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Sacco, Vanzetti, and Rosie
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14837 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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10 / 1988 |
1,975 Words |
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George Szamuely
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The trail and conviction of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1920 has taken its place in political folklore as a grotesque--though most certainly not the most grotesque--instance of American national mendacity. Here were two young men, whose almost every attribute could not fail to endear them to the Left. They belonged to anarchist groups, they were draft evaders, they were Italian immigrants. And now here they were being put to death by Warren Harding's money-grubbing, scandal-ridden America. It did not matter that the two men had been convicted of robbing and murdering a postmaster. It did not matter that the governor of Massachusetts had appointed a blue-ribbon committee, headed by the president of Harvard, to look into the question of whether the trial had been fair or not. It did not matter that the jury had concluded that the defendants were guilty as charged, even if the conduct of the trial left something to be desired. Throughout the world, the left--enjoying a surge of self-confidence following the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the dismal failure of August 1914 now all but forgotten) was up in arms. There were riots in London, Paris, and Rome. There was a general strike in Montevideo. A bomb went off in the house of the American ambassador in Paris; and another bomb, also in Paris, killed twenty people during a demonstration in support of Sacco and Vanzetti. On August 23, 1927, the two young men were executed.
Grave Miscarriage
In the ensuing years, though the details of the case were not widely known, most right-thinking, well-meaning people did not hesitate to express their conviction that a grave miscarriage of justice had occurred and that America now had its own Dreyfus affair to live down. True, Dreyfus had been pardoned and found innocent of all wrong-doing, and so far as one could tell, in the current business no evidence had been cooked up, no one had been framed, and nothing had been covered up. But the transmission of a legend has little to do with the whys and wherefores of the story on which it is based. And it became the sign of good intellectual table manners to refer to Sacco and Vanzetti not in the order of their arraignment--as Sacco and Vanzetti--but as Vanzetti and Sacco. Thus would the unjust verdict be reversed! In Herb Greer's new play Vanzetti and Sacco and Rosie, not only has the verdict been reversed in appellation but in consciousness as well. Conviction of their innocence is a mark of sanity every bit as fundamental as, say, the knowledge that water is an excellent conduction of electricity or that paper is highly inflammable. Conviction of their guilt, on the contrary, is at best a sign of dangerous derangement, at worst the creed of a group intent on subverting the existing moral and political order. Much of the action of this first-rate satire concerns a conspiracy within the portals of a conspiracy within the portals of an unspecified government ministry in an unspecified country to seize power and reveal to the world the true facts about the case of Vanzetti and Sacco. The two men were guilty as charged! Moreover they should be referred to, not as Vanzetti and Sacco, but as Sacco and Vanzetti!
Superficially Bright
Two characters--not the eponymous anarchists--are on stage almost throughout the play. Theirs is the humanitarian/revolutionary struggle superimposed on a much more conventional innovator/pedant squabble. Rosie is a secretary whom we first meet as a superficially bright but tiresomely unimaginative government employee. She
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