Sacco Aftermath

"Massachusetts . . . has blotted out the fishmonger and the cob- bler . . . who in the minds of multitudes will take for the moment their places with the Carpenter."

Thus did the overwrought Nation* begin its obsequies over another long-lost cause. In Boston, less hysterical people than the Nation's editor went about the sorry business of disposing of the bodies of Messrs. Sacco & Vanzetti and the practical business of keeping martrydom alive with yet more litigation.

Funeral. The Defense Committee denied a report that it was planning to take the embalmed bodies on an agitating tour of U. S. industrial centers. A state law required that the bodies be burned or buried before sunset the Friday following Execution Tuesday. Boston health officials extended the time to Sunday. When the brains and hearts of the corpses had been removed for examination by Harvard medicos, Massachusetts returned what remained of its prisoners to their friends, who straightway sought a public hall for a public wake. But Boston hall owners refused to lease their property. Owners of the building in which the Defense Committee had offices caused a stout joist to be nailed in the building's doorway so that no coffin might be carried in. The Defense Committee had to be content with a small mortuary chapel in the Italian section of Boston. The mortician, an artist in his way, wanted to dress the bodies in dinner jackets, but the Defense Committee said no, let them lie in their plain laboring-men's Sunday best--black cloth suits, black four-in-hand ties, un- comfortable black shoes. Let the coffins be of plain mahogany draped with Red, banked with odorous Red flowers. So it was, and their neighbors saw them as they had often seen them.

First came the three leading members of the Defense Committee-- Gardner Jackson, Aldino Felicani, Mary Donovan. Each kissed the brows of the dead. An uncountable crowd, pushed and prodded into line by police, shuffled stuffily after to scowl, weep or gape. Miss Donovan was arrested when she tried to insert an anti-Judge Thayer placard among the funeral flowers. She was later sentenced to a year in jail, appealed the case. Artist William Gropper of the New Masses was not admitted when he came to make bier portraits.

A windy drizzle swept in upon the two hearses and their strange following of limousines, rubberneck busses, taxicabs, shabby family cars. The foot crowd marched 40 abreast with arms linked when wide streets were reached, swelling to 5,000 strong. Many wore Red armbands, lettered "Remember-- justice crucified--Aug. 23, 1927."

Police lines kept the procession from passing the State Capital house. When the motorcade drew ahead of the bedraggled marchers and vanished in the distance, mounted police charged the marchers, who had grown noisy and quarrelsome. A remnant plodded on to Forest Hills.

Back in Cambridge, incendiaries had fired five buildings. In the cemetery, another fire blazed, its smoke trailing thin and mournful from the crematorium's high smokestack. The limousines were parked there, one with its shades drawn to hide the prostration of Miss Luigia Vanzetti, Mrs. Sacco and her son Dante. Mary Donovan and Gardner Jackson of the defense committee had the hardihood to follow into the crematorium after Miss Donovan had read a last eulogy to the dead. They peered through a glassed peephole at the coffins flaming in the vault. On the rim of the surrounding natural amphitheatre, the crowd watched the wisp of smoke until nightfall.

Ashes. Miss Luigia Vanzetti announced that she would take her brother's ashes to Europe via no U. S. city save New York. Mrs. Sacco was less definite, but enthusiasts bustled around Manhattan trying to lease Madison Square Garden or the Polo Grounds, the Yankee Stadium, Cooper Union or Carnegie Hall. All were refused. Police Commissioner Joseph A. Warren of New York refused a parade permit. The enthusiasts said they would display the urns, strew Red carnations, sing the Internationale in Union Square, permitted or not.

Joseph Langone, officiating Boston mortician, refused to take them to Manhattan. Rumor had it he was waiting to be paid $700 for his services. Another rumor said that Miss Vanzetti objected to further display of her brother's remains. The absence of one of the chief exhibits deflated but did not entirely halt the Union Square meeting. A huge clenched fist, representing Labor reared itself aloft in the intermittent rain while orators reiterated complaints of the masses.

"League for Justice." Robert Morss Lovett of Chicago, Boston- bred English scholar, educator, critic, liberal publicist, who had long been active in the Citizens' National Committee for Sacco & Vanzetti, issued a call for the formation, at a caucus, in Manhattan, of a Sacco-Vanzetti League for Justice. He and others had drafted aims for such a league:

1) To establish the innocence of the dead.

2) To expose, through an investigation by the U. S. Senate, an alleged conspiracy between Massachusetts and the U. S. Department of Justice for the "framed-up" deaths.

3) To examine, by a citizens' commission, into the decisions of Governor Fuller and his advisory committee.

4) To endow Mrs. Sacco & family.

5) To memorialize the dead.

Gardner Jackson of the Defense Committee, however, soon took issue with Mr. Lovett's league, flayed its founders. Probable reason: The Defense Committee was organized in 1920, at the time of the original arrests, by personal friends of the accused; the Citizens' Committee was founded much later, among intellectual liberals. After their seven-year fight the friends now professed to be "filled with sincere resentment at every attempt to exploit the Sacco-Vanzetti case for selfish political purposes, for personal vanity, for purposes of providing jobs or for any other ulterior purpose."

Red Graft? Gardner Jackson and the Defense Committee had another grievance. Last January, U. S. Communists reported to Moscow that they had raised $500,000 for "the Sacco-Vanzetti relief work." Last week the Defense Committee revealed that it had received only $300 from Communist sources. Where did the rest go? The Defense Committee had some big bills to pay.

Picketers' Appeal. For "sauntering and loitering" in front of the State House in Boston, 156 men and women were arraigned, found guilty. All but six were fined $5 and paid the fine. The others-- Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet; Ellen Hayes, retired Wellesley College professor; John Howard Lawson, playwright; William Patterson, Negro lawyer; Ela Reeve Bloor and Catherine Huntington, liberal gentlewomen--were fined $10. Lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays of the American Civil Liberties Union counseled them to appeal their cases, as tests. His argument: the defendants had not been "sauntering and loitering" any more than had thousands of other persons who idled near the State House that day. On the contrary, they had been about their serious peaceful business of carrying placards to persuade "certain people" to change their views.

Countrywide. Disturbances consequent to the executions at Charlestown, Mass., were far less violent in the U. S. than elsewhere in the world (see p. 12).

P: In Washington, 100 riflemen patrolled the Capitol but had nothing to shoot.

P: In Detroit, mounted police soon dispersed a half-hearted mass attack on the city hall.

P: Baltimore deployed bomb-pre-vention squads through its uneven brick streets, its mayor's family having been blown out of house and home three weeks before (TIME, Aug. 15). But no bombs boomed.

P: Philadelphia Reds tried to convey an impression that 12,000 to 15,000 comrades were holding a general strike. No employers credited the rumor.

*Liberal weekly published in Manhattan.