January 2011

A quite similar view of the Sacco-Vanzetti case—concluding that Sacco was very probably guilty and Vanzetti probably innocent—is contained in James Grossman’s stimulating article, “The Sacco-Vanzetti Case Reconsidered,” in the January, 1962, issue of Commentary. After reviewing the facts of the crime and examining the ballistics evidence, Mr. Grossman goes on, in the excerpt reprinted below, to discuss the characters and beliefs of the principals.

The day was August 17, 1862, a Sunday when most of the settlers in southwestern Minnesota were taking a Sabbath rest in the midst of the farmers’ yearly race to get in the ripe grain while the weather stayed good. If it was like most days in a Minnesota harvest season, there was a blue haze along the prairie horizon and the dusty smell of dry grass and wheat stubble in the air.

It was, above all, a peaceful day, and the small band of a score or so of Sioux hunters passing the scattered farms of Acton Township in Meeker County, on their way home from the Big Woods to the north, added no note of menace. Beyond begging and petty thievery, the Sioux had given the settlers little trouble; even when most of their vast hunting lands were taken from them, they only complained and grumbled but did not resist. Of course, there had been the massacre five years earlier of thirty settlers at Spirit Lake just across the border in Iowa, but Inkpaduta and his small band, who were responsible, were outlaws, disowned by their own tribesmen.

The year 1914 was one of the most fateful years in human history. As the painful half-century which it inaugurated nears completion we can see that in that year there came one of those profound turning points that occur no more than once or twice in a millennium. Probably it will be a long time before we fully understand what 1914 got us into, but we can at least begin to see what it wrenched us out of.

World society then was essentially a European society, which believed that it had above all other things the quality of permanence. Whatever happened, it was going to stay fixed.

What 1914 demonstrated was that European society was actually as unstable as a bag of cordite. It was at the mercy of a jar or spark, and in the month of August, 1914, it went up in a prodigious explosion. It had grown too rigid to adjust itself to the pressures that were building up within itself.

On his first visit to the United States, William Makepeace Thackeray discovered the truth of Carlyle’s characterization of America as “the never-resting, locomotive country”; he discovered Americans who were a hundred times more likable than the tourists he had encountered in London, “sulking or pushing”; and he discovered Beatrix Esmond and fell in love with her.

To him the most important discovery was that he could still fall in love. When he arrived in November of 1852, a very tall man of forty-one with burly, slightly stooping shoulders, gray hair, and hazel eyes that peered out at the world through steel-rimmed spectacles, he was suffering from the wrench of a final parting from Jane Brookfield, the married woman he had loved for years. Jane loved him, but had submitted to her husband’s demand that she break oft the association. Their passion was all the more tormenting for being unfulfilled: both were proper Victorians, and both were married. Thackeray’s wife was insane. She had developed schizophrenia after the birth of his youngest daughter in 1840, and had never recovered.

The American motorist has everything working for him nowadays. There is an infinite network of excellent roads on which it is almost impossible to get lost, he is never out of touch with garages and filling stations, and there is an unmatched abundance of eating places, motels, inns, and lesser conveniences, many of them extremely good. He can drive anywhere he wants to in complete comfort, troubled only by the multitude of other people doing the same thing; and in short, there is just one thing he can no longer do which once was possible to him: he cannot go pioneering and know the thrill of finding high adventure.

One day in July, 1904, Lincoln Steffens, the great muckraking reporter of McClure’s Magazine , appeared quietly in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the trail of a big story. Steffens had won a well-deserved reputation as an exposer of what he called The Shame of the Cities; now lie was studying coirupt state politics, and the Wisconsin “machine” of Governor Robert M. La Follette was next on his list. He arrived in Milwaukee convinced that despite a lot of fancy talk about “reform,” La Follette was a “demagogue … a charlatan and a crook.”

Steffens’ first informant was a prominent banker. When asked for evidence of the Governor’s corruption, the banker could not contain himself. La Follette was a “crooked hypocrite” and a “socialist-anarchist”; he was ruining Wisconsin. But the banker was too angry lo present a reasoned indictment. Next Steffens turned to a local railroad lawyer. Though this man had better control of bis temper, bis detailed analysis of La Follette was studded with words like “fanatic,” “boss,” and “actor.”