Anarchist connection
Deedy, John
Sacco & Vanzetti ANARCHIST CONNECTION MORE THAN GOOD IMMIGRANTS W HEN THEN-GOVERNOR Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts issued his 1977 proclamation removing "stigma and disgrace" from Nicola...
...Barbara Miller Solomon of Harvard University discounted O'Connell's intervention, labeling it "an act of conformism" 7 December 1979:677by the time he took it...
...It is an era of attacks on labor unions...
...The last time I tried to get in touch with my feelings they were out, so I left a note 9 . 9 Well, it does tempt, this sort of language...
...Certainly the times could have quickened instincts to collude...
...The ability to feel things at all is a proof of life, and it is profoundly refreshing after a bad time...
...This is the extent to which Sacco and Vanzetti might have been victims of a larger conspiracy to rid the country of anarchists and other troublemakers...
...the villains crucified...
...The notion that Sacco and VanzeUi were tried and convicted for their anarchism rather than the charges brought against them is not at air new...
...Granting that feeling bad about myself is a bad idea, is its real opposite to be found in feeling good about mysel~ Two of the people who told me that they felt good about themselves had just seen their marriages collapse not only under themselves but also under their children...
...yes in the sense that societies do get fearful and can panic, and when they do they can catch up people and punish them...
...Several suggested specific topics, including James Shenton of Columbia University, who recommended study of the role played by the Catholic church...
...merit files...
...The answer to that had to be both no and yes--no in the sense that the judicial monstrosities of the 1920s have been corrected and today there are more avenues of appeal...
...It certainly beats hell out of selfloathing, and rightly so: no one should feel bad about his very being--that's too heavy and even foolish a load to carry...
...As Professor Eric Foner of City College, City University of New York, remarked, "In the 1920s we see a new kind of America emerging...
...No, the question doesn't bother me anymore...
...Does a "'feeling good" declaration amount to a declaration of independence from what has really happened to you, a statement that despite everything you know you can survive...
...He is fearful, however, that files may have been destroyed and others lost in Washington's bureaucratic jungle...
...Paul Avrich 'of Queens College, City University of New York, called the failure to come to grips with the "anarchist connection" the greatest single failure of Sacco-Vanzetti literature, and he argued that it must be confronted, if only so as to understand better what happened to the pair...
...Of several minds: John Garvey FEELING...
...These men," said Pernicone, "were genuine revolutionists who believed that capitalist society had to be overthrown to achieve true liberty and justice...
...One man of advanced years had the pleasure of glimpsing himself in an old f'dm of the funeral procession for the pair, following their electrocution in 1927 in Charlestown State Prison...
...This, of course, is what anti-Sacco-Vanzetti people have charged all along, and they are sure to welcome the belated admission by Sacco-Vanzetti partisans...
...But "feeling good about myself" or "getting in touch with my feelings" can't really help here, because this is the language of alienation, suggesting that I am here, and my self or Commonweal: 678...
...It is the first decade of mass consumption as a mode of integrating workers into the social structure...
...He tried for seven years to stay out of the case, she said...
...This may be all scenario, but in the opinion of SaccoVanzetti partisans it is scenario that squares with historical fact...
...The revelations of recent years about government conspiracies to assassinate and defame people, from rulers of countries to movie actresses, makes anything thinkable...
...The case has moved, in fact, into a new and provocative phase of discussion...
...He has always maintained a curious detachment from the case...
...No one at the conference blinked an eyelash at the possibility of collusion by government in the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti...
...A I variation: "I'm feeling good about myself now...
...I have also heard it from people who have mild doubts about their own worth and from people who have emerged in one piece from struggles involving divorce, the precarious thing we call "sexual identity" these days, career problems--this "'feeling good about myself' is nearly a virus...
...That did not happen...
...There were a number of graduate students at the conference from Boston's law schools and universities, and speakers vied with one another !n seeking to enroll them in the case as writers of dissertations...
...Sacco's son, Spencer, was expected to come from Newport, R.I., but he stayed away, citing illness in the family...
...But efforts to substantiate this theory consistently ran up against the stonewall of restricted gove..m...
...It was also the period of the Americanizing of modern America, and there was little room in this America for anarchists bent on establishing a proletariat socialism...
...The Freedom of Information Act has opened up these files, and Sacc, o=Vanzetti partisans are champing to get at the data...
...Sacco & Vanzetti ANARCHIST CONNECTION MORE THAN GOOD IMMIGRANTS W HEN THEN-GOVERNOR Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts issued his 1977 proclamation removing "stigma and disgrace" from Nicola Sacco alld Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the Italian immigrant anarchists convicted and executed for murders occurring during a 1920 South Braintree payroll robbery, one might have imagined their case movingint 0 the archives of fascinating crimes and trials of yesterday, to be resurrected and dusted off on some anniversary or for some new journalistic or dramatic treatment, but a case essentially over, settled and packed away...
...A person who makes it through a period of scary uncertainty intact can find, at the end, a surprising and deep : hopefulness...
...Shenton noted that Cardinal O'Connell intervened with Governor Fuller for a stay of execution for Sacco and Vanzetti, and speculated that this was done at the direction of the Vatican and under some parallel pressure from Cardinal Hayes of New York City...
...It took a few years, but now I feel good about m y s e l f . . . " ) It seems to be the bottom line in places where guilt used to lurk...
...It is an era that marked the end of unrestricted immigration and the formation of a new Work force shorn of its radicalism...
...In the case of murderers (a couple of whom have admitted to feeling bad about themselves) it stems understandable, but even there it is probably exaggerated, maybe a form of pride9 Self-loathing is a kind of hypochondria: it is like listening hard to your heartbeat, convinced that it's going wrong...
...The conference drew together three hundred persons, including several from that aged remnant that marched and protested in Boston's streets a half-century ago for Sacco and Vanzetti...
...GOOD IT MEANS NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU'RE SORRY J Kllll FEEL GOOD about myself...
...Vincenzina Vanzetti, who was six when her brother Bartolomeo left Italy for the United States and 20 when he died, traveled from Italy for the conference, and she confessed to theBoston Globe that her bitterness with America still existed "in a certain degree--but not for the people, for the institutions...
...As for the conference, though it pointed directions, it answered no large questions...
...The excuse was valid, btit his absence not surprising...
...Sacco and Vanzetti have come down through the years as...
...He told library officials he would visit their exhibition of Felicani materials "privately...
...He told of one Department of Justice document relating to the case turning up in the files of the State Department...
...It is reason, many felt, why the Sacco-Vanzetti case cannot close, now or ever...
...but what can it mean to declare it...
...This became clear during a recent two-day conference sponsored by the Boston Public Library in conjunction with the presentation to the library of the papers and memorabilia of the late Aiding Felicani, printer, anarchist, and friend of Vartzetti, who served astreasurer of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense committee and who led the fight over long years for their vindication...
...I don't mean to deny the reality of the feeling, which is plainly real...
...the romanticized "good shoemaker andpoor fish-peddler," but as the present generation of Sacco-Vanzetti scholars are willing to admit, and admitted time and again during the Boston conference, Sacco and Vanzetti were true, dedicated anarchists...
...Self-love means never having to say you're sorry...
...A close relative to the above: "I'm trying to get in touch with my feelings...
...At least one SaccoVanzetti historian, Robert D'Attilio, has already begun .the search, and hispreliminary finding is that the role of the Department of Justice in the case was much more than it ever admitted publicly...
...The strut always leads to the banana peel, a cosmic law if ever there was one...
...This usually comes toward the end of a story about an affair that has ended or a collapsed marriage...
...I have heard this kind of sentence, and you probably have too, for the past several years, usually from friends whose personal lives are in various states of disarray and who need to get some purchase on things as the ground beneath them turns to swamp...
...Self-loathing is a refined narcissism, a back-door way of paying attention to yourself...
...Not many seemed afraid of the possibility that pursuit of the "anarchist connection" could turn up evidence compromising Sacco and Vanzetti beyond the redemption of history or public opinion...
...The 1920s was the period of the "Red scare," the fear that the revolution successful in Russia would sweep Europe and leap the Atlantic...
...This is a new day, however...
...It did not even supply a simple answer to the query from one participant whether this country could have another Sacco-Vanzetti case...
...It will probably enter politics soon as the only answer to Chappaquiddick...
...There is something finally circular and unanswerable about feeling good about yourself, something neat and sleek, like disco9 There must be more to the feeling than this...
...It followed, in Foner's logic, that the society had bigger-than-life heroes--Ruth, Lindbergh--and bigger-thanlife viUains--Sacco, Vanzetti...
...The heroes were deified...
...JOHN DEEDY (John Deedy, former managing editor of Commonweal,is a free-lance writer living in Massachusetts...
...It is an era of mass media and mass culture...
...Conference speakers, pro-Sacco-Vanzetti to the core, maintained that a central point of conviction had been reached on the issues of guilt or innocence ("they were important") and the quality of justice they ~ere accorded ("monstrous"), and that it was time now to proceed to a matter whose full exploration until lately had been impossible...
...These men were not philosophical anarchists," said Nunzio Pernicone of the University of Illinois, dismissing the term invented by 1920's liberals embarrassed by Sacco's and Vanzetti's anarchism and rationalizing it away as merely philosophical...
...It was a small point of disagreement that only accented Shenton's contention that the church's role needs study and clarification...
...Where people once said, "I'm sorry, I acted like a real jerk," now they say "I can't help howyou feel about it--I feel good about myself...
...You look for a trace of humor, and have to conclude that the person who feels bad about himself will, for all his sorry creeping around, make fewer world-class blunders than the person who feels good about himself...
Vol. 106 • December 1979 • No. 22
