Sacco and Vanzetti
The Never-Ending Wrong.
by Katherine Anne Porter.
Atlantic-Little, Brown. 63 pp. $5.95.
Katherine Anne Porter has couched her reminiscences of the last days of Sacco and Vanzetti in a tone more nostalgic than elegiac. The nostalgia arises from her recognition that the Sacco-Vanzetti episode marked a turn in her own development as a writer, a milestone at the point where the hazy landscape of youth fades from view.
This milestone was not merely personal; the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti was taken up by large numbers of educated Americans. In the course of the six years between their arrest on suspicion of murder and their execution in 1927, several threads of American experience came to be knit together.
To begin with, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti was tinged with mystery. Even when most of the educated world believed in their innocence as much as it believed the earth a globe, there remained the question of who, if not they, committed the robbery and murder for which they were being tried. Since (as several students of the case have argued in recent years) Sacco may actually have held and used the murder weapon, the mystery is even deeper. And if the “unthinkable” should turn out to have been true of Sacco, could he have let Vanzetti die innocent? What, in fact, were the relations between the two men whose names are now as legendary and as closely linked as Damon and Pythias? If Sacco’s gun did not in fact fire the fatal bullet, who tampered with it? When? The questions multiply even if they never erase the implacable fact that the two men were put to death on findings of guilt which satisfied almost no educated American under fifty.
Another thread in the case was the immigrant experience. It posed a question still not entirely resolved: can America, thanks to its lack of a hereditary landed aristocracy and of an established church, and its representative government based on universal suffrage, escape the class warfare of Europe? The arrival of large numbers of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe at the turn of the century put this question to the fire as it had not been since the Civil War. The National Origins Immigration Act of 1921 answered it in the negative: American exceptionalism could continue only if immigration were controlled. The ethnic difficulties of that period are now forgotten in the chic myth that everyone in America has made it but blacks.
For many young Americans, Sacco and Vanzetti raised this particular problem to consciousness for the first time. The novelist John Dos Passos, whose presence in Boston during the last days is meticulously recorded by Miss Porter in her memoirs, made the case a turning point in The Big Money. In one of his “Camera’s Eye” passages, Dos Passos neatly captures the immigrant aspect of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial:
Accustomed the smoking car accustomed the jumble of faces rumble cozily homelike toward Boston through the gathering dark how can I make them feel how our fathers our uncles haters of oppression came to this coast how say Don’t let them scare you make them feel who are your oppressors America or that this fishpeddler you have in Charles-town Jail is one of your founders Massachusetts?
A third major thread in the Sacco Vanzetti episode was the exploitation of the trial by American Communists, whose interest in the perfections or imperfections of American institutions was minimal, and whose human sympathies for the two accused anarchists were, if anything, less than minimal. Miss Porter, who was thirty-seven at the time, had already seen at first hand enough of the Mexican revolution and the role played in it by Communist revolutionaries to understand the way in which they, for their own doctrinal and political purposes, were now trying to exploit Sacco and Vanzetti.
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This issue—the infiltration by Communists into the independent Left, and into the American battle for civil liberties—has not disappeared over the years since the trial. It is now public knowledge, for instance, that the American Civil Liberties Union, in the 1950’s, sought the help of the FBI to ascertain which prospective candidates for its Board of Directors were, privately, Communists. Although such caution may seem quaint today to those to whom it does not seem hideously reactionary, the ACLU was by no means unrealistic in wanting to know the basic philosophy of those who demanded to participate in its leadership. All too often, the dedicated friends of democratic liberties changed their dedication with turns in Soviet foreign policy.
Miss Porter happens (so it seems) to have fallen into the hands of a Communist-led faction of the Sacco-Vanzetti protest movement. She attributes a statement to the leader of this faction, to the effect that the Communists had less interest in Sacco and Vanzetti alive than in Sacco and Vanzetti dead. This statement has been quoted by some reviewers of The Never-Ending Wrong, but others have seemed reluctant to discuss the role of the Communists in the Sacco-Vanzetti affair. John Leonard, for instance, writing in the New York Times, pointed out that numerically the Communists were a small part of the general chaos. Actually, they were no part of the chaos at all, for they knew exactly what they were doing. If help were needed to make an execution practically inevitable, whatever its justice or merits, they were ready to provide it, just as they were ready to exploit the political advantages (to Russia) of America’s supposed iniquity. For Leonard, the presence of the Communists did not significantly affect the outcome, and he implies that Miss Porter would have done better not to mention it. But the Communist participation was in fact central to Miss Porter’s understanding of the events and to the understanding of many others as well, for whom it left a sense of having been somehow betrayed in the midst of an episode in which they themselves were most deeply involved.
A fourth major element in the Sacco-Vanzetti episode, amply treated by Miss Porter, is the periodic emergence in America of a wave of social protest led by members of the ruling class, or what would elsewhere be called the ruling class. Whether it is the 19th-century anti-slavery movement, or the civil-rights or anti-war movement of our own day, all such movements have about them a particular American quality of innocence, with the participants taking for granted that nothing very serious will happen to them as a consequence of their actions. And even if some do pay a penalty, and occasionally a very high one, the upper-income participants are seldom among them.
This was certainly true in Boston, even though, as Miss Porter records, the protesters raised their own consciousness with scary stories. She writes: “There was then in existence—is it still I wonder?—an infamous law called the Baumes Law, which provided that anyone who had been arrested as much as four times—or was it more than four times?—should be eligible to imprisonment for life.” She adds a little later that “some of us couldn’t believe such a monstrosity existed on our statute books; we thought someone was playing a low joke on our ignorance.” In fact, after having been arrested for picketing, the protesters were fined $5 each for loitering—no matter how many times arrested—and urged to leave.
It would seem that a group of intellectuals protesting a legal miscarriage would be sufficiently interested in the statutes to learn that the Baumes Law, a New York State statute wholly irrelevant in Massachusetts, provided that anyone convicted, not “arrested,” of four unconnected felonies, not misdemeanors or “offenses,” could be sentenced to life after the fourth conviction as an habitual offender. The law had nothing to do with Boston in 1927. But it was essential to Miss Porter to believe this nonsense because it helped her, and presumably others, to narrow the gap between themselves and the two victims of a social disaster for which they held their parents or their own class responsible.
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How long, one wonders, will the children of America’s ruling class undergo this periodic drive to express their solidarity with those at the opposite pole of society, only to drop the cause in question when it becomes inconvenient or boring and pick up again the burdens of leadership? (How different was the response, by contrast, of similarly situated French youth to the Dreyfus case.) This curious process, like the turning over of the waters in a lake under the heat of the summer sun, was a mystery to Sacco. Miss Porter notes that neither he nor Vanzetti really trusted “these strangers from the upper world who furnished the judges and lawyers to the courts, the politicians to the offices, the faculties to the universities.” Sacco wrote to a “rich and ardent” benefactor. “Although we are one heart, unfortunately we represent two opposite classes.” Only in America.
