Bill
Bryson, one of America's premier nonfiction writers, begins his account of the
Sacco-Vanzetti case in his recent book "One Summer: America 1927"
(Anchor Books, 2013) by noting the absurd way that the profiling of immigrants
with unpopular political opinions resulted in the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti
for the payroll robbery of a shoe factory in Braintree and the killing of two
men.
As Bryson
tells it, "Chief Michael Stewart of the Bridgewater Police decided, for
reasons unattached to the evidence that the culprits were Italian anarchists.
He discovered that a man of radical sympathies lived near where the get-away
car was found and for that reason made him the chief suspect. As 'The New
Yorker' archly noted, Stewart concluded 'that after a hold-up and murder, the
murderer would naturally abandon the car practically in his own front
yard.'"
This is a
good beginning. But after pointing out the farcical basis for fingering two Italian immigrants with radical political views for a gangland crime most likely the work of professionals,
Bryson somehow works himself around to the conclusion that the two men were "probably guilty."
It's an
astonishing misjudgment, given that Bryson also tells his readers that the prosecution's case against Sacco and Vanzetti in
their 1921 trial, based on shaky eye-witness testimony and a dearth of physical
evidence, "was pretty dubious." Bryson later notes that the
celebrated American law professor (and later Supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter
"systematically and persuasively demolished" the prosecution's case
in a widely read national magazine piece.
But when he
writes about the end of case in 1927 -- now an international cause inspiring
massive demonstrations, mountains of petitions, worldwide protests and pleas for
clemency by everyone from the Pope to the Harvard Law School faculty -- Bryson
seeks to minimize the case's importance while evincing more sympathy for the
ordinary American's annoyance at the all international attention given to the case than for
immigrant Italian laborers who worked long hours in appalling conditions
for miserable wages and yet somehow failed to learn English. In the minds of
native speakers, he writes, Sacco and Vanzetti's failure to speak fluent
English despite having lived in the US for a decade confirmed the stereotype
that Italians were either stupid or lazy. Bryson does not challenge that view.
And he is
guilty of at least one incredible "howler" -- the scholar's term for
an egregious error of fact.
With the
execution two weeks away, Bryson writes, Massachusetts Governor Alvan Fuller
granted a brief stay of execution to allow "the condemned men's defense
team -- which was essentially the lone, harried lawyer Fred Moore -- twelve days
to find a court prepared to grant a retrial to hear new evidence."
How wrong
is this? Fred Moore had officially withdrawn from the case three years before
(and ceased acting for the defense the year before that) after Sacco refused to
speak to him any longer. In 1927 Sacco and Vanzetti's defense was led by the
prestigious William G. Thompson, widely regarded as Boston's top lawyer, a
thoroughly Brahmin establishment figure who took Sacco and Vanzetti's case
because the obvious flaws in their trial offended his sense of justice (and
after the defense committee raised his $25,000 fee).
And defense
counsel Fred Moore was never a "lone" anything. An active
Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee raised funds first to hire both Moore (a California
labor attorney who proved a poor choice to command respect in a Massachusetts
courtroom) and a team of assistant attorneys. The Defense Committee later
provided funds for Thompson, his assistants, and other expenses. No "lone,
harried" defender, but a team of lawyers chased US Supreme Court justices
around the county looking to convince a judge to hear their pleas for a new
trial and save their clients' lives. Bryson dismisses this effort as if it were a
Keystone Cops episode.
His ignorance of who was representing Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 is not a minor point.
The international clamor for "justice for
Sacco and Vanzetti" was a top-of-the-page headline story in the summer of
1927, regarded as a moral crusade by millions from Boston society figures (some
of whom regularly visited Vanzetti), to well-known writers and intellectuals (John Dos Passos, Katherine Anne Porter, Edna
St. Vincent Millay), and worker organizations across the political spectrum. Petitions
demanding a new trial were signed by the graduating classes of all the Ivy
League universities. Poet Millay carried a sign at the Statehouse and was
arrested with hundreds of others on the weekend before the Aug. 22 executions.
Any source account
of the famous case's last year consulted by an author planning to write about
it would necessarily include both Thompson's name and the efforts by him and
his assistants to convince the governor, the governor's special commission, the state's
courts, and eventually federal justices to hear their pleas for a new trial.
That Bryson doesn't know who represented the defendants -- and contents himself
with a slighting and wholly inaccurate reference to a supposed one-man
"defense team" -- undermines the credibility of his account of the
final days of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Further, both the tone and content of his discussion of the end of the case reveals a
slapdash approach more interested in siding with the American-born majority's view that the defendants got what they deserved than in
historical accuracy or depth.
In his s
account of the case's final months Bryson tells us that Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller, who
"appears to have been a thoroughly decent man," sought to grant the
defendants clemency but couldn't find a reason to do it. To other commentators, Fuller appears in a considerably
different light: a political opportunist who was seeking the Republican
nomination for President, tested the wind on which decision would win him more favor,
and concluded that most voters wanted to see these Italian radicals dead.
Bryson
tells us that Fuller "read every word of the transcript" and yet
failed to find evidence of the prejudice and partiality that Frankfurter and so many
other students of the case found there. He tells us that Fuller visited
the prisoners and spoke to Sacco for five minutes (another error, since Sacco
refused to see him) and to Vanzetti for much longer. As Bryson notes,
correctly, Fuller was greatly impressed by Vanzetti; yet somehow that impression
did not carry the day once the wealthy governor returned to the company of his
own kind.
Here's an
excerpt from Bruce Watson's book "Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the
Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind" (Penguin, 2007). When (Watson
writes) attorney Gardner Jackson told Fuller that sixteen witnesses swore that
Vanzetti had sold them eels on the date the state accused him of taking part in
another crime, "Fuller answered, 'Oh Mr. Jackson, those are Italians. You
can't accept any of their words.'"
So Bryson, who
increasingly takes on the role of establishment apologist as his account of the
case draws to a close, finds Governor Fuller "a thoroughly decent
man." By his own words Fuller shows himself to be, like most of his WASP
establishment contemporaries, a man of his times and class: a thoroughly decent
bigot.
Italians, plus
some non-Italians, also testified that they saw Vanzetti in Plymouth on the day
of the Braintree robbery and murders. Their testimony was discounted. Bryson is
apparently all right with that because when he sums up the question of the
defendants' innocence of guilt, he reports only views that incline toward their
guilt. He writes that Harvard President Lawrence Lowell, the head of the
three-man commission appointed by Fuller to review the trial and an open
believer in the 'racial' superiority of WASPs to immigrants -- as any serious
research into the case would show: he was vice president of the Immigrant
Restriction League -- hoped to find the men innocent "but had been
persuaded of their guilt by the evidence."
What
evidence was that? The evidence that, as Bryson points out in earlier pages,
had been "demolished" by Frankfurter and other critics.
Speaking in
his own voice, Bryson then adds, "A dispassionate examination of the record
indicates that the jury [was] not obviously bigoted and that Justice Thayer,
whatever his beliefs outside the court, conducted a fair trial." In fact,
even a superficial examination of the record indicates that Judge Thayer always
ruled in favor of the prosecution, always ruled against Defense, and allowed
prosecutor Frederick Katzmann to "badger the witness" (as courtroom
dramas have trained us to say) to his heart's content. Thayer's "outside
the court" statements include his famous remark to a Dartmouth classmate,
"Did you see what I did to those anarchist bastards?"
As for that
fair-minded jury, Bryson's own earlier pages on the case include the statement
by the jury's foreman in response to a question of the defendant's possible
innocence,"Damn them, they ought to hang anyway." This attitude should not be surprising given the government
campaign (known to history as "The Red Scare"), backed by big
business and their newspapers, to scare Americans into believing that political
radicals posed a serious threat to the stability of their country. In truth, it
would have been hard to find a jury of native-born citizens who did not harbor prejudice
against any defendant who was an immigrant and a radical, especially an Italian
one. Sacco and Vanzetti's jury of "peers" included no Italians, no
women, no minorities of any sort.
Bryson
follows this judgment with the wholly inaccurate claim that historian Paul
Avrich, in his highly regarded 1991 book "Sacco and Vanzetti: The
Anarchist Background," states that Sacco and Vanzetti were "almost certainly
involved" in the Braintree robbery-murder. Bryson writes:
"In
his 1991 book, historian Paul Avrich asked rhetorically whether Vanzetti could
have been involved in the South Braintree holdup, and wrote: 'Though the
evidence is far from satisfactory, the answer almost certainly is yes. The same
holds true for Sacco.'"
The actual
quote (page 150) is this:
"Was
Vanzetti himself involved in the conspiracy? Though the evidence is far from
satisfactory, the answer almost certainly is yes. The same holds true for
Sacco.'"
The
"conspiracy" Avrich refers to is not the Braintree holdup but a
series of bombings (mostly in 1918-19) widely attributed to anarchists. Anyone
looking at the quote on the page will come to the same conclusion. The sentence
that Bryson twists to his own purpose directly follows Avrich's lengthy account
of how Italian anarchists turned to the use of bombs to strike back at the government
and big business establishment that was persecuting them and, they believed,
oppressing the poor. The "conspiracy" included planting a bomb at the
home of the US Attorney General, an act that precipitated massive arrests of immigrants
and deportations and -- many historians have argued -- the framing of known
anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti for the Braintree crime.
Those
bombings, for whom no one was ever put on trial, and the Braintree shoe factory
robbery-murder are entirely different cases. The only thing that puts the
cases together is the government's improbable theory that anarchists were
responsible for both. Avrich may believe that Vanzetti and Sacco were "almost certainly" involved in
some unspecified way in an anarchist bombing conspiracy. He clearly does
believe that they were members of the same network as the anarchist figures
he fingers as the principal conspirators (Carlo Valdinoci and Mario Budo). But
when it comes to whether the two bore any guilt for the Braintree crime, Avrich
states that his book "makes no pretense of settling the issue of whether
Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty of the crimes for which they were executed"
(page 5). He explicitly states that the case against them "remains
unproved... nor can their innocence be established beyond any shadow of
doubt."
It's hard
for me to believe that an author of Bryson's stature could have bollixed this
up so badly unless, perhaps, he was working from notes made by others. The
representation of a respected historian's judgment about one matter as his
judgment on a distinctly different matter is not merely sloppiness, it's the
kind of academic wrongdoing that gets you kicked out of graduate school. In my
opinion, it destroys Bryson's credibility as a commentator on the case.
The
bombings Avrich writes about are an indisputably relevant concern for anyone seeking to understand
not only the "background" of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, but the tenor of
American society and politics in the early decades of the 20th century. Given
this atmosphere of fear and loathing, Sacco and Vanzetti's jurors might have reasoned
that if you believe the same things as the criminals who planted bombs at
people's homes then you deserve to die, whether or not you are guilty of the
different crime for which you are now accused.
But that is
not how the American justice system works.
You are
tried for the charge you have been accused of, not for other actions you may
have taken or for the company that you kept.
The research by Avrich (and others) showing that Sacco and Vanzetti were not as "innocent"
as many of their defenders made them out to be -- they were not saints or
"pacifists," or merely philosophical anarchists -- has led some
commentators such as Bryson to swing the other way and conclude, well if anarchists
used bombs, and Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists, they "probably" killed
people and robbed a workers' payroll.
That's not
a logical inference. It's a theory for which there is no reliable evidence. It
was put to trial and found wanting by any "fair-minded" student of
that trial with the possible exception of Bill Bryson.
Whether
misled by careless research errors or not, Bryson's account puts a sympathetic
gloss on nativist American prejudice against foreigners, lynch mob justice,
judicial bigotry, a fear-mongering abuse of state power, and a plutocratic
defense of the status quo.
That
sympathy for the devils we know may have lead to his errors and omissions. He states that
Boston quietly shrugged off the executions ("city life returned to
normal"), apparently unaware that the Boston funeral for Sacco and
Vanzetti on August 27, 1927 attracted tens of thousands and was probably the biggest
public gathering the city had ever seen up to that date. Likely he has never
seen the newsreel footage of the funeral march, because the FBI suppressed it,
telling theaters not to show it.
Other researchers
into the case believe that the state's prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti amounts to exactly that "substantial edifice of
conspiracy" -- Bryson's derisive term -- since instances of
coerced testimony and suppressed evidence are on record. And to allegations of
manufactured evidence explored in books such as "Postmortem: New Evidence
in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti" (1985) by William Young and David E.
Kaiser, a book referenced in Bryson's bibliography but not in his account.
Unfortunately,
Bryson's treatment of the Sacco-Vanzetti case does not evince a similar
sympathy with the millions of immigrants who "teemed" into the US in
the first decades of the 20th century or with the oppressive conditions endured
by laborers both foreign and native-born even in "prosperous" 1927. The
systematic disregard of the miseries of American workers by the happy few (a
theme echoed in our own day) turned Sacco, Vanzetti, and many others into
political radicals. And that deep divide between rich and poor explains the passion
and energy that transformed two anarchists into international symbols of the tyranny
of the strong over the weak.
Unlike that
era's muckrakers who exposed the misery and neglect suffered by the poor, Bryson's judgment on Sacco and Vanzetti comforts the
comfortable and afflicts the afflicted.
All of a sudden people are becoming very up front about
their cats. In his poem "Litter Box," Jefferson Carter compares his
conduct to the self-indulgent behavior of the characters "in the new Italian movie":
