The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A New England Legend

by Howard Fast

  The Governor spoke one word now. He asked, “Why?” Suddenly he was earnest; and the one word encompassed all his powers of understanding. He wanted to know why—why did they come before him pleading for the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti? Why did anyone come before him? His manner implied that he would be grateful indeed if either of these two men could explain to him why they thought that Sacco and Vanzetti must not die.

  Now the New York Writer shared the horror of the Professor of Criminal Law. The simple yet awful question, the one word directed at them by the Governor, made them speechless, and they could only wait silently for what might follow. The Governor also waited. The air in the room became heavy and motionless; life went out of the air. A grandfather clock in one corner ticked loudly and demandingly, but still all three of the men remained silent, and waited. What would have come of this, it is hard to say, for when the painful tension was near the breaking point, the door opened and the Governor’s secretary said that Mrs. Sacco and Miss Vanzetti—Luigia Vanzetti, her name was, and she was Vanzetti’s sister who had come all the great distance from Italy to plead for his life—stood outside, and were ready to see him if he would see them. Now the Governor turned to the Writer and the Professor of Criminal Law with incomprehensible and gentle apology. After all, they had come late for their appointment. He was so terribly sorry, but these two women had an appointment with him, and there were other appointments, and he had to be on schedule today. Did they want to go, or did they want to remain here and listen while he spoke to Miss Vanzetti and Mrs. Sacco?

  The Professor of Criminal Law would have gone gladly, but the Writer answered for both of them, and said please, they would remain if the Governor did not mind.

  No, he did not mind, the Governor said pleasantly, and then invited them to sit down on the claw-footed chairs that were ranged against the wall; thus they would be more comfortable. The Governor said that the best thing to do on a hot and trying day like this, was to make one’s self as comfortable as one possibly could. He was now a considerate and thoughtful host, but the Professor of Criminal Law understood that this phase of him, like his reciting his own decision, was a choreography learned and practiced, a ritual that had no relationship to actual human concern. They sat down, and the door opened and the secretary led two women and a man into the Governor’s office. The man was evidently a friend of the two women, as well as an interpreter for Miss Vanzetti, who spoke no English. She was a little woman, frail beyond belief, and both the Professor and the Writer looked at her with great curiosity. Until this moment, Sacco and Vanzetti had been two disembodied names. The sudden appearance of these two women had served to materialize both of the men before their eyes. The Writer was very much moved. He had heard that Mrs. Sacco was a beautiful woman, but he had not been prepared for the heartbreaking quality of her beauty; for this was a beauty that did not acknowledge itself. She was a woman without desire to be attractive to any man in the whole world but the one man who was denied to her; yet this very selflessness gave her the appearance of a Madonna out of some old and perfect Renaissance painting, a moment of womanhood caught by Raphael or Leonardo. Her beauty defied all the cheap and petty cliches that were a part of the culture of this land, and invented to impugn womanhood, not to ennoble it; and looking at her, the Writer wondered that he had ever thought of any other woman as being beautiful. Then he shook himself free of such feeling, for he felt in some way that it was unjust to the frightened and grief-stricken woman who stood before the Governor. Her grief was personal and very different from the strange and silent accusation of Vanzetti’s sister.

  There were no preliminaries to what Nicola Sacco’s wife said. The words poured out of her like the soft running of a mountain brook. “I know you, Governor,” she whispered. “I know that you have children. I know that you have a wife. And what do you think of when you look at your wife and children? Do you ever look at them, Governor, and think, good-by, good-by and farewell forever, and you will never see me again and I will never see you again? Do you ever think of such things? My husband loves me better than he loves himself. How can I tell you what kind of a man he is? Nicola Sacco is gentle. What shall I say to you, Governor? If an ant comes into the house, then you step on it and kill it. An ant is an insect, and a man thinks nothing of an ant. But Nicola Sacco would pick up an ant and place it outside on the ground, and when I laughed at him, do you know what he would say to me? He would say, it has life, and therefore I must honor it. Life is precious. Think of those words, Governor. I want to try to make you see him the way he was with his children—never harsh, never angry, never impatient, never too busy. His ten fingers were slaves for them. What did the children want? Should he become a donkey and ride them on his back? Then he did. A troubadour to sing songs to them? That he also was. A fast runner to run races with them? That, too. And God help us if they should be sick—he was a nurse, and never left their bedside. Did I say their bedside? You see how the years catch up with me. I should have said his bedside, only the bedside of our little boy, Dante, for he never knew the little girl, who grew up while he lay in prison.

  “Look at me, Governor. Am I the sort of woman who would be married to a murderer? Am I telling you about a man who kills in cold blood? Why will you destroy him? What terrible devils need to be satisfied with a burnt offering? What else can I say to you? I tried to think of everything I would say to you, and now it all comes down to nothing else but a man who is so full of love and kindness and good sweetness that he walked in his own garden like Saint Francis. Do you know what he wanted? He wanted for the whole world to have the little bit that he had, a good wife and good children and a plain job where he could work each day and earn his daily bread. This is all that he wanted. This is why he was a radical. He said the people of the whole world should have his own happiness. But kill? He never, never killed. He never raised his hand to another man. Never. And now will you spare him, please, please? I will get down on my knees and kiss your feet, but spare him for his children and for me.”

  The Governor listened to all this without a shadow of emotion disturbing the small, neat, complacent features and folds of his clean-shaven face. He listened very politely and considerately, nor did he protest when Vanzetti’s sister burst into a flood of Italian. The man who stood behind her translated without the emotional pitch that her voice contained; but in the very words there was a compelling and eloquent power. She told him how she had gone through France, and how the workers had persuaded her to lead a parade of tens of thousands of men and women through the streets of Paris.

  “They said to me, good heart and good cheer, for you will go before the Governor of the land and tell him the truth about Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who is such a good man, a man of justice and clear thought and great dignity. Did I come here alone to tell you this? My father sent me. My father is an old, old man. He is as old as one of those old men in the Bible, and he said to me, go into the land of Egypt where my son is held prisoner. Go before the mighty of the land—and plead for my son’s life.”

  It came as a shock to the Professor of Criminal Law to realize that the Writer was, weeping. The Writer from New York wept simply and unashamedly, and then, deliberately, he dried his eyes and stared at the Governor. The Governor met his eyes, and that in no way disconcerted the leader of the Commonwealth. He had listened to all the two women had to say, and as before, when the Professor had spoken, he waited politely, to make quite certain that they had finished speaking. When he was sure of this he said, unemotionally and simply,

  “I am terribly sorry that I cannot do something to alleviate your distress. I understand the source of your distress, but you see, the law is implacable under these circumstances. It has been a difficult task to look back six years through other people’s eyes. Many of the witnesses told me their story in a way I felt was more a matter of repetition than a product of their memory—”

  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

  EVEN 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.