violence like the McKinley assassination and Alexander Berkman’s assault on Frick.
Because all four authors were personally and emotionally involved in the Sacco-Vanzetti
trial, their texts are deliberate acts of memory and reparation, variations of the elegy;
they are thus engaged with sentiment, with feeling, which is, as Suzanne Clark argues,
taboo in what became canonized as modernist.
Explaining how this taboo functions to exclude women writers, Clark notes that "as
an epithet, sentimental condenses the way gender still operates as a political
unconscious within criticism to trigger shame, embarrassment, and disgust." [18]
Male writers of this period who espoused oppositional politics were also accused of
sentimentality. Edmund Wilson wrote disparagingly: "When a man as intelligent as Dos
Passos–that is, a man a good deal more intelligent than, say, Michael Gold or Upton
Sinclair [both defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti], who hold similar political views–when so
intelligent a man and so good an artist allows his bias so to falsify his picture of life
that, in spite of all the accurate observation and all the imaginative insight, its values
are partly those of melodrama–we begin to guess some stubborn sentimentalism
at the bottom of the whole thing, some deeply buried streak of hysteria"
[19] [italics added]. According to Wilson, gender is not a matter of a writer`s biological
sex but of his or her politics; male writers also can seem sentimental, melodramatic, and
hysterical if they support or defend political dissidents.
Because of her loyalty to traditional poetic forms, particularly the sonnet, many
critics have not assigned Edna St. Vincent Millay to the modernist canon. Her poem,
"Justice Denied in Massachusetts,” is marked by rhymes and archaic inversions of
word order, both contrary to the dominant critical accounts of modernist poetic
practice—free verse rather than rhyme and meter, urban concerns, characters, and
cityscapes as in Baudelaire’s poetry and, later, Eliot’s “Prufrock,”
rather than the natural landscapes of the Romantics. In his book Axel’s Castle (1931)
, Wilson helped formulate the criteria by which modernist texts were recognized as such.
Modernist poets who met these criteria tended to be formally radical and innovative, but
politically reactionary. Millay’s way of life was bohemian and her politics
progressive, but her poetry formally conservative.
Only the title of "Justice Denied" suggests a specific event; it does not
refer to executions, courthouses, picket lines. In its lack of referential directness and
its oblique imagery, the poem might at first reading be interpreted as a flight from the
political, but it is a poem about the failure of agency and opposition. Displacing its
subject from the city of Boston to the countryside, “Jutice Denied” is a lament,
mourning both the executed men and a generation`s fruitless efforts to save them, couched
in imagery instantly recognizable as "poetic" — natural, autumnal – making
an extended analogy between the event of the title and a blight upon nature. The two
displacements — from society to nature and from city to country — might seem in
accordance with familiar Marxist critiques as they suggest a naturalizing, even a
depoliticizing, of the subject. The poem`s inclusive gesture toward the reader ( "Let
us abandon then our gardens" ) presumably refers to the protestors or to their
generation and therefore possesses a certain resonance, since it takes the place of the
solitary, lyrical subjectivity, and suggests some form of comradeship, even in defeat. It
is, however, apparently a private "we" — hence the retreat to domestic space–
and not the public, political "we" of, for example, "We the People."
The poem in its entirety reads as follows:
JUSTICE DENIED IN MASSACHUSETTS
Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting room.
Shall the larkspur blossom 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,
Stands 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 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 go under.
Let us sit here, sit still,
Here is 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.
In the essay "Tension in Poetry" the conservative poet and critic Allen Tate
(1899-1972) uses "Justice Denied" as an example of "the poetry of mass
language" which he finds present "equally in a ladylike lyric and in much of the
political poetry of our time." [20] Mass language, he explains, is "the medium
of `communication,` and its users are less interested in bringing to formal order what is
sometimes called the `affective state` than in arousing that state." ( Tate`s
valorization of "formal order" is in opposition to an implicit anarchy.) In
expressing this view Tate might seem to be in accord with Adorno`s condemnation of
"non-radical forms." But while both Tate and Adorno seem to champion some formal
departure from familiar conventions, their motives differ. Adorno understands modernist
"negative aesthetics" as subversive of the culture industry and the commodity
form. But when Tate writes that "today many poets are driven to inventing private
languages, or very narrow ones, because public speech has become heavily tainted with mass
feeling," he is blaming democracy, not capitalism, for the decline of the aesthetic.
"Mass" is his code word, which he sets in explicit opposition to the
"language of the people which interested the late W.B. Yeats." In this context
"people" is a counterpart of Volk, Yeats having taken as his ideal a
hierarchical, agricultural society ruled by a hereditary aristocracy. [21] And Tate`s
opposition people/mass is, of course, gendered. As Andreas Huyssen observes, "The
fear of the masses in this age of declining liberalism is always also a fear of
woman." [22]
As a poet`s critique, Tate`s attack on "Justice Denied" is rather peculiar.
He writes:
From this stanza by Miss Millay we infer that her splendid ancestors made the earth a
good place that has somehow gone bad — and you get the reason from the title:
"Justice Denied in Massachusetts." How Massachusetts could cause a general
dessication, why (as we are told in a footnote to the poem) the execution of Sacco and
Vanzetti should have anything to do with the rotting of the crops, it is never made clear.
These lines are mass language: they arouse an affective state in one set of terms, and
suddenly an object quite unrelated to those terms gets the benefit of it; and this effect,
which is usually achieved, as I think it is here, without conscious effort, is
sentimentality.
Apparently metaphor itself is for Tate a violation of good taste or poetic
"tension." His misunderstanding of the metaphor seems willful; clearly, it is
not "Massachusetts" but "the denial of justice" that has caused
"a general dessication." Adopting Tate`s logic, one might make a similar
objection to the impotence of the Fisher King and the drought of The Waste Land.
Tate finally dismisses "Justice Denied" as follows: "the lines and even the
entire poem are impossibly obscure. I am attacking here the fallacy of communication in
poetry. (I am not attacking social justice.)" He seems to endorse a Mallarm?an
retreat from communication while simultaneously condemning poetic obscurity. An avowed
reactionary himself (one 1936 book is entitled Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas)
Tate does not accuse Millay of reactionary poetics.
The implication that the poem merely cedes political terrain to the victor is
problematic in view of Millay`s passionate opposition to the injustice that inspired the
poem. She did not, after all, sit in her room and read the newspapers; still less did she
approve of the trial. In fact, she first read "Justice Denied in Massachusetts"
at a public rally on Salem Street, perhaps on August 11, 1927, about two weeks before the
execution, or (which seems more likely ) hours before on August 22.[23] Communication was
clearly her intent. The context suggests that the poem was written for an act of public
mourning.
On the picket line Millay had carried a sign that read: "If these men are
executed, justice is dead in Massachusetts." [24] The similarity to the poem`s title
is obvious, but whereas the placard is unequivocal, the poem is elusive. The blunt
"dead" is replaced by the judicial "denied" (as in "the appeal
was denied"). The message of the placard having failed, the poem replaces it. Read in
public, it instantiates the private. The public "we" of the crowd dissolves
after the execution into the private "we" of the poem. Malcolm Cowley described
that night in Exile`s Return: "Afterward I talked with some of the people
who had joined in that strange nocturnal march…[After the execution] suddenly they wept
or fell silent, they separated, and many of them walked the streets alone, all night. Just
as the fight for a common cause had brought the intellectuals together, so the defeat
drove them apart, each into his personal isolation." [25]
The sad, defeated quality of "Justice Denied in Massachusetts" finds an echo
in Katherine Anne Porter`s 1977 memoir The Never-Ending Wrong, written, from
notes made during the protests, three years before the author`s death at age 90 and
published on the fiftieth anniversary of the execution. Like "Justice Denied,"
the memoir is about an "incurable wound" to the protestor`s sense of justice and
humanity ( The Never-Ending Wrong, 50, 62). Explaining her own participation,
Porter specifies the role of sentiment: "I still had my reasons for being there to
protest the terrible penalty they were condemned to suffer; these reasons were of the
heart, which I believe appears in these pages with emphasis" [italics added].
[26] An editorial in The Nation, August 31, 1927, also affirmed the
"heart": "The human heart is not yet so corroded that it can read off the
extinction of these two men without a shock to the very roots of its belief in justice and
humanity. " But as Porter`s memoir makes clear, this sympathy is problematic in view
of the barrier of social class; Porter quotes Vanzetti, who formulated the opposition thus
in a letter: "Although we are one heart, unfortunately we represent
two opposite class" [italics added] (NEW, 11). As history would
prove, social class would take precedence over sentiment, as members of the
established, WASP upper class, nicknamed the Boston Brahmins, joined forces to execute the
immigrant workers. But sentiment retains a utopian element, a potential for uniting
people, particularly women, across class interests. After describing other women`s
reponses to Mrs. Sacco, Porter writes:
I was mistaken in my anxiety — their wish to help, to show her their concern was real,
their feelings were true and lasting, no matter how awkwardly expressed; their love and
tenderness and wish to help were from the heart. All through those last days in Boston,
those strangely innocent women enlisted their altar societies, their card clubs, their
literary round tables, their music circles, and their various charities in the campaign to
save Sacco and Vanzetti…bringing money they had collected in the endless, wittily
devious ways of women`s organizations. They would talk among themselves and to her about
how they felt, with tears in their eyes, promising to come again soon with more help. They
were known as "sob sisters" by the cynics and the hangers-on of the committee I
belonged to who took their money and described their activities as "sentimental
orgies." (NEW, 37-38)
While identifying to some degree with these women, Porter also attempts to stake out a
political stance that is distinct from that of anarchists, communists, and capitalists,
but her sympathies shift back and forth throughout the text. The Never-Ending Wrong
expresses some of the ambivalence of the fellow traveler while confessing to a
"lifelong sympathy for the cause to which they [Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin]
devoted their lives–to ameliorate the anguish that human beings inflict on each
other–the never-ending wrong, forever incurable" (NEW, 62). Porter
describes herself as a "registered member of the Democratic Party, a convinced
liberal" (NEW, 14) and as bourgeois; she expresses hostility to both
the communists involved in the protests and to the capitalists who celebrate the
executions. She expresses an anarchist`s critique of the communist obedience to the party
hierarchy : "The air was stiff with the cold, mindless, irrational compliance with
orders from `higher up` " (NEW, 13). After the execution, Porter`s
wrath is directed at the Brahmins and capitalists. She describes taking the elevator
with three entirely correct old gentlemen looking much alike in their sleekness,
pinkness, baldness, glossiness of grooming, such stereotypes as no proletarian novelist of
the time would have dared to use as the example of a capitalist monster in his novel …
One of them said to the others in a cream-cheese voice, "It is very pleasant to know
we may expect things to settle down properly again, " and the others nodded with
wise, smug, complacent faces. To this day I can feel again my violent desire just to slap
his whole slick face all over at once, hard, with the flat of my hand, or better, some
kind of washing bat or any useful domestic appliance being applied where it would really
make an impression — a butter paddle — something he would feel through that smug layer
of too-well-fed fat. (NEW, 49)
In this incident Porter seems infected with the violence generally attributed to
anarchists, who had much the same motive, but her urge takes explicitly gendered terms –
"washing bat," " butter paddle" — as if she were pitting the female
domestic worker against the male capitalist. Her fantasies become more violent –
"pushing him down an endless flight of stairs, or dropping him without warning into a
bottomless well, or stringing him up to a stout beam" (NEW, 50). But she is
horrified by these thoughts; recognizing that the unfair executions had caused "some
incurable wound to her very humanity," she writes: "My conscience stirs as if,
in my impulse to do violence to my enemy, I had assisted at his crime" (NEW, 50).
Her violent anger is another kind of "sentiment," not sympathy but outrage, also
taboo as an unseemly emotion. Unable to align herself wholeheartedly with either the
women`s clubs, the anarchists, or the communists, Porter is exemplary of the fellow
traveler who is committed in opposition to a specific injustice but not committed to a
particular totalizing critique of its cause. This negative stance is both the virtue and
the weakness of the fellow traveler, who remains uncontaminated but isolated and therefore
powerless.
Porter recognizes the explosiveness of Sacco and Vanzetti`s particular political
loyalty, with its reputation for violence: "A fearful word had been used to cover the