Chapter III: The March of Sorrow

“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.”
From “The Way,” by +Laura Simmons+.[8]

“And within the offices of the Defense Committee that day, how was it?”

“It was businesslike,--very unpleasant,” answered Rose Pesotta.

“You mean?”

“I mean that little was said, and yet all seemed to be saying, ‘We must bury our dead!’ They could think of nothing else.”

* * * * *

Between the midnight of their execution and the Sunday of the March of Sorrow, throughout the world protest and violence had been expressing themselves in one way and another,--portents for all who had eyes to see and ears to hear.

In Cheswick, Pennsylvania, on the 22nd, state troopers had ridden into a peacefully conducted protest meeting of some fifteen hundred striking miners and their wives and children, and two hundred had been injured. They were in an orchard, picnicking in groups, when it all happened. A trooper who had swung his club once too often upon the heads of women and children had been killed. The newspapers told about that. The news did not tell about the woman, mother of four children, who was so beaten up that she bled to death. The news did not tell about old women who were assaulted, or about the young women and children about whom Don Brown told, through the medium of the _New Republic_, women and children beaten, thrown across rooms, gassed and ridden down. Did Pittsburgh know? What would William Penn have thought about his namesake state if he could have been present at the bloody dispersement of this orderly, peaceful protest meeting in behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti?... In Colorado in the coal fields matters did not fare any better.

In London, on August 23d, forty persons were injured near the Marble Arch where mounted and foot police charged Sacco-Vanzetti sympathizers. The crime of these sympathizers was that they tried to march. In Paris on the same date street benches were torn up and newsstands were overturned to be used as barricades by a mob of some fifteen thousand sympathizers. In the conflict hundreds of civilians were injured, and scores of police.

There were demonstrations throughout the civilized world as well as in London and Paris. In Rosario, Argentine, throngs waiting in silence, in silence bared their heads when just after midnight the news of the executions reached them. At Buenos Aires a sympathetic strike and the boycotting of American manufactures and products was organized. At Sydney, Australia, a huge procession protested the executions and resolutions were passed by the workers to boycott American goods. At Johannesburg, South Africa,--Olive Schreiner’s country,--an American flag was burned on the steps of the Town Hall and speeches were made urging the boycotting of American goods. In both Berlin and Leipzig there were serious clashes between rioting protestants and the police. In Oporto, Portugal, many people were hurt when police dispersed a demonstration being held in front of the American Consulate.

But at Headquarters, little was said, and yet, as Rose Pesotta expressed it, all were saying, “We must bury our dead.” Stillness, fog-like, blanketed both grief and work, and was broken only by the buzz of telephone, or the question or answer of some quiet voice.... The authorities had nailed a two by four plank upright in the entrance of Defense Headquarters, so that no coffins could be carried through and up the stairway. It had been the plan of the Defense that loving hands should bear the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti up the stairs in order that they might lie in state in those rooms where the battle for their lives had been fought. The Rotenberg Estate, which owns 256 Hanover Street, had complained to the police. In death as in life the Committee met defeat, and the bodies had to be taken from Charlestown Prison to Langone’s Funeral Chapel.

In many places outside that Funeral Chapel might have been heard the harsh echoes of cheap denunciation of those who now lay still. But the sound that was in the ears of the men and women in the Defense Committee and in other committees that had struggled to save them, were the “Hail and Farewell” of Sacco and Vanzetti to the Defense written in the Death House on August 21:

+“THAT WE LOST AND HAVE TO DIE, DOES NOT DIMINISH OUR APPRECIATION
AND GRATITUDE FOR YOUR GREAT SOLIDARITY WITH US AND OUR FAMILIES.
FRIENDS AND COMRADES, NOW THAT THE TRAGEDY OF THIS TRIAL IS AT AN
END, BE ALL AS OF ONE HEART. ONLY TWO OF US WILL DIE. OUR IDEAL,
YOU OUR COMRADES, WILL LIVE BY MILLIONS. WE HAVE WON. WE ARE NOT
VANQUISHED. JUST TREASURE OUR SUFFERING, OUR SORROW, OUR MISTAKES,
OUR DEFEATS, OUR PASSION FOR FUTURE BATTLES AND FOR THE GREAT
EMANCIPATION.+

+“BE ALL AS OF ONE HEART IN THIS BLACKEST HOUR OF OUR TRAGEDY, AND WE
HAVE HEART. SALUTE FOR US ALL THE FRIENDS AND COMRADES OF THE EARTH.+

+“WE EMBRACE YOU ALL AND BID YOU OUR EXTREME GOOD-BY WITH OUR HEARTS
FILLED WITH LOVE AND AFFECTION.+

+“NOW AND EVER, LONG LIFE TO YOU ALL, LONG LIFE TO LIBERTY.+

+“YOURS FOR LIFE AND DEATH.+
+Nicola Sacco+
+Bartolomeo Vanzetti+.”[9]

And as at Defense Headquarters they were getting ready to bury their dead, in the ears of millions of sympathizers the world over were not only those words of +HAIL AND FAREWELL+, but also all the tender courtesies that these two gentlemen of a gentle land had not forgot in their final hours of agony. There was Vanzetti thanking his unfailing friend, Mrs. Jessica Henderson, “most heartfully” for her care of his sister, and admitting that at sight of his sister his heart had “lost a little of its steadiness.” And Vanzetti writing a long and beautiful letter to “Friend Dana,” the student of English Literature.[10] And there was Sacco writing a last letter to his little son, Dante, of which some of the sentences once read will always be remembered:

“What here I am going to tell you will touch your feelings, but
don’t cry, Dante, because many tears have been wasted, as your
mother’s have been wasted for seven years, and never did any good.
So, Son, instead of crying, be strong, so as to be able to comfort
your mother, and when you want to distract your mother from the
discouraging soulness, I will tell you what I used to do. To take her
for a long walk in the quiet country, gathering wild flowers here and
there, resting under the shade of trees, between the harmony of the
vivid stream and the gentle tranquillity of the mother nature, and I
am sure that she will enjoy this very much, as you surely would be
happy for it. But remember always, Dante, in the play of happiness,
don’t you use all for yourself only, but down yourself just one
step, at your side and help the weak ones that cry for help, help
the persecuted and the victim because they are your better friends,
they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo
fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy and freedom for
all the poor workers. In this struggle of life you will find more
love and you will be loved....”

Appreciation, guidance, love, courage for others, their thought in these last hours,--messages that for centuries to come will teach men how to live and how to die....

If, for their own comfort, on that last night of their life, they might have seen their Defense Committee as some others saw it: the worn face of Aldino Felicani; the persistence of Gardner Jackson; the ceaseless watchfulness of Joseph Moro; the pallor of Mary Donovan; and, centered in the midst of all their love and care, the quiet, patient beauty of Rosa Sacco.

The Governor had assured a woman of wealth--also a woman of courage and judgment--who had come to plead with him for stay of sentence, that after it was over they would both sleep better in their beds. It is probable that the only peace that night for multitudes of men and women of all ranks and of national and international interests, was the bitter gratitude that after the long agony, Sacco and Vanzetti knew the peace of death. For they knew so well that all was not over, as the authorities and the news said it was. They knew that it was only just begun.

Two days later on the evening of August 25th some eight thousand people were gathered before the doors of Langone’s waiting to go in to look upon the faces of the Italian martyrs. Some had stood there all day pressing up against the ropes that held them off. Very shortly after those doors were opened, Mary Donovan, nerves at the breaking point after the long years of Defense work and those thirteen days covering the postponement and preparation for the executions, as some news and camera men were about to take pictures of Sacco and Vanzetti, took her stand at the head of the coffins, in her hands a placard two and a half feet long and two feet wide. On it were Judge Webster Thayer’s words spoken while petitions for a new trial were still to be argued before him: “+Did you see what I did to those anarchistic bastards?+”

A battle of wills then ensued between Joseph Langone, the funeral director, whose license would be at stake if trouble occurred, and Mary Donovan. The struggle was soon over. The photographers went ahead with their work, and Mary Donovan stepped outside, where the crowd of eight thousand was waiting, and handed her placards to a newspaper man to copy. As they were being returned to her a Sergeant of the Police snatched them from her, and another struggle was begun. It culminated, despite the attempt of Gardner Jackson and Powers Hapgood to defend her, in her arrest on two charges: first, inciting to riot; second, distributing anarchistic literature.

Mary Donovan, whether her action at this time was well-judged or not, was within her rights in permitting the reporters to copy her placards. As far as the distribution of anarchistic literature is concerned, the “literature” involved was of the making of Judge Webster Thayer who might dislike having his phrases called anarchistic. Mary Donovan herself is a registered member of a political party whose tenets are opposed to those of anarchy,--I mean that political party known as the Socialist Party of the United States. She was given six months on each count or a year in prison, and her case is still to be called.

Saturday night was gone and Sunday had come. Sunday noon the March of Sorrow was scheduled to begin the long traversing on foot of some eight miles to Forest Hills where the last ceremony was to be held and the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti cremated. From the steps and portico of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in Boston a waiting crowd was looking out upon a far greater throng which packed Tremont Street to the curb. To Beacon Hill and that State House already barred to the marchers by road signs and trucks placed end on end across all entrances to it, the Common rose in gradual ascent.

This day and hour of August twenty-eighth, 1927, was as rain and wind swept as a November day, with dead leaves falling from trees still green. Many of those who stood upon the portico steps, not a few who stirred upon the Common, believing in the leadership and healing power of ideal action, must have touched the thought of this Boston of 1927 with its American Tragedy of Injustice and its memories of Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison as one touches the inexplicable,--something of amazement and fear both in their thoughts. What did it all mean? Or Italian by birth, minds sought refuge during those gray and solemn hours by a grave in the Campo Santo, Genoa, with its legend “+PRO VITA NUOVA+,” remembering Mazzini and phrases revealing his suffering and his triumph.

On Hanover Street, within Defense Headquarters, and a few doors away on the opposite side of the street at Langone’s, since early morning preparations had been going forward,--all was “business like.” At ten the Funeral Chapel had been closed. But thousands had seen those faces, alabaster in death, of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler. From Defense Headquarters word was being passed out that the March of Sorrow was to begin at one o’clock. There still, all was quiet and the one thought that they must bury their dead. Not permitted to begin the march with the famous red arm band about the sleeve--+Remember, Justice Crucified! August 22, 1927+--word was passed out to put the bands into pockets until a certain point on the marching route had been reached.

For hours throngs of mourners had been gathering in the North End all along the quarter of a mile between the Funeral Chapel and North End Park. Waiting open cars had been filled to overflowing with scarlet flowers, and on foot many volunteers were to bear crimson wreaths. Then the pallbearers carried out the coffins to the waiting hearses. Led by two closed cars, one containing Mrs. Sacco and Miss Vanzetti, Aldino Felicani and Dante Sacco, the other empty and waiting for the moment when the members of the Defense Committee should step into it from the head of the marching ranks, at a signal the great cortège fell into step, arm linked to arm, the motors in the cars began to throb, and the March of Sorrow was begun.

And it was begun to the pounding of horses’ hoofs, for at the head and on either side of the hearse and the two closed cars rode mounted State police clad in black raincoats and hats. The official intent was scarcely that of honoring the dead, yet the escort was not unlike that given to dead kings. To the thought of Mary Donovan and other members of the Defense from a letter returned the words of Vanzetti: “Such treatment formerly was given only to saints and kings.”... All those eight miles from Scollay Square to Forest Hills the thunder of those hoofs beat upon the ears of those who mourned.

At first, Alfred Baker Lewis said, the attitude of the police was strictly neutral. But when they saw that a procession of some fifty thousand people had determined, despite the rain, to pay honor to these two martyrs their attitude changed. From the start a procession unique in the history of human experience both for numbers and in the length of the route covered encountered difficulties. First the police had heavy trucks set close together all across the street and directly in the way of the line of march. In the attempts of the marchers to get through or around obstacles, one man was injured by being pushed through a plate glass window. But the marchers did get around the trucks and reform the procession.

In the gray and rain of Scollay Square, where fog was drifting in and pools of water were collecting, the police charged the line and started clubbing, and a detail of the mounted police rode straight into the column. A man on the sidewalk, indignant at the unprovoked attack on the marchers, swore at the police--to do this to the Boston police is to break much more than a tenth of the decalogue--and the man was arrested and taken to the police station. By such methods the police succeeded in “clearing” Scollay Square, but they could not keep it cleared. Quietly, steadily, the thousands of mourners came on, some filtering through the police cordon, others making detours, and again forming a column of solid ranks, arm linked to arm, twenty abreast.

Past Scollay Square, a brave salute to the police, out came the red arm bands. And now arm linked in arm, step perfect, the inscription on those arm bands repeated, repeated, repeated, itself in rhythm to the marching multitudes: “+Remember--Justice Crucified! August 22, 1927.+” The long wavering line of flame under rain,--human hearts, crimson flowers, the undulating thousands of red arm bands, the hearses bearing the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti,--the great cortège of Sorrow went on.

Upon the steps and within the portico of Saint Paul, from the Common, the waiting throngs saw them coming. In the minds of those who watched and those who marched echoed the words of the Silent Ones behind whom the great concourse was marching: “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 moment belongs to us--that agony is our triumph!”

The sweeping tide of human beings had moved slowly up Hanover Street, packed from curb to curb behind those shining hearses, behind the crimson flowers, and was whittled at by the police during the entire eight miles to Forest Hills Cemetery. Undaunted by either violence or the black skies gathering more and more rain, the cortège reformed again and again, and went on,--the human spirit of justice establishing its integrity and achieving in sorrow its purpose. The love of those who marched was not unlike the love of Those Two borne along the miles of all that way, and from whose dead lips, age after age, would be scattered the truth for which they had given their lives, “ashes and sparks ... among mankind.”

On that day those who seemed to be in control were the Boston police, and they did their bit towards educating the multitudes. It was not, perhaps, the education which they thought they were giving. It was rather like a lesson Louis Rabinowitz saw taught at the corner of the Boston Common and of Charles Street. As the March of Sorrow, heckled by the police, struggled forward, the “pupil” whom the police took in hand was a typical American youth,--100 per cent American, clothes and brains. Pressed against the picket fence of the Charles Street Mall he was much amused at the plight of the funeral cortège as, desperately, the marchers sought to meet every new obstacle the police set for them, and at the same time keep order in the marching ranks.

“A sudden charge of the mounted Cossacks,” wrote Louis Rabinowitz of
the Young People’s Socialist League, “brought a smile to his lips.
The slow stiffening of the workers’ lines in the face of vicious
clubbings drove away the smile, to leave instead a wrinkling of the
brows and a look of wonder and respect. As though he wondered at such
courage, and whence it could have sprung. What was the matter? Why
were all these people suffering like that?

“‘Hey, you! Get away from there and run!’ It was the snarling vicious
growl of some mad creature. The youth quickly turned his head and saw
not far distant from himself a beefy, bristling, ‘flat-foot,’ fresh
from clubbing the mourners.

“The young man began to obey the threatening commands and slowly
walked away from the fence to proceed along the path.

“‘Run, I told ye--and keep running. I’ll smash your face in for
you!’ As he uttered this threat the cop rapidly moved after the
youth. The latter, noticing over his shoulder as he walked the
onslaught of the lumbering beef-face with his ever-swinging club,
began to run. Out of breath, the Boston police ‘club-swinger’ stopped
and fiercely shook his fist at the retreating back of his escaping
quarry.

“As the lad ran the look of wonder disappeared from his face. In its
place there grew an expression of grim determination crowned with
the certainty of hope. And as he joined the line of plodding workers
he uttered a single significant remark: ‘Now I know why you are
fighting.’”

But on that day, in those hours, greater than those police masters was the Master of all Men. “Eloquent, just and mightie Death” had persuaded. Before the eyes of this American boy, Death was drawing “together all the farre stretchèd greatness, all the pride, crueltie, and ambition of man,” and was showing him not only the visible symbols of courage and brotherhood but also the symbols of stupidity and injustice.

The police continued to “maintain order,” carving off from the cortège by every strategy in their power and by force large numbers of the marching thousands until what had been fifty thousand at Hanover Street became scarcely two hundred marchers at Forest Hills. They ordered opposite tides of traffic into the marchers, they even diverted traffic into the cortège, they threw trucks across the way, they rode straight into by-standing groups of sympathizers, and they clubbed. All that those who marched wanted was to reach Forest Hills, there to pay the last deference to Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. They did not want trouble. And they kept on doggedly, forming and reforming in what Blanche Watson in _The New Leader_ has called their “plodding glory.” And marching, marching, marching, beside them, unseen, unheard, was another army,--all the phantasmagoria of many forces, of hope, of despair, of hate, of love, the death, the life, of all the ages through which mankind, dusty and travel-stained, has fought his way upwards.

Towards the close of the march the struggles of the cortège with the police became more acute. But under the leadership of Rose Pesotta and Alfred Baker Lewis the sympathizers kept on, the police making last brutal efforts to incite them to violence. More than seven of the eight miles had been covered in the rain.

Arm linked in arm they were swinging on bravely and silently when suddenly at Forest Hills Elevated Station came the sharp command, “Get over there!”

And police charged them, together with an automobile from the station house in which a patrolman rode down the crowd. Not a half minute was given the procession to obey before clubs began to swing and marchers to sprawl. There were curses, blows and kicks, and the guardians of law and order drew their guns. They were “keeping order,” of course! Anybody could see that, as by this last violence upon the worn men and women they succeeded in cutting away more than two-thirds of the brave and peaceful remnant of all the thousands.

Within almost a stone’s throw of Forest Hills Cemetery, that “third” slipped into a side street, and reformed.... Again, arm linked to arm, they swung on through the rain and the fast approaching night, in perfect order, silent except for their marching steps, on they plodded that last half mile to the Cemetery where a cordon of state police denied them entrance. They had kept on to the end. And now, the rain coming down in torrents, they stood with bared heads before the closed gates.

There, too, by the Walk Hill entrance stood Professor Ellen Hayes of Wellesley, and some of her friends. In an automobile they had joined the funeral procession. But endlessly harassed by the police, they had detoured and gone directly to the Cemetery. They stood there by the gates, watching the police jamming and hustling the throngs. They saw the hearses come and enter the gates. Far behind those hearses and the following cars brilliant with flowers, they had seen that gallant few coming, all, as Miss Hayes wrote in _The Relay_, “whom the police and the rain and the long miles had allowed to come through. Brilliant red bands gleamed on their arms.” In silence, wishing that they, too, might have been equal to the long hard march, this group of elderly women saluted them.

Now within the Chapel the quiet bodies waited till a woman’s tremulous voice should speak a few unforgettable words in their memory, and the bodies should be taken into the retort rooms there, again, to be baptized by fire, yet never to the end to be free from police surveillance. For even in the Cremation Chamber was to be a parade of police joking and laughing as fire reduced all that was mortal of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti to ash.

The “last” moment had come. The little Chapel would hold no more than a hundred. Every seat was filled, and a few stood about the walls. Haggard and white, as those who stand at the foot of the cross, Mary Donovan read words, written by Gardner Jackson, that for fearless grandeur will be remembered with the spoken and written words of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti:

“+Nicola Sacco+ and +Bartolomeo Vanzetti+, you came to America
seeking freedom. In the strong idealism of youth you came as workers
searching for that liberty and equality of opportunity heralded as
the particular gift of this country to all new-comers. You centered
your labors in Massachusetts, the very birthplace of American
ideals. And now Massachusetts and America have killed you--murdered
you because you were Italian anarchists.

“A hundred and fifty years ago the controlling people of this state
hanged women in Salem--charging them with witchcraft. The shame of
those old acts of barbarism can never be wiped out. But they are as
nothing beside this murder which modern Massachusetts has committed
upon you. The witch-burners were motivated by the superstitious fear
of an emotional religion. Their minds were blinded by their selfish
passion to reach Heaven. The minds of those who have killed you are
not blinded. They have committed this act in deliberate cold blood.
For more than seven years they had every chance to know the truth
about you. Not once did they even dare mention the quality of your
characters--a quality so noble and shining that millions have come
to be guided by it. They refused to look. They allowed the bitter
prejudice of class, position and self-interest to close their eyes.
They cared more for wealth, comfort and institutions than they did
for truth. You, Sacco and Vanzetti, are the victims of the crassest
plutocracy the world has known since ancient Rome.

“Your execution is ‘one of the blackest crimes’ in the history of
mankind. It is that and more. Horrible enough would it be if the
killing of you had been ordered by the political and material powers
alone. How much more horrible it is to have this act sanctioned
and even blessed by those who pass among us as the leaders of
intellectual and spiritual power. The blatant exultation with which
they aided in your death is the final sign that the act of killing
you was the act of vengeance of one class--the class dominated by
worship of money and position--against you as symbols of another
class--the workers and all others aspiring to realize the true
meaning of life.

“‘If it had not been for these things,’ said Vanzetti shortly before
his death, ‘I might have lived 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! The last moment
belongs to us--that agony is our triumph!’

“By that triumph we are fired with an everlasting fire. Your long
years of torture and your last hours of supreme agony are the living
banner under which we and our descendants for generations to come
will march to accomplish that better world based on the brotherhood
of man for which you died. In your martyrdom we will fight on and
conquer.”

FOOTNOTES:

[8] “America Arraigned,” edited by Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney.

[9] For letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, _Vide_ “The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti,” edited by Marion Denman Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson, Viking Press, New York.

[10] Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana.