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, Félix 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.
