Flowering Legend
The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti.
By G. Louis Joughin and Edmund M. Morgan.
Harcourt, Brace. 514 pp. $6.00.
A generation has passed since the state of Massachusetts put to death two Italian immigrants, not because they were criminals, which was never proved and which few people now believe, but because they were anarchists. Fate ordained that they should focus upon themselves the anger and hatred of a conservative community, normally decent, that for the moment was frightened out of its wits by the post-World War I witch-hunt of A. Mitchell Palmer. A generation has been almost long enough to blur the slate of memory, especially among the young people.
It is for these young people, primarily, that an able and sensitive scholar and a distinguished lawyer have written this fine book, the definitive volume to date. It will enable the generation born during the 20’s to experience imaginatively the ordeal that their elders lived through on the clear summer night of August 23,1927. The next morning we found that a good deal had been changed. The words law, justice, truth, honor, had lost their meaning for minds chilled by the cold wind of force, baffled by the spiritual paralysis of a whole community.
Yet something had been gained, too. The mean rancor of the unworthy judge, the blind and vulgar snobbism of the President of Harvard University were redeemed by the “splendid gentility” (the phrase is their lawyer’s, a Harvard man) of the fish peddler and the self-forgetting devotion of the shoemaker who spent his last hours trying desperately, in a letter, to heal in advance the psychic wound he knew his son must suffer. They were redeemed by the extemporaneous statement of Vanzetti to the judge:
This is what I say: I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the most low or misfortunate creature of the earth—I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for myself; but I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute me two times, and I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already. . . .
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Frameups are morally and socially costly. As the American economy floundered under the impact of the Great Depression, it became apparent that American intellectuals in significant numbers had withdrawn their allegiance from the society that had framed Sacco and Vanzetti. During the next few years the letterheads of Communist front organizations were decorated with the names of many writers, artists, and scholars who had figured prominently in the defense of the Charlestown prisoners. For years Heywood Broun did the party’s work in the Newspaper Guild. Dos Passos was almost alone in declining to join the lengthening procession of fellow travelers.
Was this the ideological legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti? Scarcely. The men were anarchists, and even as they were arrested, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia were busy liquidating their anarchist opposition. Cynically, the party and its defense arm, the International Labor Defense, exploited the case for what it was worth in kudos and collections, and then befouled their memories to promote the expansion of a police state that had developed the mass production of frameups as an instrument of rule.
One of the most valuable services of the present volume is that it makes the true legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti clear beyond any possible doubt. It roots the legend where it belongs, in the soil of libertarian faith and aspiration. In 1926, Vanzetti wrote in prison:
“In Russia this happened: The Czarism was destroyed by revolution: part of the owners were expropriated; a party took the power, stopped the continuation of expropriation and appropriated to itself that part of the social wealth which had already been expropriated by the people. From that moment the revolution began its regression and a few leaders of a small party became the only real rulers of Russia. They were immediately compelled to form a national army and build a policy worse than the Czar’s one; to uphold a new church, not better than the old one; and, given the conditions, to be more reactionary and tyrannic than the dethroned autocracy itself. . . .”
Professor Joughin quotes from the hundreds of poems, stories, novels, and plays based on the Sacco and Vanzetti story. The four chapters contributed by Professor Morgan will be of especial interest to students of the law. Rarely has a collaboration been so intelligently planned or so capably executed as this one. Here is the Sacco-Vanzetti legend complete. It can yet serve us well in life as in letters.
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