Injustice
Jackson, Brian
Injustice THE BLACK FLAG by Brian Jackson Routledge & Kegan Paul. 208 pp. $12.95. Brian Jackson introduced himself to Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Van-zetti in the course of research on...
...Each had an alibi...
...Among them: Upton Sinclair's two-volume novel, Boston, and a Maxwell Anderson play, Winterset...
...It took the state of Illinois only a few years to recognize the miscarriage of justice in the execution of the Haymarket Labor martyrs...
...At first, they assumed their arrest had something to do with their political activities, so they lied to the police...
...The evidence against them was, by and large, circumstantial...
...I can still see mounted policemen pushing crowds outside the Ashland Boulevard Auditorium during a mass meeting a few nights before the executions, and I remember too well the night of August 22, 1927—the quiet in our home, the subdued talk, and then the angry voices when we heard that the men were dead...
...The material he turned up thanks to the Freedom of Information Act shed no new light on the case...
...John Dos Passos, Heywood Broun, Eugene Lyons, and Felix Frankfurter also wrote about the case...
...It was the sheer accumulating of details...
...In his treatment of anarchism, Jackson cites Attorney General Palmer: "Each and every adherent of this [anarchist] movement is a potential murderer or a potential thief, and deserves no consideration...
...Sacco and Vanzetti were members of a Boston anarchist group stalked by U.S...
...The two were carrying guns when picked up...
...They were foreign, working Glass, armed, and anarchist...
...Such was the anarchism of Sacco and Vanzetti...
...Palmer at the height of the 1920 "Red Scare...
...This clouded all judgments...
...But most later rejected violence altogether...
...To Palmer, anarchism meant violence and he was determined to crush it...
...He contends: "It was not so much one item which appeared to lead to a guilty verdict...
...Strictly speaking, anarchism was then synonymous with nonviolence, no matter th'at some of the faithful believed in "propaganda by deed," a violent act or two to limn injustice...
...Jackson's book is a first-rate account, concise and dramatic, of that sad episode...
...A jury found them guilty...
...He believes, as do many others, that guilt was not proved at the trial...
...I, on the other hand, do not remember a time I did not know of Sacco and Vanzetti...
...In the United States, labor people, liberals, poets, and writers protested, picketed the governor's mansion, walked a death march in front of the penitentiary, were arrested...
...Wells pleaded for a review of the case and a new trial...
...In 1977, on the fiftieth anniversary of the executions, Governor Michael S. Dukakis issued a proclamation removing the stigma long attached to their names: at the same time he said he hoped to clear the name of the state of Massachusetts...
...Both men had evaded the draft and taken part in labor strikes...
...one of their comrades had died a mysterious death while in custody...
...Poems, plays, articles, and novels turned on the story...
...Attorney General A.M...
...Jackson sorts out the evidence presented by the state and the defense...
...American anarchism, 1920s-style, was, more than anything else, a call for a new social order based on peace, freedom, mutual aid, and human understanding...
...Governor John Peter Altgeld exonerated the executed men and granted an absolute pardon to their comrades still alive...
...Several witnesses to the crime told the police that the murderers were of swarthy complexion and appeared to be Italian...
...I recall seeing as a young boy the first "Free Sacco and Vanzetti" button on the lapel of a family friend at a Workmen's Circle convention in Chicago...
...If Jackson had any "faint trace" of the "good shoemaker" and the "poor fish peddler" it was "in the patterns of faraway memory...
...For seven years the two sat in jail, their execution postponed by legal appeals and worldwide protests...
...The basic facts of the Sacco-Vanzetti case are these: In April 1920 a paymaster and his guard were killed by a gang of five gunmen during a daylight robbery in South Braintree...
...Massachusetts was much slower in coming to terms with Sacco and Vanzetti...
...Why," he asked himself during his study, "was it that some man or woman, by the moment and manner of their dying, pulled the future toward them, twisted the skeins of the world in improbable and unexpected ways...
...Vincent Millay proclaimed in verse, "Justice [was] denied in Massachusetts...
...In the end it was for this that the state executed them...
...Both were guilty— and proudly so—of a cultural crime...
...For the generation who lived through those days, The Black Flag: A Look Back at the Strange Case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti brings back haunting memories of the injustice that the state of Massachusetts would take more than fifty years to acknowledge...
...Theirs was not an age of reason in American history," Jackson writes...
...The judge bragged, "Did you see what I did to those anarchistic bastards...
...He reappraises the case, discusses Sacco and Vanzetti's anarchism, and reminds all that, as Edna St...
...I remember attending protest meetings with my parents...
...Shortly before their arrest they helped organize mass meetings to protest the brutality the police visited upon radicals...
...Brian Jackson introduced himself to Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Van-zetti in the course of research on martyrs—the great, the famous, the unheralded...
...Arthur Weinberg (Arthur "Weinberg is co-author with his wife Lila Qf the award-winning biography, "Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel...
...They team-teach social history at DePaul University...
...Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, and H.G...
...Three weeks after the murder, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian workmen, were arrested and charged with the crime...
Vol. 46 • March 1982 • No. 3
