by Howard Fast
The Dictator extended his own hands to greet this old man, and remained for a moment in deep silence. The old worker who led the delegation took his written plea out of his pocket and unfolded it carefully. While the others stood behind him, their caps in their hands, he read hesitantly and not without fear, in a trembling voice, the following message:
“A thousand peasants and working people of Italy have gathered together in the town of Villafalletto, where Bartolomeo Vanzetti was born. We have met together in the memory of a good and gentle Italian, who is unjustly doomed to die. We resolve that we will do all in our power to prevent his death; whereupon, we humbly send a delegation of our members gathered from the villages around Villafalletto, as well as from the city of Turin, to plead with il Duce that he may intervene with the government of the United States to prevent this unspeakable legal murder. We know the power of il Duce’s voice, and we humbly and respectfully urge that his voice be raised to ask clemency for two sons of our working class, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.”
When the old man had finished reading, his rheumy and tired eyes filled with tears, and he groped in his pocket for a handkerchief to dry his cheeks. Unquestionably, he had a personal relationship to the doomed men.
When the Dictator suddenly embraced the old man, everyone in the room was visibly moved by the impulsive action. Half of the delegation were weeping when they left the office, and as the Dictator reseated himself behind his desk, he himself was not unmoved. Still caught in the spirit of the occasion, he called for a stenographer, and dictated the following press release:
“Il Duce has communicated with the President of the United States in a plea that the lives of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, both of them of Italian origin, may be spared. He has called upon the President of the United States to take this step in view of cementing relations between Italy and the United States, within the framework of warm friendship existing between these countries for so many years.”
“The President of the United States, acknowledging il Duce’s message, has conveyed his intense regrets that, due to the system of government prevailing in the United States, this matter would have to remain in the hands of the State government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. While the President of the United States recognizes the sincere interest and deep concern of il Duce in this matter, he regretfully announces that he has no power to intervene.”
When he had finished with this message, the Dictator pointed out to the Minister of Labor that it must coincide with a statement from Washington, and that his confirmation should be obtained before his own statement was released to the press. The Minister of Labor assured him that no difficulties would lie in the path of such a desirable conclusion to the affair.
All this had acted as a catharsis, and the pall of gloom lifted from the Dictator. In another twenty minutes, he was able to leave his office for his bedroom, and suddenly the day, the future, all the circumstances of his existence, had once again become bright and joyful.
Chapter 8
BEGINNING in the morning of August 22nd, the picket line had been moving back and forth in front of the State House. The size of this picket line varied. When it began for today, there were no more than a handful of persons who defiantly and self-consciously moved along the sidewalk, walking silently in those very early hours of the day. A little later, when people began to hurry by to their work, the size of the picket line increased; and there was a brief interval around noontime when it was swelled by many men and women who joined it for fifteen minutes or a half-hour before they in turn went back to their jobs.
But even apart from this, the picket line had increased substantially by ten o’clock, and by this time, dozens of policemen had taken their places on the scene, spreading out—in effect, surrounding the picket line and attempting to give an impression of sturdy defenders of the people meeting a dangerous menace. First there were only city police; then the city police were reinforced by state police; then a car parked about a block away, four men with tommy guns sitting inside of it, ready if the occasion arose; although what possible occasion could call them into action, no one on the picket line was able to say. The actual purpose of the massed police and semi-military preparations around the picket line was more to intimidate than to defend; and in this process of intimidation, the police were not wholly unsuccessful.
For three or four days, people concerned about the Sacco-Vanzetti case had been coming into Boston from all over the United States. When the final decision was made by the Governor of the Commonwealth that Sacco and Vanzetti must go to their death at midnight of August 22nd, it seemed to many people in many parts of the United States that they themselves could hear the low but bitter moan of anguish that arose out of Boston. This was felt by an amazing variety of people. Physicians and housewives and steel workers and poets and writers and railroad engineers, and even ranch hands riding on their lonely work in the far, far west, shared this peculiar and fearful intimacy with the lives and the hopes and the fears of. Sacco and Vanzetti. Execution is as old as mankind, and unquestionably the number of those who were innocent but went to their death, was great; yet never before in this land had an impending execution affected and shaken so many people.
In Seattle, Washington, the day before August 22nd, a Negro Methodist minister preached a sermon on the case of Sacco and Vanzetti. He began his sermon by recalling an experience he had had in the state of Alabama as a little child. Such experiences were common enough to Negroes born and raised in the South for a particular chord to be struck among his listeners; and the preacher went on to tell how, in the little town where he had lived, a cry for blood had filled the air. A poor, foolish, hysterical woman raised the cry that she had been raped; and then all the hounds of hell began to gallop at full pace. Even though he was just a little boy at the time, this Negro minister had consciously watched a web of circumstances tighten around an innocent man until finally the innocent man was lynched. The preacher now recalled the inevitability of these circumstances, and the anguish and suffering of the man trapped by them.
“What do I see in this case of Sacco and Vanzetti?” he asked from his pulpit. “I try to talk to you, my flock, as a man of God, which is not an easy thing. But I must also talk to you as a black man. No more can I shed my skin then I can shed, here in this life, my soul. I have been thinking a great, great deal about this case of Sacco and Vanzetti, telling myself that a Sunday would come when I could no longer keep silent and I would have to preach my sermon on it. I do not delude myself into believing that one sermon spoken by one voice will really alter the awful fate that awaits these two poor men. Neither can I delude myself into believing that my own silence should be justified by this understanding.
“Last night, I talked with my wife and my children of Sacco and Vanzetti. The five of us sitting there, all colored people whose crust of bread has at times been bitter indeed, found ourselves weeping. Afterwards, I asked myself why we had wept. I recalled that there have been those historians recently who claim that they cannot find spelled out in history, proof of the passion of our Lord, Jesus Christ. How foolish these people are! They seek for evidence of one Christ and one crucifixion, when the history of that time tells the story of ten million crucifixions. Yesterday I and my people were slaves in bondage; and two thousand years ago, there was an angry slave called Spartacus, who led his people against their bondage, and told them to rise up and make themselves free. When he was defeated, six thousand of his followers were crucified by the Romans. Who, then, will say to me that history makes no mention of the passion of Jesus Christ?
“And will someone a thousand years from today seek vainly in the pages of history to discover and reveal the passion of Sacco and Vanzetti? Will they ask for chapter and verse—and if they should not find it, say that the Son of Man never died for us? This I asked myself, and when I had asked myself this, a bleak sadness came over me, my heart became heavy, and when I stared into the darkness, looking for light and fo
r a pathway, none appeared. Then I had to say to myself, You are a man of little faith and less understanding, and I had to berate myself and become angry with myself, for in so short a time I had forgotten that I and my wife and my three children all wept because these two Italian immigrants must die, because a web of circumstances had closed about them, and no force in the whole world seems able to save them. If out of this, I see only the darkness, then indeed I have ceased to believe either in God or in His Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ.”
“But always, the glimmer of light appears somehow out of the darkness. I wanted to preach a sermon, and I asked myself, who will I preach to?” In my mind’s eye, I saw my congregation sitting in their pews, and I looked upon them in a way I had not looked upon them before. I had never said to myself before that I preach to plain working people, to hewers of wood and drawers of water. I tried to think of them only as people—and what need to define them as working people? Yet my own people are working people—are they not? I see now that you wipe your eyes. That is right. And in due time, you will weep; for the passion of Sacco and Vanzetti is your passion and mine. It is the passion of the working people of our time, whether their skin be white or black. It is the passion of the poor driven Negro of my childhood, who was hanged up by his neck by a mob of screaming, hate-driven men. It is the passion of a working man who goes from place to place, pleading that someone will buy the power of his hands, because his wife and his children are hungry. It is the passion of the Son of God, who was a carpenter.
“We are a patient people. With what effort we learned our patience, I cannot possibly estimate—for how does one measure blood and tears and heartache? But we are a patient people, and slow to anger. Yet now I do not know whether this is a virtue or a fault? They have said now that Sacco and Vanzetti must die in a few days. I do not know what our duty is, so few of us and so far away. There was one man, Peter, who could not see his Lord and companion taken, whereupon he drew a sword and smote with it. Then said Jesus unto Peter,”
‘“Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which my father hath given me, shall I not drink it?’
“Long did I ponder upon these words, trying to dispute with something within me which said, No, this is not enough. I have no answers. My heart is filled with sorrow, and I come to you with my sorrow to ask that we pray together for these two men.They will die for us.…”
These words spoken by the preacher were an expression of what some people felt, and what others felt was expressed in other ways. Many, out of the depth of their feeling, decided to journey to Boston. Most of those who did this, came without any clearly preconceived plan of what they might accomplish. Deep within themselves, as within the Negro minister, there was a need and a desire to give sound in a mighty voice; but for that kind of rage and anger and protest, people must be disciplined and trained, and these people were neither disciplined nor trained for this sort of thing. Some of those who came to Boston were poets who knew that here was an anguish beyond their command of words; others were physicians, who sensed that here was a pain and an illness that no skill of theirs could heal; and still others, who were workers, sensed even more deeply that they themselves had been sentenced to death, and that man must not die without protest. Coming to Boston, these people went to protest meetings; they asked questions to which there were no simple or definitive answers; and most of them sooner or later turned their steps toward the State House where a picket line had been in motion for many days.
Some of them could not bring themselves to join the picket line. It was no small thing to step across the crevice of fear and wonder and habit and inhibition into the ranks of a picket line. Many of these people who had come to Boston had never before in all their lives seen a picket line, much less marched on one; it was new to them. They were not certain what it meant, what its intent was, or what it might possibly accomplish; and on the part of some of them, there was a feeling that all this was a little ridiculous, this marching to and fro, carrying signs, calling out slogans, and in effect, mumbling a prayer into the thin air, a bitter prayer that two men might not perish wretchedly. Therefore, some of these people could not bring themselves to join with the picket line. Though they willed their bodies to move toward it, a stronger counter-force overcame this subjective willing, and they stood paralyzed in a dim and heartsick awareness of what their paralysis meant, and of how many more than themselves it was symbolic. Not alone were some of those who had journeyed to Boston paralyzed, but millions like them who had not come to Boston, were also paralyzed, and thereby ineffectual, and would only weep impotent tears when an Italian shoemaker and an Italian fish peddler perished at last.
There were others, however, who were not paralyzed, who managed to push aside their own reluctance, and who stepped forward and took their places in the picket line.
“Lo and behold,” some of these said to themselves, “I have discovered a new weapon that I never dreamed of! A fine, strong weapon which I can use as well as another!”
They touched shoulders with people they had never seen before, and a current of strength flowed from shoulder to shoulder. Some of these people were young; others were of middle age and some were old; but all of them were alike in that they were doing something they had never done before and thereby discovered strength they had never possessed before. Many of them joined the picket line sheepishly, marched timidly at first, then more confidently, then with a new bearing which denoted pride and determination. They squared their shoulders, lifted their heads and straightened their spines. Pride and anger became a part of their being, and those who had remained empty handed at first, found themselves eagerly taking picket signs from others who had carried the signs for hours. The signs became weapons; they were armed, and they had a feeling, implicit if not wholly defined, that in this simple, almost ordinary act of marching together in protest with their fellow men and women, they had linked themselves with a mighty movement that stretched over the entire earth. New thoughts formed in their minds, and new emotions surged through them; their hearts beat faster; they knew sorrow in a way they had not known it before, and plain anger within them was turned into protest.
Again and again, the police engineered provocation against the picket line. During the first part of that day of August 22nd, the line was twice broken up, and each time, men and women were arrested and carted away to local police stations. This too was a new experience for many of those on the picket line: poets, writers, lawyers, small business men and engineers and painters who had lived all their lives in peace and enormous security, suddenly found themselves being handled and pushed and crowded like common criminals, their security gone and shattered, the law which had so long enfolded them protectingly, now a weapon of murderous anger turned against them. Some of these people were terribly frightened; others, however, met anger with anger and hatred with hatred, and in the very act of being arrested, underwent, a change that was to be with them and to affect them for all the rest of their lives.
For the workers who were arrested, the process was much simpler, for neither surprise nor fear accompanied what was to them a process neither new nor extraordinary. One of these people was a Negro worker, a sweeper from a textile mill in Providence, Rhode Island. He had taken this day off, the whole day, without pay, so that he might come to Boston and see what other people were doing, people who, like himself, could not bear the thought that death unopposed would overtake Sacco and Vanzetti. This Negro worker had not thought too much or too deeply about the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, but for many years it had been a part of his consciousness and of the world around him in a simple and direct manner. He had never combed through the evidence in the case, but now and again he would read something that either Sacco or Vanzetti had said, or something else that was a part of their backgrounds or which illuminated a part of their backgrounds; and reading this, he would understand, also in a simple and uncomplicated manner, that these two accursed men could not commit a crime, but were plain and ordinary working
people like himself. Sometimes, indeed, he pondered with aching thoughtfulness over this identity, as when he read in a newspaper the following statement by Vanzetti in one of his published letters:
“Our friends must speak loudly to be heard by our murderers, our enemies have only to whisper and even be silent to be understood.”
The Negro had pondered for a long time over these few words, and they had in time become a part of his own decision. His decision took him, on August 22nd, to Boston, where he joined the picket line in front of the State House. He did not over-rate or under-rate this action; he recognized it for what it was, a very small action that would neither split the world asunder nor free the two men whom he had thought of for a long time as his friends. But all of his life, this man had fought against his own extinction, and had done his fighting with just such small and apparently hopeless actions, and he knew, through a wealth of practical experience, that to disdain such small actions was to disdain all action. He lived in no exalted dreams of what might be for himself tomorrow, but moved instead in terms of direct practicality for today.
In the hours he marched on the picket line, he was able to convey something of himself to the men and women around him. He was not a very tall man, but in the hard bulk of him there was an appearance of stamina and reassuring solidness. He had a square, pleasant face, and none of his motions or actions ever became either hurried or uncontrolled; and for these very reasons, he radiated an impression of his strength and conveyed to the people around him an added sense of security. He also walked easily on this task, as did many of the other workers, accepting the picket line as neither a rare nor an extraordinary moment in his existence. On the first occasion that the police tried to demolish the picket line and provoke arrests, he steadied the people around him, passed the word along, “Easy does it. Pay them no mind, and just let’s us go on with our business,” and thereby helped the people on the line to maintain both their discipline and their composure. However, these slow and deliberate actions of his caught the attention of the police. Plain clothes men pointed him out to each other, whereupon, he was noted and marked, and his importance was assessed. In the small struggle and drama of the picket line, he was chosen for elimination; and the second police provocation was directed toward him. He was picked up and arrested, and at one o’clock in the afternoon on August 22nd, he was brought to police headquarters and put into a cell by himself.
