Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [60]
From this point onwards, Vanzetti worked for himself, selling fish from a hand-pulled cart and, when money was tighter than usual, building roads, cutting ice or shoveling snow for the Board of Public Works—earning his bread in the open air and, as he put it, “by the honest sweat of my brow.” His interest in radical politics and activism continued. Knowing he could not pursue his intellectual and social interests in a conventional job, he preferred to work for himself. Later he would say that he disdained business because it was a form of speculation using human lives.
During the cordage strike, Vanzetti had met one of his communist-anarchist heroes, Luigi Galleani, a passionate advocate of violent revolution, who came to Plymouth to encourage the protesters. For several years Vanzetti had been a subscriber and contributor to Galleani’s Italian-language journal, the Subversive Chronicle, which plotted the overthrow of the capitalist regime and argued in favor of terrorism and political assassination. The Chronicle had also published the Italian translation of Leopold Kampf’s On the Eve, a play examining the lives of Russian revolutionaries who were radicalized during the years following 1905, and a widely distributed bomb-making manual with the innocent title Health Is Within You.
Americans had feared radicals before the war, and distrusted foreigners—people from Southern and Eastern Europe, Russians and Italians, as well as Germans—during it, but the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 aggravated existing fears and prejudices. Floods of new immigrants, many from Russia, many with established communist sympathies and inspired by events at home, began to dominate the American communist movement in the late 1910s. Labor unions began to ally themselves with international radical groups; their militancy scared employers. Although the total number of active communists in the United States was probably well under 40,000, they were a vocal minority and the threat of a communist revolution on American shores began to seem a very real one. “If I had my way, I’d fill the jails so full of them [Bolsheviks] that their feet would stick out of the windows,” declared the evangelist Billy Sunday.
Because radicals, whether they were communists, anarchists, socialists or “Wobblies” (members of a group called the Industrial Workers of the World), were usually pacifists who had opposed the war, and because so many of them were new to American shores, they were labeled unpatriotic—potential traitors who ought not to be allowed to remain in the United States. Respectable politicians started saying things like, “My motto for the Reds is S.O.S.—ship or shoot. I believe we should place them all on a ship of stone, with sails of lead, and that their first stopping place should be hell.” (In March 1920 the New Republic attributed this quotation to General Leonard Wood, who stood against Warren Harding for the Republican presidential nomination that year; Wood publicly denied saying it.)
Intolerance, as the historian Frederick Allen observed ten years later, “became an American virtue.” Any individual or activity that cast into question “America” or “American values” was deemed suspicious. In popular parlance a Bolshevik was anybody “from the dynamiter to the man who wears a straw hat in September” while the name “radical” covered all those whose shades of opinion ranged “from a mild wonderment over ‘what the world is coming to’ to the extremists of the left wing.’”
This anxiety about outsiders, especially non-Northern European foreigners, was given pseudo-scientific credence by a series of books