The way the world is going

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.