The trial may well have been more unfair than seems apparent in the record. There the most glaring fault is the district attorney’s harrying interrogation of the two men as to their beliefs, their lack of patriotism, and their reasons for running away to avoid the draft. The impropriety stares out of the printed page. Here certainly was error, yet I cannot believe that this was primary in the jury’s verdict. On the other hand, the judge’s charge, which Felix Frankfurter so condemned, seems reasonable enough in cold print. I was finally left with the feeling that if I had been on the original jury, I should have voted with the others. Yet I was not really certain.

Looked back at over the lapse of years, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti becomes a tragedy in the classical sense. It was no melodrama, as many have seen it, with good neatly divided from evil. Katzmann was as sharp as most district attorneys out for a conviction, a limited man but not a bad one. Judge Thayer could not hide the bias of his obsessions. He was indiscreet and he was weak, but he made an effort to conduct the trial fairly. Both he and Katzmann believed to their dying day that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty.

It was not a conspiracy of evil men against noble men, as Maxwell Anderson saw it in his play Gods of the Lightning. There was something more, something deeper and more embracing in the case. It was in fact fate that was the mover behind the events at the Dedham courthouse in the spring of 1921. And it was fate in the ironic Greek sense, dwarfing all the participants, ending in inexorable disaster.

Sacco and Vanzetti were figures of Greek tragedy: the doomed king’s son becomes in modern dress two Italian workmen. Fate lurks behind them at each step. Sacco scarcely misses a day at his factory except the day of the murders. If he had missed any other day, the factory records would have been his alibi. Without him it is agreed that Vanzetti could not have been convicted. Fate engineered the almost accidental arrest of the two men as they were riding on the Brockton streetcar. But for fate, Sacco would have been off to his native country in three days.

And as in Greek tragedy the hero condemns himself unknowingly in his own words, is doomed by his own inner weakness, so in the end are Sacco and Vanzetti doomed by theirs. The men of peace go armed. Fate plus human weakness—that is the basis of high tragedy, a tragedy such as theirs that they played out to the end with bravery and dignity. It was a tragedy for everyone concerned with the case, and in the end it is best accepted so, as it was by the Greeks.

CHAPTER TWO
HISTORY, WRITTEN AND
OTHERWISE

Walking up State Street a third of a century after the executions, on another August afternoon, I wondered again about the enigma of the case. The whole drama had been played out within twenty miles of here: in South Braintree, in Bridgewater, in sedate Dedham, in the gilt-domed State House beyond the Common, and finally just across Prison Point Bridge in the granite fortress of the now-demolished state prison. Would it ever become as clear-cut as the Dreyfus affair, where everyone was at last satisfied of the grossness of the injustice done? That still seemed unlikely. In 1950 the seven surviving jury members were interviewed as to their later opinions. The decades had only confirmed their belief in the rightness of their verdict. In 1959 a judiciary committee of the Massachusetts legislature had refused to consider granting Sacco and Vanzetti a posthumous pardon.

Where the past is reduced to shelves of documents in a library it becomes manageable enough for the scholar or historian to make his evaluation. But where it is still an actual present in the contradictory minds of living men, what yardstick can one use except that of preconceptions? Was the chief of police who arrested Sacco and Vanzetti a forger of evidence? Did their first lawyers betray them? Was the district attorney a barrator with his hand out under the table? Was the judge mad? Was President Lowell of Harvard a Yankee bigot? Many upright men had maintained these things. Were Sacco and Vanzetti quietistic anarchists, or did they believe in the politics of the deed?

Boston seemed downcast, heatstruck. The Old State House at the head of State Street had, I noticed, been steam-cleaned, and the clock over the balcony had been replaced by a more authentic sundial. As I reached the subway entrance under the ancient foundations, an eddy of heat snapped in my face like a dirty towel. At that moment a herd of tourists following the Freedom Trail had paused at Point 9 to get Freedom Stamps from the slot machine for their souvenir albums. A shiny-faced man in a Hawaiian sport shirt was maneuvering against the sun to get a photograph of the lion-and-unicorn supports on the Old State House facade, no doubt thinking they went back to 1776 instead of merely to a twentieth-century Armenian tinsmith’s shop. Watching the tourists, I felt I ought to have some sort of souvenir book myself to paste with self-congratulatory stamps for interviewing people on an afternoon like this.

My first call was on a corporation lawyer who had spent years writing a book to prove that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. His firm, occupying the sixth floor of a large old-fashioned building on Federal Street, was ostentatiously shabby with a well-preserved Edwardian décor. A horseshoe-shaped receptionist’s desk dominated an outer office.