Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [64]
Prejudice, ignorance and intolerance were gradually being institutionalized. One senator declared that the bill would mean “that the America of our grandchildren will be a vastly better place to live in. It will mean a more homogeneous nation, more self-reliant, more independent, and more closely knit by common purpose and common ideas.”
Only a few lone voices, like that of the Baltimore Evening Sun, dared express disapproval of the bill, pointing out that the United States had finally abandoned “that old and admirable tradition that this land was to serve as a refuge for the oppressed of all nations. No longer is the foreigner, to American eyes, a welcome fugitive from the political, economic and religious oppression of the Old World.”
From the start, liberal intellectuals and political progressives recognized Sacco and Vanzetti’s cause as their own. In late 1921 Anatole France wrote an open letter to the people of the United States, describing Sacco and Vanzetti’s crime as one of “opinion” and their sentence as “iniquitous.” “It is horrible to think that human beings should pay with their lives for the exercise of that most sacred right which, no matter what party we belong to, we must all defend,” the French writer wrote, urging Americans to save the two men “for your honor, for the honor of your children, and for the generations yet unborn.”
The following year, in an article in Harper’s, the writer Katharine Gerould declared that America was no longer a free country. “No thinking citizen, I venture to say, can express in freedom more than a part of his honest convictions,” she wrote. “I do not of course refer to convictions that are frankly criminal. I do mean that everywhere, on every hand, free speech is choked off in one direction or another.” Her piece provoked hundreds of responses, as many denouncing her as a dangerous radical as rejoicing that someone had at last dared tell the truth.
For the six years following their conviction, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco were held in different prisons, Vanzetti serving hard labor in Charleston and Sacco in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours out of twenty-four in Dedham, Iowa. Both were affected profoundly by their incarceration. At one point Sacco went on hunger strike, refusing food for thirty days; Vanzetti became so depressed and paranoid that he spent four months in a prison asylum.
When they were well, the two men wrote to each other from their cells with fraternal affection. They had known one another since 1917, when they had spent six months in Mexico avoiding the draft. Neither had supported what they saw as a war to defend capitalist interests. From that point on, bolstered by their shared ideals and commitment to Galleanist principles, their friendship had flourished.
Burly Nicola Sacco, at thirty years old in 1921 three years Vanzetti’s junior, had arrived in America in 1908, within months of Vanzetti, but he had gone straight to Boston. His family were prosperous peasant farmers from the foothills of the Apennines in southern Italy. Unlike Vanzetti, Sacco was married with two young children and had a steady and relatively well-paid job; like his friend, though, he had been a socialist and anarchist since 1913. On the day he was said to have committed the South Braintree robbery and murders, Sacco claimed he had been at the Italian consulate in Boston, getting passports for himself and his family to return to Italy for good. He had saved almost $1,500, enough