Remembering Sacco and Vanzetti

...The author recalls Ridge's "bitter hot breath and her deathlike face," adding, "she had not long to live...

...or that we would let the Communists dupe us into deserting Republican Spain...

...their professed anarchism was all too patent a cause of their doom...

...It goes on to say that the two men "were tried before a Massachusetts court and condemned to death about 18 months later...

...the capitalist monster rejoicing that things will settle downlike characters in an old morality play...

...In my teens I came upon the account of the death watch at the end of Dos Passos' U.S.A., and I felt I had not only been present but even had a special understanding of everything that led up to it...

...Of Sacco and Vanzetti she writes, "A fearful word has been used to cover the whole list of prejudices and misinformation, and in some deeply mysterious way, their names had been associated with itAnarchy...

...They were found guilty 15 months later, but not sentenced until April 1927...

...5.95) the very kind of mistake Vanzetti deplored in his letter...

...Except for a five-month stay in a psychiatric hospital, Sacco remained in the Dedham jail for seven years, moving to Charlestown July 1,1927,10 days before the date originally set for execution...

...Their silent intensity frightened me...

...Writers & Writing REMEMBERING SACCO AND VANZETTI BY RUTH MATHEWSON In a letter from Charlestown Prison, a year before he and Nicola Sacco were executed, Bartolomeo Vanzetti complained to a friend that "the indolence, the incapacity, the inexactness of those who have willingly or half willingly wrote on our case, has always caused much disgust, and often indignation and wrath to me...

...Her first Sentence tells us that Sacco and Vanzetti "were accused of a most brutal holdup of a payroll truck, with murder" in South Braintree in April 1920...

...Thus the truth is spoiled, the seriousness of the case destroyed together with the trustings of the intelligent and impartial readers...

...She cannot demonstrate this, however, because in her longer view there are no turning points nothing changes...

...Do these derive, I wonder, from haste to bring the book out on the 50th anniversary to the day, August 23of the execution...

...She "never believed that we would not help France chase Hitler out of the Ruhr, as Mussolini had chased him single-handedly out of the Polish Corridor (and Mussolini himself was receiving heavy financial and political support from very powerful people in this country...

...They charge repeatedly until she is rescued by a friend...

...In a way, to borrow the title of one of Porter's finest short stories, my own "Downward Path to Wisdom" started there...

...Through some sad accident, Katherine Anne Porternot a comrade but deeply sympathetic for "reasons...

...Whatever this list of expectations may reflect, it is not, as she says, "a species of Jeffersonianism...

...A passage on the author's liberal idealism, for example, seems to me not so much "politically illiterate," as she ironically suggests, as incoherent...

...No admirer of Katherine Anne Porter's memorable short stories and novels expects from her a review of undisputed facts found in any standard reference work...

...The crime is never-ending...

...I was born in Braintree not long after the holdup murders and my father, a sole-leather salesman, knew some of the employes at the shoe factory where the crime took place...

...Porter's belief that, like Jesus, Joan of Arc, the Moscow defendants in '37, and others, their fate was sealed before they stood trial may make this a mere technicality, yet the literal history deserves respect once the decision has been made to include it...

...Vanzetti was tried and convicted for an unsuccessful attempt to rob a payroll truck in Bridgewater in April 1919...

...Porter watches the poet Lola Ridge standing dazed and unmoving as police raise the hooves of their horses just over her head...

...While these circumstances conferred on me no privileged information, I never lost a sense that I was involved in the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti...

...And in her Afterword she says of Vanzetti that "it is proven by testimony that he was innocent of murder...

...The wonder is that she has chosen to present any of this material...

...I am sorry to say that the writings of the conservative or of the liberals have shown much more competence, sense of measure and of responsibility than those of the more near to me...

...I recall hearing later that the eyewitnesses among them who agreed to testify for the defense lost their jobs as a consequence...

...True, all the forces of the century were gathered in Boston, but her elliptical sense of time takes away their historical significance...

...She has put them all on stagethe charitable woman, the seeker of justice and mercy, the "self-appointed world-reformers," the fascist, the commissar who wants death for the two men ("what...

...Can it be that, smarting from the imputations of censorship following the demand that Diana Trilling excise from her recent book of essays some unfavorable remarks on Lillian Hellman, the publisher has refrained from the most routine queries about details...

...or that we would aid and abet Franco...

...Or, perhaps sadder still, can the magazine and publishing house that printed Felix Frankfurter's brilliant indictment of the conduct of the Dedham court and the moving "Last Statement" of Vanzetti, be too remote from the momentous events of half a century ago to have recognized inaccuracies, or have thought of checking...

...all Italians frightened me then, as they did other children of the Irish who had preceded them to New England by a few decades and had their own problems of assimilation in a wasp community...

...A few publications edited by fellow Anarchists were reliable, "yet someone of our comrades made big errs and blunders...

...The reader's interest in these recollections of her involvement in the last desperate efforts to save the men should And to some extent does depend on the quality of her impressions, taken from notes set down at the time...

...Porter misrepresents Sacco's ordeal, which was terrible enough, in citing a letter written from Charlestown, "where he had been in and out of the death cell since July, 1921...

...good are they alive...

...The case proved to be, Porter says, "one of the most important turning points in our history," a symptom of change "deep and sinister...

...But for that very reason, and because the book was written to meet an obligation to historyto provide a "plain, full record," Porter saysshortcomings that would normally merit brief mention loom large...

...Here the reference is to the celebrated trial for the Braintree murders, when Vanzetti's defense, naturally, was different...

...Yet when it departs from personal experience, this little book is so careless of the most elementary, easily ascertainable truths, it blunts her contribution to a broader understanding of the tragedy...

...But "that day" refers to the date of the Bridgewater holdup attempt, when no murder was committed...

...she could have appended a brief chronology or bibliography...

...Unlike such figures, though, Porter representatives cancel one another out, and lamentably, so it seems to me, they do the same to Sacco and Vanzetti...

...He was selling eels on that day, for Christmas...

...They are especially glaring to me for personal reasons...

...of the heart"has committed in The Never-Ending Wrong (Atlantic little, Brown, 62 pp...

...Moreover, I came uncomfortably to realize that Porter herself uses the word throughout The Never-Ending Wrong in a way that repeatedly covers "the whole list of prejudices and misinformation...

...She adds that the testimony of those who bought the eels "was ignored when the real trial was begun...

...I remember when I was six watching from our car on a Boston street a grim Italian protest procession, the marchers all in black...

...There is nothing mysterious about linking the defendants with anarchy...

...That vigil outside the prison is also powerfully described in Porter's book, though here again, a small factual error undercuts the effect...

...Of course the "crime" of the title is the damage done to the two men, to the nation and to humanity, not the offenses Sacco and Vanzetti were (falsely, I believe) charged with...

...The fact is that Lola Ridge survived until 1941 (after writing two of the few good poems among the many inspired by the event...

...He was not speaking of theoretical "correctness," but of simple matters of fact, and he found it humiliating to admit that even the Fascist Italo-American newspapers had been more helpful than an anti-Fascist daily whose discussion of "the Bridgewater robbery" and "the Braintree crime" had shown "an astonishing in exactness...

...My gentle father's explanation of the parade merged with the horror of learning about the electric chair as soon as I was able to read the newspapers, and both became inextricably associated with the occasion in August 1927...

...In fact, they were accused of robbing and murdering a paymaster and his guard who were walking down the street from one factory building to another...

...Porter has added to the scene a gratuitous "dying poet...

...Surely it is with the editors that the final responsibility for such small but cumulatively oppressive errors must lie...

...It is not merely with the record that Porter is careless: I found myself disconcerted by larger confusions and ambiguities in the whole work...