What has been done for us by the people of the world, the laborers (I mean workers) and the greatest minds and hearts proves beyond any possible doubt that a new conception of justice is planing its way in the soul of mankind: a justice centered on man as man. For as I have already said, you, they are doing for us what once could only have been done for saints and kings.
Somehow in the years at Charlestown, Vanzetti—the misfit, the wanderer—became the master of language. Even in his early fumblings with grammar he was always eloquent. As early as December 1921, after a brief glimpse of the close-ranged Roxbury streets on the way to his Dedham hearing he could write: “O, funny, humble, old, little houses that I love; little house always big enough for the greatest loves, and most saint affects.”
In his letters, in his speech to the court, one can trace the developing cadences of English, the tone-giving rhythm of the Anglo-Saxon that runs below the surface of the modern tongue. This moving eloquence—where did it come from? It was as if the man grew as his prospect of life shortened. After raging to Alice Blackwell against those he considered his persecutors, he could apologize in his next letter: “I am yet man enough to look streight in to the eyes, the black gastly reality and the tragedy of my life.”
As he came face to face with that reality, he had no room for accretions and superficialities. What was left to him was acceptance. “I neither boast nor exalt, nor pity myself,” he wrote Mrs. MacMechan. “I followed my call, I have my conscience serene.” He understood that the most one could hope for was “the little knowledge of the enormous mystery surrounding us and from which we sprang.” His freedom taken from him, he became a free man.
Anarchism remained the core of his beliefs: a vision of the peaceable kingdom where the wolves and the lambs of the industrial world would attain their ultimate reconciliation. “Oh, friend,” he wrote to his teacher, “the anarchism is as beauty as a women for me, perhaps even more since it include all the rest and me and her. Calm, serene, honest, natural, vivid, muddy and celestial at once, austere, heroic, fearless, fatal, generous and implacable—all these and more it is.” He defined the anarchist’s creed as
All what is help to me without hurt the others is good; all what help the others without hurting me is good also, all the rest is evil. He look for his liberty in the liberty of all, for his happiness in the happiness of all, for his welfare in the universal welfare.
If the golden age could only come about through violence, he would accept violence—though with deep personal regret:
I would my blood to prevent the sheeding of blood, but neither the abyss nor the heaven’s, have a law who condamns the self-defence.... The champion of life and of the liberty should not yield before the death.
Sacco’s nature had a darker turbulence. The now obsolete term anarchist-communist would have applied to him as it would never have applied to Vanzetti. Anarchist though he called himself, he saw life in terms of the Marxist class struggle, in which “as long as this sistem of things, the exploitation of man on other man reign, will remain always the fight between those two opposite class.” Unlike Vanzetti, he did not concern himself with anarchism as the rejection of government, but with the immediacy of conflict. In a dream he had at Dedham he described how he found himself in the middle of a strike in a Pennsylvania mining town and how soldiers with guns and bayonets came to put it down:
And so the fite it was to beginning, and while the fite was begin I jump upon a little hill in meddle of the crowd and I begin to say, Friend and comrade and brotherhood, now one of us as going to move a step, and who will try to move it will be vile and coward, here the fite as go to finish. So I turn over towards to the soldiers and I said, Brothers you will not fire on your own brothers just because their tell you to fire, no brothers remember that everyone of us we have mother and child, and you know that we fite for freedom wich is your freedom. We want one of the fatherland, one sole, one house, and better bread. So while I was finish to say that last work one of the soldiers fire towards me and the ball past throught my heart, and while I was fall on ground with my right hand close to my heart I awake up with sweet dream!