Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [68]
On 21 August Sacco and Vanzetti formally thanked the Defense Committee that had supported them since their arrest. “That we have lost and have to die does not diminish our appreciation and gratitude for your great solidarity with us and our families. Friends and Comrades, now that the tragedy of this trial is at an end, be all as of one heart. Only two of us will die. Our ideal, you our comrades, will live by millions; we have won, but not vanquished. Just treasure our suffering, our sorrow, our mistakes, our defeats, our passion for future battles and for the great emancipation.”
That same day, Vanzetti wrote to Nicola’s thirteen-year-old son, Dante, of how his father had “sacrificed everything dear and sacred to the human heart and soul for his fate.” He hoped, he said, that Dante would understand that they had died for their principles, honor their memories, and perhaps one day take his father’s place “in the struggle between tyranny and liberty.”
Last-minute appeals went unheeded. An editorial in the New York World summed up the views of those who still hoped that eleventh-hour pardons might be issued. “The Sacco-Vanzetti case is clouded and obscure. It is full of doubt. The fairness of the trial raises doubt. The evidence raises doubt. The inadequate review of the evidence raises doubt. The Governor’s inquiry has not appeased these doubts. The report of his Advisory Committee has not settled these doubts. Everywhere there is doubt so deep, so pervasive, so unsettling, that it cannot be denied and it cannot be ignored. No man, we submit, should be put to death where so much doubt exists.”
At three minutes after midnight on the morning of Tuesday 23 August, Celestino Madeiros entered the execution room in Charleston prison. Nine minutes later he was dead. Nicola Sacco came in at 12.11, having refused the ministrations of a priest, and was strapped to the electric chair shouting, “Long Live Anarchy!” in Italian. He was pronounced dead eight minutes later.
Finally Bartolomeo Vanzetti was brought into the room, having also refused the last rites. He declared his innocence one final time, expressed his forgiveness for those who had brought him to this point, and shook his warden, William Hendry, warmly by the hand, thanking him for all his kindness. For most of the past seven years this prison had been his home. Hendry was so overcome that he was barely able to confirm that Vanzetti was dead at twenty-six minutes past twelve. The three executions had taken less than half an hour.
As they had hoped, Sacco and Vanzetti’s demise set off a series of retaliatory demonstrations, riots and bombs targeting United States embassies in Paris, Rome and Lisbon as well as all across America. Five hundred Italian immigrants protested against the executions in Boston’s North End. Writers John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay were among many arrested for picketing the Boston State House the day before Sacco and Vanzetti died.
Millay was not alone in crediting their deaths with awakening her social conscience. “It is impossible for me to be an Anarchist, for I do not believe in the essential goodness of man,” she wrote afterwards, contrasting her own disillusionment with Sacco and Vanzetti’s unflinching idealism. “The world, the physical world, that was once all in all to me, has at moments such as these no road through a wood, no stretch of shore, that can bring me comfort. The beauty of these things can no longer at such moments make up