The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A New England Legend (26 page)

“Now they will die, and there is no hope left.”

“As long as time is left, hope is left,” the Communist answered.

“An answer by rote,” the Professor said, his voice bitter. “I have been to the prison and come back from there. It is the end, and as hopeless at the end as it was at the beginning. I am sick with it. I know the men are guiltless, and yet they must die. My faith in human decency will die with them.”

“Your faith dies easily,” the Communist said.

“Does it? Is your faith stronger? Where is your faith, sir?”

“With the working people of America,” the Communist answered.

“That's a lesson you've learned, but isn't it at odds with reality? I've never argued with you people. I've known you were everywhere around this case, and sometimes I've even admired the energy and the selflessness with which you worked. I would not permit myself to redbait, as others do, for in my own way I have as great a necessity as anyone to live in a world where justice prevails. For that reason, I worked with you, but now your position angers me. What faith in the working people? Where are they? Oh, I agree that Sacco and Vanzetti are being put to death because they are working men, Italians, communists, agitators—because a scapegoat is needed, an example, a warning. But where are your working people? The Federation does nothing, and the great Federation leaders sit at home—they are not even on the picket line. And the working men—where are they?”

“Everywhere.”

“Is that an answer?”

“For the moment, it is. What would you want—for the working people to storm the jail and free Sacco and Vanzetti? Things are not done that way—except in foolish dreams. They may kill Sacco and Vanzetti; they killed Albert Parsons, and Tom Mooney is in jail, and there will be others too, but not forever. They do these murderous things only for one reason—because they fear us, and they know we will not endure these things forever.”

“Who? The communists?”

“No, not the communists. The working people. And those who murder Sacco and Vanzetti hate the communists only because the communists are knit to the working people.”

“What notions you have!” the Professor said. “Would you want me to believe this tonight—of all nights?”

“You can't believe it. For you, when Sacco and Vanzetti die, there will die with them all hopes and dreams of justice and reason.”

“That's a cruel thing to say.”

“But admit that it's the truth.”

“And if I do? Don't you talk too glibly of opposing a power as great as this? The whole world cries out that they shall not die, and yet they will die. I admit I am afraid: I put my faith in something, and it's lost. I don't know your nameless working people. I don't understand them—any more than I understand you.”

“Any more than you understand Sacco and Vanzetti?”

“Any more than I understand Sacco and Vanzetti,” the Professor of Criminal Law admitted sadly. And there was truth in this; his grief was in good measure for his own shattered hopes and lost faith, and walking on the picket line, he said to himself,

“Now indeed do I weep for myself and not for them. Something most precious and irreplaceable within me is going to die, and I weep because I am the chief mourner.”

So each wept in his own fashion—but there were some who remained dry-eyed; and these dry-eyed ones did other things instead of weeping. They pledged to themselves a long memory and an absolute identification. They made notations in their own hearts and they drew up a balance sheet that extended as far back as the memory of mankind and the first whiplash on the first bent back. These dry-eyed ones said to themselves, “There is a better way than weeping and a better way than tears.”

And now in the prison itself, the final hour came to its finish, and the moment arrived for the first of the three men to die. That was Celestino Madeiros, thief and murderer, and the deputy warden of the prison and two prison guards came to his cell and beckoned to him. Madeiros had been waiting for them, and very quietly and with amazing dignity, he took his place between the two guards and walked with them for the thirteen paces that separated his cell from the execution chamber. When he entered this chamber, he stopped for a moment and let his eyes travel over the faces of the assembled spectators. Afterwards, some said that a look of anger passed across his face, but more of those who watched him were agreed that he was unmoved and unperturbed as he sat down in the electric chair. The signal was given, and two thousand volts of electricity were sent coursing through his body. The lights of the prison grew dim and then strong again, and Celestino Madeiros was dead.

The second to die was Nicola Sacco. Like Madeiros, he walked with a simple dignity which, coming after the behavior of the first doomed man, sent chills of fear through the spectators. It was neither normal nor reasonable that two men should go to their death in this fashion, yet here it was happening.

Sacco said never a word. With great calm and dignity, he walked to the electric chair and sat down. He looked straight ahead of him while they fastened the electrodes. The lights dimmed, and a moment later, Nicola Sacco was dead.

The last of the three was Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Now the procedure had become a challenge to the officials and the representatives of the press who were there to observe and to write about the execution. After the silence which had accompanied the death of Sacco, there was an audible sigh that went up from the crowd, and then there was a whispering back and forth as to what Vanzetti would do. They whispered in order to prepare themselves for his entrance into the death chamber, but whisper though they might, they could not prepare themselves wholly or properly. They could not anticipate the lion-like poise of him as he walked into the execution chamber, or the dignity with which he stood before them. His self-possession, his calm, his command of the situation, was more than they could bear, callous though they were, and armed as they were with the fortitude required to witness a triple execution. He broke through their defenses. He looked at them with what can only be described as a sense of judgment, and he pronounced the words he had decided to say, slowly and clearly.

“I wish to say to you,” Vanzetti told them, “that I am innocent. I have never committed any crime—some sins—but never any crime.…”

There were hard men there, but hard as they were, their throats constricted, and many among them began to cry silently. It never occurred to them to halt their tears now with the argument that they were only weeping for two Italian radicals who were supposedly alien to all that is known as Americanism. This never occurred to them. Some of them closed their eyes, and others turned their heads away—and then the lights waned, and when the lights became bright again, Bartolomeo Vanzetti was dead.

Epilogue

At that time, in the city of Boston, there was a club known as the Athenaeum, and to this club there belonged those whose names were connected with the city's past, with the long past days of Emerson and Thoreau. Such men as the President of the University, who sat in final judgment on Sacco and Vanzetti, were powerful influences in this club—a place into which no foreigner, no first-generation upstart, no Jew or Negro, had ever penetrated
.

On the morning after the execution, on August 23, 1927, a slip of paper was found to have been inserted in every magazine in the reading room of the club. And on each slip of paper were the following words:

“
On this day, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, dreamers of the brotherhood of man, who hoped it might be found in America, were done to a cruel death by the children of those who fled long ago to this land of hope and freedom
.”

Biography

Howard Fast (1914-2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast's commitment to championing social justice in his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his lively cinematic style.

Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast's mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London's
The Iron Heel
, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.

Fast began his writing career early, leaving high school to finish his first novel,
Two Valleys
(1933). His next novels, including
Conceived in Liberty
(1939) and
Citizen Tom Paine
(1943), explored the American Revolution and the progressive values that Fast saw as essential to the American experiment. In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party, an alliance that came to define—and often encumber—much of his career. His novels during this period advocated freedom against tyranny, bigotry, and oppression by exploring essential moments in American history, as in
The American
(1946). During this time Fast also started a family of his own. He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and the couple had two children.

Congressional action against the Communist Party began in 1948, and in 1950, Fast, an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because he refused to provide the names of other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Fast was issued a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. While in prison, he was inspired to write
Spartacus
(1951), his iconic retelling of a slave revolt during the Roman Empire, and did much of his research for the book during his incarceration. Fast's appearance before Congress also earned him a blacklisting by all major publishers, so he started his own press, Blue Heron, in order to release Spartacus. Other novels published by Blue Heron, including
Silas Timberman
(1954), directly addressed the persecution of Communists and others during the ongoing Red Scare. Fast continued to associate with the Communist Party until the horrors of Stalin's purges of dissidents and political enemies came to light in the mid-1950s. He left the Party in 1956.

Fast's career changed course in 1960, when he began publishing suspense-mysteries under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. He published nineteen books as Cunningham, including the seven-book Masao Masuto mystery series. Also, Spartacus was made into a major film in 1960, breaking the Hollywood blacklist once and for all. The success of
Spartacus
inspired large publishers to pay renewed attention to Fast's books, and in 1961 he published
April Morning
, a novel about the battle of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution. The book became a national bestseller and remains a staple of many literature classes. From 1960 onward Fast produced books at an astonishing pace—almost one book per year—while also contributing to screen adaptations of many of his books. His later works included the autobiography
Being Red
(1990) and the
New York Times
bestseller
The Immigrants
(1977).

Fast died in 2003 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Fast on a farm in upstate New York during the summer of 1917. Growing up, Fast often spent the summers in the Catskill Mountains with his aunt and uncle from Hunter, New York. These vacations provided a much-needed escape from the poverty and squalor of the Lower East Side's Jewish ghetto, as well as the bigotry his family encountered after they eventually relocated to an Irish and Italian neighborhood in upper Manhattan. However, the beauty and tranquility Fast encountered upstate were often marred by the hostility shown toward him by his aunt and uncle. "They treated us the way Oliver Twist was treated in the orphanage," Fast later recalled. Nevertheless, he "fell in love with the area" and continued to go there until he was in his twenties.