Too many defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti are embarrassed by their radicalism and concentrate on the "who-done-it?" of the robberymurder. But the determination to get rid of them was too persistently fanatical to be an oddity of Boston or Harvard, an unfortunate judicial slip, a prejudice of one person or another. It is best explained by the powerful resolve of the American capitalist system after World War I to eliminate all radical threats on the eve of a new and uncertain era in world history. This fear of opposition seems exaggerated, knowing the weakness of revolutionary movements in America, but there is considerable historical evidence that the American ruling class, with so much at stake—control of the greatest aggregate of wealth in the world—takes no chances.
Consider the situation in the United States in 1920, when Sacco and Vanzetti were first arrested on that streetcar in Brockton. Between 1877 and 1914, the nation had experienced the most violent rebellions of working people in the history of the modern state: the railroad uprisings of 1877 (including a take-over of the city of St. Louis), the anarchist-led demonstrations in Chicago in 1886, the Homestead steel strike of 1892, the nationwide Pullman strike of 1894, the victorious Lawrence textile strike of 1912, and, finally, the bloody warfare in the Colorado mine districts in 1914, where federal troops had to be called in after the Ludlow Massacre to control a state-wide insurrection of armed, angry miners.
In the years before the first World War, the Industrial Workers of the World was born—militant, revolutionary, uniting all sorts of workers the system had worked so hard to separate (skilled and unskilled, black and white, native and foreign), resisting vigilantes and police, arousing nationwide attention with its work in the Lawrence strike. In the electoral counterpart of those labor struggles, the Socialist Party, its magazine Appeal to Reason read by 500,000 people, was winning a million votes for Eugene Debs as president, and electing socialist officials in hundreds of towns throughout the country. Miners in the Far West, farmers in Oklahoma, and clothing workers in New York City were showing a class consciousness that might spread in a country so crassly dominated by Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Armour, and the other robber barons.
The war in Europe created an opportunity for a patriotic assault on radical movements. Congress legislated, President Wilson signed, the Supreme Court sanctioned, the Justice Department moved, and two thousand dissenters from the war were prosecuted, nine hundred sent to prison. Virtually the entire leadership of the IWW was put on trial and jailed; the Socialist and anarchist movements were crippled by jailings and deportations.
With the war over, the repression did not end; indeed, it intensified, for in the meantime the Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia. It is hard for us today to understand fully the fright of the American capitalist class at that event. But if the American government, so powerful in the 1960s, could be driven to a frenzy of mass bombardment by the prospect of a small Asian country turning Communist, it becomes easier to understand the reactions to the Russian and Chinese revolutions. Indeed, the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti bears the same chronological and psychological connection to the Russian Revolution, as the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951 does to the Chinese Communist victory two years earlier.
Had not this atmosphere cooled between 1920 (the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti) and 1927 (their execution)? Somewhat. But by now the case was a national cause, an international issue. It had become a test of will, of class strength. We'll show them! "Did you see what I did with those anarchist bastards the other day. That will hold them for a while?" (The words of Judge Thayer, spoken at a Dartmouth football game after he had turned down a defense motion for a new trial, quoted in an affidavit by Dartmouth Professor James Richardson.)
The American system keeps control not only by a lottery of rewards (only a few make it, but everyone has a chance), but also by a lottery of punishments (only a few are put away or killed, but it's better to play it safe, be quiet). The determination to get a few obscure Communists, or a few obscure Italian anarchists, only becomes comprehensible as part of such a system, a scheme only partly understood by those who carry it out, but with the accumulation of more than enough parts to make the plan whole. What is perhaps not seen at all by the jury, and only dimly by the prosecutor, is seen more clearly by Governor Fuller, the wealthy auto dealer, and Lowell, the textile millionaire president of Harvard.
Upton Sinclair wrote Boston in nine months, in what seems like a barely-controlled anger, right after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in August, 1927. He had become famous twenty years before, instantaneously, when his expose of the Chicago stockyards, the novel The Jungle, appeared serialized in the Socialist magazine Appeal to Reason, and then, within a few months of its publication as a book, became a national success and was reprinted in seventeen translations all over the world. The Jungle influenced Bertolt Brecht's play Saint Joan of the Stockyards, was praised by George Bernard Shaw in England, and in America by the feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Socialist Eugene Debs. It became the prime example of "muckraking" literature for generations of Americans.
Sinclair went on from The Jungle to become one of the most productive and widely read American writers in the history of the country. Before his death in 1968, at the age of ninety, he had written ninety books and thousands of articles. His correspondence (collected at the Lilly Library of Indiana University) totaled 250,000 letters to and from people all over the world, famous and obscure.
Born in Baltimore of Southern parents, his father an itinerant, heavy-drinking salesman, his mother the proper, puritanical daughter of a minor railroad official, Sinclair grew up in vermin-infested boarding houses in Baltimore, and then, after the age of ten, in dingy rooms in Manhattan. He learned about class differences firsthand by observing the financial manipulations of a banker uncle. He was on his own at seventeen, already writing professionally. He went to City College and Columbia, taught himself French, German, and Italian, and, early on, read the anarchist poet Shelley.
He first turned to socialism in his early twenties, when he met Socialists, and began reading books like Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward, and Jack London's People of the Abyss. His own writing was always incorrigibly political. His dissections of the educational system, the press, the arts, the politics of oil (his novel Oz'/was banned in Boston, oddly enough, for its mild sex passages rather than for its outrageous political viewpoint), were intended to bury capitalism under a barrage of facts, and to present socialism in a way that Americans could accept.
Sinclair was something of an activist too. He was arrested in New York in 1914 for picketing Rockefeller's office after the Ludlow Massacre (the burning to death of eleven children and two women in a miners' tent colony after a machine-gun attack by the Rockefeller-controlled National Guard). And in 1923 he was arrested for reading the First Amendment to striking IWW transport workers in San Pedro, California.
In 1922, after the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, during the period of endless motions and appeals, Sinclair visited Vanzetti in Charlestown prison. Perhaps this was the beginning of that thinking process which led to Boston. Certainly, the portrait of Vanzetti in the novel is more poignant, more textured, than can be found anywhere in the literature on the case, except in the letters that Vanzetti and Sacco wrote from prison. I cannot resist quoting something Vanzetti (still trying to master the English language) wrote, which suggests as much about him as it does about 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, mundain ambition, his own wife, his children, himself and his own life...
Oh, yes, I may be more witfull, as some have put it, I am a better babbler than he is, but many, many times in hearing his heartful voice ringing 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, quanch my heart trobling to my throat to not weep before him—this man called thief and assassin and doomed.
When, seven years after that visit to Vanzetti, Sinclair began to write Boston, just after the executions, he chose to tell the story through a sixty-year old grandmother. Perhaps he was impelled by his own experience with women. His first marriage was a failure. He seemed unable to give his wife, Meta Fuller, the passionate love she wanted, and they were divorced. It was Meta who read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics, and gave it to him, after which he went on to Bebel's Women and Socialism and the writings of Havelock Ellis. While this did not make him an ideal husband and father to their son, it made him conscious of the subjugation of women, and he later became a strong supporter of feminist programs, including birth control and pay for housewives.
Sinclair's heroine in Boston is Cornelia Thornwell, who deserts her Brahmin-banker family to live with poor Italians, work in a factory, walk a picket line, become a friend of Vanzetti. She becomes totally involved in the case. Such a heroine, improbable as she is, makes the book a pioneering literary work. Irs feminist impulse is clear, through Cornelia, who walks a wide arc around her proper daughter to embrace her radical granddaughter, thinking, saying: "What was the reason women were always bound by fear? Because they were afraid! Why were they obedience? Because they obeyed!"
We are a bit uneasy with such a person—the kind of patronizing blue-blood-sympathizer-with-red-causes it is easy to poke fun at. But there is wisdom in the device, because through Cornelia's family connections, Sinclair can show us the Brahmins of Boston and America, their opulence as owners, their poverty as people, compared to the family of Beltrando Brini, with whom Cornelia lives.
Of course, there is simplification and romanticization, beneath which rests an undeniable truth about the effects of a capitalist culture on both its beneficiaries and its victims. In one of Sinclair's brilliant juxtapositions, he contrasts Nicola Sacco and Elbert H. Gary, chairman of the board of directors of the U.S. Steel Corporation. As Sacco and Vanzetti were awaiting execution, the press reported that Gary had died, and left a dying message for his loved ones, his last will and testament:
I earnestly request my wife and children and descendants that they steadfastly decline to sign any bonds or obligations of any kind as surety for any other person, or persons; that they refuse to make any loans except on the basis of first-class, well-known securities, and that they invariably decline to invest in any untried or doubtful securities of property or enterprise or business.
As Sinclair puts it: "At this time, two anarchist wops, one of them an avowed atheist, the other a vague deist of the old-fashioned sort, were writing their last words to their beloved ones. Nicola 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, between the harmony of the vivid stream and the gentle tranquillity of the mother nature, and I am sure that she will enjoy this very much.... But remember always, Dante, in the 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."
Observing the Thornwell family up close, and the Brini family up close, Upton Sinclair shows us America in the way it does not want to be seen, as a class society, its politics as class politics, its justice as class justice. It is an old-fashioned view, obscured and complicated by the material and ideological possessions of middle-class America, and yet still fundamentally true.
In the midst of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, a wealthy man in 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 calling it "justifiable homicide." Upton Sinclair reports it in Boston, but it could be a news item from any period in American history, including our own.
When Boston came out in 1928, some reviewers, while admiring it as "propaganda," scorned it as art. But most praised it. The New York Times called it "a literary achievement...full of sharp observation and savage characterization...." The chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Committee of 1928 said later that Boston would have received the prize were it not for its "socialistic tendencies" and "special pleading." (When Sinclair did finally win a Pulitzer Prize in 1943, for the third of his eleven "Lanny Budd" novels, Dragon's Teeth, it was for a rather toothless novel about a heroic world wanderer, offspring of a munitions maker and a beauty queen, an art dealer, secret agent, sexual and political adventurer, a kind of left-of-center James Bond who waded through the mud of international politics with clean strides, a man not likely to consort with the likes of stockyard worker Jurgis Rudkus of The Jungle, or the fish peddler Vanzetti in Boston.)
Boston, along with The Jungle, is generally considered to be among Sinclair's best novels. He had not the literary gifts of a John Steinbeck, who combined verbal artistry with political passion. But he was a compelling story-teller, and he had his moments of real eloquence. Against so many contemporary novelists, bubbly with style, cynical about human possibility, pretentiously psychological, and ultimately empty, the power of Upon Sinclair's prose in Boston, the clarity of his viewpoint, seem refreshingly healthy.
George Bernard Shaw wrote Sinclair from England, praising his artistry in recreating historical fact:
I have regarded you, not as a novelist, but as a historian; for it is my considered opinion, unshaken at 85, that records of fact are not history. They are only annals, which cannot become historical until the artist-poetphilosopher rescues them from the unintelligible chaos of their actual occurrence and arranges them in works of art.... When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to your novels.
Boston does not fit orthodox library categories, which insist on the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. It is a history of the SaccoVanzetti case truer than the court transcript, more real than any non-fiction account, precisely because it goes beyond the immediate events of the case to bring the reader the historical furnace in which the case was forged, to the atmosphere in the country breathed in by all participants, despite the closed doors of the courtroom, judge's chambers, and jury room, poisoning the verdict. It puts the straight lines of neutral type in the law books under a microscope, where they show up as rows of trenches in the war of class against class.
It may be objected that it is a distortion of the facts to go outside the record of the case to the record of the system. But why should the historian who really seeks the truth about an event recapitulate the strictures of the courtroom, which focuses only on "the facts," scrupulously keeps out the "irrelevant," and then places in charge of determining the facts, and judging what is relevant, a black-robed agent of the system.
The greatness of Boston, in distinction to all the books arguing the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti, is that it raises a far more important question: the guilt or innocence of the system of economics, politics, and culture which created factories like the Slater and Merrill shoe factory at South Braintree, millionaires like the Lowells and the Fullers, robbers like the Morelli gang (which may have done the job at South Braintree) and radicals like Sacco and Vanzetti, and lets them all loose, in a war to the death, where the rich control the armaments of bullet and law.
With such a view of the case, expectations of "justice" become as naive as expectations of winning at roulette, for in both cases, while there are exceptions, to keep the suckers coming, the structure of the game insures that everyone will be kept in place. If a case like that of Sacco and Vanzetti is seen, not as an objective weighing of evidence, but as an instance of the struggle between the classes, then Sacco's insistence from the beginning, waving aside all lawyers' promises and f
riends' hopes, makes profound sense: "They got us, they will kill us." So does his statement to 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 to fit 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.
Then on whom can the Saccos and Vanzettis of our time depend, when the judicial system, however frocked to disguise its shape, is made of the same stuff as the larger system to which it connects? Certainly not, Sinclair shows us through Cornelia Thornwell's shattered innocence, on judges, juries, higher courts, governors, committees of notables. Governor Fuller was polite but firm. The intellectual Lowell was calm but unyielding. The Massachusetts Supreme Court, the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, Holmes and Brandeis, reacted with coldness, the technicalities falling from their lips like icicles.
Nor could they count on the lawyers and committees for the defense, who depended on legal arguments, on the investigation of facts, always deluding themselves that more facts, better arguments, would win, not understanding that this was one of those moments in history when the ruling class closes ranks. At such moments, the liberal press retreats into cowardly cautiousness. And the customary niceties of free speech and assembly, so proudly paraded before the world as proof of America's goodness, are withdrawn, the permits canceled for meetings on the Boston Common, and the police called to club and arrest those who gather in defiance.