dark and threatening as a cloud-filled sky. Several people who were waiting outside of his office and had one thing and another to discuss with him, changed their minds and decided that what they had to talk about would hold until his mood changed a little; that is, all except the electrician, for like the Warden, the electrician had not chosen this day but had instead been confronted with it, and he had things to discuss with the Warden whether the Warden’s face was solemn or not. He entered the Warden’s office and pointed out to him with necessary bluntness that here it was a quarter of an hour past eleven o’clock in the morning, and he had not tested the current.

  “Well, why the devil don’t you test it?” the Warden wanted to know.

  “Only because I was told to see you and talk to you before I tested it,” the electrician answered defensively.

  The Warden now remembered that he had given those instructions. It was just a small kindness he had thought of, for it did no good for the prison population to see the lights wax and wane, grow dim, and then come on again. When that happened, they knew everywhere in the prison that juice was being fed into the electric chair, and that here was a sort of rehearsal for the taking of life. Not being a completely insensitive man, the Warden was aware that every prisoner in the place shared to some extent in the suffering of the three doomed men, and waited for the time of execution with fear and at least some heartsickness. The prison bound its population into a unit that was like a living body, and when a part of this body died, a little of each individual also died. People who have never been in prison, worked in a prison, or done time in a prison, might be at a loss to understand just how this is, or even unwilling to believe that plain, ordinary criminals could feel such sympathy with men who are condemned to death. Nevertheless, the Warden knew this unity of pain to be a fact. He did not like to prod such feelings on the part of hundreds of men needlessly, and he was also capable of picturing the specific kind of mental pain the little dress rehearsal with electric current would bring to Sacco and Vanzetti and Madeiros. While they had to die many times before this day was finished, do what anyone might, it seemed needlessly cruel to inject this added bit of horror.

  The Warden said some of this to the electrician, who agreed, but pointed out that there was nothing he could do about it.

  “The way it is,” the electrician said, “you can never be sure that your wiring or your fuses are going to stand up under the load that you have to feed into that chair. Just between you and me, sir, that’s the God-damnedest way to kill a human being that anybody ever thought of, and why they ever thought of it beats the hell out of me. It just doesn’t make no sense at all to put a man into an electric chair and send current into his body. If they think it is painless, then they are crazy. You just have to see it happen once to know how painless it is! I tell you this—if I had the choice myself between this kind of thing and being hanged, I’d want to be hanged. I’d want to be shot, or anything rather than to have to sit down in that chair.”

  “I’m not asking about your feelings on the subject, mister,” the Warden said testily. “All I ask is why you have to test that damn chair all day long?”

  “Just for this reason,” the electrician explained. “Suppose you put one of them into it and throw the current and it shorts. Let’s say a wire burns out or a fuse goes. Well, that’s a pretty situation, isn’t it? That would make a fine situation, to have one of them poor devils sitting there with the electrodes on and with his eyes bandaged, and then to have to wait two hours before the break could be rewired, or the short found, and then the execution could go on again.”

  “Well, we don’t want that to happen,” the Warden said. “You can be sure that’s the last thing in the world I want to happen. But why can’t you test it once this evening?”

  “It just doesn’t work that way,” the
electrician explained. “You have to keep testing it and finding the weak spots. You build up the weak spots so that when the night time comes, there are no weak spots left, and you know that when you throw juice in, it’s going to hold up under it, and so is the regular prison lighting system going to hold up.”

  “All right, then. The hell with it,” the Warden said. “Go on and do whatever you have to do.”

  The electrician nodded and left the Warden’s office, and a little while later, sitting in their cells, Sacco and Vanzetti saw the lights dim, remain dim for a moment or two, and then grow strong again. Each of them became rigid when this happened. In more than a manner of speaking, they died while they lived.

  There were only three cells in the Death Row in the State Prison. The builders of this particular wing of the prison—which was known as Cherry Hill, for some strange reason—had not pictured a contingency where there would ever be more than three men awaiting execution at one time. Therefore, Death Row consisted of three cheerless, airless, and lightless cells. They were all in one row, side by side, and instead of the customary barred door that most prison cells have, these three cells had heavy wooden doors with only a small grill in each door. Therefore, it was necessary to light these cells artificially; and to people inside, the cells seemed to shrink, to dwindle, to fold in upon themselves with particularized intensity and exceedingly slow horror, when the wiring system of the prison was tested.

  As Nicola Sacco sat upon the edge of his cot and watched this happen, he heard a violent cry, sharp and piercing and loaded with sudden, unbearable pain, as an animal’s cry might be; and it came from the cell next door, Madeiros’ cell. This cry died away and was then followed by a series of moans; and in all his life, Sacco felt, he had never heard anything so pitiful, so utterly wretched and bereft as these moans of the poor, damned and frightened thief. Then, with ears acutely accustomed to every change of sound, he heard Madeiros fall prone upon his cot and begin to weep. This was more than Sacco could bear. He leaped up, ran to the door of his cell, and shouted through the opening,

  “Madeiros, Madeiros, do you hear me?”

  “I hear you. What do you want?” Madeiros asked through his tears.

  “I want to comfort you a little. I want you to take heart.”

  Even as he said this, Sacco wondered what on earth there was to comfort any one of the three of them, and from where indeed they could take heart or hope? As an echo of his own thoughts, Madeiros answered,

  “What’s there to take heart in?”

  “There’s still hope.”

  “For you, maybe, Mr. Sacco. Maybe there is still hope for you, but there is no hope for me. I am going to die. Nothing in the whole world can change that. In just a little while, I am going to die.”

  “Now isn’t that nonsense!” Sacco cried, feeling better now that he had to struggle with the fears of another. “That’s real nonsense, Madeiros. They can’t take your life until they take ours. So long as they keep us alive, they must keep you alive too, for you are the most important material witness to the whole affair of Sacco and Vanzetti. Now look—just you look at it this way. Why do you think the three of us are here together? We are here together because our fortunes are linked. There is nothing to cry about yet.”

  “Isn’t death something to cry about?” Madeiros asked woefully, as a child might ask a totally pathetic and obvious question—the answer to which was equally pathetic and obvious.

  “You keep saying death. Now is no time to think of death and talk about death, just because they want to play with their lights. Well, who cares about that? Who cares what they do with their lights? Let them turn the lights on and off all day long if that’s the way they feel about it!”

  “They are testing the electric chair in which we are going to die.”

  “Oh, there you go again!” cried Sacco. “Nothing but death! The trouble is, you have given up.”

  “That’s right. I have given up. It’s all wasted.”

  “What is wasted?”

  “My whole life is wasted. Nothing ever came of it. It was wrong. From the first day I was born, it was wrong and wasted. But I never made it that way. Do you understand, Mr. Sacco? I never made it that way. Something else made it that way. I spoke to Mr. Vanzetti about it once, and he tried to explain to me some of the things that made it that way. I listened very carefully while he explained it. I would begin to understand something he says and then I don’t understand it any more. You know what I am talking about, Mr. Sacco?”

  “I know,” Sacco said. “Poor boy—of course I know.”

  “But it was all wasted.”

  Sacco said, “Life is never wasted. Madeiros, I swear to you that I am telling you a most profound truth. Life is never wasted. It is wrong for you now to think that your whole life was wasted just because you did some things that might have been bad. How was it with my own sweet little boy? If he did bad things, did I lock him up in a dark room? No. I tried to explain to him. I tried to show him that there are good ways and that there are bad ways. Sometimes it was very hard to make him see the difference, because a little boy is not a fully grown and wise man. Well, that was because he had a father; he was lucky to have a father to explain things. But when someone does something when they are eighteen or nineteen or twenty years old, the way you did, Madeiros, well, then it is something else. Nobody bothers to take a little time and sit down with you and try to make it clear and plain what is a good thing and what is a bad thing.”

  He heard Madeiros start to weep again, and he shouted to him, “Madeiros, Madeiros, please, I did not want to say anything to make you more sorrowful. I was only trying to explain to you that life is not wasted. I think of it this way—you want me to tell you how I think of it, Madeiros?”

  “Yes, tell me, Mr. Sacco, please,” the thief said. “I am sorry if I cry. That is because sometimes things happen to me that I can’t control. I don’t want to have a fit, but then sometimes I have a fit. I don’t want to cry, but then I just go and cry, whether I want to or not.”

  “I understand how that is,” Sacco answered gently. “Now here is what I meant, Madeiros. I meant that every human life in the whole world is connected with every other human life. It is just like there were threads that you can’t see from every one of us to every other one of us. In the worst terrible moments, when I am filled with such hatred for the judge who is so cruel and so unfeeling in the way he sentenced us, I still say to myself, he must not be hated unreasonably. He is a part of human beings the way you are. He too is connected with little threads to all of us. Only he has become filled with sickness and hatred. Do you see what I mean, Madeiros?”

  “I am trying all I can to understand,” Madeiros answered. “It is not your fault if I don’t understand.”

  “But life is not wasted,” Sacco insisted. He raised his voice and called to Vanzetti for confirmation. “Bartolomeo! Bartolomeo!” he called. “Have you been listening?”

  “I have been listening,” Vanzetti said, standing up against the door of his own cell, the tears running softly and effortlessly down his face.

  “And am I not right when I tell Madeiros here that no human life is ever wasted?”

  “You are right,” Vanzetti answered. “Nick, you are very right, and filled with wisdom. Listen to him when he says something, Madeiros. He is very wise and kind.”

  At that moment the prison bells began to ring, clanging out the noonday hour. It was now twelve o’clock, high noon, on August 22, 1927.

  Chapter 7

  HIGH NOON in the city of Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is six hours away, measuring distance with zones of time, from Rome in Italy. When it is twelve o’clock on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, the late afternoon shadows are already settling over the beautiful antique ruins, the lovely open squares, and the hot and miserable slums of Rome.

  It was the time when the Dictator took his afternoon exercise before he dressed for dinner. Today he sparred with light gloves
. The exercise was not absolutely routine, nor always the same, for on some days he skipped rope; on other days he boxed; and again, he would fence with the ancient Roman shield and shortsword. He prided himself on his physical prowess; and when he sparred in what he liked to refer to as “the American manner,” he drove in close, giving his opponent no quarter and showing no mercy. Whether with good or bad grace, the unfortunate sparring partner had to take the punishment, realizing that there were natural limits to the sense of sportsmanship shown even by this most sportsman-like of rulers. On the other hand, the Dictator enjoyed the bodily contact of boxing, the solid smack of leather against flesh, and the feeling of physical conquest and achievement that came from it.