Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Pen and Gavel





The pen, it is alleged, is mightier than the sword.  But how does it stack up against the gavel?  This week I have been reading and thinking about two powerful literary responses to two famous (or infamous) judicial trials.  The first ended in the conviction of a French army officer on a charge of treason before a military tribunal in 1894.  In the second, in 1921, two Italian anarchists living in the Boston suburbs were convicted of capital murder before a court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  I refer, of course, to the “Dreyfus affair” on the one hand and to the “Sacco and Vanzetti case” on the other.

            Virulent French anti-Semitism did not create the Dreyfus Affair, but it greased the skids for a glide path to a monstrous injustice.  Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jew, was a French artillery officer charged with passing military secrets to the Germans.  There had been treason, and there was a French officer who had committed it, but it was not Dreyfus ; and in any event the actual issue almost immediately became overwhelmed by a much more profound political-cultural struggle to the death between Republicans (the heirs of the Revolution) and Nationalists (political and clerical reactionaries).   The Army was one of the few national institutions commanding wide respect, but its leadership was full of anti-Semites, Catholic reactionaries, and faded aristocrats.  Having once convicted Dreyfus in a hurried, grossly incompetent and unfair trial, the Army leaders could not allow the correctness of their verdict to be questioned, though its defense required the compounding of injustices and an increasingly criminal cover-up—abetted at every step by a gutter press seething with malevolence.


 Alfred Dreyfus ( 1859-1935)

            Into this maelstrom the liberal novelist Emile Zola made the most famous journalistic intervention in history.  At the beginning of 1898 he published in a newspaper a blistering open letter to the President of France, FĂ©lix Faure.  This was the famous “J’accuse” letter in which he charged Army leaders, and especially the chief investigator, General du Paty de Clam, of conscious criminal malfeasance.  His aim was to invite a suit for libel which might force the uncovering of the cover-up.  The plan worked to a degree; for although the civil court too acted in a grossly prejudicial way, and although Zola was convicted, his intervention helped turn the tide.  Dreyfus was eventually cleanly exonerated.  Seldom has a secret conspiracy unraveled so dramatically.  The Dreyfus Affair convulsed France for a decade, and many historians see it as the defining event of post-Revolutionary French modernity.  Actually, Zola had not known the half of its iniquity, but his fearless catalogue of accusations remains one of the most influential op-eds ever penned.


Emile Zola (1840-1902)


The case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, an immigrant cobbler and an immigrant fishmonger, is just a hundred years old.  The crime was the murder of two men in a payroll heist on April 15, 1920 in Braintree MA.  The circumstances were and remain murkier than those in the Dreyfus Affair as finally revealed.  The two men were not rich Jews (Dreyfus was usually described as a “rich Jew”), but their families had not arrived on the Mayflower.  They were wops or guineas, in the slurs du jour.  Even worse,  they were politically active anarchists—one of the scarier words in a country in the grips of a post-War Red Scare.  Soulful Vanzetti, with his huge mustache and his eels, was very probably innocent.  Sacco, a true proletarian revolutionary with his cache of small arms and ammunition, was --despite decades of orthodox left-wing denial long since turned to sedimentary rock--probably guilty.  But the legal process, which found little room for reasonable doubt or much else that was reasonable, was grossly prejudicial.  Both were found guilty and both, after heated years of ferocious protests, political tensions, gubernatorial reviews, temporary stays, competing hysterias on the left and on the right, and the crudest forms of exploitation by accusers and champions alike, both were electrocuted in 1927.

Nicola Sacco 1891-1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888-1827)

The was no single Emile Zola for Sacco and Vanzetti; but there were a hundred aspirants.  Throughout the world, but especially in America, the number of writers and intellectuals who took up their cause was legion.  I cannot pretend to have read all of them, but I still have no hesitation in identifying one essay as the greatest.  That would be the memoir-essay of Katherine Anne Porter—she calls it a story—entitled “The Never-Ending Wrong,” first published in The Atlantic Monthly for June, 1977, half a century after the executions.*  A work so carefully mellowed can hardly be accused of giving voice to the passions of the moment.  It is instead a meditative poem in prose by one of America’s purest writers, ever.  Not that it lacks passion, but it is an examined passion.  Wordsworth famously characterized poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind”.

 

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)


The history of American labor relations is rife with economic brutality, police malfeasance, judicial criminality, frameups and railroading.  But the history of radical protest is no less rife with manipulation, bad faith, and useful idiocy.  Porter was entirely aware of the cynical Communist efforts to highjack her own protest group back in the Twenties.  I myself am old enough to have seen thousands marching to proclaim the innocence of Julius Rosenberg, and I was provoked into writing a whole book by five hundred academic intellectuals gathered to deny the mendacity of Alger Hiss and heap calumny upon Whittaker Chambers.  Even though some of our historians are as dogmatic as the theologians of old, the standard of history cannot be the standard of Anglo-American jurisprudence: certainty beyond reasonable doubt.  Ms. Porter could not bring herself to believe, as I have come to believe, that Nicola Sacco was a murderer, that indeed his political doctrine made no accommodation for the “bourgeois” legal procedures in which he became enmeshed.  But that does not change the fact that the Sacco-Vanzetti trial was indeed a “never-ending wrong.”  The eventual, and for far too many the grudging rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus could not recompense his sufferings on Devil’s Island.  Esterhazy, the real spy, lived out his days in undisturbed mendacity in England.  The criminal conspirators in the Army (save one who committed suicide) made no atonement.  But Dreyfus was alive and well and  died in bed a septuagenarian.  For Sacco and Vanzetti it was the hot seat and the cold grave.  There was not much that a tardy resolution in the Commonwealth’s legislature could do about that—or even a brilliant retelling of the “story” by Katherine Anne Porter.

*Library of America, vol. 186, pp. 830-866.