[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Sacco and Vanzetti

[Morton K. Brussel]

A gift from Zinn. Reflect.

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Michael Albert <sysop at zmail.zmag.org>
> Date: April 14, 2007 10:18:55 AM CDT
> To: <znetupdates at zmail.zmag.org>
> Subject: ZNet Free Update essay from Howard Zinn
> Reply-To: sysop at zmail.zmag.org
>
>
> …below is an eloquent piece from Howard Zinn, an excerpt from his  
> new book, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, published earlier  
> this year by City Lights. For Howard's upcoming speaking schedule,  
> see the City Lights Web site: http://www.citylights.com.
>
>
> Sacco and Vanzetti
> by Howard Zinn
>
> The following is an excerpt from Howard Zinn's new book, A Power  
> Governments Cannot Suppress, published earlier this year by City  
> Lights. For Howard's upcoming speaking schedule, see the City  
> Lights Web site: http://www.citylights.com.
>
> Fifty years after the executions of Italian immigrants Sacco and  
> Vanzetti, Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts set up a panel to judge  
> the fairness of the trial, and the conclusion was that the two men  
> had not received a fair trial. This aroused a minor storm in Boston.
>
> One letter, signed John M. Cabot, U.S. Ambassador Retired, declared  
> his "great indignation" and pointed out that Governor Fuller's  
> affirmation of the death sentence was made after a special review  
> by "three of Massachusetts' most distinguished and respected  
> citizens-President Lowell of Harvard, President Stratton of MIT and  
> retired Judge Grant."
>
> Those three "distinguished and respected citizens" were viewed  
> differently by Heywood Broun, who wrote in his column for the New  
> York World immediately after the Governor's panel made its report.  
> He wrote:
>
> It is not every prisoner who has a President of Harvard University  
> throw on the switch for him..If this is a lynching, at least the  
> fish peddler and his friend the factory hand may take unction to  
> their souls that they will die at the hands of men in dinner  
> jackets or academic gowns.
>
> Heywood Broun, one of the most distinguished journalists of the  
> twentieth century, did not last long as a columnist for the New  
> York World.
>
> On that 50th year after the execution, the New York Times reported  
> that: "Plans by Mayor Beame to proclaim next Tuesday 'Sacco and  
> Vanzetti Day' have been canceled in an effort to avoid controversy,  
> a City Hall spokesman said yesterday."
>
> There must be good reason why a case 50-years-old, now over 75- 
> years-old, arouses such emotion. I suggest that it is because to  
> talk about Sacco and Vanzetti inevitably brings up matters that  
> trouble us today: our system of justice, the relationship between  
> war fever and civil liberties, and most troubling of all, the ideas  
> of anarchism: the obliteration of national boundaries and therefore  
> of war, the elimination of poverty, and the creation of a full  
> democracy.
>
> The case of Sacco and Vanzetti revealed, in its starkest terms,  
> that the noble words inscribed above our courthouses, "Equal  
> Justice Before the Law," have always been a lie. Those two men, the  
> fish peddler and the shoemaker, could not get justice in the  
> American system, because justice is not meted out equally to the  
> poor and the rich, the native born and the foreign born, the  
> orthodox and the radical, the white and the person of color. And  
> while injustice may play itself out today more subtly and in more  
> intricate ways than it did in the crude circumstances of the Sacco  
> and Vanzetti case, its essence remains.
>
> In their case, the unfairness was flagrant. They were being tried  
> for robbery and murder, but in the minds, and in the behavior of  
> the prosecuting attorney, the judge, and the jury, the important  
> thing about them was that they were, as Upton Sinclair put it in  
> his remarkable novel Boston, "wops," foreigners, poor workingmen,  
> radicals.
>
> Here is a sample of the police interrogation:
>
> Police: Are you a citizen?
>
> Sacco: No.
>
> Police: Are you a Communist?
>
> Sacco: No.
>
> Police: Anarchist?
>
> Sacco: No.
>
> Police: Do you believe in this government of ours?
>
> Sacco: Yes; some things I like different.
>
> What did these questions have to do with the robbery of a shoe  
> factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts, and the shooting of a  
> paymaster and a guard?
>
> Sacco was lying, of course. No, I'm not a Communist. No, I'm not an  
> anarchist. Why would he lie to the police? Why would a Jew lie to  
> the Gestapo? Why would a black in South Africa lie to his  
> interrogators? Why would a dissident in Soviet Russia lie to the  
> secret police? Because they all know there is no justice for them.
>
> Has there ever been justice in the American system for the poor,  
> the person of color, the radical? When the eight anarchists of  
> Chicago were sentenced to death after the Haymarket riot (a police  
> riot, that is) of 1886, it was not because there was any proof of a  
> connection between them and the bomb thrown in the midst of the  
> police; there was not a shred of evidence. It was because they were  
> leaders of the anarchist movement in Chicago.
>
> When Eugene Debs and a thousand others were sent to prison during  
> World War I, under the Espionage Act, was it because they were  
> guilty of espionage? Hardly. They were socialists who spoke out  
> against the war. In affirming the ten-year sentence of Debs,  
> Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes made it clear why Debs  
> must go to prison. He quoted from Debs' speech: "The master class  
> has always declared the wars, the subject class has always fought  
> the battles."
>
> Holmes, much admired as one of our great liberal jurists, made  
> clear the limits of liberalism, its boundaries set by a vindictive  
> nationalism. After all the appeals of Sacco and Vanzetti had been  
> exhausted, the case was put before Holmes, sitting on the Supreme  
> Court. He refused to review the case, thus letting the verdict stand.
>
> In our time, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sent to the electric  
> chair. Was it because they were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of  
> passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union? Or was it because they  
> were communists, as the prosecutor made clear, with the approval of  
> the judge? Was it also because the country was in the midst of anti- 
> communist hysteria, communists had just taken power in China, there  
> was a war in Korea, and the weight of all that could be borne by  
> two American communists?
>
> Why was George Jackson, in California, sentenced to ten years in  
> prison for a $70 robbery, and then shot to death by guards? Was it  
> because he was poor, black, and radical?
>
> Can a Muslim today, in the atmosphere of the "war on terror" be  
> given equal justice before the law? Why was my upstairs neighbor, a  
> dark-skinned Brazilian who might look like a Middle East Muslim,  
> pulled out of his car by police, though he had violated no  
> regulation, and questioned and humiliated?
>
> Why are the two million people in American jails and prisons, and  
> six million people under parole, probation, or surveillance,  
> disproportionately people of color, disproportionately poor? A  
> study showed that 70% of the people in New York state prisons came  
> from seven neighborhoods in New York City-neighborhoods of poverty  
> and desperation.
>
> Class injustice cuts across every decade, every century of our  
> history. In the midst of the Sacco Vanzetti case, a wealthy man in  
> the town of Milton, south of Boston, shot and killed a man who was  
> gathering firewood on his property. He spent eight days in jail,  
> then was let out on bail, and was not prosecuted. The district  
> attorney called it "justifiable homicide." One law for the rich,  
> one law for the poor-a persistent characteristic of our system of  
> justice.
>
> But being poor was not the chief crime of Sacco and Vanzetti. They  
> were Italians, immigrants, anarchists. It was less than two years  
> from the end of the First World War. They had protested against the  
> war. They had refused to be drafted. They saw hysteria mount  
> against radicals and foreigners, observed the raids carried out by  
> Attorney General Palmer's agents in the Department of Justice, who  
> broke into homes in the middle of the night without warrants, held  
> people incommunicado, and beat them with clubs and blackjacks.
>
> In Boston, 500 were arrested, chained together, and marched through  
> the streets. Luigi Galleani, editor of the anarchist paper Cronaca  
> Sovversiva, to which Sacco and Vanzetti subscribed, was picked up  
> in Boston and quickly deported.
>
> Something even more frightening had happened. A fellow anarchist of  
> Sacco and Vanzetti, a typesetter named Andrea Salsedo, who lived in  
> New York, was kidnapped by members of the Federal Bureau of  
> Investigation (I use the word "kidnapped" to describe an illegal  
> seizure of a person), and held in FBI offices on the 14th floor of  
> the Park Row Building. He was not allowed to call his family,  
> friends, or a lawyer, and was questioned and beaten, according to a  
> fellow prisoner. During the eighth week of his imprisonment, on May  
> 3, 1920, the body of Salsedo, smashed to a pulp, was found on the  
> pavement near the Park Row Building, and the FBI announced that he  
> had committed suicide by jumping from the 14th floor window of the  
> room in which they had kept him. This was just two days before  
> Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested.
>
> We know today, as a result of Congressional reports in 1975, of the  
> FBI's COINTELPRO program in which FBI agents broke into people's  
> homes and offices, carried out illegal wiretaps, were involved in  
> acts of violence to the point of murder, and collaborated with the  
> Chicago police in the killing of two Black Panther leaders in 1969.  
> The FBI and the CIA have violated the law again and again. There is  
> no punishment for them.
>
> There has been little reason to have faith that the civil liberties  
> of people in this country would be protected in the atmosphere of  
> hysteria that followed 9/11 and continues to this day. At home  
> there have been immigrant round-ups, indefinite detentions,  
> deportations, and unauthorized domestic spying. Abroad there have  
> extra-judicial killings, torture, bombings, war, and military  
> occupations.
>
> Likewise, the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti began immediately after  
> Memorial Day, a year and a half after the orgy of death and  
> patriotism that was World War I, when the newspapers still  
> vibrating with the roll of drums and the jingoist rhetoric.
>
> Twelve days into the trial, the press reported that the bodies of  
> three soldiers had been transferred from the battlefields of France  
> to the city of Brockton, and that the whole town had turned out for  
> a patriotic ceremony. All of this was in newspapers that members of  
> the jury could read.
>
> Sacco was cross-examined by prosecutor Katzmann:
>
> Question: Did you love this country in the last week of May, 1917?
>
> Sacco: That is pretty hard for me to say in one word, Mr. Katzmann.
>
> Question: There are two words you can use, Mr. Sacco, yes or no.  
> What one is it?
>
> Sacco: Yes
>
> Question: And in order to show your love for this United States of  
> America when she was about to call upon you to become a soldier you  
> ran away to Mexico?
>
> At the beginning of the trial, Judge Thayer (who, speaking to a  
> golf acquaintance, had referred to the defendants during the trial  
> as "those anarchist bastards") said to the jury: "Gentlemen, I call  
> upon you to render this service here that you have been summoned to  
> perform with the same spirit of patriotism, courage, and devotion  
> to duty as was exhibited by our soldier boys across the seas."
>
> The emotions evoked by a bomb that exploded at Attorney General  
> Palmer's home during a time of war-like emotions set loose by the  
> violence of 9/11-created an anxious atmosphere in which civil  
> liberties were compromised.
>
> Sacco and Vanzetti understood that whatever legal arguments their  
> lawyers could come up with would not prevail against the reality of  
> class injustice. Sacco told the court, on sentencing: "I know the  
> sentence will be between two classes, the oppressed class and the  
> rich class.That is why I am here today on this bench, for having  
> been of the oppressed class."
>
> That viewpoint seems dogmatic, simplistic. Not all court decisions  
> are explained by it. But, lacking a theory that fits all cases,  
> Sacco's simple, strong view is surely a better guide to  
> understanding the legal system than one which assumes a contest  
> among equals based on an objective search for truth.
>
> Vanzetti knew that legal arguments would not save them. Unless a  
> million Americans were organized, he and his friend Sacco would  
> die. Not words, but struggle. Not appeals, but demands. Not  
> petitions to the governor, but take-overs of the factories. Not  
> lubricating the machinery of a supposedly fair system to make it  
> work better, but a general strike to bring the machinery to a halt.
>
> That never happened. Thousands demonstrated, marched, protested,  
> not just in New York City, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, but in  
> London, Paris, Buenos Aires, South Africa. It wasn't enough. On the  
> night of their execution, thousands demonstrated in Charlestown,  
> but were kept away from the prison by a huge assembly of police.  
> Protesters were arrested. Machine-guns were on the rooftops and  
> great searchlights swept the scene.
>
> A great crowd assembled in Union Square on August 23,1927. A few  
> minutes after midnight, prison lights dimmed as the two men were  
> electrocuted. The New York World described the scene: "The crowd  
> responded with a giant sob. Women fainted in fifteen or twenty  
> places. Others, too overcome, dropped to the curb and buried their  
> heads in their hands. Men leaned on one anothers' shoulders and wept."
>
> Their ultimate crime was their anarchism, an idea which today still  
> startles us like a bolt of lightning because of its essential  
> truth: we are all one, national boundaries and national hatreds  
> must disappear, war is intolerable, the fruits of the earth must be  
> shared, and only through organized struggle against authority can  
> such a world come about.
>
> What comes to us today from the case of Sacco and Vanzetti is not  
> just tragedy, but inspiration. Their English was not perfect, but  
> when they spoke it was a kind of poetry. Vanzetti said of his  
> friend Sacco:
>
> Sacco is a heart, a faith, a character, a man; a man lover of  
> nature and mankind. A man who gave all, who sacrifice all to the  
> cause of liberty and to his love for mankind: money, rest, mundane  
> ambition, his own wife, his children, himself and his own life.. Oh  
> yes, I may be more witful, as some have put it, I am a better  
> babbler than he is, but many, many times, in hearing his heartful  
> voice ring a faith sublime, in considering his supreme sacrifice,  
> remembering his heroism I felt small, small at the presence of his  
> greatness, and found myself compelled to fight back from my eyes  
> the tears, quench my heart throbbing to my throat to not weep  
> before him-this man called chief and assassin and doomed.
>
> Worst of all, they were anarchists, meaning they had some crazy  
> notion of a full democracy in which neither foreignness nor poverty  
> would exist, and thought that without these provocations, war among  
> nations would end for all time. But for this to happen the rich  
> would have to be fought and their riches confiscated. That  
> anarchist idea is a crime much worse than robbing a payroll, and so  
> to this day the story of Sacco and Vanzetti cannot be recalled  
> without great anxiety.
>
> Sacco wrote to his son Dante: "So son, instead of crying, be  
> strong, so as to be able to comfort your mother.take her for a long  
> walk in the quiet country, gathering wild flowers here and there,  
> resting under the shade of trees.But remember always, Dante, in  
> this play of happiness, don't you use all for yourself only.help  
> the persecuted and the victim because they are your better  
> friends.. In this struggle of life you will find more love and you  
> will be loved."
>
> Yes, it was their anarchism, their love for humanity, which doomed  
> them. When Vanzetti was arrested, he had a leaflet in his pocket  
> advertising a meeting to take place in five days. It is a leaflet  
> that could be distributed today, all over the world, as appropriate  
> now as it was the day of their arrest. It read:
>
> You have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the  
> capitalists. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you  
> harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your victories?  
> Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the  
> future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where  
> you can live like a human being and die like a human being? On  
> these questions, on this argument, and on this theme, the struggle  
> for existence, Bartolomeo Vanzetti will speak.
>
> That meeting did not take place. But their spirit still exists  
> today with people who believe and love and struggle all over the  
> world.
>
>
>
>
>

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