whole list of prejudices and misinformation, and in some deeply mysterious way, their
[Sacco and Vanzetti`s] name had been associated with it — Anarchy … not even the word
`Communism` struck such terror, anger, and hatred into the popular mind" (NEW,
6). Sometimes Porter endorses an anarchist assessment of the ills of society, and at other
times she voices the most stereotypical objection to the elimination of government, as in
the following passage:
Fascism, Nazism, new names for very ancient evil forms of government — tyranny and
dictatorship — came into fashion almost at the same time with Communism … But Anarchy
had been here all the nineteenth century, with its sinister offspring Nihilism, and it is
a simple truth that the human mind can face better the most oppressive government, the
most rigid restrictions, than the awful prospect of a lawless, frontierless world. Freedom
is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity; it brings
out the old raiding, oppressing, murderous instincts, the rage for revenge, for power, the
lust for bloodshed. (NEW, 7)
This Hobbesian passage exposes the limits of Porter`s political thinking, assuming the
worst of human beings` "instincts" and ultimately preferring oppression to
freedom.
In her memoir Porter imagines political engagement not in terms of a conversion
narrative but of a fall from grace, from "youthful" faith in humanity and
optimism about the future into "mature" disillusionment and pessimism. She
affirms the value of sentiment but sees it as impotent, writing of Vanzetti`s final words,
his idealism: "It is very grand and noble in words and grand, noble souls have died
for it — it is worth weeping for. But it doesn`t work out so well" (NEW,
61 ). The end of Millay`s poem situates the "we" in a posture of resignation;
similarly, Porter describes the mood after the executions: " In my whole life I have
never felt such a weight of pure bitterness, helpless anger in utter defeat, outraged love
and hope as hung over us in that room" (NEW, 48).
Porter and Millay`s written responses to the Sacco-Vanzetti case are personal and
epiphanic, and in this they contrast with Upton Sinclair`s Boston, a novel over
750 pages long which attempts to detail every aspect of the case. Sinclair considered
himself a socialist, but he had read and been influenced by Kropotkin`s books, Mutual
Aid and Appeal to the Young. [27] In the author`s preface Sinclair calls Boston
"a contemporary historical novel" and acknowledges that it is "an
unusual art-form," compounded of real and imaginary characters (B,
xxxv). Boston is not a roman ? clef ; the historical characters –
Sacco, Vanzetti, Judge Thayer, Governor Fuller, and others involved in the trial — are
called by their real names. "The story has no hero but the truth," Sinclair
explained, " and its heroines are two women, one old and the other young, who are
ardently seeking the truth" (B, xxxvi). Howard Zinn refers to the novel`s
"feminist impulse," explaining that Sinclair`s first wife, Meta Fuller, had
given him Charlotte Perkins Gilman`s Women and Economics which, along with
subsequent feminist reading, led Sinclair to support birth control and pay for housewives,
among other women`s issues. [28] His choice of an older (sixty-year-old) woman as the main
character is particularly striking in light of the conventions of the novel: the German Bildungsroman,
the young Frenchman from the provinces who comes to the city, the protagonist of the
modernist novel who is, like Joseph K. of The Trial, a thirty-year-old
man. Sinclair, who received a lot of hate mail, was attacked for his feminist beliefs; in
a response to one, he wrote," I am grateful to you for your kindness in seeking to
educate me, but I think I ought to explain to you that you are dealing with a hopeless
case. I was one of the few men who marched in the first woman suffrage parade in New York
more than twenty years ago, and I am an ardent feminist." [29]
Boston opens with an emancipation. Cornelia Thornwell`s husband, a Brahmin
whose inherited wealth came from the ownership of cotton mills, is found dead at his desk
like the villainous Colonel Pyncheon in Hawthorne`s opening to The House of the Seven
Gables. Cornelia is consequently "told of her release" (B, 1). She
sheds no tears for her dead husband, tolerates with some difficulty the squabblings of her
children and grandchildren over their inheritance, and leaves after the funeral to become
a lodger in the same house where Vanzetti lives and to work in a cordage factory owned by
a family friend. Cornelia`s late rebellion against her class is partially explicable in
terms of her own origins, which are Irish, not Brahmin. But she explains her departure as
consistent with New England history and thought:
"For forty years [Cornelia says] I did what I was told was my duty … Now for the
rest of my life I am going to be an individual, and not a cog in the family machine. And
while that may seem terrible to you, you can comfort yourself with the fact that it is
real `Boston`–old `Boston,` the very best there is. Everything that is glorious in our
history has been made by people who have `come out,` and fought some prevailing sentiment
[she names Sam and John Quincy Adams, Emerson, Thoreau, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, James
Russell Lowell, Thomas Wentworth Higginson]…Boston history has been made by the `saving
minority.`" (B, 120-21)
In The Education, the self-proclaimed "conservative Christian
anarchist" Henry Adams concurs: "resistance to something was the law of New
England nature." [30]
In Boston, as in The Never-Ending Wrong, the opposition between
social class and sentiment is foregrounded, and again the utopian hope is that sentiment
can bridge the gulf between classes. Like the "sob sisters" of Porter`s account,
Cornelia is accounted a sentimentalist by both the "revolutionists" and the
wealthy, who believe that class interests will always ultimately take precedence over
humanitarian feelings:
The Brinis [the family in whose house she boards] had long ago found out who Cornelia
was; they knew that she came from a great rich family; yet not all the cruel "class
consciousness" could weaken their trust in her. It seemed to Cornelia that this
offered some hint of how to avoid the stresses of the war between capital and labor; also
for the bitter strife between the old Yankees and the new foreigners, and for the
"crime wave," and many other troubles of the time. But when she told that theory
to her friends of the great world, they called it "sentimental," and went on
with their wiser and more practical plan of jailing and deporting and killing. Also most
of the so-called "class-consciousness" revolutionists would have agreed that
Cornelia`s program was "sentimental"; so apparently the jailing and deporting
and killing had to continue. (B, 199)
Despite or perhaps partly because of the violence on both sides, Sinclair underlines
the similarities between the ideas of revolutionary New England and those of anarchist
revolutionaries. Told of the anarchist doctrine that each person is "a law unto
himself," Cornelia responds: "That ought to frighten me, but we New Englanders
were raised on that creed — we called it Transcendentalism" (B, 232).
Cousin Letitia, a proper spinster who chaperones Cornelia`s granddaughter Betty around
Europe, meets some of these revolutionaries; in a letter home Betty writes: "When she
[Letitia] was in school, she was taught to admire the revolutionary leaders of New
England, and now that she meets those in Europe, she finds them highly educated men"
(B, 185). And a French communist editor observes that "there are few
anarchist book shops without copies of Thoreau`s `Duty of Civil Disobedience` " (B,
232). The conflict between the anarchist cause and the Brahmins is formulated as another
moment in Boston`s historical dialectic between liberty and consolidated power.
But the clear division between the Brahmin class and their social subordinates is,
Sinclair suggests, destabilized by the American preoccupation with race. As Italians,
Sacco and Vanzetti`s "whiteness" is questioned by their American-born fellow
workers, who therefore align themselves with the Brahmins. As was the case with Irish
immigrants in the nineteenth century, white skin is not a matter of biology and European
descent; it is put into question by the immigrants` poverty. The anarchists` alibis for
the robbery were supported only by their fellow countrymen; by contrast, another accused
man, Orciani, "had been able to produce an American alibi … he could produce his
boss and several other `white men` to swear he had been at his machine all day" (B,
237). The "white" jurors are also unsympathetic to the Italians:
One by one the jurors were selected; Arthur W. Burgess, shoemaker of the town of
Hanson, Henry S. Burgess, caretaker of the town of Wareham, Joseph Frawley, shoe-finisher
of the town of Brockton, Charles A. Gale, clerk, of the town of Norwell–so it went, all
Anglo-Saxon names…such little people of the old stock, having failed for one reason or
another to become rich, looked with bitter contempt upon the immigrants who came pouring
into the country, to beat down wages and make life harder for the "white men" of
New England. Far from having any sense of class solidarity, they clung to the American
idea that their children would rise and join the leisure class; their attitude to the
Italian was that of the poor whites of the south to the Negroes. "All these wops
stand together," said one juryman to another, discussing the case at lunch in a
restaurant. (B, 251)
While the jurors cherish the American dream of unlimited upward mobility, the judge of
the Sacco-Vanzetti case is tormented by awareness of the limits of that mobility. Sinclair
sees class anxiety at work in the unjudicial behavior of Judge Web Thayer, who publically
expressed animosity toward the anarchists while the case was before him ("Did you see
what I did to those anarchistic bastards?"); Thayer did not come from a
"blue-blood" family, lived in Worcester, not the Back Bay, and had attended
Dartmouth instead of Harvard (B, 249-50). As a member of the class to which
Thayer vainly aspires, Cornelia Thornwell recognizes Thayer`s "inferiority complex, a
sense of the gulf which yawned between him and the great ones of his community, and which
he would never cross, even though he won his way to the Supreme Judicial Bench" (B,
249). While the women of Sinclair`s Boston are fluid, able to transgress class
boundaries, the men are fixed in place by anxiety over racial, economic, or social status.
In true anarchist fashion Boston argues that capitalism and the state are the
chief practitioners of violence; the villains are either bankers and factory magnates,
like Cornelia`s Brahmin in-laws, or state officials, like Governor Fuller and Judge
Thayer. Having researched all the shady aspects of the case, Sinclair presents in detail
the manipulations and deceptions of those in power. While Sacco and Vanzetti express the
views of workers and anarchists, Cornelia`s function in the novel is to articulate from
"inside" criticisms of privilege, prejudices, and court procedure; her high
social standing allows her access to the powerful historical figures of the case, whom she
confronts. Sinclair’s only modernist strategy is that of juxtaposition: contrasting
scenes for ironic effect. He even collected funds to send signed copies of Boston
to as many university libraries as possible. Public access to the information he
accumulated for the novel was part of his reason for writing it.
Like Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos was active in the protests against the conviction
and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. His politically engaged U.S.A. trilogy and Manhattan
Transfer differ from novels like Ulysses and To the Lighthouse in
that they incorporate the "stream of consciousness" of the public sphere as well
as that of individual subjectivity. Following Malcolm Cowley, Granville Hicks, and Isidor
Schneider, Barbara Foley takes the three volumes of U.S.A. as examples of the
"collective novel," formally modernist but ideologically an offspring of
proletarian fiction, which in turn has its origins in the "liberal critical realist
tradition … of Bleak House, Middlemarch, and A Hazard of New
Fortunes." [31] As a modernist, Dos Passos was inspired by European and American
painting, notably the socially critical work of the German Expressionist Georg Grosz, and
Futurist painting, like the dynamic urban scenes of Boccioni.[32] He also admired
the films of D. W. Griffith and Serge Eisenstein, from whom he appropriated for fiction
the concept of montage.[33] His adaptations of new techniques in painting and film
included "The Camera Eye," the function of which is to give the position of the
observer; the Newsreel, which represents media voices–headlines, advertisements, popular
songs; and narrative "portraits" of historical figures like Frank Lloyd Wright,
Isadora Duncan, Henry Ford, and Frederick Taylor.
But despite its daring formal innovations, the U.S.A. trilogy has remained on
the borders of the canon, marginalized by its politics, its historical specificity, and
the attack it makes upon the American dream of power and wealth. All-American boys who,
like Charley Anderson, attempt to live out the American dream, lead dissolute, corrupt
lives and die foolish, unpleasant deaths. The most positive figure of The Big Money is
Thorstein Veblen, a "masterless man" and critic of monopoly capital, who
"suffered from … an unnatural tendency to feel with the workingclass instead of
with the profittakers" [TBM, 88]. The climactic event of the entire trilogy,
many critics agree, is the Sacco-Vanzetti case, which, along with the stock market crash,
dominates the conclusion of The Big Money. [34]
Of the four writers discussed here, Dos Passos was arguably the most sympathetic to and
knowledgeable about anarchist theory, yet despite its anti-capitalism, The Big Money was
unpopular with leftists in the 1930s. Herbert Gold attacked the novel because of its
negative representation of communists and labor organizers, and indeed these attitudes do
seem to foreshadow Dos Passos’s turn to the right during the Cold War. In his
assessment of communists, Dos Passos was not alone; Katherine Anne Porter and George
Orwell (in Homage to Catalonia ) express similar criticisms. Bakunin had long ago
predicted that communism would become authoritarian in structure. There are other
indications of Dos Passos`s future politics in The Big Money. Contemporary
readers will recognize that the novel stereotypes homosexuals, Jews, and people of color.
[35]
During the 1920s and well before The Big Money (1936), Dos Passos wrote
articles and letters in support of Sacco and Vanzetti, including a 127-page pamphlet
entitled Facing the Chair (1927). In it he describes anarchism as "the
outlaw creed" based on "the vanished brightness of the City of God"; New
England`s hostility to anarchism stems, he suggests, from its own lost hopes for the City
of God, and New Englanders therefore hate "with particular bitterness, anarchists,
votaries of the Perfect Commune on earth."[36] Dos Passos interviewed both men
in prison and published an account of the interview in a bulletin of the Sacco-Vanzetti
Defense Committee. A Harvard graduate himself, Dos Passos also wrote an "open
letter" to President Lowell of Harvard which was published in The Nation during
the trial. Like Sinclair he understood Harvard`s role in legitimating the trial and
execution, the importance of social class to the whole affair, and the larger implication
that "civilization" was being sustained by an act of barbarism:
You are allowing a Massachusetts politician to use the name of Harvard to cover his own
bias and to whitewash all the dirty business …The part into which you have forced
Harvard University will make many a man ashamed of being one of its graduates…Your loose
use of the words "socialistic" and "communistic" prove that you are