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The person charging this material is re- 
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 which it was withdrawn on or before the 
 Latest Date stamped below. 
 
 Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons 
 for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from 
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 To renew call Telephone Center, 333-8400 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN 
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Lay 
 i 
 
AMERICA ARRAIGNED! 
 
AMERICA ARRAIGNED! 
 
 Edited by 
 LUCIA TRENT 
 and 
 
 RALPH CHEYNEY 
 
 With an introduction by 
 JOHN HAYNES HOLMES 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DEAN & COMPANY 
 1928 
 
Copyright 1928 by 
 DEAN & COMPANY 
 
 ESR 181 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
» TALMADGE 
 
 - 
 
 f / f) Y 
 | 
 CONTENTS PAGE 
 SUISSE) SA NR Ces oD MRI 9 
 INTRODUCTION by JOHN HAYNES HOLMES ................. 13 
 
 BEFORE GOVERNOR FULLER AND HIS ADVISORY 
 COMMISSION REFUSED TO INTERCEDE 
 
 BERENBERG, DAVID P.: 
 
 For the 23rd Of August .......ssssscscsssrsscnssssssnssnssssssscoeconesesesssenees 23 
 CHEYNEY, RALPH: 
 
 ATMA THEO DOE TE each oc cccccelasiirs cocensestaeec eee tasenccduceteeds 24 
 DAVIES, MARY CAROLYN: 
 
 POLI Cal DOLL ase tae ceeetrs tense getescsentecesscecocancuteee ntbe pee cmensutachoas 5 
 deWITT, S. A.: 
 
 Musing Onutwo Meniin: Dedham Jail ccc essesesdocsactaes 26 
 MANROSS, W. WILSON: 
 
 Sacco-Vanzetti PUN UKs aN Ges QLD here aetendvacnscanedas cass eeateibaet ieee teeneeiuecce 27 
 FEINSTEIN, MARTIN: 
 
 PSTACCHY eaaaaath WV TURCLL MN 5.1 0ii) eM Se svassocdectiesscosecnssscdncodedruauhaecs stsloun ss 28 
 FLETCHER, JOHN GOULD: 
 
 RU MMRVACCIN ALLEL ViATEZOLED cxcsssiiiscncceysvolgrenssis nonvces catenins ds cocker taed tae 29 
 GINSBERG, LOUIS: 
 
 ee ACCC ITU ATIFOEE Tere sold scarecnenedteepaseecceee |, See haan 30 
 
 BRE REIIIDCCH ATIC LAT UIIED Ucns chy ceeded gal uaa va oak eduaseauentinge anes ass ia ys 31 
 GOODENOUGH, CAROLYN LEONARD: 
 
 GREY SACCO. title V ATIZELELS bicsreis cs cansecladseedceodetsadeacarce de saeearun nae Se 
 HARTSOCK, ERNEST: 
 
 0 TSMC ASS Fol py Tease aac Billa Se PY Rai Me ERR hi Geshe MUR NG EN oa 
 MOSKOWITZ, NICHOLAS: 
 
 FROGS TON RGUT ER ETINIEO) | oct tips care le. s adsthcsen tad, capansecdeycek cash esengaammouaeremere 34 
 MUSSER, BENJAMIN: 
 
 Sacco- IY SAREE fase sestt caxsendaneecnntantann stees en necnectnrney senatebostess tite estd iets ao 
 RIDGE, LOLA: 
 
 Two MPMI TDCALTT NE LIIISOS Select. cadescecsctececestececbh dntedvetecchess cee ce oe eenG 36 
 ROOT, E. MERRILL: 
 
 SET ae Va Te MORE: VWs are ©) URGNGION po cae NOOR UN ee NBL AC ON A GN 39 
 ROSE, BLANCHE WALTRIP: 
 
 1a ae wr ate) eee bh NRT AO VL eo ed se Up Np EMG 4l 
 SIEGRIST, MARY: 
 
 Tall Winds Shall Walk For Sacco and Vanzetti ................ 42 
 SQUIRES, EDITH LOMBARD: 
 
 RE RSSACIIESCHES 1 MO Cameteeelely Scacncchcccecoucap)cpde uous caudssseneascsaseouusorsseues 43 
 TRENT, LUCIA: 
 
 PLGW Ly OUT) VV OTIC) LTOTH DIES ee eee oe ata ae en 44 
 
 [5] 
 
CONTENTS (Continued) 
 
 WHITAKER, ROBERT: PAGE 
 
 The (Calprits coc lalla cecceesslatiet ney nr 45 
 ZORN, GREMIN: . 
 
 The Poets Sacco’ and) Vanzetti c....:....cishccscesssesteuceneee een 46 
 TRENT Wi PR: 
 
 On Meeting Miss Vanzetti in Paris .......2godeee ee 46 
 
 AFTER INTERCESSION WAS REFUSED BUT BEFORE 
 THE CRUCIFIXION 
 
 BLANKFORT, SEYMOUR MICHAEL: 
 
 A Final) Appeal: jiccciccccccccccscceschsscccesossescoscoceseceesaselee aeennanaaa 48 
 BYNNER, WITTER: 
 
 The Condemned) iacicessccccsscaccaccecscecsvesssedesccacsscaseussuata gia aetna aaa 49 
 CHEYNEY, RALPH: 
 
 To Governor Fuller and his Advisory Council .0.........ccc.s00 50 
 CULLEN, COUNTEE: 
 
 Not ‘Sacco and: VanzZetti iscscsccSscccsscossocovsacseecsslcotscegsssase aman ama 51 
 DEUTSCH, BABETTE: 
 
 Of ‘Sacco’ and: Vanzetta scccc3ccccsccssleccsocesssocsodecsdecs osaue een aaa 52 
 EMORY, WILLIAM CLOSSON: 
 
 Another, Pilate) ccc.) cscs. sludesddscestaccassasealssuscesentola ean 52 
 HOLMES, JOHN HAYNES: 
 
 The Ballad of Charlestown Gaol (01.60.05... scsttece eect 53 
 POTAMKIN, HARRY ALAN: 
 
 The Infamous Ritual) ii oles et ee 56 
 
 RELLA, ETTORE: 
 
 A Half Hour Before the Execution of Sacco and Vanzetti 57 
 ROOT, E. MERRILL: 
 
 On Hearing the News that Governor Fuller Sanctioned 
 
 the Murder of Sacco and’ Vanzettt .2.c.0..0\...c0cce 
 RORTY, JAMES: 
 
 Gentlemen of Massachusetts «.....:..:..--sccoss)cecoscoscervecseauatenapaueneniee 59 
 TRENT, LUCIA: 
 
 Tro. Bishop Lawrence | o..c...cc.cccccasscocsoocccseienccscatesdses¥ers aeeeenene Manan 61 
 
 To President Lowell and his Commission ..........c:ccscscssseeseee 61 
 WOOD, CLEMENT: 
 
 Golgotha in” Massachusetts ( ciccc.ececsc.ccsoscocecscesetesnnsuucqneeeeauee anes 62 
 
 AFTER THE CRUCIFIXION 
 BURNS, VINCENT G.: 
 
 Who’ ‘Are. the ‘Griminals 2.) coi. icucssccnsccconlosscepns eee .. 64 
 BYNNER, WITTER: | 
 
 Once More, O Commonwealth! \ c.c:.ccsicclsccecesesscossncersnere eugene 65 
 CAREW, HAROLD D.: 
 
 Justice’, 1s “Dead «cepeccciccdbeselesscevepessensouaeeaccauscneiuvtesineenet eas aman 66 
 
CONTENTS (Continued) 
 
 CHEYNEY, RALPH: PAGE 
 
 PCCERS CUT LUy Erne aceite ty ees cer citbaieta ue seoneccder arte et nteticierei octets 67 
 DeFORD, MIRIAM ALLEN: 
 
 TEETH Cl1Ghe IVE UIT CET Mattes cn ecay oc cscees scvcsseenceuscandonsstcantuaceeiiereveeassvetensduases 67 
 FICKE, ARTHUR DAVISON: 
 
 PCA VOTAily WM ASSACTIUSOLES) | ciccicsacnsvecescsencacsehccvenstutteenedteienescecetoeeice 68 
 HARLOW, S. RALPH: 
 
 BES EV Gf OL CU res traNacetstasatvsnse dares casesevessnaseasdugttoutcwct sacunsencdeeeel 69 
 KERNAN, MARY PLOWDEN: 
 
 VBR ELV AEC EE cece ose res eaten eta cca oak cokcenccecccosncnaconseutereatelntekeatonetees 70 
 KREYMBORG, ALFRED: 
 
 Aueusticends, Ay ed-Letter | Day: si.2....ccceccsueccesmteetindovacoctedias 71 
 MAGIL, A. B.: 
 
 BO TAR AG IVE TCLS SEE T1C i vecculescacoancbanscnsvcsasdvaces cosedscncsgepeorae eebaeaeveise 72 
 MARKS, JEANNETTE: . 
 
 PREC VAD COPS ETLOU Hid cy Utrcee eles ince cotesaceavchecesochveovcltbccsteetne eaeticetints 77 
 MILLAY, KATHLEEN: 
 
 ES LYE GREE 1 Ae SRC 3 a Die Stiefel REY Area 78 
 MILLAY, EDNA ST. VINCENT: 
 
 mustice Denied | 11, Massachusetts): ..csc.ccccoctcecsnss ssccseqscavetenpsoscvssecs 79 
 LEONARD, WILLIAM ELLERY: 
 
 Se ELL ORIGIN EL rere Tae ree Sascatats enckcrcusepessbeesakt dcauesd eich neadapreseouoneeeeeerms 80 
 OATMAN, MIRIAM E-.: 
 
 PP TOP ON COUTTS Prsee eerste cal eess haar vekacaceseduadeccesccenautoucteobesccnessr cent eeease 81 
 PASSOS, JOHN DOS: 
 
 PENCE PA UGE IEACE EIN O Wiel crives cccntsocicssenesaesecs vcsestidcsacte leet cenan tar sdectechinte 82 
 SPICER, ALICE N.: 
 
 RS ON TW AYRE ME CIEL ii eicoesecescscadeeaieepas csceaties deta chobetconsteabtcine: dinceeecme 85 
 SIMMONS, LAURA: 
 
 GET VN 08 a re eR A UR Be ARP URE LH 86 
 PRESS, MAX: 
 
 Theta oy ate ep bigs bad Negeri 610 fos Pi Silay acta NO bOI a A NBO Ue dt 87 
 SHIPERY JOSEPH T.: 
 
 For a Land that Allows Sacco and Vanzetti to Die ............ 88 
 REIGH) HENRY; Jr.: 
 
 Teer ETE Vc CL VGL ates tect tac tuceconckoncverseens Vass vccadsouseeanelosnintons ssevanreotvaiee 90 
 SEAVER, EDWIN: 
 
 Ree LOCALS PES ITO tye toca rid csc vtec ateatecotameiesants cad come ee tae cL 91 
 TEA JOSIAH: 
 
 EAVES ee eh ret ac ccteasnsecktes tebe ade ohaidanchesecsos toe idkassotieasernts: OR 92 
 WEBSTER, BETHUEL MATTHEW, Jr.: 
 
 BURL OTR se oa ratte hue atet a phe a eus Sr ir ssaahacacdckialacebneaecesiceiet nian 93 
 HUNT, ALICE RIGGS: 
 
 re TaEata POF ATE ae a 9 RAs eA alr sh LON OR Bee RIE 94 
 
» 
 
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FOREWORD 
 
 HIS book is published with a three-fold function. 
 It is a memorial tribute to Nicola Sacco and Bartolo- 
 meo Vanzetti, martyrs for world brotherhood and 
 freedom. It is a protest against the rape of justice by Mas-\ 
 sachusetts in murdering these noble and innocent men and 
 also by the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United 
 States and by President Calvin Coolidge in not interfering. 
 We hope that it will serve likewise as a clarion-call to par- 
 ticipate in the labor movement for which Sacco and Vanzetti 
 gave up their lives on the electric chair and which alone can 
 prevent the repetition of such a tragedy. 
 
 Before August 23rd, 1927, day of eternal shame to 
 America, we sent part of the manuscript of this book to 
 Sacco and Vanzetti and to Gov. Alvin T. Fuller accompanied 
 by the following letter to the governor: 
 
 “In the name of the foremost poets of America we 
 are sending you part of the manuscript of an anthology 
 of poems protesting again the conviction and punishment 
 of Sacco and Vanzetti, which will be published in the 
 event that these men are not set free. These poems are 
 an indication of the attitude of our poets in regard to this 
 case. If these innocent martyrs are sent to the chair or 
 to prison as victims of war hysteria, and every prejudice 
 and force opposed to civilization, this book will live to 
 cry shame on the justice of Massachusetts. 
 
 “Yours for American fair play.” 
 
 Not Massachusetts alone must be held responsible, how- 
 ever, but the entire American empire. Calvin Coolidge 
 might have intervened as did Woodrow Wilson in the Tom 
 
 [9] 
 
Mooney case—and it is well to remember that Mooney and 
 many other victims of frame-ups against labor are at this 
 moment behind prison bars. 
 
 Though the editors alone are responsible for the selection 
 of the poems which with Dr. John Haynes Holmes’ stirring 
 introduction constitute this volume, the following leaders of 
 liberal and radical opinion stand sponsor for this venture of 
 America’s poets to put themselves on record against oppres- 
 sion in a case of world importance: 
 
 Forrest Bailey Gardner Jackson 
 
 Harry Elmer Barnes © Robert Morss Lovett 
 Samuel A. DeWitt John Dos Passos 
 
 Mary Donovan Oswald Garrison Villard 
 John Haynes. Holmes Gremin Zorn 
 
 B. W. Huebsch 
 
 The publication of this book would have been impossible 
 without the generous co-operation of three loyal humanists, 
 William Floyd and Helen and Benjamin Musser, to whom 
 we gladly acknowledge our debt of gratitude. 
 
 Gratitude is due the editors of the following publica- 
 tions for permission to reproduce herein poems originally 
 published in their pages: 
 
 The Citizen 
 
 The Commonweal 
 
 The Conning Tower of the New York World 
 Contemporary Verse 
 
 The Daily Worker 
 
 The Greenwich Village Quill 
 
 The Nation 
 
 The New Leader 
 
 The New Masses 
 
 The New Republic 
 
 The Sacco-Vanzetti Anthology of Verse (Pamphlet) 
 Unity 
 
 [ 10 ] 
 
In some thirteen days, at the close of a great tragedy and 
 the beginning of a great awakening, America was hurled 
 into a whirling vortex of forces which she is yet to under- 
 stand. “The End and the Beginning,” an analysis during 
 the hours of final suspense of the personalities and factors 
 at work in the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee of Boston, 
 is by Jeannette Marks, professor of English literature at 
 Mount Holyoke College, and author of the book Edwin 
 Markham writes about as “that remarkable volume ‘Genius 
 and Disaster.’”’ One of the Sacco-Vanzetti poems in this 
 Anthology, “Two Crucified,” is by her... For “The End 
 and the Beginning,” James Oneal, editor of “The New 
 Leader,” and author of several books on the history of 
 American Labor movements, among them “The Workers 
 in American History” and “American Communism,” has 
 written an introduction re-stating and interpreting the main 
 legal features of the Sacco-Vanzetti indictment and trial. 
 In this volume, being published by the Vanguard Press, can 
 be found the famous Address given by Mary Donovan at 
 the close of the March of Sorrow on August twenty-eighth. 
 
 We wish space permitted us to pay tribute to the many 
 men and women, both conservative and radical, who have 
 sacrificed greatly to save the lives of these two men and 
 American honor in the eyes of the world. 
 
 Lucia Trent 
 Ralph Cheyney 
 
 eT aan 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 N April 15th, 1920, a paymaster and his guard were 
 shot down in the streets of South Braintree, Massa- 
 chusetts, by a gang of five gunmen, who escaped in 
 
 an automobile with loot amounting to about $15,000. 
 
 On May 5th, 1920, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Van- 
 zetti, humble workingmen, both Italians, were arrested and 
 charged with the above robbery and murder. From the mo- 
 ment of this arrest, unusual interest was aroused in the case 
 —first, because of the peculiarly atrocious nature of the 
 crime, and secondly, because of the unusual character of 
 the accused. 
 
 Sacco and Vanzetti were quiet citizens, of good reputa- 
 tion. Sacco was an operative in a shoe factory who had an 
 excellent record, and was trusted and highly praised by his 
 employer. He had a home, a wife and family, a bank-ac- 
 count, a garden which was his delight. Vanzetti, a fish- 
 peddler, traveled his daily route with his little wagon, well- 
 liked by scores of householders, mostly of his own nation- 
 ality, with whom he did business. Neither man had ever 
 been convicted or accused of any crime.* In the three weeks 
 intervening between the murder and their arrest, they con- 
 tinued to live quietly and work busily in the neighborhoods 
 where they were known. No change of any kind in their 
 conduct and appearance was ever reported. So far from 
 attempting to hide themselves, both Sacco and Vanzetti were 
 participating in preparations for a public meeting in which 
 they would be conspicuous in an unpopular cause. Yet 
 these were the men who were charged with committing in 
 broad daylight, on a crowded street, a desperate robbery, 
 
 *The charge against Vanzetti for the attempted hold-up at Bridge- 
 water on December 24, 1919 and his subsequent trial and conviction 
 came after the arrest for murder. 
 
 [13 ] 
 
carried through with such promptitude, efficiency and ruth- 
 lessness as to suggest inevitably the work of professional 
 bandits. 
 
 There was another peculiar and unusual circumstance 
 in the case. The late winter and spring of 1920 was the 
 time of the famous deportation raids conducted by Attorney- 
 General Palmer. Radicals of every description were being 
 rounded up by Department of Justice agents, held under 
 charges of one kind and another, and sent out of the country 
 whenever possible. Now Sacco and Vanzetti were both 
 radicals! They were members of the so-called Galleani 
 group of anarchists who were being hunted by Palmer’s 
 lawless agents. One of the most prominent of them, Salsedo, 
 had been seized in New York, and had either jumped 
 or been thrown from a fourteenth-story window of the Park 
 Row building, where he had been detained eight weeks. 
 Sacco and Vanzetti, fearing immediate arrest and a like fate, 
 had armed themselves; when suddenly arrested on May 5th, 
 they assumed at once that they were being seized because of 
 their radical activities. Nor were such fears and assump- 
 tions groundless, for an agent of the Department of Justice, 
 Fred J. Weyand, has since testified on oath that “these 
 men had nothing whatever to do with the South Braintree 
 murders, and that their conviction was the result of coopera- 
 tion between the Boston agents of the Department of Jus- 
 tice and the District Attorney (of Norfolk County, Massa- 
 chusetts).” 
 
 It was facts of this description which aroused the in- 
 terest not only of Sacco and Vanzetti’s fellow-countrymen 
 and fellow-radicals, but of certain men and women of liberal 
 spirit who feared that injustice was being done under guise 
 of law. As the case developed, especially during and after 
 the trial at Dedham, interest was deepened and fear quick- 
 ened among a growing number of persons who never before 
 had become involved in such an affair. The case for the 
 prosecution was obviously weak. ‘The alibis of the defend- 
 ants were impressive both in number and. quality. The 
 
 a. 
 
judge, Webster Thayer, was bitterly hostile. The district 
 attorney, Mr. Katzmann, was ferocious in his attacks on the 
 prisoners. All sorts of extraneous facts, bearing directly or 
 indirectly on the dangerous radicalism of the defendants 
 and calculated to prejudice the hand-picked jury, were 
 dragged into the court-room. The verdict of guilty left a 
 settled conviction in the minds of thousands that Sacco and 
 \. Vanzetti had been denied a fair trial, and that the sentence 
 \\ represented a gross betrayal of justice. Yet every effort for 
 justice in the case failed: 
 
 Eight motions were made to Judge Thayer for a new trial, 
 but this prejudiced man, in effect passing on his own bias as 
 well as on the new evidence submitted, obstinately refused a 
 re-opening of the case. Twice appeal was made from Judge 
 Thayer’s decisions to the Supreme Court of the state, only 
 to reveal that the highest tribunal in Massachusetts could or 
 would do nothing in the case. Amid growing alarm and in- 
 dignation in the minds of millions of people the world 
 around, the case was carried as a last resort to the Gov- 
 ernor, Alvin T. Fuller, who associated with himself in a 
 matter now become momentous beyond all expectation, an 
 Advisory Committee consisting of Judge Robert Grant, Pres- 
 ident A. Lawrence Lowell, of Harvard University, and Pres- 
 ident Samuel Wesley Stratton, of the Massachusetts Institute 
 of Technology. When the Governor, with unanimous ad- 
 vice of this Committee, refused to interfere, two facts be- 
 came apparent. First, Massachusetts was determined to 
 vindicate her law and assert her power, though innocent 
 men were made to pay the price of death. Secondly, and in 
 its larger aspects, this case was only a latest episode in 
 the age-long struggle of the weak against the strong, the 
 poor against the rich, the workers against the masters. 
 When, on the night of August 22nd, 1927, amid a silence on 
 Boston streets that seemed a world-wide hush of horror, 
 Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were burned to 
 death in the electric chair, a new chapter was finished in the 
 dark but heroic aE of man’s ceaseless struggle against op- 
 pression. 7 
 
 [15] 
 
ern 
 
 The first reaction upon this legal crime was that of wrath, 
 
 shame, pity, and overwhelming despair. Now that time has 
 
 softened the passion of that midnight hour, there comes a 
 sense of uplift. 
 
 The way those men endured the agony of their seven 
 years torture, and the way at last they died! With what 
 ecstacy was Vanzetti inspired, when he spoke those immortal 
 words to the judge who condemned him: 
 
 “Tf it had not been for these things, I might have live 
 out my life, talking at street-corners to scorning men. 
 I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now 
 we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. 
 Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for 
 tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man, 
 as now we do by an accident. Our words, our lives, our 
 pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives of a good 
 shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler—all! That last mo- 
 ment belong to us—that agony is our triumph!” 
 
 For all our grief and horror, the example of such spirit- 
 ual grace as this brought courage and new faith! 
 
 Then the protest that sustained the cause, if it did. not 
 save the lives, of these two men! There is a sense of justice 
 in the world, after all. When two humble workers can so 
 stir the hearts of men, we can still trust in humankind. When 
 such. an effort can be made to vindicate two unimportant 
 radicals for the sake of abstract right, we may look to a 
 brighter future. There is an end to this sort of thing. Some 
 day man’s spirit will master his institutions, man’s sacrifice * 
 redeem society, and love at last be regnant upon the earth. 
 I know that Amos saw a true vision when he foretold the 
 coming of a time when “justice (should) flow down as 
 water, and righteousness as a mighty stream,” for in the 
 Sacco-Vanzetti case I have felt the spiritual power of the 
 awakened conscience of the race. 
 
 Lastly, the new mobilizing of conscience for the work 
 ahead! “We have an idea,” said the Boston Herald, a few 
 days after the execution in Charlestown prison, “that the 
 case will soon be over, and that the public here and abroad, 
 
 [ 16 | 
 
of every shade of opinion, will accept the result, and forget 
 about it. The whole affair will then pass into history, not 
 again to be heard from...’ Thus do the strong ever sat- 
 isfy themselves that they can crush the poor and weak into 
 oblivion. They kill the body, and think that therewith they 
 are killing the soul. How mad their delusion! How ridicu- 
 lous their complacency! For nothing lives so surely, so im- 
 perishably, so terribly, as injustice! 
 
 Chicago thought that the case of the Haymarket bomb- 
 throwers would “soon be over” and men “forget about it,” 
 when the anarchists had been tried and condemned, as Sacco 
 and Vanzetti were tried and condemned, in a courtroom 
 dominated by fear and hate, and at last, by due process of 
 law, had been put to death upon the scaffold. But nothing 
 could end the horror of that judicial crime. Men “of every 
 shade of opinion” slept uneasily at night; they walked the 
 streets distraught and fearful by day. The vision of these 
 anarchists would not down. Their noosed bodies hung at 
 every street-corner and in every doorway. And while all 
 men were thus unhappy, some men were busy! These latter 
 were determined to get at the truth, that the world might 
 know and not merely suspect the horror that had been done. 
 And at last, so clearly was the prejudice of the court estab- 
 lished, so utterly the verdict of the jury discredited, so 
 fully the innocence of the condemned vindicated, that an 
 heroic Governor was moved to do the little that he could to 
 correct the wrong, and thus restore the ways of justice to 
 his state. The anarchists’ case was never, and will never 
 be, forgotten. It is remembered, att will forever be reme 
 
 In the same way, France thought that the Dreyfus case 
 would “soon be over,” and men “forget about it,” when the 
 helpless Captain had been condemned as a traitor, and sent 
 away to his living death on Devil’s Island. Nothing could 
 be more complete and final than the destruction of this man 
 —nothing more overwhelming than the power arrayed 
 
 [17] 
 
against him. But the case lived on! The body of Dreyfus 
 was in his tropic prison, but his spirit haunted the boule- — 
 vards of Paris. One year, two years, three years, four years, 
 five years went by, and still Dreyfus lived more terribly 
 than ever. For all the passing of time, for all the power of 
 army and state, that traitor-Jew on Devil’s Island would not 
 disappear. He had been banished from French soil, but 
 nothing could avail to banish him from French minds. Then 
 at last spoke Zola, who now, for this one heroic deed, lies 
 buried in eternal glory in the Pantheon—and the case was 
 reopened until justice was done. Dreyfus now lives in honor, 
 and France forever hangs her head in shame. 
 
 But the perfect precedent is the Calas case in eighteenth 
 century France, the case which Voltaire made immortal. 
 The poor villager, Calas, was arrested, tried and condemned 
 for the death of his son. Calas was a Protestant, his son 
 had recently turned Catholic; this gave the Church the 
 chance to charge murder when the boy’s body was discov- 
 ered. Calas was broken on the wheel, his property confis- 
 cated, his family driven as beggars on to the highroad. The 
 priests patted unctuously their good round bellies, and knew 
 that the case would “soon be over’ and forgotten. But it 
 was not forgotten! No man weaker than Calas; no institu- 
 tion more potent than the Church! But the rumors of this 
 case traveled on the current of every river, took wings and 
 flew on every wind. At last they came to the ears of Vol- 
 taire in Geneva, and aroused this man, already old, to the 
 greatest work of his life. Voltaire made the Calas case his 
 mission to his contemporaries and to posterity. He carried 
 its story to every nation in Europe. He bombarded princes 
 and bishops with the ceaseless fire of his wrath. Consumed 
 himself with hatred of injustice, he resolved that the world 
 should never sleep again until this crime had been corrected. 
 Voltaire labored on this case for years; and in the end, as 
 always, justice triumphed. Calas was vindicated, his family 
 restored, and the case made memorable forever to the glory 
 of truth and the shame of wicked men. 
 
 [ 18 ] 
 
So, now, with Sacco and Vanzetti! ‘Massachusetts, 
 there she stands’—triumphant, scornful, contented, bloody. 
 She thinks her crime upon the innocent will be forgotten. 
 Certainly she hopes it will be forgotten, for in her own heart 
 she knows she has done murder. But deeds like this live 
 on. There are those who would make them live, if they did 
 not within themselves have the momentum of survival. For 
 the universe, after all, is moral. A work of violence and 
 horror, like that achieved upon Sacco and Vanzetti, dis- 
 rupts the cosmic order, which itself must strive till it is 
 whole again. The agitation for the release of these men, 
 which began years ago, will continue, now that they are dead, 
 for years to come, until at last the truth is known and 
 heard. There are millions of men who will never forget, 
 until Sacco and Vanzetti are justified. There are thousands 
 of men who will never rest, until the work of justification 
 has been carried through to its triumphant end. If these 
 men reach not the goal in their time, they will teach the 
 tale to their children, and pledge them to like service of the 
 murdered dead. So will the story become a legend through 
 all future time—the names, Sacco and Vanzetti, the per- 
 petual symbols of victorious martyrdom. 
 
 This book is the voice of the poets. They have heard the 
 cry of stricken justice, and have caught it up in words of 
 prophecy and poignant song. Anger, pity, love speak in 
 these pages. All men and women committed to the Sacco- 
 Vanzetti cause must feel gratitude to the compilers of this 
 anthology, Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney,* themselves 
 true poets of prophetic vision, for gathering this chorus and 
 thus adding to the volume of that mighty million-tongued 
 voice which will “lift up like a trumpet, and spare not” till 
 the “nation do righteousness, and forsake not the ordinances 
 of justice.” 
 
 John Haynes Holmes 
 
 ; *Ralph Cheyney has lost his position on account of his participation 
 in this protest. 
 
 [19 ] 
 
ty 
 ry 
 
BEFORE GOV. ALVIN T. FULLER AND HIS AD- 
 VISORY COMMISSION REFUSED TO INTERCEDE 
 
FOR THE 23RD OF AUGUST 
 
 These two sad men! The day we let them die 
 A little more of that will pass away 
 That was our soul. Our heavy earth-bound clay 
 Will loom a little darker in the sky. 
 Oh, few faint voices bravely asking “Why?” 
 You pass like whispers in the roaring play 
 Of madmen marching to a holiday. 
 We know. We know, why bound to death they lie. 
 
 Who thinks of them? The millions do not know, 
 And if they did, their souls would still be lamed. 
 The pride that once on Boston Common flamed 
 
 These many years is burning very low. 
 
 Nearer and nearer, ominous and slow, 
 
 Marches the death by which we shall be shamed. 
 
 —David P. Berenberg 
 
 [ 23 ] 
 
THE WHITE TERROR 
 
 Before such men as you I stand 
 
 With head hung low, abashed, ashamed, 
 Not only of my Judas land 
 
 But that I also should be blamed. 
 
 That courts are owned by wealth and error 
 Is nothing new in history’s pages; 
 
 And men who fight the armed White Terror 
 Must face their death while hatred rages. 
 
 But shame on folk of the printed word 
 Who raise no cry that rich men plunder! 
 Come, let our voices all be heard 
 In revolutionary thunder. 
 
 —Ralph Cheyney 
 
 [ 24 ] 
 
THEIR WEAPON 
 
 “We are proud of death,” 
 Two men said; 
 
 “We are proud of death;” 
 When they are dead, 
 
 They shall be leaders 
 Greater far 
 
 Than the living 
 Ever are. 
 
 They shall sway thousands 
 With stopped breath, 
 With quiet hands. 
 If you give them death 
 
 You give a sword 
 For their hands to slay 
 All you hold dear and high 
 Some day. 
 
 —Mary Carolyn Davies 
 
 [25 ] 
 
MUSING ON TWO MEN IN DEDHAM JAIL 
 
 You, in quiet courage 
 
 Have retained a freedom 
 Wider than the space 
 Where even the planets fret 
 Away their settled dooms. 
 
 You are the symbol 
 
 Of our servitude. 
 
 The bars that halt your flesh 
 Are stripes that sear 
 
 Their insolence and shame 
 Upon our souls... 
 
 Souls . . . Recurrent Christ, 
 Forgive the sacrilege... ! 
 
 Souls are instruments of sense 
 Beyond the grunt of swine 
 Who snout the filth of pens 
 For sustenance. 
 
 Only souls can see 
 
 The vision founting from the eyes 
 Of one who dies 
 
 Quite firmly for a dream. 
 
 One Christ is worth 
 A thousand-fold 
 
 The craven multitude 
 He bleeds himself 
 To save. 
 
 And if you die, 
 
 Oh, do not say you gave 
 Your torchlike living 
 
 For our sodden selves.... 
 
 | 26 | 
 
But slowly let us learn 
 
 How we 
 
 Who stood complacently before 
 Your piteous gaol 
 
 Had lost our liberty. 
 
 —S. A. deWitt 
 
 SACCO — VANZETTI 
 
 A cry of “red” affrights the rabbit court; 
 The Law runs, trembling, from a crimson rag. 
 Two souls must face the death-embracing chair 
 That judges, at their plush-lined clubs, may boast 
 Of how they sent the bloody Reds to Hell. 
 
 Sweet Justice bleeds upon the court-room floor, 
 While cringing jurors shake with hate and fear, 
 And trample in the stinking mud and filth 
 The name of their once glorious native state; 
 And grinning murder wears the garb of Law. 
 
 —W. Wilson Manross 
 
 [27] 
 
SACCO AND VANZETTI 
 
 Who is it knocks upon the gate? 
 Who is it cries from fallen feet? 
 O brothers, let us not be late, 
 
 O warriors, stand against retreat! 
 
 The bloody ballad sings again, 
 
 And men are wasted by despair, 
 
 Lo, where the garrulous wings complain 
 In a cuckold-crowded air! 
 
 Dragging a noisome trail of wonder 
 
 The caravans of darkness drift 
 
 Against your brightening word of thunder, 
 O dawn-awakened ones, be swift! 
 
 Who is it knocks upon my heart? 
 
 They have debarred you, crucified! 
 Called you savage, and upstart, 
 
 Broken your teeth, and pierced your side. 
 
 Wide are the currents of your grief, 
 Deep upon deep your torment lies, 
 
 O tasters of the bitter leaf, 
 
 O runners where the summer dies! 
 
 —NMartin Feinstein 
 
 [ 28 ] 
 
TO SACCO AND VANZETTI 
 
 Because you believed 
 
 Man must win through to final perfect freedom; 
 
 Because you held 
 
 That justice should be done beneath the sky ; 
 
 Because you knew 
 
 The desperateness of your cause, and yet dared fight for it; 
 
 Behold, we prosperous ones whose eyes and hearts are 
 blinded, 
 
 In the name of the law, set forth our proclamation 
 
 That you shall shamefully die. 
 
 And is it not right, 
 
 Within this cage where gods and men alike are heartless, 
 
 Is it not fair, 
 
 Since greed and lust consume our hollow days, 
 
 Is it not clear 
 
 By the rules of this slaughterhouse where insects stir and 
 couple, 
 
 That you who would not take life upon such terms, 
 
 Should have your lips contemptuously sealed to all our blame 
 and praise? 
 
 —John Gould F letcher 
 
 [29 ] 
 
TO SACCO AND VANZETTI 
 
 The vision of your love, a current, streams 
 Forth from your prison, a magnetic pole, 
 
 Encircling every country, every clime, 
 And galvanizing every slothful soul. 
 
 Let your magnetic current burn away 
 All torpor, all indifference .. . let its heat 
 Scorch the false glitter and the vacant pride, 
 The arrogance of high and smug conceit. 
 
 Thus, Sacco and Vanzetti, may your words 
 Reverberate through every clime and mart; 
 There is no other nation but the race; 
 There is no other country but the heart. 
 
 —Louis Ginsberg 
 
 [ 30 ] 
 
TRUMPETS AND DRUM | 
 
 Sacco and Vanzetti, 
 You ransom us from sleep 
 Which manacles with fetters 
 That silent cravens keep. 
 
 You are the living trumpets 
 In lands where tyrants rail; 
 You know that freedom blossoms, 
 When freedom is in jail. 
 
 Thus blazoned to each conscience, 
 Your spirit’s freedom tells 
 
 We are the ones in prison; 
 We are the ones in cells. 
 
 Your anguish is a banner ; 
 Your pride it waves like flame; 
 For you, all tongues of rancor 
 Become the tongues of fame! 
 
 Sacco and Vanzetti, 
 
 You make the world your drum 
 To herald to the ages 
 
 Your glorious martyrdom! 
 
 —Louis Ginsberg 
 
 [31] 
 
TO. SACCOrAND VANZE OTT 
 
 In happier years you strove to find 
 A way of Justice for Mankind. 
 You gained instead a felon’s cell 
 And death, perhaps, we cannot tell. 
 
 But this you’ve gained, a world aroused 
 Till Justice is once more espoused ; 
 
 A world that angered through your cause 
 Demands revision of its laws. 
 
 So others need not share your fate, 
 Or die through prejudice and hate. 
 Now, by your case, all hearts are tried, 
 The friends of Truth are on your side. 
 
 What if the base outrank the true? 
 The ages still belong to you. 
 
 Your names a bugle-call shall be, 
 Till men shall flame to set men free. 
 
 You’ve shared the sufferings of the cross, 
 
 You’ve done your share, you’ve gained through loss 
 A place to live in hearts of men, 
 
 You’ve knit the ranks of Truth again. 
 
 So live or die, brave men, in peace! 
 
 A world will welcome your release; 
 
 Or, if you die, mankind will say, 
 
 “Two martyrs’ crowns were won today.” 
 
 —Carolyn Leonard Goodenough 
 
 [ 32 ] 
 
THE NEW SALOME 
 O shall we call her Justice who demands 
 No scale but vengeance for her bloody hands? 
 
 Who lewd and shameless strips to dance before 
 The tyrant Prejudice like her who bore 
 
 John’s guiltless head triumphant on a platter? 
 A sweet dish for the law! Is it no matter 
 
 That innocence is slain to make a prize 
 On which Hate’s Harpy stoops to gormandize? 
 
 Yet, if she be not Justice, rip the veil 
 From the imposter’s face—but do not pale 
 
 With thwarted rage nor choke with frightened breath 
 To see that phantom men call Death. 
 
 —Ernest Hartsock 
 
 [ 33 ] 
 
JESUS ALSO SINNED 
 
 Visions forever dwell within the souls of men. 
 Forever pound upon Jehovah’s land. 
 
 Ideas forever wake the earth 
 
 With re-echoing thunders. 
 
 When Jesus sinned against his fathers, 
 Brothers crucified him; 
 
 The bloody wound in his flesh 
 
 Became a banner for marching men. 
 
 Men march forever 
 Beating time 
 To tomorrow’s hymn. 
 
 Tomorrow men will be one 
 With the earth and with heaven. 
 
 Men will lift 
 Red horizons above their heads 
 Replacing them with blue transparencies. 
 
 Trumpets 
 Will blast open 
 Forgotten graves. 
 
 And they will come forth 
 Who have died on the crosses; 
 
 The valleys will forget 
 
 The snow and the winters; 
 
 And the mountains will raise 
 
 Their trees to the unconquered skies. 
 
 —Nicholas Moskountz 
 
 [ 34 ] 
 
SACCO — VANZETTI 
 (From a Long Poem) 
 
 If you must die because from alien race 
 
 You bring a social redemption and rebirth, 
 Mercy must evermore conceal her face, 
 
 Justice and Truth must vanish from the earth. 
 If you must die, something will die in us 
 That fed itself to law; if you must die, 
 
 Death’s womb will bear a scourge more perilous 
 To peace of Mammon -than is anarchy. 
 
 You are a crucial case, decisive test, 
 
 Puppets in drama far beyond our ken; 
 
 And on you laboring immigrants will rest 
 Shambles for brutes, or betterment of men. 
 
 —Benjamin Musser 
 
 [35 ] 
 
TWO:vIN THE DEATH HOUSE: 
 
 Shall we “make heroes” of you—when all you ruminate, 
 
 Of songs, books, art, or the world’s thought, 
 
 Hard-learned, meagerly fitting, like worker‘s clothes, 
 
 Askew upon you, might be talked out in one evening? 
 
 Of you—not having any bright possession, or good hope 
 of it, 
 
 Save what lies in two hands—hands cognizant 
 
 Of the cool feel of fish and of the grains of leathers, 
 
 Hands made stiff 
 
 In such plain service as men live by, yet despise the servers. 
 
 We cannot see, for those used hands, you are about to die... 
 
 Or we might find that in your eyes not to our liking, a dimmed 
 
 Opaque foreglimmering of a too imminent light 
 
 That may burn up, like some high-powered ray, 
 
 All that we have and are or may be, even... there is a 
 torsion in this thought.... 
 
 All our poor guerdons of posterity. I do not know 
 
 What you have given or withheld or hid deep from maraud- 
 ing death— 
 
 What gleams of your balked vision, whose harsh fire 
 
 May make men blind or mad, but never quite 
 
 Leaves eyes that it has once illumined, or what malfeasant 
 shapes 
 
 Conspire in the watched night, there cornered in your prison 
 house. 
 
 But this I know recurs: 
 
 old man with empty eyes, 
 
 eyes of an old doll 
 
 upon which the wax has melted, 
 out of the buzzing silence 
 blue-coated shapes, 
 
 well-filled and tight 
 
 as the bellies of blue flies, 
 staring out of their eye-places 
 
 [ 36 | 
 
at but not into your warm men’s eyes 
 as they lead you out... 
 
 Hour by sleuth hour, till the cropped gold head 
 
 Of morning, shut outside the corridors, had turned to gray, 
 Their looks, infesting even the midnight, crept 
 
 Nimbly, along the flashlight’s ray 
 
 And battened on you while you slept. 
 
 Seven times, ice-bearing days have shaken their white crops 
 upon the world 
 
 And forward airs have rumored of the loam at heat, down- 
 ward, over the coifed hills. 
 
 slim tongues of flame 
 licking at the iceheads, 
 about the plumed peaks 
 
 out of consuming snow 
 
 an invisible smoke going up 
 in the crystal silences 
 
 a silvery crying 
 
 of little waters set at large. 
 
 You have endured those moments, you 
 
 Close to the rough nap of earth, and knowing her perennial 
 ways. 
 
 And when, on some one of your counted mornings, light 
 
 That pulls at the caught roots of things 
 
 Has pierced you with a touch, or leavened air, 
 
 Too warm and softly mutinous for men to bear 
 
 Who knows that which you know, blows in and on you. 
 
 You too have hoped—with the ardor of young shoots, re- 
 nascent under the concrete, 
 
 And with them have gone down to defeat again. 
 
 You, Vanzetti, with the marching blue in your eyes, 
 
 And your smile a lonesome thing in the shadow of the death 
 house, 
 
 I think you know, for children know sometimes and child- 
 like men, } 
 
 [ 37 ] 
 
There are two lights that, running parallel, may flame— 
 
 Flame being one with flame and not with that it feeds upon— 
 
 Into one dazzling circuit. And meeting thus destroy 
 
 All that which lies between... . 
 
 Did not once a keeper turn, he too smiling a little, 
 
 He like you isolate, from you forever separate, 
 
 Only your smile, like a split ray of light, identical, 
 
 That for a moment trembles together, traversing the dark 
 impasse. 
 
 Did he fumble, missing a beat in the implacable rhythm, as 
 he turned the key, 
 
 As one letting fall a vessel might pause before stooping to 
 see if the pattern be broken. 
 
 Old patterns are not easily broken, inspired fishmonger, 
 
 Though “men about to die may be forgiven for plain speak- 
 ing” 
 
 And in your eyes that are intrepid without hate 
 
 And unwavering before oncreeping death, you yet hold your 
 captaincy. 
 
 —Lola Ridge 
 
 [ 38 J 
 
SACCO AND VANZETTI 
 
 Two simple men who loved the sun 
 Were sentenced to oblivion 
 For the thing they had not done— 
 
 Two simple men whose martyrdom 
 Was to be stricken blind and dumb 
 Because they prayed, “Thy Kingdom come!” 
 
 Yet did not merely pray, but spoke 
 The future’s gospel, till they woke 
 Perhaps a score of working folk. 
 
 They spoke for human brotherhood ; 
 They would not call red murder good; 
 When others crouched in fear—they stood! 
 
 They hated force of steel or stealth; 
 Love was their sun to bring men health; 
 They saw the world one commonwealth. 
 
 Within the world (that wild beasts’ den!) 
 They spoke to wolves as if to men, 
 That Eden might return again. 
 
 In fear of truth and innocence, 
 Men silenced them with the immense 
 Irony of a vile pretence. 
 
 Men shut them from the earth and air 
 And sun that were so free and fair ; 
 Seven years their warden was despair. 
 
 Trapped within stone they had to walk— 
 Death like the shadow of a hawk 
 
 Above them—while the lawyers talk— 
 Seven years their house was stone and steel, 
 
 While sick hope in recurrent reel 
 Whirled them like men strapped to a wheel. 
 
 [ 39 J 
 
The tribal victims of blood-lust 
 And all the cobwebs and the dust 
 Of judges legal and not just. 
 
 Tombed for lost years they had to lie 
 While the white Spring seven times went by— 
 Poor dead men who could never die! 
 
 Yet though they could not move but lay 
 Inert, they knew that every day 
 They stumbled down a steeper way— 
 
 Away from which they could not turn 
 Till down far vistas they discern 
 The sullen bulk of chairs that burn. 
 
 There in the darkness clear they saw 
 Engines of anguish and of awe, 
 The fiery guillotines of law. 
 
 They felt the iron cap whose chill 
 Is but a dam of ice to spill 
 The floods of fire that roar and kill— 
 
 The cap that pours into the brain 
 The livid needles of its pain 
 Till the blood boils within the vein. 
 
 They felt the fumbling trusties lock 
 The straps about them, while the clock 
 Beat the sick moments till the shock— 
 
 The moments that must have an end 
 When some white, unseen hand should send 
 The tides of fire to roar and rend— 
 
 Oceans of fire to stab and strain 
 Through ruptured channels of each vein 
 Till the skull bubbles with the brain. 
 
 | 40" 
 
O Jesus Christ, our Master, you 
 Died that our love might save these two: 
 And still we know not what we do! 
 
 —E, Merrill Root 
 
 PRISONERS 
 
 The powers that be 
 
 Must love thoughts of the gray skeletons 
 Of your hopes: 
 
 AT Sacco, 
 
 Ah, Vanzetti, 
 
 Though they chain your flesh 
 And thirst to drink your tears, 
 Even now they too, are prisoners 
 Bound by their lust for might. 
 And their imprisonment shall last 
 Through the length of years, 
 
 But you— 
 
 You shall lie in peace: 
 
 You must be free! 
 
 —Blanche Waltrip Rose 
 
 [41 ] 
 
TALL, WINDS SHALL WALK FOR? 
 SACCOVAND VANZET EL 
 
 Tall winds shall walk across your dungeon bars, 
 And unseen trumpets on the darkness ride, 
 Invisible hands shall turn a key within, 
 
 Voices shall cry “Acquitted!” through the world. 
 
 Not easily shall this darkness be resolved, 
 
 Light from the breath of finer ethers drawn; 
 
 Yet shall it surely come, one with the suns and tides, 
 
 The appointed hour of slow, inevitable dawn. 
 
 Hour when the Shining Ones that now press heavily, 
 
 Weeping for “Stupor Mundi,” through seven-veiled bands 
 of night 
 
 Shall be as those who pass to some bright festival. 
 
 Where are the keys that shall unlock your doors? 
 
 Whose is the hand shall smite to freedom’s skies? 
 
 Know this, O held of a dark that is deeper than darkness: 
 By day and night they speed, the Unseen Messengers, 
 Hourly the Invisible Liberators of the skies 
 
 Work toward the will of Light. 
 
 Daily they gather in the sacred groves, 
 
 Burning the darkness . . . speaking a peace to men. 
 
 Only wait out the sodden, bat-eyed moments, wait; 
 High hearts, still bear the dungeon’s stark indignity; 
 Time is a fountain for you, laving our air, 
 
 Time is a sword, brandishing truth in our faces, 
 Time is an army, driving the tyrannies. out! 
 
 —Mary Siegrist. 
 
 [ 42 ] 
 
MASSACHUSETTS 1667-1927 
 
 Old Granny Green in her garden plot 
 Hobbles and mutters, “Here’s bergamot, 
 Marjoram, fennel, thyme and rue— 
 
 But I cannot see, as I used to do; 
 
 My hands are heavy, my bones are sore, 
 Yet folks still come to my cottage door 
 And ask for simples and herbs to heal, 
 Or a charm to make the coldest feel 
 
 The warmth of spring, love’s eager pain— 
 Ah me, I would I were young again! 
 
 For ’tis cruel hard to grow old alone, 
 
 But I have my cat and my own hearth-stone, 
 And my bit of garden to love and tend— 
 But times are hard at the winter’s end. 
 
 “Hark, up the road comes a merry shout! 
 
 My dull ears ring—’tis a noisy rout— 
 
 And what are they calling? ‘Old Granny Green!’ 
 “Yes, yes I’m coming.’ (My apron’s clean, 
 
 ’*Twill cover my ragged shift and gown. 
 
 Sure, ’tis gentry driving out from town.)” 
 
 She curtsied and smiled with her hand at her ear, 
 While her black cat purred, as the crowd drew near; 
 And then, as a stone flew swiftly by, 
 
 She crawled in the bushes to snarl and die. 
 
 “Old witch,” one yelled, “You killed my cow!” 
 
 And another, “My daughter’s at death’s door now!” 
 While a third sent a stone with well-flung aim, 
 
 And she shrieked when it struck her—the old beldame! 
 
 They carried her down to the market-square, 
 And they burnt her old body to ashes there; 
 While Cotton Mather and all his kin, 
 Watched with a sanctimonious grin. 
 
 [ 43 ] 
 
Ah, that was three centuries past, you say— 
 But 1s justice done in the world today? 
 
 —Edith Lombard Squires 
 
 HOW YOUR WORLD TREMBLES 
 Lovers, glide through your mirrored halls, 
 Or kiss a while by your garden walls, 
 
 Pink tea ladies with gold lorgnettes 
 Expatiate on your red sunsets. 
 
 Your way of life is any easy thing 
 Where one may chuckle and choose and sing. 
 
 In another world is an iron door. 
 Two men stare at a sullen floor. 
 
 Watch from citadels of ease 
 How your world trembles at men like these! 
 
 —Lucia Trent 
 
 | 44 | 
 
THE: CULPRIT 
 
 Where once, by Massachusetts bay, 
 On bloody Boston Common, 
 
 The Quakers went the hangman’s way, 
 The “wrath of God” upon ’em; 
 
 And Salem’s sombre judges raged, 
 Approved by law and jury, 
 
 And war against the witches waged 
 With Bible-nourished fury. 
 
 Again the court and state unite 
 To do the Devil’s bidding ; 
 With show of Justice and of Right 
 Their coward conscience kidding. 
 The whole world now the stage, whereon 
 They work their own undoing; 
 The very ghosts of ages gone 
 Today’s hysteria spewing. 
 
 O, Massachusetts! ere the hour 
 Shall seal thy shame forever, 
 Stay thou thy mannikins of power! 
 And check their mad endeavor! 
 How shall they fear who face the chair, 
 Thorn-crowned, blood-stained, and sweaty? 
 Thou art the culprit, roped and bare!. 
 Not Sacco and Vanzetti. 
 
 —Robert Whitaker 
 
 [45 ] 
 
THE POETS TO SACCO AND VANZE GT: 
 
 Not for you— 
 You are already deified— 
 But for ourselves we raise a lamentation 
 
 Not for you— 
 You are already crucified— 
 But for ourselves we beg a vindication. 
 
 We shall be forgotten 
 When the red dawn breaks; 
 You shall have begotten 
 Immortal stakes. 
 —Gremin Zorn 
 
 ON MEETING MISS VANZETTI IN PARIS 
 
 In my emotional life nothing has so impressed me as 
 meeting in Paris Signorina Vanzetti just from her farm on 
 her way across the Atlantic to meet her condemned brother 
 in America. Her face was pale and tragic, and the purging 
 of my feelings sped apace as though from the effects of 
 Sophoclean art. She was clad in simple black, and seemed 
 a rural not a regal Electra. Clytemnestra and her bloody 
 mate had no part in that play; and there was none to put 
 to death save that protesting pair far away in a prison ward. 
 But Nemesis behind went up into the air. 
 
 —W. P. Trent 
 
 | 46 ] 
 
AFTER INTERCESSION WAS REFUSED BUT 
 BEFORE THE CRUCIFIXION 
 
A FINAL APPEAL 
 
 Winds of the world give answer, 
 Answer in sweeping song. 
 Winds of the world, we ask you. 
 How long? How long? 
 
 Seas of the shouting waters, 
 Instruments of Fate, 
 
 Seas of the dancing waters, 
 Shall we wait? We wait. 
 
 Stars of the heavenly scroll, 
 
 Many faced scroll called sky, 
 Answer, O cup of the night, 
 
 Must we die? We die. 
 
 —Seymour Michael Blankfort 
 
 [ 48 J 
 
THE CONDEMNED 
 
 Once you have killed these men, destroy their skin 
 And bone utterly and hide all vestiges 
 
 Of their existence. Let only nothingness 
 
 Remain of what your prisoners have been. 
 
 Permit their friends no grave to lay them in, 
 
 Brase their writings and their likenesses, 
 
 Forbid their names in all assemblages, 
 
 Cause them to be unmentionable sin. 
 
 For if anyone so much as named their name, 
 
 It would mean not them but you yourselves and shame, 
 And looking on their likeness he would see 
 
 Not them in prison cells but you and me— 
 
 And would find recorded on their graveyard stone 
 That the death we meant for them became your own. 
 
 —Witter Bynner 
 
 [ 49 | 
 
TO GOVERNOR FULLER AND HIS 
 ADVISORY COUNCIL 
 
 America is dead; her heart is stricken. 
 
 The state that bore her now has brought her death. 
 At your smug deed not only live men sicken; 
 
 Our patriot dead draw one hurt shuddering breath. 
 
 How will the future hold you slaves whose lust 
 Led you to rape your land, bring scorn upon her? 
 She yet may grow, reborn, from martyrs’ dust. © 
 But she lies dead. No land outlives its honor. 
 
 —Ralph Cheyney 
 
 130] 
 
NOT SACCO AND VANZETTI 
 
 These men who do not die, but send to death, 
 These iron men whom mercy cannot bend 
 Beyond the lettered law, what when their breath 
 Shall quietly and naturally end? 
 What shall their final retribution be, 
 What bloody silver then shall pay the toils, 
 Exacted for this legal infamy, 
 When death indicts their stark, immortal souls? 
 
 The day a slumbering but awful God, 
 Before time to eternity is blown, 
 Examines by the same unyielding rod 
 These images of His with hearts of stone— 
 These men who do not die, but death decree, 
 These are the men I should not care to be! 
 
 —Countee Cullen 
 
 [51] 
 
 U. OF ILL: LIB: 
 
OF SACCO AND VANZETIEI 
 
 Who has been happy, tasting sunny fruits, 
 Or hearing summer hum her vast green song, 
 Or watching ocean tugging at its roots, 
 Or lying in quick arms when nights are long— 
 How shall he now bask in the honey hours, 
 Ask favors of his love or of his fate, 
 When, like a beast fondling what it devours, 
 Law slobbers justice—cold upon the plate. 
 
 Yet history knows: to every age, its crimes; 
 
 Empires half-fledged cannot be wholly wise. 
 We shudder, learning to endure our times, 
 
 And from the threatened flood avert our eyes. 
 Our senses will applaud the world again. 
 
 But who can clap life into murdered men? 
 
 —Babette Deutsch 
 
 ANOTHER PILATE 
 (To Gov. Fuller on his Sacco-Vanzetti deciston:) 
 Another Pilate washed his hands and said: 
 The priests of gold are clamoring in my ear, 
 (And thinking of his politician’s head) 
 I really see no cause to interfere. 
 
 —Wrilliam Closson Emory 
 
 [ 52] 
 
THE BALLAD OF CHARLESTOWN GAOL 
 
 1 
 There’s a chair for you, Vanzetti, 
 In a cold and empty room; 
 A chair aloof and lonely, 
 Like a spectre in the gloom; 
 A chair with open arms and wide, 
 To welcome you to doom. 
 
 Z 
 They’ve made this chair, Vanzetti, 
 Good men, and strong and true, 
 To manifest the will of God 
 On poor men such as you; 
 To show the Lord Christ lives again, 
 And dies, the Lord Christ, too! 
 
 3 
 In olden days, Vanzetti, 
 They used a cross instead ; 
 They stretched a man upon its beams 
 By foot and hand and head; 
 And nailed him there with iron spikes, 
 Until his heart was dead. 
 
 4 
 But nowadays, Vanzetti, 
 Good men are very kind; 
 They offer you an easy chair, 
 To sleep, if you’re inclined ; 
 With nice electric batteries 
 To sooth an anxious mind. 
 5 
 Great Caiaphas is Christian, now— 
 He heeds what Jesus says; 
 And Pilate, who is civilized, 
 Does justice all his days; 
 And even executioners 
 Have sweet and gentle ways. 
 
 [53 ] 
 
Yet cruel death is much the same 
 In’any modern city; 
 
 The fires of fear and hate and lust 
 Consume all human pity; 
 
 And righteous mobs cry “Crucify” 
 In Charlestown as in Calvary. 
 
 7 
 And after-death is much the same, 
 For no men kill the soul; 
 They rend and burn and crush the flesh, 
 But leave the spirit whole; 
 And then strange wonders come to pass 
 That men cannot control. 
 
 8 
 The buried dead lie not in peace 
 Within the quiet tomb; 
 
 Their broken lives are quickened, 
 They grope amid the gloom; 
 And, sudden, they are born again 
 
 From out a timeless womb 
 
 9 
 They rise, these dead and walk the earth: 
 John Brown is marching on; 
 Shrewd Socrates is teaching still 
 How wisdom may be won; 
 The shining Christ is yet a light 
 For men to gaze upon. 
 
 10 
 They rise and shine, these noble dead, 
 Like planets in the sky; 
 They speak—and stricken nations hear 
 The voice without reply; 
 They live—and all the world beholds 
 The life that cannot die. 
 
 [54] 
 
11 
 There’s a chair for you, Vanzetti, 
 In a house where angels tread; 
 A throne with thrones where sit the host 
 Who judge the quick and dead; 
 The martyr-host, whose sufferings 
 Divide the good and bad! 
 
 12 
 Upon that throne, Vanzetti, 
 You'll sit the ages through; 
 And all the myriad sons of men 
 Will stand, and look on you— 
 The proud, to wither and bow down, 
 The meek, to live anew. 
 
 13 
 Look up, look up, Vanzetti, 
 Your chair is glowing bright; 
 Your prison chamber, thronged with saints 
 Who welcome you tonight ; 
 The forged lightnings of men’s wrath, 
 God’s baptismal of light! 
 
 —John Haynes Holmes 
 Execution Day, August 22, 1927. 
 
 | 95 | 
 
THE INFAMOUS RITUAL 
 
 The summit of our worship has been reached 
 
 and here upon this gangrene hill we stand 
 
 showing our blood-garnished teeth where touched 
 their sweet unwelcome flesh. Great God, thy hand 
 is opaque to all others’ light. To us, O Lord, 
 
 it is a clear glass, and this was thy reward, 
 
 the toothsome sacrifice of these unwelcome kind 
 not ours, hence not worthy to the feast. See, 
 
 we have not slain them singly but in pairs, 
 
 we felt solicitude for even what was in their cry; 
 mercy we gave them, yea, what greater glory theirs 
 than to have been our holy unwelcome lust, 
 
 our pleasure and our appetite. And they who stood, 
 unwilling to forsake in us their trust, 
 
 beneath the sacrificial flame raising wrought arms 
 and voices, they are the unaccepted brotherhood 
 who gave us our little beauty and our only charms— 
 we have repaid them often with their proper place. 
 Ours is the dominance of claws and not the grace 
 of fingers; ours is not the sweetness of a hand. 
 Almighty Bludgeon, we have been taught to hide the 
 face when we have by thy might bestowed the wand. 
 
 —Harry Alan Potamkin 
 
 [ 96 ] 
 
A HALF HOUR BEFORE THE EXECUTION OF 
 SACCO AND VANZETTI 
 
 There will be no light 
 
 in a half hour. 
 
 The moon will lift cloths of white cloud 
 to her eyes, 
 
 and stars will slink 
 
 into the cheerless grottoes of the night. 
 
 In a half hour 
 
 there will be no sound. } 
 
 Vallies will disband their far echoes 
 
 martialed on the distant slopes. | 
 
 Mountains 
 
 will quiet their clanging cymbals of veined metal. 
 Trees, rigidly mute, 
 
 will be deaf to the wind. 
 
 In a half hour 
 
 life will falter and rot. 
 
 A pestilential rain will drive long fingers 
 to covet the buried seeds, 
 
 and green sprouts 
 
 will sicken upon themselves and die.... 
 
 This half hour raised upon eternity’s breast 
 
 like a terrible dug for the whole world to suck 
 
 is shrivelled and the poisoned milk has coursed 
 
 into the measureless veins of the Unknown Mother... 
 
 Molten streams 
 
 trickle into countless hearts 
 and black shells 
 
 sound the thin crackle of doom. 
 The very earth 
 
 [57] 
 
quivers and splits 
 and there is only ruin at her heart.... 
 
 Women have not lost the ancient wail. 
 Ettore Rella 
 
 ON HEARING THE NEWS THAT GOVERNOR 
 FULLER SANCTIONED THE MURDER OF 
 SACCO AND VANZETTI 
 
 I love the forests of the lightnings, where 
 White-hot and terrible trees with purple boughs 
 Shake down the rain, like wild leaves, thru the air 
 And then fall crashing on the mountains’ brows. 
 The storm without me is the storm within: 
 
 The lightnings make white forests in my soul: 
 Within my spirit roars earth’s stress and din: 
 Within my mind the mightier thunders roll. 
 
 Fall, fall great livid sky-upholding trees! 
 
 Fall, fall and shatter all our human world! 
 
 Fall like doom’s conscious Caryatides 
 
 And let high heaven to deep hell be hurled. 
 Crush man, the angel with the maggot’s brain: 
 Crush man, the idiot ape, the spawn of Cain! 
 
 --E. Merrill Root 
 
 [ 58 ] 
 
GENTLEMEN OF MASSACHUSETTS 
 
 Understand this, you bleak-hearts, you gray imposters, you 
 wisps, you spectres, half-born, death-elected ; 
 
 No man votes death to another; self-given, that cup, and 
 you— 
 
 Seven years we pled and pled with you; we said: 
 
 “This blood you crave is poison, this for you and yours the 
 final, steep 
 
 “Gulf to oblivion, why so fast, old apes? The tiger Tomor- 
 row has smelled you, the sky 
 
 “Breeds vultures, though you sow a hundred Christs on every 
 hill 
 
 “Death is your harvest, it will not be long. 
 
 “Because the fish peddler sang as he brought the sea’s gifts 
 to the people— 
 
 “Because the shoe-maker laughed as he nailed a new last 
 in the sky— 
 
 “God, how you bayed in the fouled mangers of your courts, 
 your clubs, your counting houses! 
 
 “God, how you wolfed the lean bone of your nothingness!” 
 
 Now it is done; the fish peddler goes free; the shoe-maker 
 walks well shod in a temple you cannot defile. 
 
 I think you will be quiet a little now; deaf old men soon 
 learn not to speak much. 
 
 [59 ] 
 
Scarcely you chose at all, every man to his poison and yours 
 has been a long time brewing. 
 
 We, who heard the death rattle, might have spared our pains. 
 
 The wheel turns; gentlemen, I think the earth is a little sick 
 of you. 
 
 Brown men, yellow men, black men, women and little naked 
 children will walk these lanes 
 
 Have you not seen how the sick fields welcome the new 
 blood? 
 
 Be quick, the old lilacs, the wild indifferent laurel will feed 
 on your bones. 
 
 Be quick, I would not have one laurel bell less pink for your 
 
 delay. 
 —James Rorty 
 
 | 60 ] 
 
TO BISHOP LAWRENCE 
 (On His Congratulatory Telegram to Gov. Fuller) 
 
 You call yourself a follower of Christ, 
 Who chuckled when these men were sacrificed ? 
 
 You dare to preach of Jesus on the cross, 
 You who have sanctioned the unholy loss 
 
 Of two brave lonely dreamers who have stood 
 Like Him for peace and brotherhood? 
 
 Go hide your face among the Pharisees, 
 Who always have condemned such Christs as these. 
 
 Go hide your face among the world’s disdained! 
 Your hands are leprous and your vestments stained. 
 
 —Lucia Trent 
 
 TO PRESIDENT LOWELL AND HIS COMMISSION 
 
 Oh, let us not be bitter against foes 
 
 Of right, too base to bear the name of men. 
 How blind and pitiful you are, God knows, 
 
 Herded like common swine within the pen 
 Of your class prejudice and coward fears. 
 
 Our bitterness would sear our tongues in vain 
 For now no lips of passion and no tears 
 
 Can heal two lives of this deep-thrusted pain. 
 Thank God, dark earth is mothering and kind, 
 
 Kinder than your low court and prison den. 
 You cannot kill the dream of those who find 
 
 A faith that shall restore the world to men. 
 
 —Lucia Trent 
 
 ee 
 
GOLGOTHA IN: MASSACHUSETTS? 
 
 Not even two thieves to grace this slow murder. 
 Instead, two innocent dreamers, in place of one 
 Tortured for seven years, a hell harder 
 Than the crude spitting and flogging of Mary’s son. 
 And the end either the leaping, rending spark 
 Or longer commuted torture . . . all to please 
 Those who herd men into a fouler dark, 
 Heedless of the heaping agonies, 
 For gain... for dividends . . . for prosperity. 
 For a world where a Coolidge or a Harding primps, 
 And iron rule and rigid authority + 
 Are in the dollar, and its plump pimps, 
 Until that shrieking hour when a new sky 
 Echoes their screams, as the people shout: Crucify! 
 
 —Clement Wood 
 
 [ 62 ] 
 
AFTER THE CRUCIFIXION 
 
WHO ARE THE CRIMINALS? 
 
 Massachusetts, with solemn pride, 
 Upheld her courts; and two men died. 
 
 The brazen state house on the hill 
 Shrieked to the world her right to kill. 
 
 Massachusetts squared her jaw 
 And loosed her holy hounds of law. 
 
 Shrewd dogs are they who know red bait, 
 Well-trained for punishment and hate. 
 
 The judges, rulers, rich men smile, 
 And silk-gowned ladies feast in style. 
 
 To such what means the awful chair? 
 Or whether trials are just and fair? 
 
 Cruel men, beware! The Christs you kill 
 Will walk in power with us still! 
 
 Within your room of harnessed fire 
 You have built a mighty martyrs’ pyre. 
 
 By the great Grand Jury of Mankind 
 You stand condemned as fools and blind. 
 
 Your folly proves a turning key 
 To set the hordes of the crushed ones free! 
 
 —Vincent G. Burns 
 
 [ 64 ] 
 
ONCE MORE, O COMMONWEALTH! 
 (August 23, 1927) 
 
 Rise up, old ghosts, you dead and dumb, 
 To see where the scholars and judges come !— 
 Living and eloquent they bear 
 New witness to your ancient care: 
 They have come in their robes and piled the pitch, 
 They have burned their witch, they have 
 
 burned their witch. 
 
 Go back to your graves, you dumb and dead. 
 
 There are other judges in your stead 
 
 Whose hearts, while you lie under sod, 
 
 Are bounden to your jealous God, 
 
 And you and they have eased your itch, 
 
 You have burned your witch, you have 
 burned your witch. 
 
 —Wiaitter Bynner 
 
 [65 ] 
 
JUSTICE IS DEAD 
 
 “Judge Thayer boasted of what he would do to the ‘anarchistic 
 bastards’”—From an affidavit alleging prejudice of trial judge im 
 the Sacco-Vanzettt case. 
 
 Toll the bells for Justice. ... 
 Justice is dead! 
 
 Cowards hold the scepter 
 Over her head; 
 
 Hatred holds the balance, 
 Vengeance is the cry: 
 
 “Kall them without mercy; 
 Let the bastards die!” 
 
 Toll the bells: the judgment’s 
 Cruelty stands; 
 
 Pilate, blind and groping, 
 Washes his hands. 
 
 Prejudice has triumphed, 
 Triumphed in its lust; 
 
 Hope is bruised and bleeding, 
 Trampled in the dust. 
 
 Ring the bells for Freedom! 
 Truth is not dead: 
 
 Love still weaves its garland 
 Over her head. 
 
 Legal crucifixion 
 Done by little men 
 
 Cannot vanquish Justice— 
 It shall rise again! 
 
 —Harold D. Carew 
 
 [ 66 ] 
 
RED FLAG 
 
 This is no time for tears, no place for mournful poses. 
 We have a trust to fill before our brief day closes. 
 
 A hundred thousand Saccos and Vanzettis starkly die 
 Whose agonizing arms accuse the stormy, bloodied sky 
 
 On battlefields, in dismal mills and dank, dark mines 
 In fetid tenements and on brave, far-flung picket-lines. 
 
 Whence comes the hue that stains the workers’ flag so red? 
 The rich have dyed it deep with the blood of our slaughtered 
 dead. 
 
 i 
 It is they who have sown the tempest, they who have made 
 it war. 
 Our children shall win to freedom; theirs shall pay the score. 
 
 —Ralph Cheyney 
 
 AFTER THE MURDER 
 
 They are not dead while still there beats 
 One heart that freedom’s blood has stirred ; 
 While still amid the dolts and cheats 
 
 One cry in justice’ name is heard. 
 
 Go, Massachusetts! fouled and shamed, 
 Go hide your desecrated head; 
 
 Bury the past you have defamed :— 
 
 Your hounded victims are not dead! 
 
 —Miriam Allen deFord 
 
 [ 67 ] 
 
PRAYER IN MASSACHUSETTS 
 
 Upon this soil may no tree ever grow. 
 In this land may no lips ever again 
 
 Speak the word justice, now that all men know 
 Those lips have long boasted and in vain 
 
 May never young men hither come to learn 
 What cruel elders have no power to teach ° 
 
 May no lights burn here save witch fires that burn 
 Along some desolate and abandoned beach. 
 
 May this dour land go back now whence it came— 
 To early granite, to implacable sea. 
 
 May there descend on it the cleansing flame 
 Of some remote supreme catastrophe 
 
 Divorcing it forever with its shame 
 From men who would be generous, wise and free. 
 
 —Arthur Davison Ficke 
 
 [ 68 ] 
 
LEST WE FORGET 
 
 (“Now that the Sacco-Vanzetti case is a closed incident, let us turn 
 our thoughts to other things more vital to the nation’s welfare. 
 —News Item.) 
 
 Now that the trial has ended, 
 And the execution is o’er; 
 Let us return to our business, 
 Talk of the thing no more, 
 File it away in the records, 
 Dead men’s ashes won’t speak; 
 Turn to tomorrow’s problems, 
 “Who'll win the fight next week?” 
 
 Drink with the judge at the clubhouse, 
 Styme his ball on the links; 
 Escape from the inquisition 
 Of the mind that unceasingly thinks, 
 Some things are better forgotten, 
 The clamor for justice dies; 
 Conscience is eased of its mission, 
 If only the ghosts won’t rise. 
 
 But some of us can’t forget it, 
 By the bitter pain we shared, 
 By our high hopes disillusioned, 
 By the faith that was not spared; 
 By the questions still unanswered, 
 By the challenge still ignored, 
 We've lit a flame within our hearts, 
 A beacon of the Lord. 
 
 So keep us, keep us, Justice, 
 Forever toward that Light; 
 
 Keep us we pray from slipping 
 Back to that deadly plight ; 
 
 Where buoyant doubts lie buried, 
 
 | 69 | 
 
And rebel hearts must beat, 
 To the tune and rhythm set them 
 By tradition’s lagging feet. 
 
 —S. Ralph Harlow 
 
 DEATH WATCH 
 (Midnight, August 22nd, 1927) 
 
 We sat in silence so profound 
 As Death’s hand loosed the bars; 
 It seemed as if our spirits too 
 Went out beyond the stars. 
 
 We wondered why one after one 
 The Pilates turned from plea 
 That never was refused by Him 
 Who walked in Galilee. 
 
 And when will this be clear to us 
 Across the fleeting ban; 
 
 That we may learn from simple men 
 Of Brotherhood to Man? 
 
 —Mary Plowden Kernan 
 
 [ 70 ] 
 
AUGUSY? 22nd: A RED-LETTER DAY 
 
 I’m goin’ to buy myself a bloomin’ flag 
 An’ wave the stars an’ stripes over my head! 
 Make way for me an’ my old rusty nag, 
 For once I’m patriotic, I see red! 
 Haven’t you heard the news, you starin’ sheep? 
 Sacco an’ Vanzetti will hang today! 
 That’s right, fall in behind, let no man sleep— 
 My Country ’Tis of Thee—harrah—hooray! 
 
 Down with the bloody little murderers— 
 Who do them goddam dagoes think they are? 
 
 Off with their heads—an’ if their friends are sore— 
 Off with theirs, too—the dirty foreigners! 
 
 An’ while we’re at it, raise this day on high— 
 Let’s nail it up beside the Fourth o’July! 
 
 —Alfred Kreymborg 
 
 [71] 
 
i 
 
 MURDER AT MIDNIGHT 
 
 In Memoriam Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Betrayed and 
 Murdered In The American Class War, August 22, 1927. 
 
 a 
 
 “Both are dead.” 
 
 Dead. 
 
 Press the button. Turn on the juice. 
 Dead. 
 
 Waiting, waiting. 
 
 For what? 
 
 Two wops to sit down in a chair 
 
 And be dead. 
 
 Show’s over. 
 
 Time to go home, go to bed. 
 
 Time to forget, put it out of your head. 
 
 Dead. 
 
 (Death. Grim Reaper. Symbolic. Cloak. Hood. Scythe. 
 Skull.) 
 
 Dead. 
 
 Both. 
 
 I walked out into the huge soft night. 
 No light. 
 Someone had strangled the stars. 
 
 II. 
 
 Seven years to make a shroud. 
 
 | Seven years to make it strong enough — 
 
 \ To hold the whole of life. 
 
 ‘ (Wonder how long it takes to make an electric chair ?) 
 Seven years for two wops. 
 
 Dying. 
 
 Dead. 
 
 “Massachusetts is too proud——” 
 
 Seven years to make a shroud. 
 
 [ 72 ] 
 
7 
 
 po: III. 
 
 \ 
 
 l/ 
 
 \V 
 
 iG 
 
 CITY 
 
 JAIL 
 HUNGER 
 WORKER 
 SUBWAY 
 DEMPSEY 
 BABE RUTH 
 JESUS 
 STRIKE 
 STARVATION 
 MURDER 
 DEATH 
 
 IV. 
 
 Three men in frock coats playing dice. 
 Three men and a fourth playing with skulls. 
 Fingers weblike and precise. 
 
 / Caressing calmly the fluttering dice. 
 
 Harvard accents glide like gulls 
 
 From lips like nooses hard and strong. 
 What are the stakes? How long, how long? 
 Four men in frock coats playing dice. 
 
 Dice. Are they loaded? 
 
 Loaded. Bloated. 
 
 Four bloated frock coats playing with skulls. 
 
 V. 
 
 And on two faces hangs the mask 
 
 ’ Of the immobile anguish of the years. © 
 
 This is the honorable task 
 
 Of those unbitten by subtle doubts or fears. 
 
 Climb, you lousy wops, into your holes. 
 
 _The god of the Fullers and Thayers will care for your souls. 
 
 [73] 
 
VI. 
 
 Nights are made black for deeds like this. 
 Nights are made black, muffled and secret. 
 Press the button. Turn on the juice. 
 Show’s over. 
 
 And the corroding dawn, 
 
 Waiting, 
 
 Steals like a thief, trembling and ghastly white, 
 Through the thick, bolted night. 
 
 The job is done. 
 
 Whistles shriek in factory and mill. 
 And the implacable sun. 
 
 Climbing, 
 
 Hangs splendid and terrible and still. 
 
 VII. 
 
 ¢ Go back, slaves, go back. 
 Go back to the factories, the dancing machines, 
 Go back, dancing slaves. 
 
 Noon. 
 
 (The sun is a big round brass spittoon.) 
 Life seethes, blown up. 
 
 Collapses like a pricked balloon. 
 
 Night. 
 
 “Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.” 
 
 VELL 
 
 Too intolerably blue, empty, shining, remote the sky. 
 
 Too intolerably serene, calm the tall, greatwinded trees. 
 
 Too green every leaf, every grass. 
 
 Seared by no sadness, no blight even of the cool keen panting 
 autumn, 
 
 [74] 
 
The brown stain of the taking away. 
 Nothing to mar, no hunger of stamped-out growing, no cry 
 Out of denial. 
 
 Trees lift strenuous leanness, raise petulant hands, drag 
 darkness 
 
 To them. 
 
 | Nothing, nothing to mar. 
 
 “a IX. 
 
 Each sound is their sound. 
 
 Life demands life. 
 
 Beyond the pathos and the pain 
 That humans martyr humans with 
 Their blood shouts over all the earth. 
 Blood, red blood. 
 
 My brothers’ blood is on my hands. 
 My brothers’ agony burns my flesh. 
 Agony. Blood. 
 
 On my hands. 
 
 X 
 f Pity the wretches that will sit in the cells 
 , | Of Charlestown and of Dedham Jails. 
 \¥™~ | Pity the poor stiffs that will come after 
 \ To live a while in those exquisite hells, 
 _ To live and hear always two voices, always the tread 
 / Of feet always, always dead. 
 | Pity the fellows that will scrub the floors and walls 
 | Of Charlestown and of Dedham Jails, 
 _ And never be able to wash away 
 , The great trembling stain 
 \. Of Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s pain 
 
 (“The men of this dying old society they brutally have pulled 
 
 [75 ] 
 
Mi 
 
 / 
 
 me away from the embrace of your brother and your 
 poor mother.”’) 
 
 Pity the rats that will gnaw the moldy crumbs 
 
 Of Charlestown and of Dedham Jails, 
 
 And smell the smell of their blood 
 
 And gasp. | 
 
 ‘“T would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the most low 
 misfortunate creature of the earth—I would not wish 
 to any of them what I have had to suffer for things 
 that I am not guilty of.’’) 
 
 Pity them, pity them all. 
 
 Al. 
 
 Sacco And Vanzetti Must Not Die! 
 Shrill signs hurl the workers’ cry. 
 Strike. Protest. Telegram. 
 Massachusetts doesn’t give a damn. 
 A million-throated workers’ crying. 
 Sacco and Vanzetti dying, dying. 
 Sacco and Vanzetti dead. 
 
 Dead. 
 
 WE SHALL NOT SOON FORGET! 
 XII. 
 
 Hang up your justice on the sour-apple tree of your pride. 
 
 Hang it up, I say, for vultures to feed on 
 
 For soft worm fattening, for the gladdening of all gnawing, 
 ravenous things. 
 
 Hang it up where its resonant stink will fill every corner and 
 crack of the earth. 
 
 Swing it, swing it. 
 
 Hang up your justice on the sour-apple tree of your pride. 
 
 —A. B. Magil 
 
 [ 76 ] 
 
TWO CRUCIFIED 
 (After Midnight, August Twenty-second) 
 
 O Jew Jesus, Jew Jesus, 
 
 Down from your tree again! 
 
 The wind, the wind, the wind, the wind, 
 Whirls with a dove in pain. 
 
 O Jew Jesus, Jew Jesus, 
 
 Great fellowship for you! 
 
 The peace, the dream, the hope, are here— 
 See what these poor doves do! 
 
 O Jew Jesus, Jew Jesus, 
 
 Wings in a world of love! 
 
 The wind, the wind, the wind, the wind, 
 Cries like a bleeding dove! 
 
 —Jeannetie Marks 
 
 [77] 
 
GRIST 
 
 Now we go down the years dry eyed with hate, 
 Never again the tears of little woes 
 
 Shall blind the hard and arid sight of those 
 Who know that human laws can never wait— 
 But kill as surely as the water flows. 
 
 Never again the hope that any fate 
 
 Can stay the death of words that came too late, 
 And purge us of the bitterness that knows 
 
 The certain way that empty justice goes. 
 
 —Kathleen M lay 
 
 [ 78 ] 
 
JUSTICE DENIED IN MASSACHUSETTS 
 
 Let us abandon then our garden and go home 
 
 And sit in the sitting room. 
 
 Shall the larkspur or the corn grow under this cloud 
 
 Sour to the fruitful seed 
 
 Is the cold earth under this cloud. 
 
 Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot 
 conquer ; 
 
 We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of 
 them. 
 
 Let us go home and sit in the sitting room. 
 
 Not in our day 
 
 Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before, 
 
 Beneficent upon us 
 
 Out of the glittering bay, 
 
 And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea. 
 
 Moving the blades of corn. 
 
 With a peaceful sound 
 
 Forlorn, forlorn, 
 
 Will stand the blue hay rack by the empty mow; 
 
 And the petals drop to the ground, 
 
 Leaving the tree unfruited, 
 
 The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the 
 weed uprooted. 
 
 We shall not feel it again. 
 
 We shall all die in darkness and be buried in the rain. 
 What from the splendid dead 
 
 We have inherited 
 
 Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued 
 See now the slug and the mildew plunder. 
 
 Evil does overwhelm 
 
 The larkspur and the corn; 
 
 We have seen them flounder. 
 
 [79] 
 
Let us sit still 
 Here in the sitting room until we die. 
 At the step of Death on the walk rise and go, 
 Leaving to our children’s children this beautiful doorway, 
 And this elm. 
 And a blighted earth to till 
 With a broken hoe. 
 —Edna St. Vincent Millay 
 
 It is a great grief that your book will contain no verses 
 from me in tribute to those two brave and gentle spirits, 
 Sacco and Vanzetti, whom for seven years I have tried to do 
 my small part in saving from judicial murder. I am ailing 
 in body and mind and have not today whatever power over 
 words I had when I wrote “The Lynching Bee.” But can 
 you not incorporate this note in your book? I would not 
 seem by silence to give consent to this terrible deed—terrible 
 for its social implications of contemporary upper class stu- 
 pidity and smugness, even more than for its fierce moment 
 of injustice and cruelty. Let my feet and face stand with 
 the rest of you, even though my lips are shut. There, in 
 that company, my very silence will speak. 
 
 —William Ellery Leonard 
 
 [ 80 ] 
 
THE MEETING 
 
 The blackness faded, the day was breaking, 
 The road ahead was strange and bare. 
 “Welcome, Sacco! Welcome, Vanzetti!” 
 Cried three who met them there. 
 
 *Like you,” said the old man, “I died for justice.” 
 “Like you,” said the young man, “for brotherhood.” 
 “Like you,” said the woman, “I died for heeding 
 The voice of the highest good.” 
 
 “We all have known the crowded courtroom, 
 The lying charge, the doom of death, 
 
 We have known the loneliness, the darkness, 
 The pang of the parting breath. 
 
 But men learn slowly, comrades, slowly ; 
 
 Many must yet be sacrificed 
 
 To teach them righteousness, love, and justice’— 
 Said Socrates, Joan, and Christ. 
 
 —Miriam E. Oatman 
 
 [81 ] 
 
THEY ARE DEAD NOW 
 This isn’t a poem 
 
 This is two men in grey prison clothes. 
 
 One man sits looking at the sick flesh of his hands— 
 hands that haven’t worked for seven years. 
 
 Do you know how long a year is? 
 
 Do you know how many hours there are in a day 
 when a day is twenty-three hours on a cot in a cell, 
 
 in a cell in a row of cells in a tier of rows of cells 
 
 all empty with the choked emptiness of dreams? 
 
 Do you know the dreams of men in jail? 
 Sacco sits looking at the sick flesh of his hands— 
 hands that haven’t worked for seven years 
 
 remembers hoeing beans at twilight in his garden 
 remembers the crisp rattle of the edger 
 remembers the mould of his wife’s back 
 fuzziness of the heads of kids. 
 
 Dreams are memories that have grown sore and festered, 
 dreams are an everlasting rack to men in jail. | 
 
 Vanzetti writes every night from five to nine 
 fumbling clumsily wittily with the foreign words 
 building paper barricades of legal tags, 
 
 habeas corpus, writ of certiorari, 
 
 dead spells out of a forgotten language 
 
 taken from the mouths of automatons in black. 
 
 They are dead now 
 
 The black automatons have won. 
 
 They are burned up utterly 
 
 their flesh has passed into the air of Massachusetts 
 their dreams have passed into the wind. 
 
 [ 82 ] 
 
“They are dead now,” the Governor’s Secretary nudges the 
 Governor, 
 
 “They are dead now,” the Superior Court judge nudges the 
 Supreme Court judge, 
 
 \ “They are dead now,” the College President nudges the Col- 
 : lege President, 
 A dry chuckling comes up from all the dead: 
 The white collar dead; the silkhatted dead; the frockcoated 
 dead 
 They hop in and out of automobiles 
 breathe deep in relief 
 as they walk up and down the Boston streets. 
 
 These two men were not afraid 
 
 to smell rottenness 
 
 in the air of Massachusetts 
 
 so they are dead now and burned 
 
 into the fierce wind from Massachusetts. 
 Their breath has given the wind new speed. 
 Their fire has burned out of the wind 
 
 the stale smell of Boston 
 
 Ten thousand towns have breathed them in 
 
 and stood up beside workbenches 
 
 dropped tools 
 
 flung plows out of the furrow 
 
 and shouted 
 
 into the fierce wind from Massachusetts. 
 
 In that shout’s hoarse throat 
 
 is the rumble of millions of men marching in order 
 is the roar of one song in a thousand lingoes. 
 
 The warden strapped these men into the electric 
 chair 
 
 the executioner threw the switch 
 
 and set them free into the wind 
 
 [83 ] 
 
they are free of dreams now 
 
 free of greasy prison denim 
 
 their voices blow back in a thousand lingoes singing 
 one song 
 
 to burst the eardrums of Massachusetts. 
 
 Make a poem of that if you dare! 
 —John Dos Passos 
 
 [ 84 ] 
 
SACCO-VANZETTI 
 
 What !—set adrift in dark of sudden death 
 
 These humble toilers for the daily bread 
 
 Of wife and children? How—when they are dead— 
 Should God be answered for their stolen breath? 
 Could late remorse, or rite, or any wreath 
 
 Redeem hard judgment, iron hand, blind head 
 
 That balanced Wealth with Justice, and then said :— 
 “Because they menace Mammon, it is... . death’? 
 
 Bewildered aliens—knowing little law; 
 (Our many laws we mostly disobey !) 
 But human—so believing no base flaw— 
 Should blot from them the light of Freedom’s day— 
 Though they had been misled to such misdeed, 
 Remember: Capital‘s pet jail birds— freed! 
 
 —Alice N. Spicer 
 
 [ 85 ] 
 
THE WAY 
 
 Pass not too near these outcast sons of men 
 
 Where walked the Christ ahead! lest you, too, share 
 The rabble’s wrath! in time take heed! beware 
 
 The shame—the bitter woe of Him again! 
 
 Your flaming zeal speak not so rash—so loud! 
 
 Pass on your prudent path within the crowd. 
 
 What if they mark you of His band? and cry: 
 “Behold this one, as well!’ ah—you should know 
 The jeers—the stones, for all that with Him go! 
 Have caution, fool! let others yearn and die! 
 These broken ones you love with hot heartbreak 
 Can save you not! be warned by His mistake! 
 Remember how He spurned the risk and loss! 
 Remember how they nailed Him to a Cross! 
 
 —Laura Simmons 
 
 [ 86 ] 
 
‘LO, GOVAIADVIN Da FULLER 
 (August 23, 1927) 
 
 And now the awful deed is done, wash well your hands 
 Before the mob; can you not see 
 
 The Nazarene go forth at your commands 
 
 And climb again to Calvary? 
 
 Snug and content you sleep tonight while he 
 
 Is writhing on the cross again. 
 
 Hear how the mob shouts at his agony; 
 
 Hear how a few weep at his pain. 
 
 How will it be with you in that red dawn 
 
 When we shall scale the walls of hate and fear, 
 
 When those you killed shall be again reborn 
 
 With all the truths they held so dear? 
 
 Pilate, you have steeled our hearts and cleared our eyes 
 To meet the morning light as darkness dies. 
 
 —Max Press 
 
 [ 87 ] 
 
FOR A LAND THAT ALLOWS SACCO AND 
 VANZEDTITO DIF 
 
 From heaven what sign? 
 
 What writing on the wall? 
 
 What whisper running along the wind that power and pride 
 shall fall? ) 
 
 Assyria lies barren, the might of Egypt is a whirled simoon 
 over deserts, the Persian hosts. 
 
 Fell behind tumbling waters, and Greece is a story told, and 
 sounding Judea 
 
 Lives in a dying book, and Rome was proud of its world 
 dominion, the haughty hidalgos of Spain 
 
 Have gone with their Inquisition; mighty nations have gone 
 
 Up roads of pride and splendor past memory of their start, 
 past chiding recollection 
 
 Of simple things and honest ways and surging force of 
 spirit—spirit’s a word they deny, a myth to them, a 
 delusion 
 
 Their science and power and growth have parted from, have 
 surpassed—their one salvation, 
 
 Pride: To stand in the ways of truth that lead past public 
 scorning. 
 
 Power: To be gentle as the mountain breasted with pine 
 and crested with snow, calm as justice opening her 
 eyes, serene 
 
 As laying of fingers on the new born. Have ye this power, 
 this pride, O Nation of Nations? O ye in your turn. 
 
 For a space overgrown, three-bellied lord of the earth, with 
 brazen bowels and feet of tempered steel and head 
 
 Bent ground-ward from habit of search for gold and oil! 
 Have ye mole’s eyes? Look up—will the sun blind 
 ye? Can ye look upon man 
 
 Nor be ashamed? Will your kind know ye? Already the 
 whispers, the squirrels through the forests of the mind 
 
 Telling their brethren the tale, beyond fear and hate to a 
 pity, as for the eagle dying, as for a land once great 
 
 [ 88 | 
 
Turned by its splendor from truth, won by its wealth from 
 justice, swaggerly blindly 
 
 To its doomed end. What have ye of worth, O my country, 
 what hidden well of spirit, with breath 
 
 Of humility astir in your lungs, softly, what steel rod of 
 wrath ejecting the wrong 
 
 As the ramrod, the powder—what fire to eat the poison 
 though half your glory burn—my country !— 
 
 —Joseph T. Shipley 
 
 [ 89 | 
 
DEAD — THEY LIVE 
 
 Their spirits march to no slow drums of death. 
 
 Let fall no tear! Their bodies have been slain— 
 Their spirits freed by one hot blasting breath, 
 
 Now march with those who have not died in vain 
 
 Unloosed from narrow prison cells they go 
 
 With giant strides through all the earthly lands, 
 Red banners flaunt about them, and to show 
 
 The way bright torches flame in mighty hands. 
 
 They’re marching, marching, marching in the night. 
 Unshackled now they move with steady tread 
 
 And eyes that glance neither to left nor right 
 Within the ranks of labor’s martyred dead. 
 
 Lift high the crimson banners! Lift the torches! 
 Two staunch recruits have joined this army brave 
 
 To shining goals that ever steadfast marches, 
 Defying now the prison and the grave! 
 
 —Henry Reich, Jr. 
 
 [90 ] 
 
NOW DEATH IS KING 
 (To Sacco and Vanzetti) 
 
 Now death is king and death’s cadets 
 are seated in the high places 
 
 let honest men look to their souls 
 
 for we are fallen on evil days. 
 
 When justice owns herself a whore 
 and panderers sit upon the bench 
 and shepherds of our youth by day 
 turn death’s procurers in the dark 
 let honest men look to their souls. 
 
 Let us look to our souls I say 
 and cast the ghastly reckoning 
 of all our sloth and heart’s decay 
 for we are fallen on evil days. 
 
 Not theirs the cross were crucified 
 nor yet Pilat’s or Pharisees’ ; 
 
 in the calculus of God 
 
 Christ and Judas cancel out 
 
 In one apocalyptic flash 
 
 that we the quick may live to see 
 how death is king and his cadets 
 are seated in the high places. 
 
 Oh, honest men look to your souls 
 treasure the shame and agony 
 
 and note how from our stagnant depths 
 has sprung the common enemy 
 
 now we are fallen on evil days. 
 
 —Edwin Seaver 
 
 [91 ] 
 
HARVEST 
 
 (In the first few minutes of August 23rd, 1927 there were four exe- 
 cutions in Boston, Massachusetis. Those murdered at this time were 
 Madeiros, Sacco, Vanzetti, and a pathetic little hunchback, Justice.) 
 
 How did we lose the road and reach this jungle? 
 How did we ever find our way to this? 
 
 Follow the brook, they said, it’s bright and clear 
 And you'll be safe from swamp and precipice. 
 
 How could we know that some more wise than God 
 Would dig canals and tamper with the brook, 
 Bending it back until it met itself, 
 
 The thing was never said in song or book? 
 
 How could we know that forced into a ring, 
 We would be left in jungles, black and tall, 
 The brook, encircling all our tangled lives, 
 Swelling to overflow and drown us all? 
 
 How could we know that helpless in the net 
 Our kin and kind had spun we'd feel the thong 
 Of some small cricket chirping on a twig, 
 
 “Life is gay and man is never wrong.” 
 
 —Josiah Titzell 
 
 [92] 
 
PEDDLER 
 
 (If it had not been for these thing, I might have live out my Ife, 
 talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, 
 unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. . . —Vanzetti to 
 Judge Thayer.) 
 
 But for these things I might live out my life 
 On corners telling pale, disheartening slaves 
 Diluted truths. I might proclaim that strife 
 Of man with man is sin, that justice waves 
 
 A ragged cloth and holds unbalanced scales. 
 To die unmarked, unknown, was my poor lot; 
 But for these things my words were foolish tales 
 A peddler tells to men about to rot. 
 
 By dying I have trimmed a smoking lamp 
 That still lights footsteps down a narrow hall; 
 My pain has been sustaining fuel in damp, 
 Unlovely places where the ghastly pall 
 
 Of hopelessness is cast. My spirit sings, 
 
 For in my tomb a broken lantern swings. 
 
 —Bethuel Matthew Webster, Jr. 
 
 [93 ] 
 
Is 
 Is 
 Is 
 Is 
 Is 
 Is 
 Is 
 Is 
 Is 
 Is 
 Is 
 Is 
 Is 
 Is 
 Is 
 Is 
 
 SACCO AND VANZETTI 
 
 it death to endure in the thoughts and the hearts of 
 millions of men everywhere? 
 
 it death to uphold, stimulate, and inspire, confidence in 
 eternal truth-values ? 
 
 it death to so terrify power entrenched that its cohorts 
 must murder to govern? 
 
 it death to re-vivify laws of creative ideals, for re-birth, 
 ever healthy and virile? 
 
 it death to face death with that calmness of surety knowl- 
 edge of innocence brings? 
 
 it death to await with love toward the killers, having no 
 word of hate for the tyrants? 
 
 it death to so challenge the thought of the living that 
 thoughtless ones think and thought-precedents crumble? 
 
 it death to remodel ideas extant so that even conservatives 
 listen ? 
 
 it death to promote these ideas into actions, not alone 
 by the one, but by thousands? 
 
 it death to stand firm when the storm of negation would 
 break positive corner-stones ? 
 
 it death to remind progeny of rebellion that rebels are 
 forebears of freedom? 
 
 it death to raze barricades, climate, class, race, which so 
 long have obstructed thought’s travels? 
 
 it death to precipitate friendships, unknown, between these 
 who, alive, are remote from each other? 
 
 it death to establish pass-words and pass-ports which the 
 future requires at its portals? 
 
 it death to re-focus the eyes of the living to see coming 
 turn-stiles and levels? 
 
 it death to re-propagate timeless, and mutual, light-giving 
 fire, recognizable to all the living? 
 
 eral 
 
No! All these achievements are Life! Life full-robed in the 
 splendor of dawn and the morrow! 
 
 Death comes but to those who so stupidly try to own night- 
 shrouds for yesterday’s coffins! 
 
 Life owns nothing, gives all, and blossoms wherever new 
 dawns are expected and morrows elude all possessors! 
 
 —Alice Riggs Hunt 
 
 [95 ] 
 
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