Sacco’s nature had a darker turbulence. The now obsolete term
_anarchist-communist_ would have applied to him as it would never
have applied to Vanzetti. Anarchist though he called himself, he saw
life in terms of the Marxist class struggle, in which “as long as
this sistem of things, the exploitation of man on other man reign,
will remain always the fight between those two opposite class.”
Unlike Vanzetti, he did not concern himself with anarchism as the
rejection of government, but with the immediacy of conflict. In a
dream he had at Dedham he described how he found himself in the
middle of a strike in a Pennsylvania mining town and how soldiers
with guns and bayonets came to put it down:
_And so the fite it was to beginning, and while the fite was begin I
jump upon a little hill in meddle of the crowd and I begin to say,
Friend and comrade and brotherhood, now one of us as going to move a
step, and who will try to move it will be vile and coward, here the
fite as go to finish. So I turn over towards to the soldiers and I
said, Brothers you will not fire on your own brothers just because
their tell you to fire, no brothers remember that everyone of us we
have mother and child, and you know that we fite for freedom wich is
your freedom. We want one of the fatherland, one sole, one house, and
better bread. So while I was finish to say that last work one of the
soldiers fire towards me and the ball past throught my heart, and
while I was fall on ground with my right hand close to my heart I
awake up with sweet dream!_
On a secondary level the dream was Sacco’s acceptance of his
execution, which he saw as predetermined, inevitable. Vanzetti, on
the other hand, was optimistic until almost the end. Even Webster
Thayer, in whom all the forces inimical to him and to Sacco seemed
concentrated, he could view with the dispassionateness of his note to
the Brinis just after the arguments on the supplementary motions: “I
dislike to vilify humane being and would be more than glad, happy—if
he by one just act, would comples me to change my opinion—but there
are no reasons till now.”
A few months later, discouraged from any such fugitive hopes,
Vanzetti reverted to a more somber picture of the judge:
_I have never expected, nor I expect from him other than some then
thousand volts divided in a few times; some meters of cheap bord and
4 x 7 x 8 feet hol in the ground._
_No matter how much of sympathy I try to bestow upon him, or with how
much of understanding I try to judge his actions; I only and alone
can see him a self-conceit nerroved mind little tyrent, beliving
himself to be just, and beliving his utterly unjust and unnecessary
social office to be a necessity and a good. He is a bigot and,
therefore, cruel. At the time of our arrest and trials, his peers
were sawing red all around, and he was sawing more red than his
peers._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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