Sacco and Vanzetti
Deedy, John
between what a soldier reveals of himself in his own vignette and what we learn of his fate, perhaps fifty pages later, from someone else, and this possibility demands attentive reading;...
...Too many very important areas are left virtually untouched...
...The murder of the German prisoners affects scarcely a tenth of the novel's characters, directly or indirectly...
...Vignettes such as these make Miss Porter's failure so much more agonizing...
...of anarchist Emma Goldman holding court years later at the Select in Paris...
...And if that proclamation left open gubernatorial judgment about their actual innocence, then surely from Miss Porter would come a testament to the innocence of the two men who died for robbery and murder, but also because they were avowed anarchists, discomforting ideologues and "foreigners...
...But, of course, Miss Porter has confused the attempted Bridgewater robbery of December 24, 1919, with the South Braintree robbery of April 15, 1920, an evidentiary connection attempted by police and prosecution in an effort to establish a similarity of purpose, vehicle, method and ethnic background Of the perpetrators involved in the two incidents...
...He called on all the families he knew who were his friends, to deliver their orders f o r eels, and during the trial these people, when questioned, told exactly the same story...
...As such hers becomes an almost reactionary memoir, and she herself a curious counterpart of the exalted Boston Cardinal, William Henry O'Connell, who like Miss Porter was a periphery character in the Sacco-Vanzetti story...
...Propaganda: The A r t o f Persuasion: World War I I ANTHONY RHODES, VICTOR MARGOLIN, Eds...
...Alas, the disappointment...
...And she was outside the prison gates the night the juice was thrown, twice...
...The murders were committed at South Braintree, and although Vanzetti had an alibi for what he was doing that April day of 1920, it wasn't that he was selling Christmas eels...
...Miss Porter was a part of the events...
...one knew they couldn't get one with Judge Thayer...
...He was selling eels on that day, for Christmas...
...Surely out of the pristine preservation of a professional writer's feelings and impressions would come a memorable reflection, one that would satisfy Sacco-Vanzetti cultists as much as the recent proclamation of the Governor of Massachusetts removing the "stigma and disgrace" from the two...
...Nor is any sort of morality presumed to be an authority...
...and sped off...
...Chelsea House, $30 GORDON C. ZAHN As a coffee-table conversation starter or off-beat nostalgia item, the quality paper and the lavish color reproductions of propaganda posters may make this volume worth its price...
...She has been silent since about the case, nursing her impressions and going about her business as exquisite short-story writer, accomplished novelist and campus celebrity, at the same time refusing to read any book or article about the pair until she had revised or arranged her notes on the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti...
...BOOKS SACCO AND VANZETTI JOHN DEEDY The Never.Ending Wrong KATHERINE ANNE PORTER Atla.ntic.Little, Brown, $5.95 It is easy to make a snap judgment in favor of Katherine Anne Porter's 50th anniversary memoir about Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the good shoemaker and the poor fish peddler who went to their deaths in Massachusetts' Charlestown State Prison on August 23, 1927...
...Instead of the "definitive" collection promised in the promotional material, this is little more than an interesting, but clearly unsystematic, sampling of propaganda items including--in addition to the posters already mentioned-selected movie stills, phonograph record labels, postage stamps, and the like...
...it took no small amount of courage given the prejudices of the day...
...with a multiplicity of perspectives playing on them, Company K's most henious moments become morally problematic, but then so do its most benign...
...Later analyses suggest that their 2 September 1977:572...
...O'Connell refused to intervene in the case--and he likely could have intervened effectively through Governor Fuller to forestaI1 execution--because among other things he too believed the case had been taken over by ideological opportunists...
...The ship was going down and Miss Porter casts herself in the role of one rushing about arranging the deck chairs...
...Some themes find expression in all settings: the "loose talk sinks ships" warnings seem a universal concern...
...A background as an opponent of the war may have made this reviewer hypersensitive to the more obvious propaganda appeals to "the .home front" that affected almost every aspect of civilian life...
...But in hanging herself up on the fair-trial issue, she isolated herself on a detail that, however lamentable, had early become academic...
...It is a very lonely and desolate and powerful book, its formal discontinuity the image of modern despair...
...the robbery was foiled by guards, and the would-be robbers jumped in their touring car...
...As the last of keen eyewitnesses, she could have left behind an important historical document...
...Certainly all these presumptions were justified by the title of her book...
...Miss Porter, to her credit, parted company on that point...
...Passages of her book, particularly those describing the death-watch outside Charlestown State Prison, are gripping in their suspense and almost poetic in their beauty...
...so, I suspect, are many other war novels...
...Vincent Millay, Willie Gropper...
...One is likewise grateful to her for glimpses, however fleeting, of other partisans in the case: of fellow-picketers John Dos Passes, Edna St...
...She picketed for Sacco and Vanzetti, was arrested and bailed to picket again, to be arrested and bailed anew, etc...
...She put her body on the line, and for that history holds her honorable...
...more predictable, perhaps, are the gross and at times obscene portrayals by all nations of the respective enemies as subhuman, raging beasts of prey...
...American literature in the 1930s, not a rich decade for it, would be measurably smaller without Company K. It is much more than a war novel...
...of Sacco's wife and Vanzetti's sister, the latter over from Italy to plead her brother's cause, receiving the "savage sympathy" of demonstrating crowds...
...If, as it appears, the author and editor had more scholarly objectives in ,mind, it misses the mark by a wide margin...
...But the point is this: No one was hurt, much less murdered, at Bridgewater while Vanzetti was off selling his eels...
...Surely, too, Miss Porter would convey something of the intensity of the period to generations that know Sacco and Vanzetti but dimly, if at all, and who may not suspect that even then the system could be perverted to cause a frightful miscarriage of justice...
...Obviously I read Miss Porter's book with great anguish--but I read it also with a certain fascination...
...Unfortunately, except for very occasional comments upon the aesthetic quality or the extent to which a given poster was or Was not effective, no attempt is made to discuss or compare the different techniques or approaches in any depth...
...I wince, therefore, in deflating any argument, including Miss Porter's, that just one of the two was innocent...
...Vanzetti had been charged and convicted of the Bridgewater crime, despite all the testimony that he had indeed been selling eels that day...
...Sacco and Vanzetti were the victims of a political hysteria that was no less real, only less sophisticated, than that of the McCarthy era thirty years later...
...A three-decades interest in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and an acquaintanceship with a late defense lawyer of the trial, has long since left me convinced of the innocence of the pair...
...Miss Porter writes with regard to Vanzetti: It is proven by testimony that he was innocent of murder...
...One didn't have to wonder whether Sacco and Vanzetti were getting a fair trial...
...A more substantive confusion occurs in Miss Porter's "afterword," the wrapup section in which she wavers between the possibility that both Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty, that both were innocent, that "maybe" Sacco alone was guilty (this being arrived at with the help of Francis Russell's exotic hypothesizing over the "superhuman or subhuman silence" of Sacco's son Dante), and finally that Vanzetti surely was innocent...
...However if either or both are to be declared "innocent of murder" let it not be on the basis of some befuddled facts...
...the problem was that she agonized about it long after agonizing made any sense intellectually...
...Instead she wills the world a thin and garbled memoir, beautifully expressed and deeply felt, but so much less than we might expect of anything from Katherine Anne Porter...
...The Italian tradition of eating eels on Christmas Eve occupied his time all that day...
...Judge Thayer betrayed his bias in 1921, while the trial was in progress, and his remarks quickly became a cause cdl~bre all their own...
...The Never-Ending Wrong is sketchy and rambling, the confusions of a very old person whose interest in the case turns out to have been, and remains still, more institutional than individual-the probable innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti being secondary to whether they got a fair trial--and whose latterday preoccupation is whether she was "used" a half-century ago by radicals (read Communists) seeking to exploit the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti for their own ideological purposes...
...The case is too clear and too much is at stake for that...
...Incidentally, Miss Porter in her book has Judge Thayer speaking in the past tense, a confusion of time that may help her explain ex post /actO the nature of her witness, but it does nothing for accuracy...
...Wartime propaganda from all the major combatant nations is represented here, and for some reason a few of the early Nazi political posters are thrown in for good measure...
...Those massive bond drives, for instance, always seemed to coincide so conveniently with dramatic battlefield developments...
...The fairness question was settled, and the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti sealed beyond doubt, the golf day at the Worcester Country Club when Judge Webster Thayer spoke of "those bastards down there" and how he was going to "get them good and proper...
...but more often we never hear of the soldier again...
...What proceeded from that point was sheer travesty, and seemed to call for Commonweal: .$71 some more germane concern than whether the niceities of the system were being observed...
...The process of law, more specifically its possible abuse, was precisely why she was involved...
...Besides, what right had he or anyone to intervene in the process of the law of the land...
Vol. 104 • September 1977 • No. 18
