Italians

If Secretary of State Kellogg follows current fiction--which is doubtful, he being a very busy man--there is little likelihood that among his favorite authors is John Dos Passos, unhappy young post- warrior; author of Three Soldiers and Manhattan Transfer. Yet many a busy mind is widely inquiring. And if he did not chance to stray so far afield himself, Secretary of State Kellogg may well have had his attention called by some friend to an unusual bit of Author Dos Passos' work in the current New Masses.

Two Characters. "Early mornings, pushing his fish cart up and down the long main street of North Plymouth, Mass., ringing his bell, chatting with housewives in Piedmontese, Tuscan, pidgin English, Bartolomeo Vanzetti worried about the raids, the imprisonment of comrades, the lethargy of the working people. He was an anarchist . . . Between the houses he could see the gleaming stretch of Plymouth Bay, the sandy islands beyond, the white dories at anchor. He was planning to go into fishing himself in partnership with a man who owned some dories. About three hundred years before, men from the west of England had first sailed into the grey shimmering bay that smelt of woods and wild grape, looking for something; liberty . . . freedom to worship God in their own manner . . . space to breathe. Thinking of these things, worrying as he pushed the little cart loaded with eels, haddock, cod, halibut, swordfish, Vanzetti spent his mornings . . . weighting-out fish...." The fish peddler worried because a few days before, on a fine cool May morning in the year 1920, a body had been found--smashed lifeless on the pavement in front of a Department of Justice office--the body of another anarchist, a printer. This printer had been arrested for de- portation during the anti-Red hysteria. The man had jumped or been pushed from a 14th floor window. Anarchist Vanzetti, having read the news, joked little that morning with the housewives. "At the same time, Nicola Sacco was working in Stoughton on an edging machine at the Three K's shoe factory. . . , He had a pretty wife and a little son named Dante. There was another baby coming. He lived in a bungalow belonging to his employer, Michael Kelly. . . . The men were friends. Often Kelly advised him to lay off this anarchist stuff. There was no money in it. ... Sacco was a clever young fellow and could soon get to be a prosperous citizen, maybe own a factory of his own some day, live by other men's work. But Sacco, working in his garden in the early morning before the whistles blew, hilling beans, picking off potato bugs, worried about things. He too was an anarchist."

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were friends. Once they had fled the country together to go to Mexico because they did not want to go to the War. They were slackers. They were anarchists. Back in Stoughton they decided that in view of this recent flare of the patriots they had better get rid of some incriminating evidence over in the hall where the radicals held their meetings. In the mushroom industrial towns surrounding Boston, following the denouement of the old shipping and farming, three social spheres have evolved: the effete descendants of stern Puritan days; the wealthy, Democratic, Irish Catholics; and Polyglotia -- "the wops, bohunks, polacks, dagoes, hunkies"* who speak with a foreign accent. They are the workers. The three factions hate each other. Whether the novelist sees truly or falsely, such was the scene, such the two personalities which Author Dos Passos painted as background for the long string of incidents which have now become the international case of "Sacco and Vanzetti." Murder. In the middle of the afternoon of April 15, 1920, a paymaster and guard were walking through the streets of another Massachusetts town, South Braintree, carrying some $5,000 to a shoe factory. Two men, apparently Italians, stepped from one side of the street, shot the paymaster and his guard fatally, snatched the money, escaped in an automobile which arrived just as the act was completed. For three weeks the neighborhood buzzed with anger, for no arrests had been made. Then the police got a tip. From a garage a woman telephoned that some suspicious looking Italians had been there for a car. That day, Mr. Sacco and Mr. Vanzetti were picked up and taken into custody. The officers had found them carrying concealed weapons; later in police court they lied about their whereabouts on the day of the arrest, lied about other things. The officers swore they had started to pull revolvers, but the two anarchists denied that. Then came the trial. The officers told about the revolver-pulling incident, and swore to it. The principal harangue of the prosecutor and the judge: that this gun-pulling should be interpreted as "consciousness of guilt." In vain, did Mr. Vanzetti summon at least 20 witnesses stating that they had purchased eels and fish from him at the hour of the crime in South Braintree. They were dismissed as "Italians." Mr. Sacco attempted to establish an alibi that he had been in Boston procuring a passport the day of the crime. That was mighty suspicious to the jury, despite the fact that the Italian consul at Boston had sworn that it was true. "Sacco and Vanzetti" (the names have lost their individuality after six years in the headlines and are now only the name of a "case") explained that they had the guns because they feared attack from the anti-Reds; that they had lied to save their radical friends. However, many witnesses identified Sacco and Vanzetti as participants in the crime. Yet more testified to the contrary. Virtually all the witnesses saw the crime from safely distant factory windows. Both men were found guilty of murder in the first degree.* New Aspect. Then began an unusual, new, phase of the business. Protests from all over the world poured into the State Department through its embassies, clamoring that injustice had been done. Socialistic and communistic friends of Sacco and Vanzetti showered epithets, threats, and bombs on many a far-flung U. S. legation. The Department warned that extraordinary precautions would be wise (TIME, June 21), after several persons had been killed. Last week the ill-guided demonstrations came to a peak in Paris, as the day of death approaches the two Italians. Ten thousand Parisian workers in embattled assemblage decried the execution, maintaining as always, that the men are being made the victims of anti-radicalism. Meanwhile a stay of execution has been given in the light of new testimony and an alleged confession from a Spaniard.

So far, insistent official foreign protest has not been considered at the Secretary's office. With many more demonstrations like the Parisian episode, Mr. Kellogg can, perhaps, envision the story from another angle, perhaps as psychologically delineated by Author Dos Passos.

*Wops ............Italians Bohunks .............Hungarians and Slavs Polacks ..........Poles Hunkies ............Hungarians Dagoes .........Italians *Later, in jail, Vanzetti fumbled with the fretwork of English idiom, his squinting pen articulating the letter below: ". . . Innocent; I am so. I did not spittel a drop of blood or steal a cent in my life. A little knowledge of the past: a sorrowful experience of life itself had give to me some idears very different from those of many other umane beings. But I wish to convince my fellowman that only with virtue and honesty is possible for us to find a little happiness in the world. I preached; I worked. I wished with all my faculties that the social world would belong to every uman creatures, just so as it was the fruit of the work of all. But this do not mean robbery. . . "The insurrection, the great movement of the soul, do not nedd dollars. It nedd love, light, spirit of sacrifice, idears, conscience instints. And all this blassing things can be seeded, awoked, growed up in the heart of man in every way but with robbery or murder for robbery. . . "Do not violate the law of Nature if you do not want to be miserable. I remember : it was a night without a moon but stary. I sit alone in the darkness, I was sorry, very sorry. With the face in my hands I began to look at the stars. I feel that my soul wants to go away from my body, and I have to make an effort to keep it in my chest. So, I am the son of Nature, and I am so rich that I do not need money. And for this they say that I am a murderer and condemn me to death."