Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [65]
Vanzetti had no plans to return to Italy, although like Sacco he had been frustrated, humiliated and demoralized by the discrimination and hostility he had encountered in the United States. After a seven-day crossing in steerage, he had sighted New York from the ship, looming “on the horizon in all its grandness and illusion of happiness.” But from his first steps on land he was shocked to find that he and his fellow arrivals were treated like animals. In his characteristically idiosyncratic prose, Vanzetti remembered seeing terrified children weeping as they went through immigration procedures. “Not a word of kindness, of encouragement, [were given] to lighten the burden of tears that rests heavily upon the newly arrived on American shores. Hope, which lured these immigrants to the new land, wither [sic] under the touch of harsh officials.”
Friendless, empty-handed and unable to speak or understand English, twenty-year-old Vanzetti was typical of many Southern and Eastern European immigrants to the United States. Al Capone’s family, which had arrived fourteen years earlier, had at least had each other. “Where was I to go? What was I to do? Here was the promised land. The elevated [railroad] rattled by and did not answer,” remembered Vanzetti, his words unwittingly echoing Charlie Chaplin’s first frightened response to New York. “The automobiles and the trolleys sped by, heedless of me.”
The single contact Vanzetti had in New York could not find him space to sleep in his crowded, rat-filled tenement, so Vanzetti slept in the park. He did help him get work as a dishwasher, for which Vanzetti was paid $5 or $6—as much as a worker on Ford’s plant would earn in a day, a few years later—for an eighty-eight hour week. Although he hated baking, Vanzetti eventually managed to find work as a pastry-chef (the trade he had been trained in as a boy), but time and again he was sacked for no reason after a few months in the job. It turned out that the head chefs were paid by the employment agencies every time they hired a new worker, so they never kept anyone for long. Over the next few years, as he made his way slowly eastwards towards Boston, Vanzetti preferred to find manual labor under the open sky in furnaces, quarries and rail yards.
Vanzetti never married; his life was spent alone. What sustained him through these hard years was his inner life, his almost spiritual understanding of social justice. He read everything he could get his hands on (in Italian), from the Divine Comedy to Charles Darwin to Maxim Gorky to the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta. Vanzetti started to see himself as a champion of “the weak, the poor, the simple and the persecuted”: the character of the man who would inspire the Plymouth cordage workers and then a generation of discontented intellectuals began to take shape.
“I understood that man cannot trample with impunity upon the unwritten laws that govern his life, he cannot violate the ties that bind him to the universe,” he wrote while he was in prison. “I grasped the concept of fraternity, of universal love. I maintained that whosoever benefits or hurts a man, benefits or hurts the whole species . . . I wanted a roof for every family, bread for every mouth, education for every heart, light for every intellect . . . I maintain that liberty of conscience is as inalienable as life . . . I am and will be until the last instant (unless I should discover that I am in error) an anarchist communist, because I believe that communism is the most humane form of social contract, because I know that only with liberty can man rise, become noble, and complete.”
Neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had spoken, read or written English with any fluency when they were arrested. Sacco did not read or write much until 1922, but Vanzetti began to study from the moment he was imprisoned. Visitors commented on his “keen interest in world affairs, and his thirst for knowledge.”
Smiling benevolently beneath his substantial walrus moustache, in prison Vanzetti became an icon of the left. In letters to