Those who spoke said what was right to say [Holmes wrote]. By common consent those present put anger aside, and moved to higher levels of the spirit. Watchers in Boston flashed to New York the fateful moment when the two men died. Something happened in that moment when myriads of hearts, the world around, were cleansed of fear and hate. In them Sacco and Vanzetti were born again, and will surely live.
Others were not able to attain such humanistic serenity. For Eugene Lyons, in the New York Tass office, Sacco and Vanzetti had become like members of his own family. Up until the execution hour he kept cabling the news to Moscow. When the two men died, he recalled,
the case which was integrated with my own existence, intimate as few things in life ever become intimate, was over, finished. Nothing to do but go home to bed.... I remember wondering why I could not weep and shriek with the hurt of it, just as I was to wonder seven years later at my father’s coffin.
With the news of the executions, Europe seethed. The issues of the case that had confused and divided the United States seemed perfectly clear in transatlantic perspective. The inhabitants of expatriate Elliot Paul’s tiny left-bank Rue de la Huchette represented the workers generally in their indignant conviction that Sacco and Vanzetti had been murdered because they were foreign anarchists and leaders of American labor, and that Judge Thayer and Governor Fuller had destroyed them for the good of their own privileged kind. Paul saw the week of rioting that followed as the first of a series of quakes that would jar France’s hostile classes apart and lead to the death of the Third Republic. On the day of the executions Paris was like a city under siege. A general strike halted almost all traffic. Soldiers with machine guns took up positions in the principal squares and along the boulevards. Republican Guards were out in their brass helmets. The American Embassy was ringed with tanks. In the working-class districts—which the bourgeois took care to avoid—the metal shutters were closed. Yet there were no demonstrations during the day, and except for the soldiers and the guns and the tanks the city seemed almost empty. Pierre Van Paassen remembered the silence of the streets as so intense it was almost frightening. But early on the following morning, when L’Humanité spread the news in an extra sheet with one black-splashed word “Assassinés!,” the militants struck out. On the Boulevard Sebastopol they tore the iron lamp posts from the concrete and tossed them through plate-glass windows, then looted the largest grocery store in Paris and pelted the police with canned goods from behind a barricade of tables and carts. With linked arms, fifty abreast, they surged across the Place de l’Opéra while long-aproned café waiters scurried to hide the seltzer siphons. Sixty police were injured in a pistol battle when a mob tried to set up barricades in front of the American Embassy. In Montmartre the front of the Moulin Rouge was demolished.
In Geneva, the evening before the executions, a mob of five thousand roamed the streets for several hours, overturning American cars, sacking shops displaying American goods, and gutting theaters showing American films. Finally the mob gathered to smash the windows of the Palace of the League of Nations. One rioter was killed, a number injured, after troops with fixed bayonets were sent in.
In Germany Die Rote Fahne and other Communist papers appeared on August 23 with black borders. There were demonstrations in Bremen and Wilhelmshaven, and a two-hour torchlight parade in Stuttgart. A marcher was killed in Leipzig; in Hamburg a number of demonstrators were wounded, and a policeman and a worker killed. At one of the largest meetings in the history of the Weimar Republic, Ernst Thälmann compared the murder of Sacco and Vanzetti to that of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The playboy mayor of New York, Jimmy Walker, in Berlin on a visit, was booed as he entered the City Hall. Die Rote Fahne advised him to spend his vacation on Governor Fuller’s farm.
In England forty protesters were injured in a riot at the Marble Arch, and on the night of the executions a crowd gathered before Buckingham Palace and sang “The Red Flag.” On the day of the funeral the flag on the building of the Labor Party was at half-mast. Flags were at half-mast throughout the Soviet Union. A street in Moscow was named for Sacco and Vanzetti, and Sovkino, the state motion picture bureau, ordered an Austrian company to start making a film about them. Later the Soviet Government named a pencil factory in their memory and for years produced pencils stamped with their names.
Many were hurt in Oporto, Portugal, when police broke up a demonstration in front of the American Consulate. In Rosario, Argentina, throngs waited in silence and bared their heads when just after midnight the news of the executions reached them. Buenos Aires experienced a general strike. In Mexico City, Diego Rivera spoke at a mass meeting. In Sydney, Australia, a huge procession protested the executions. In South Africa the American flag was burned on the steps of the Johannesburg City Hall.
Nothing comparable occurred in the United States in the six-day interval between the executions and the funeral. A plan of the International Labor Defense and the New York Emergency Committee to have the ashes of Sacco and Vanzetti brought to New York for a Union Square memorial meeting broke up in recriminations between the International Labor Defense and the Boston committee. The Communists blamed Mary Donovan, Michael Gold describing her as “an obscure, spiteful female with a great lust for publicity.”
For Boston, on the morning after the executions, the case at last seemed finished. The Herald sprinkled its editorial page with relieved metaphors: