ignorant or careless of the differences in mentality involved in partisanship in the
various schools of revolutionary thought. This is a matter of life and death, not only for
Sacco and Vanzetti but for the civilization that Harvard University is supposed to
represent .. It is inconceivable that intelligent reading men can be ignorant in this
day of the outlines of anarchist philosophy… It is upon men of your class and
position that will rest the inevitable decision as to whether the coming struggle for the
reorganization of society shall be bloodless and fertile or inconceivably bloody and
destructive… As a Harvard man I want to protest most solemnly against your smirching the
university of which you are an officer [italics added] [37]
Dos Passos`s involvement in the case had multiple origins. Like Sacco and Vanzetti, Dos
Passos had been opposed to American participation in World War I. Of Portuguese descent
and cosmopolitan background, one of his biographers points out, he was roused by
anti-Italian sentiment. [38] His visits to Spain introduced him to anarchist
thought, which he admired and which influenced him perhaps the rest of his life. [39]
There are anarchist characters, and evidence of anarchist sympathies, in other Dos Passos
novels.
The Camera Eye sections of The Big Money give voice to the individual
consciousness represented in more mainstream modernist novels like The Sound and the
Fury and Mrs. Dalloway.[40] They read like prose poems–unpunctuated,
but with spaces for line breaks. Like the lack of punctuation, the unhyphenated
combinations of words suggest the influence of James Joyce. Camera Eyes (49) and (50)
focus exclusively on Sacco and Vanzetti. Camera Eye (49) compares the earlier English
immigrants–whom the Camera Eye calls "the roundheads the sackers of castles the
kingkillers haters of oppression"–who settled Massachusetts Bay with the immigrant
Italians who live there in the 1920s. The Camera Eye moves among them, asks questions (
"you ask them") and articulates their own questions and fears:
in scared voices they ask Why won`t they believe? We knew him We seen him every day why
won`t they believe that day we buy the eels. [41]
The reference is to the court`s failure to believe Italian witnesses, particularly when
they provided alibis for Vanzetti on the day of the robbery. For Dos Passos, there is a
bitter irony in this opposition between the descendents of immigrants fleeing oppression
and new immigrants fleeing oppression, an irony that further suggests the betrayal of
American ideals. Only one of the new immigrants isn`t scared, a boy whom Vanzetti used to
help with his homework, a boy who "wants to get ahead … wants to go to Boston
University" (TBM, 391). The desire for upward mobility persists. The
speaker/seer of the Camera Eye thinks about all this on his way home:
…make them feel who are your oppressors America
rebuild the ruined words worn slimy in the mouths of lawyers
district-attorneys collegepresidents Judges without the old words the immigrant haters of
oppression brought to Plymouth how can you know who are your betrayers America
or that this fishpeddler you have in Charlestown Jail is one of your
founders Massachusetts? (TBM, 391).
Again Dos Passos draws attention to the contradictions exposed by the case: Vanzetti
the anarchist is synonymous with New England`s lost spirit of rebellion, its forgotten
desires for moral self-direction, a climate of tolerance, and freedom from unjust
authority.
Mary French, the character in The Big Money who becomes involved in the
protests againt the trial, is, like Sinclair`s Cornelia and Betty, a woman from the upper
classes who has become sympathetic to workers` causes. After several failed relationships
with male comrades, Mary French is, like Dos Passos, arrested for picketing; she visits
Sacco and Vanzetti in Dedham jail and decides optimistically, "when the case was won,
she`d write a novel about Boston" (TBM, 403). Her comrades assign her
to influence newspaper coverage of the trial, but the journalists are cynical. When she
exclaims to one, "If the State of Massachusetts can kill those two innocent men in
the face of the protest of the whole world, it`ll mean there never will be any justice in
America ever again" (TBM, 404), he responds by blaming the "common
people" and refuses to become involved. In both Sinclair`s and Dos Passos`s novels, a
woman seemingly takes the place of a male author. This is perhaps to avoid the implicit
and gendered sentimentality in any human being`s sympathy for another, but the female
character could also be expressive of a consciously feminist stance. If, as Eileen Sypher
suggests, James and Conrad, in order "to contain the threat of anarchism find this
concept of the new woman readily available to collect their terror of radical social
change," [42] Sinclair and Dos Passos invent positive women characters, New Women,
who successfully take the the traditional emotional responsiveness of women into a new
realm, that of political engagement. Robert Butler contrasts Mary French`s life with those
of many in the U.S.A. portraits: "apparently powerful people are brought to
ruin while seemingly weak people are endowed with dignity and possibility." [43]
As Barbara Foley points out, however, Mary French "seems motivated as much by
sexual hunger and ego insecurity as by political commitment." [44] Sinclair is
ultimately more persuasive as a feminist than is Dos Passos.
Newsreel LXVI announces the executions in the public sphere; Camera Eye (50) elaborates
from the private sphere. The newsreel intersperses lines of "The International"
with newspaper headlines that proclaim Sacco and Vanzetti must die. The Camera Eye
describes the reaction of the Defense Committee in Salem Street: "there is nothing
left to do … we are beaten … our work is over." It rises to a denunciation of the
wealthy and powerful who control all institutions and whose existence belies American
democracy:
America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out
who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul
their hired men sit on the judge`s bench they sit back with their feet on the tables
under the dome of the State House they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars
the guns the armed forces the powerplants
they have built the electricchair and hired the executioner to throw the switch
all right we are two nations
. . .
but do they know the old words of the immigrants are being renewed in blood
and agony tonight do they know the old American speech of the haters of oppression is
new tonight in the mouth of an old woman from Pittsburgh of a husky boilermaker from
Frisco who hopped freights clear from the Coast to come here …
the men in the deathhouse made the old words new before they died. [TBM,
413, italics added]
The redemptive power of the executions lies most crucially for Dos Passos in this
renewal of American rhetoric and the great awakening of social conscience, a renewal made
manifest in the responses of working-class Americans like the old woman and the
boilermaker as well as in the activism and texts of American writers. [45]
Like Millay and Porter, Dos Passos reacted to the executions with bitter
disappointment. At the conclusion of Camera Eye 50, which incorporates a section of
Vanzetti`s famous, touching speech, Dos Passos writes, "we stand defeated
America." But despite this sense of defeat and the recognition that, in Disraeli`s
words, we are "two nations" of rich and poor, immigrants and Brahmins, men and
women, Dos Passos sees some grounds for hope: America and the language of democracy have
been renewed by the steadfastness of Sacco and Vanzetti–who never recanted in seven years
of imprisonment–and by the dedication of those who supported them, some of whom, like Dos
Passos and Dorothy Parker, were soon to travel to Spain to witness the civil war in which
anarchists would play a prominent role. In yet another sense, then, what William Godwin
called punishment as "example" does not work. Just as the Haymarket trial and
executions inspired the anarchist activity of Emma Goldman, so did the Sacco-Vanzetti
case, as Vanzetti had predicted, act as "propaganda by the deed," radicalizing
many writers and intellectuals who would demonstrate their new political sympathies in the
decade of the Great Depression. The trial and executions did not so much inspire anarchist
beliefs in these writers as draw their attention to the inequities of wealth and power and
arouse in them more sympathy for, or understanding of, the struggles of immigrants and
workers.
In the very last pages of the novel, Dos Passos constructs a deliberately ironic
contrast to the outcome of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. A stockbroker named Samuel Insull is
accused of defrauding thousands of investors of their life savings. Unlike Judge Thatcher,
Insull`s judge is "not unfriendly" and unlike Vanzetti, Insull defends himself
with platitudes: "Old Samuel Insull rambled amiably on the stand, told his lifestory:
from officeboy to powermagnate, his struggle to make good, his love for his home and the
kiddies" (TBM, 469). While the anarchists are opposed by the governor of
Massachusetts and the president of Harvard, Insull is supported by the business elite of
Chicago, who even testify on his behalf. He himself explains, weeping, that his
ten-million dollar theft was "an honest error"–and is acquitted. The villains
of The Big Money, as its title suggests, are successful Ragged Dicks [46] like
Insull, who have made Faustian bargains and betrayed the founding American dream of
liberty and equality.
Dos Passos does not, however, recognize that there were always contradictions and
betrayals in American history and ideology–that the originary purity he longs for never
existed and that he idealizes the first generations of European immigrants. This blind
spot in his critique is predictive of his later politics. His representation of the
Puritans as kindred spirits to the Italian anarchists is highly problematic, since
Puritans and anarchists took quite different positions in regard to the state, law,
punishment, and religion. [47]
The importance of the Sacco-Vanzetti case is literary, as well as political and
historical. It exposes the limits of American canon formation—the literary texts
selected for study as representative of particular social eras. Literary critics have
characterized American modernism as conservative or reactionary; they have written about
Fitzgerald rather than Sinclair, Hemingway rather than Dos Passos, Eliot rather than
Millay. The Sacco-Vanzetti case shows that notable American writers of the 1920s and 1930s
were capable of sympathizing with, writing about, and demonstrating on behalf of adherents
of a radical left politics; they were even capable of understanding the ideas of these
radicals in relation to the founding ideas of the United States.
"For a time it seemed that Sacco and Vanzetti would be forgotten," wrote
Malcolm Cowley afterwards. "Yet the effects of the case continued to operate, in a
subterranean way, and after a few years they would once more appear on the surface .. The
intelligentsia was going left; …it was discussing the need for a new American
Revolution." [48] The trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, according to
such contemporary accounts, restored the sense of ongoing revolution as definitive of modern
American literature as well as of the American Renaissance. The Americanist Sacvan
Bercovitch, who was named after the two anarchists,