Michael Gold reports on well-mannered Boston’s murder frenzy in the days before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

‘Lynchers in Frock Coats’ from New Masses. Vol. 3 No. 5. September, 1927.

It is August 14th, eight days before the new devil’s hour set for the murder of Sacco and Vanzetti. I am writing this in the war zone, in the psychopathic respectable city that is crucifying two immigrant workers, in Boston, Massachusetts.

All of us here fighting for the two Italians are without hope. We feel that they will burn. Respectable Boston is possessed with the lust to kill. The frockcoat mob is howling for blood — it is in the lynching mood.

If the two Italian workers do not die it will not be the fault of cultured Boston. The pressure of the workers of the world will have accomplished the miracle. But I repeat, the handful of friends working desperately here are without hope. The legal procedure in this case is nothing but a bitter joke. The blood lust alone is real.

You can’t understand this case unless you are in Boston now. You must mingle with the crowds at the newspaper bulletin boards on Washington street, hear sleek clerks and ex-Harvard football players and State street stock brokers mutter rancorously:

“These Anarchists must die! We don’t want this kind of people running America!”

They whisper, they fidget, they quiver with nervousness and fear, they jump like cats every time a pin drops. The city has lost its head. The atmosphere is like the war days, when George Creel’s skilled literary liars were scaring everyone with the news that the Kaiser’s airplanes were about to bomb Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

Those who sympathize with Sacco and Vanzetti in the street crowds keep their mouths shut. They are as unpopular as a Northern friend of the negroes would be at a Southern lynching bee.

Most of the well-dressed well-mannered Boston bourgeoisie are frank in saying Governor Fuller should not have granted a reprieve. They openly accuse him of being too soft.

The city is under martial law. The entire State militia has been brought into Boston, and is quartered on the alert in the armories. The police are on 24-hour watch, equipped with machine-guns, teargas bombs, and armored cars. No meetings are allowed on the Sacco-Vanzetti case. If you wear a beard, or have dark foreign hair or eyes, or in any way act like a man who has not had a Harvard education or Mayflower ancestors, you are picked up on the streets for suspicion.

You must not look like a New Yorker. Two New York women, Helen Black and Ann Washington Craton, were arrested and questioned at a police station for the crime of looking like New Yorkers. You must not need a shave. Six Italians in an automobile who had come for the demonstration on August 10th were arrested and held on a bombing charge because two of them needed a shave.

Detectives dog you everywhere; yes, those stupid, criminal, blank detective faces haunt you everywhere, in restaurants, in drugstores while you are having an ice cream soda, in cigar stores, even in toilets. At night you can rise like Shelley from your dreams and stare below into the moonlit street and see a knot of evil, legal detective faces, watching you lest you go sleep-walking.

It is highly dangerous to be out in the streets after midnight. A group of us, after a hard day’s work at the headquarters, went searching for a restaurant at 12:30, and were followed, not by four or five of the detectives, but by a whole patrol wagon load of them.

I was one of those who picketed the State House on August 10th, the first date set for the murder of Sacco and Vanzetti. Forty of us marched up and down the concrete walk between the elm trees near the Common, gaped at by a vast curious mob of Bostonians and police and detectives, and from the capitol’s ornate balconies, by the official flunkeys of Governor Fuller.

Jewish needle trade workers and Communists from New York. There were five young Finnish working girls from Worcester, Massachusetts, two of them under the age of fifteen. There was John Dos Passos, the splendid young novelist, and Dorothy Parker, a gay, sophisticated writer of light verse and satirical plays with a flavor of social conscience. There was a group of Italian workers, some of them Anarchists. There was a group of young Communist workers from Chicago and New York. There were iron-workers,

Our picket line was a good cross section of the sentiment that has been aroused in America and the rest of the world. There were sailors, jewelry workers, barbers, bakers, educators, agitators and waiters. There was finally a little fiery Anglo-Saxon aged 62, who made a speech in court affirming that he was opposed to Anarchism, was a Harvard graduate, and wanted justice for the two doomed men, for all of which he was fined $ 20.

Dorothy Parker and I were arrested by the same brace of ironhanded policeman. As they hauled us off on the long walk to the police station, a crowd followed after us — a well-dressed Boston mob, of the type that lynched Love joy during the abolition days.

Some of these respectables booed us, and several of them hooted and howled:

“Hang them! Hang the Anarchists!”

That is the mood of respectable Boston at this hour. A friend of mine who is a veteran newspaperman in this city says he has never seen respectable Boston in as tense a mood as now.

“If this were the South they would not wait for Governor Fuller but would storm the jail and lynch Sacco and Vanzetti,” my friend said.

But Governor Fuller is in the lynching mood, though he feels constrained to decorate it with Puritan legalities. And President Lowell of Harvard is in that mood, and all those who have conspired one way or another to execute the two Italians.

They will kill Sacco and Vanzetti legally. They are determined on revenge. For decades they have seen wave after wave of lusty immigrants sweep in over their dying culture. For years these idealists who religiously read Emerson and live on textile mill dividends have had to fight rebel immigrants on strike.

New England is dying culturally and industrially. The proud old libertarian tradition of the abolition days has degenerated into a kind of spiritual incest and shabby mediocre pride of family. The inefficiency of the blueblood factory owners has pushed the textile industry South, where there is plenty of cheap, unorganized and unrebellious native labor.

So these ghosts, these decadents, these haughty mediocre impotent New Englanders have flamed up into a last orgy of revenge. They have the subconscious superstition that the death of Sacco and Vanzetti can restore their dying culture and industry. At last they have a scapegoat. At last they can express the decades of polite frosty despair.

They are as passionate against these Italian workers as white Southerners toward the negro. They know that New England is rotten from stem to stern, and that the slightest match may prove the brand to start a general revolt in the industrial and political field. They will not be moved from their lust for a blood sacrifice — these faded aristocrats. They are too insane with fear and hatred of the new America.

All I can see now to save Sacco and Vanzetti is a world strike. Nothing less stupendous can shake the provincial Chinese wall of this region. Boston is not conducting a murder case, or even the usual American frame-up — it is in the throes of a lynching bee, led by well-spoken Harvard graduates in frockcoats.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1927/v03n05-sep-1927-New-Masses.pdf