Sacco & Vanzetti: the case resolved.

Sacco & Vanzetti: The Case Resolved

THIS IS A VERY well-written book by a man whose knowledge and understanding of modern American history is deeply rooted in his own New England traditions. The book is important on two levels. One is Francis Russell's careful revision of the still widely accepted legend of the innocence of these two Italian terrorists. In August 1977, Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts, officially declared the fiftieth anniversary of their execution "Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day.' Dukakis explained "that although he took no stand on whether the two were guilty or innocent, he wanted to remove any stigma or disgrace from the names of their families and descendants and so from the name of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.' Russell writes: "How that could be done without declaring them innocent is a politician's secret.' Never mind. That declaration was another of those Ideas Whose Time Has Come. An idea whose time has come --especially in this Age of Publicity-- is usually no good.

More than 25 years ago Francis Russell became interested in this long-moldering case. He had thought, too, that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. Then the evidence to the contrary came together in his mind with his own intellectual honesty. The result was Tragedy in Dedham, published in 1962, in which Russell--rather conclusively, for this reviewer--established that Sacco was guilty of murder as charged, while Vanzetti, at least technically, was not. I write "for this reviewer,' since, during the 25 years that followed, not many people changed their minds.

In November 1982 Russell received a letter. It was written by the son of Giovanni Gambera, who had died a few months before, one of the committee of four who knew Sacco and Vanzetti intimately and who ran the case for the anarchists. The father confided his secret to his son. "Everyone' in the Boston anarchist circle "knew that Sacco was guilty and that Vanzetti was innocent as far as the actual participation in the killing. But no one would ever break the code of silence even if it cost Vanzetti's life.' The letter to Russell ended: "I do hope this letter brings you some added ease and satisfaction for the research you did. Between you and me, this is the last word.'

The result was this book. Russell reopened his case. What followed were another two years of research, including the now available FBI files, ballistic tests, and a visit to Gambera in San Francisco. Hence the subtitle: "A Case Resolved.' All of this Russell sets forth in precise, lucid, often restrained prose. It is a detective story, the unfolding of a complicated case with remarkable literary skill.

But the detective story operates at only one of the book's two levels, the second of which is at least as interesting, and perhaps more telling. For Russell's work does not consist merely of the reconstruction of a crime, the legal evidence, and the story of the trial: It is a reconstruction of an episode in the history of public opinion ("public opinion,' rather than popular sentiment), of a certain part of the American intellectual climate at a certain time.

In August 1927 there were anti-American demonstrations in European capitals protesting against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in the Massachusetts electric chair. Mussolini and Stalin lamented the event in public. But that is not the significant portion of this story. In the United States, as Russell writes,

In the feverish months of 1927 the case became a rallying point for the intellectual and academic commonality that in many cases set the tone for their entire lives. To intellectuals in their postwar sense of isolation and alienation, it gave a community of spirit, the pentecostal feeling of belonging, as well as the unadmitted satisfaction of identifying themselves with an elite. Their indignation was itself liberating, a catharsis of the emotions, a commitment of faith where the need to believe became the will to believe.

And that was not all. Not only intellectuals and liberals and radicals but the entire array of American bohemians were allied in this sentiment, together with many Boston ladies, bluebloods and bluestockings, women "of dogmatic goodwill . . .' They now had a cause which they embraced with at least as great a fervor as that of Abolitionism or the League of Nations. "To the tough-minded Communists they were known as "sob sisters.'' (It took the vision of a great philosopher--Santavana, in The Last Puritan, a book that Russell does not mention--to see, a decade later, this connection between an etiolated Puritanism and the congealment of passions for some things on the Left.)

But Francis Russell's inquiry is a reconstruction of a chapter in intellectual history, not an ideological thesis. While he is good in describing the novel evidence of ballistic tests, he is --for this reviewer--even better in revising the historical shibboleths of a certain time and place. He proves, for example, that the first (May 1921) trial of Sacco and Vanzetti had little or nothing to do with the Red Scare that had followed World War I: By 1920 most of the vestiges of that scare were gone. Yet the assertion that Sacco and Vanzetti's arraignment was inescapably part and parcel of the scare has remained the accepted opinion of historians and political scientists to this day. Again, Russell firmly establishes that the 1927 trial and the previous jury selections were fair, and that Judge Thayer has been unjustly maligned ever since. Even more importantly, he recounts how certain people who later became celebrated American jurists were not only wrong in their assessments of the case but were purposeful intellectual opportunists. These include the then very young Michael A. Musmanno, who cut a ridiculous figure even in the eyes of Sacco and Vanzetti's closest associates at the time, but who wrote a largely fake book about the trial (which he had not even attended) and the verdict and who subsequently rose to circle high among the legal eagles of the Republic, becoming a hanging judge at Nuremberg and Justice of the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Another great man was Felix Frankfurter, whose--entirely wrong--treatise The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis for Lawyers and Laymen made the Sacco-Vanzetti case "belatedly chic.' It was also an important step in the career of that abrasive and ambitious man who became, eventually, a Justice of the Supreme Court.

Sic transit . . . Thucydides, the first historian, wrote in the preface of his History of the Peloponnesian War that his task was the reduction of untruth. In this sense every historian worth his salt is a revisionist of sorts. As Kierkegaard once wrote, the truth is given to God alone; but what He gave to men is the task of the pursuit of truth. The Sacco-Vanzetti episode ought to teach us many things, among them that the single-minded pursuit of justice may actually lead to the veneration of untruth--which may be the main problem of the twentieth century.