Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [76]
I find myself thinking even now that the story of Sacco and Vanzetti may yet enter the bones of future generations. Perhaps it needs to be told only a few more times. If so, then the flight into Mexico will be seen by one and all as yet another expression of a very holy sort of common sense.
Be that as it may: Sacco and Vanzetti returned to Massachusetts after the war, fast friends. Their sort of common sense, holy, or not, and based on books Harvard men read routinely and without ill effects, had always seemed contemptible to most of their neighbors. Those same neighbors, and those who liked to guide their destinies without much opposition, now decided to be terrified by that common sense, especially when it was possessed by the foreign-born.
The Department of Justice drew up secret lists of foreigners who made no secret whatsoever about how unjust and self-deceiving and ignorant and greedy they thought so many of the leaders were in the so-called “Promised Land.” Sacco and Vanzetti were on the list. They were shadowed by government spies.
A printer named Andrea Salsedo, who was a friend of Vanzetti’s, was also on the list. He was arrested in New York City by federal agents on unspecified charges, and held incommunicado for eight weeks. On May third of Nineteen-hundred and Twenty, Salsedo fell or jumped or was pushed out of the fourteenth-story window of an office maintained by the Department of Justice.
Sacco and Vanzetti organized a meeting that was to demand an investigation of the arrest and death of Salsedo. It was scheduled for May ninth in Brockton, Massachusetts, Mary Kathleen O’Looney’s home town. Mary Kathleen was then six years old. I was seven.
Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested for dangerous radical activities before the meeting could take place. Their crime was the possession of leaflets calling for the meeting. The penalities could be stiff fines and up to a year in jail.
But then they were suddenly charged with two unsolved murders, too. Two payroll guards had been shot dead during a robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts, about a month before.
The penalties for that, of course, would be somewhat stiffer, would be two painless deaths in the same electric chair.
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VANZETTI, FOR GOOD MEASURE, was also charged with an attempted payroll robbery in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. He was tried and convicted. Thus was he transmogrified from a fish peddler into a known criminal before he and Sacco were tried for murder.
Was Vanzetti guilty of this lesser crime? Possibly so, but it did not matter much. Who said it did not matter much? The judge who tried the case said it did not matter much. He was Webster Thayer, a graduate of Dartmouth College and a descendent of many fine New England families. He told the jury, “This man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions.”
Word of honor: This was said by a judge in an American court of law. I take the quotation from a book at hand: Labor’s Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais. (United Front: San Francisco, 1955.)
And then this same Judge Thayer got to try Sacco and the known criminal Vanzetti for murder. They were found guilty about one year after their arrest—in July of Nineteen-hundred and Twenty-one, when I was eight years old.
They were finally electrocuted when I was fifteen. If I heard anybody in Cleveland say anything about it, I have forgotten now.
I talked to a messenger boy in an elevator in the RAMJAC Building the other morning. He was about my age. I asked him if he remembered anything about the execution when he was a boy. He said that, yes, he had heard his father say he was sick and tired of people talking about Sacco and Vanzetti all the time, and that he was glad it was finally over with.
I asked him what line of work his father had been in.
“He was a bank president in Montpelier, Vermont,” he said. This was an old man in a war-surplus United States Army overcoat.
Al Capone,