OUTRAGES IN DEFENCE OF ORDER.
THE PROPOSED MURDER OF TWO AMERICAN RADICALS
One of the most intriguing phenomena of the present time is the
increasing readiness of the supporters of established institutions
to use violent and illegal methods against anything that seems to
threaten these institutions. Law and Order have become excuses for
lawlessness and crime. The gravest threats to freedom and progress,
personal security and security of property, have come in late years
far more from within established institutions than from without. In
crimes against life, truth, personal honour, private freedom, and
legal rights, the professional “rebel,” though by no means an angel,
finds himself a poor second to the responsible administrator, the
judge, the official, and, above all, the conservative “strong man.”
The instances multiply. They vary from the grotesque to the sheerly
horrible, from the ridiculous burglaries of the British Government up
the scale to prolonged torment and murder. At present the western world
is confronted with a case altogether typical of this paradoxical resort
to evil on the part of those who are supposed to be its professional
antagonists--the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, in Massachusetts. It is an
affair more dismaying from some points of view even than the long tale
of atrocities on which the Fascist dominion in Italy rests to-day. It
calls for the closest study on the part of every one who is concerned
with the present development of our civilization.
I will state the bare, indisputable facts of this amazing case. They
do not admit of contradiction; they are matters of common knowledge.
I quote them from a small, generally accessible book, “The Case of
Sacco and Vanzetti,” by Professor Felix Frankfurter. He is far abler
and far better qualified to deal with such an affair than I can hope
to be. Intellectually and politically, he is a figure of the utmost
respectability. He is Professor of Administrative Law in the law
department of Harvard University; he was Assistant Secretary of War at
Washington during the war. He has come into the affair from no motives
but the interest of a specialist, the passion of a good patriot for the
honour of his country, and the indignation and pity of an honest man.
He has made an exhaustive study of all the evidence and records in the
trial, and he has presented the results with extreme lucidity. Before
his intervention William G. Thompson, a great Massachusetts lawyer, had
already taken up the cause of the two miserable defendants. And these
are the essentials of this abominable business as these two have laid
them bare.
Sacco was a worker in a shoe factory in Stoughton, Mass.; Vanzetti
was a fish pedlar. They were arrested and charged with participation
in a “hold-up,” involving the murder of a paymaster and his guard, and
the theft of a box containing about sixteen thousand dollars. It was a
hold-up in broad daylight, the victims were shot, the box was snatched,
and the murderers made off in a car. The evidence for the presence of
the two accused upon the scene of the murder, when one examines the
record, is contemptible. It is manifestly, to any one who has assisted
at police court proceedings, that sort of cultivated evidence one gets
out of unintelligent witnesses by pestering and pressure long after
their real testimony has been exhausted. One poor woman, for example,
who saw the scene from a window at a distance of thirty yards or more,
who had a second and a half to observe a car passing at fifteen or
eighteen miles an hour, and who refused at first to identify Sacco,
was induced after a year of police education to describe how in that
brief interval she had remarked the peculiar shape of his forehead, the
distinctive length of his hair, and the particular size of his hands.
On the other hand, the evidence that both of the accused were
elsewhere is sound and convincing. The murder was committed at
Braintree, in the outskirts of Boston, at 3 P.M., and an official
of the Italian consulate in Boston witnesses that he was visited by
Sacco, who was seeing about his passport to Italy, at 2.15 on that
day. Vanzetti, the prosecution maintained, was, as various customers
testified, with Italian duplicity, selling fish far away from the place
where he was simultaneously committing murder. On the evidence for an
alibi alone, the active complicity of these two men in the Braintree
crime would have been laughed out of court in any unimpassioned
trying of the case. The rest of the case for the prosecution is as
contemptible. It is a feeble and tortured attempt to convict. No traces
of booty, no association with any murder gang, no contributory facts of
weight sustain the contention of the prosecution.
But this is not all. It is not merely that these men have been found
guilty contrary to the weight of the evidence so far as it concerns
themselves; they are held guilty, and they are to be executed on
July 10th next in the teeth of the fact that a Portuguese named
Madeiros subsequently confessed, and that the real murderers are quite
clearly indicated. Professor Frankfurter names them and demands their
prosecution. Is this too incredible for the reader? Let him read the
Professor’s dispassionate statements. I do not see how any clear-headed
man, after a reading of the Professor’s summary, can have any other
conviction than that Sacco and Vanzetti are as innocent of the
Braintree murder, for which they are now (after seven years of prison
hardship and mental torture) awaiting death, as Julius Cæsar, or--a
better name in this connection--Karl Marx.
But why then are they to die? The clue to the riddle is to be found
in the cross-examination of Sacco by District Attorney Katzmann, and
in an illuminating remark made by one of the jurymen in the case.
This murder, it must be understood, occurred as long ago as April,
1920, near the height of the great “Red” scare in the United States.
It was a hot time for any miserable worker who had involved himself
with Communist or even mere Socialist propaganda and organization.
Sacco and Vanzetti, honest, industrious, worthy men in most other
relations, as the assembled evidence shows, were--radicals! They were
pacificists and Socialists. They seem to have been connected with a
certain Salsedo, whose wickedness may be judged from the fact that in
the general “drive” against the Reds he was arrested by the United
States Department of Justice, put in a room on the fourteenth floor
of a Park-road building, and then found dead on the sidewalk below.
Evidently a desperate bad character. Perhaps he fell in an attempt to
climb down from the fourteenth floor; perhaps he did not. These two men
were certainly associated with him; they had taken part in pacifist
and socialist activities. Sacco, drawn to fight in the Great War, had
evaded and gone to Mexico, and Vanzetti, in addition, had spoken at
meetings against military service, and the prosecution directed itself
less to the trifling matter of the Braintree murder than to these facts.
Mr. Katzmann’s method with his victim was to worry him about his
evasion of military service during the war and about his Socialist
views. To go on worrying and wearying and provoking him, with his
imperfect knowledge of English, until he blundered into phrases and
statements that would be acutely offensive to the carefully selected
jury. Before a jury of inflamed Massachusetts patriots, Mr. Katzmann’s
ideas of fair play allowed him to ask these poor devils whether they
_loved_ the United States, whether they thought the United States a
free country, whether they were disappointed by the United States,
whether they subscribed to newspapers likely to be distasteful to the
jury, whether they were sympathetic with anarchists, and so forth,
and so on, and Judge Thayer, the presiding judge, instead of kicking
a prosecution of this quality back to the proper charges, aided and
abetted these foul irrelevancies.
What had these disputes to do with the plain question of murder with
violence before the courts? The prosecution, says the “Yale Law
Journal,” was allowed to ask, “at a time of intense popular feeling
against anarchists and all opposed to the established order, questions
emphasizing in a picturesque and telling manner the political views of
a defendant on trial for a crime which admittedly had not the slightest
relation to these views.”
That was the spirit and method of this trial. The quality of the jury
at which this stuff was aimed may be judged by the fact on record that
before the trial Ripley, the foreman, said to a friend who doubted the
guilt of the accused: “Damn them, they ought to hang anyway.” These
two men were in fact condemned not as murderers, but as socialists
and pacifists, and it is as Socialists and pacifists that they are to
be killed in July. The pro-killing party in the United States hardly
troubles to maintain the flimsy story of their murder guilt. The
Braintree murder is indeed merely a legal fiction in this case like
the John Doe and Richard Roe of various old-fashioned English legal
instruments. If it can be used to kill Sacco and Vanzetti, then I do
not see why it should not become a standard legal form, and why any
other people in the United States whose opinions are considered to
be unsound, whose presence on earth is regarded as unpropitious, or
who have got themselves disliked in any way, should not presently be
included in this murder case and sent after these first victims to the
electric chair.
The facts of the case are now so patent and so widely known that no
American citizen from the President downward who studies the evidence
has any excuse for pretending to believe that Sacco and Vanzetti had
hand or part in the Braintree murder. The case has passed out of the
purview of courts and persons, and become a challenge to every American
citizen. The fact, plain as day and staring the world in the face,
cleared of all prevarications and pretences, is that the greatest, most
powerful, and modern state in the world is now confronted with the
question whether it will or will not permit these men to be killed upon
a false accusation because of their political views. Is their blood to
stain Old Glory?
I will say no more of Sacco, the factory hand, and Vanzetti, the
pedlar of fish, who have been doomed to die lest America fall. I turn
to a much more intricate and interesting figure, Judge Thayer. These
others are just confused, common back-street men, but Judge Thayer is
a type. After reading Professor Frankfurter’s book through I went to
and fro in it, picking out everything I could about Judge Thayer. My
curiosity grows. I would like to study him intensively, get photographs
of him, dive into his life story, learn about his school and college.
And that, not because I think he is anything strange and out of the
way, but because he is so tremendously normal. I perceive that he was
in perfect accord with the District Attorney, Katzmann, and in close
sympathy with the jury, when Sacco and Vanzetti were, not so much
tried, as baited in his court. He had no feeling of wrong-doing at
that time. “Thayerism,” if he will permit me to draw a word from him,
is no rare thing in America. Nor is it rare in England. It interweaves
intimately with the mental quality of the European Fascist. It is a
widely diffused and dangerous force in our modern world. “Thayerism,”
the self-righteous unrighteousness of established people. Let us
consider its more salient characteristics.
In the first place, after my first exploration of Judge Thayer, I
am left with the persuasion that he is, legally speaking, a quite
honest man. That is to say, I do not think that he was guided by any
considerations of personal profit to take the line of conduct that
is making him Stupor Mundi, the amazement of the civilized world. I
think that he and his jurymen had a feeling of profound obligation to
their country, and that they really supposed that they were serving
great civilized ideals in doing as they did in the conviction of their
victims. I am not so sure of the District Attorney. I thought his
cross-examination tricky and evil; but then I am accustomed to the
candours of science, and I find most lawyers in most cross-examinations
tricky and evil. But District Attorney apart, the court, I am
convinced, felt that it was making a large fair display and doing
helpful work to maintain the good life, the spacious and generous
and wholesome American life, by accepting proofs that were no proofs
against these friendless men--who “deserved to be hanged anyway.” I
feel sure that the Judge went home to his family--and I can quite
believe he has a very nice family--with a sense of a stern duty
manfully done.
After the trial I agree that his record is not so straightforward. The
criticism of his verdict seems to have surprised and hurt him. He must
have felt that he had settled this business for his country’s good,
and that he did not deserve the trouble made about his settlement. His
conduct suggests wounded vanity and bad temper rather than any Satanic
qualities. People came into court and hurt his feelings by motions for
a new trial, which he refused indignantly. The Supreme Judicial Court
of Massachusetts, without inquiry into the evidence of the murder,
but simply upon legal issues, upheld his right to block a retrial. It
still upholds him. To the last application based upon the Madeiros
confession of 1925, after studying the motion “for several weeks
without interruption,” he produced an opinion of twenty-five thousand
words. Professor Frankfurter describes it, with manifest deliberation
of phrase and with all the weight of a trained critic of just this
sort of material, as “a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations,
suppressions, and mutilation.” I quote without endorsement this opinion.
I believe Judge Thayer’s conduct of the original case was entirely
honest; and if his final opinion hardly comes up to the standards of
that high word, it still remains, for most fallible men, a very human
and sympathetic effort. What is the matter with Judge Thayer is not
that he is a bad man, not that he is antimoral, but that he is--to put
it mildly--extremely obtuse mentally and morally. This mental and moral
obtuseness seems to have extended to his court and to a considerable
body of opinion in the United States which sustained him in his
crushing of these two unfortunates.
It is difficult to say just how far that obtuseness does not extend
in our English-speaking communities. Many people in the continent
of Europe hold that it is innate, that the American and English are
by nature stupid people, acting often with clumsy and unintentional
cruelty, and missing the point of most issues. That stupidity carried
with it a certain obduracy which in many rough practical issues has the
effect of strength. But the writing and acts of Judge Thayer and his
District Attorney indicate considerable acuteness and liveliness. I do
not believe they are naturally dishonest or stupid. I am quite willing
to credit them with intelligence, integrity, and public spirit. But it
is crude intelligence, dull integrity, and sentimental public spirit.
They have under-developed minds; the minds of lumpish, overgrown
children. They have had no fine moral and intellectual training. They
have lived in an atmosphere where there is no subtle criticism of
conduct and opinion, where everything is black or white, bad “to be
hanged anyway,” or good to be given every privilege. Everything is
overemphasized. To be bad or wrong is not to be against the law on this
issue or that; it is to be outlawed and not given a dog’s chance. It
is to be hounded down. They have acquired no pride in discrimination
or exactitude. They are easily prejudiced violently for or against
anything, and they are as incapable of behaving with scrupulous
fairness to any one who they think is in the wrong as they are capable
of the sloppiest adulation and indulgence for any one they think is in
the right. In religion they have never learnt to distinguish cant from
faith, they are the natural prey of Elmer Gantry and his kind, and in
politics and social questions they cannot distinguish honest criticism
of their fundamental ideas from aimless malignant wickedness. They are
not mentally quickened to the point of generosity; they are blind to
the pathetic idealism of these poor aliens in their midst; they have
panics against dreaming workmen who can scarcely talk intelligibly;
they see red and feel murderous. And they mean well!
They mean well. That is the tragedy of this situation. The Judge
Thayers of our world, just as much as the Saccos and Vanzettis, want
the world to be fair and fine. The motives on neither side are entirely
base. But Thayerism has the upper hand, and it is all too ready for
hasty conclusions even if they involve blood sacrifices. Too many
Americans, I fear, believe that a little blood-letting is good for
their civilization. So did the Aztecs before them. But blood is a poor
cement for the foundations of a civilization. It is less a cement than
a corrosive. There have been civilizations before the present one in
America, and for all the blood they shed so abundantly upon their high
places they have gone and are buried and stuff for the archæologist.
Six weeks still remain for justice and pity. Will the mighty and
fortunate United States, perhaps the greatest power in the world
to-day, allow the State of Massachusetts to kill this machine hand
and this fish pedlar on the charge that they have committed a crime
of which all the world now knows them innocent, or will it, at the
eleventh hour, induce the Governor of that State to put an end to their
seven years of misery and hardship in some more gracious fashion?
Sacco and Vanzetti were not executed in July; they were reprieved
for a special inquiry until August 10th. On the eve of that day they
were again reprieved for a further twelve days until the United
States Supreme Court could decide upon certain points of law that
still remained unsettled. No legal power existed outside the State of
Massachusetts to avert the infamous conclusion. They were electrocuted
on August 22nd.
_29 May, 1927._