|
Article Excerpt
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In his iconic In the American Grain William Carlos Williams distinguishes between the bodies of conquerors and the souls of the murdered and defeated: "History, history! We fools, what do we know or care? History begins for us with murder and enslavement, not with discovery .... Fierce and implacable we kill them but their souls dominate us" (39-40). Williams's "souls" are not otherworldly or religious, but rather historical ghosts, those persistent residues of injustice that permeate the American grain. Such ghosts, reminders of the contradictions embedded in American ideals, have particular relevance and resonance in remembering the story of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
The letters of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, written during their seven-year imprisonment from 1920 to their 1927 execution, slice back into a history of violence and oppression of Italian radical immigrants in the early twentieth century. Like the Triangle fire of 1911, and perhaps for the same reasons of blatant injustice, the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti evoked an outpouring of cultural responses--poetry, novels, music, plays, and art (particularly Ben Shahn's paintings and mural). The symbolic power of these two anarchists, shoemaker and fish peddler, continues with the recent documentary by Peter Miller and journalistic history by Bruce Watson. Theirs is not a dated story. Their arrests amidst a climate of terror and fear, their confusion about the charges against them, and their limited English resonate with our own time of terrorist anxiety and treatment of undocumented immigrants.
Why come to America? Sacco emigrated at the age of 17 in 1908 with his older brother. He recalled, "I always remember when my brother Sabino and me were on ship board on the way to this free country, the country that was always in my dreams" (Letters 10). Vanzetti, who was apprenticed to a baker at the age of 13 by his father and faced long hours of labor instead of the education his intellect craved, also came in 1908 at the age of 20. Sacco from Torremaggiore, the boot of southern Italy, and Vanzetti from Villafalletto, a province in northwestern Italy, emigrated to America not as stereotypically impoverished and jobless Italian peasants (both families owned land in Italy) but for their own complicated reasons--grief over a dead mother, independence from parental control, employment opportunities, rejection of Catholicism--and the lure of an ideal America of freedom and liberty.
The sinking of Sacco and Vanzetti's dream of America is a large story that lends itself to specific analysis. Although their names are forever linked in history, their personalities and interests differed. Ferdinando Sacco, who later adopted the first name of a deceased older brother Nicola, was a husband, a father, and a skilled worker who at one time held three jobs--an edge trimmer in a shoe factory by day, a night watchman in the same factory by night, and as gardener tending his boss's property (Polenberg ix-x, 3). He had little formal schooling and was not particularly interested in education, seemingly content to be working with his hands and, because he loved nature, being out of doors. Due to a technicality in Massachusetts law, he was not allowed to work while he was imprisoned because he was not yet officially sentenced. In a 1922 letter he alludes to the extent of his work deprivation, "I am joy when I am work" (Letters 7).
In contrast, Bartolomeo Vanzetti was unmarried, worked a string of low paying jobs, and lived in a boarding house. Intensely interested in learning both in Italian and English, he was a careful and keen interpreter of literary, philosophical, and political texts. For example, in response to Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanzaly (Gitanjali) he...
|
