Stanley Resor, president of the New York advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, was much influenced by the work of the psychologist John Watson in a.n.a.lyzing buying patterns. In blindfold tests Watson showed that smokers could not tell cigarette brands apart-so that although they bought one brand and had brand loyalty, other factors than the taste of the tobacco (despite what they may have thought) were influencing their choice. Advertisers soon learned how to capitalize on these other factors.
Creating and playing on consumer insecurities, advertisers told potential buyers that one key to maintaining beauty, youth, energy and attractiveness was health and personal hygiene. The actress Constance Talmadge, promoting cigarettes, declared, "There"s real health in Lucky Strike . . . For years this has been no secret to those men who keep fit and trim. They know that Luckies steady their nerves and do not harm their physical condition. They know that Lucky Strike is the favorite cigarette of many prominent athletes, who must keep in good shape." Advertisers" success in manipulating the gullible buying public became an article of faith. An essay of 1922 on the subject opened with the words, "Do I understand you to say that you do not believe in advertising? Indeed! Soon you will be telling me that you do not believe in G.o.d."
In the early 1920s Listerine, variously used in the nineteenth century as a surgical antiseptic, a cure for venereal disease and a floor-cleaner, was transformed by advertising into a magical product which would free its user from the dreadful, life-ruining scourge of halitosis-a faux-medical condition invented by the marketing men. Their advertis.e.m.e.nts showed a downcast girl holding her friend"s bridal bouquet above the caption, "Often a bridesmaid, but never a bride." The cause of her loneliness was "chronic halitosis"-which, happily, Listerine (rebranded as a mouthwash) promised to cure. Listerine"s profits soared from $115,000 to $8 million in just seven years.
Advertisers promoted an obsession with cleanliness and good hygiene because it would sell their products; as the historian Stephen Fox puts it, it also "projected a WASP [white Anglo-Saxon Protestant] vision of a tasteless, colorless, odorless, sweat-less world" that chimed with the rampant nativism of American politics. The unspoken message was that immigrants could become better Americans by swilling away their garlic breath with Listerine or covering up their spicy body odor with deodorant. The growth of national advertising (and the prosperity that fueled it) fostered a very specific sense of Americanness and patriotism-wholesome, moral, aspirational and conformist-a sliced-white-bread and apple-pie view of the world. Those who did not fit into this mold, or could not afford to, were branded as outcasts.
Many industries boomed in the 1920s, but one stands tall above the rest: the automotive business. "Why on earth do you need to study what"s changing this country?" asked one of the Lynds" interviewees in Middletown. "I can tell you what"s happening in just four letters: A-U-T-O!" In 1920 there were 7.5 million cars in the United States; a decade later that number had soared more than three times to 27 million, or one car for every five people. In mid-1920s Middletown, owning a car had become by 1924 "an accepted essential of normal living," just as owning a telephone had been at the turn of the century. Half of Middletown"s working-cla.s.s families owned cars, almost all paid for by installment-although, of that group, a third did not yet have a bathtub.
Cars and the network of roads and suburbs that sprang up in their wake transformed America physically and psychologically. Distances shrank. For the first time people could travel more than five miles to work or school; trips of a hundred miles or more suddenly became a regular occurrence. In 1920 each car would travel 55,000 miles in its lifetime; by 1930 that number had jumped to 200,000 miles. Three million miles of government-coordinated asphalted highways crisscrossed America by 1927, including a transcontinental road that allowed motorists to drive directly across the country from coast to coast. Filling stations, perhaps the archetypal image of twentieth-century America, were built by the sides of these new roads in their thousands; traffic lights and parking regulations were gradually introduced in towns.
Traditional patterns of living were also transformed by the introduction of the car. Rural communities were no longer isolated islands surrounded by empty prairies. Children who did not live in towns could go to school, and thus had the chance to create lives different from their parents". Work patterns changed. Teenagers borrowed their parents" cars to meet their friends on their own; families went for a drive instead of going to church on Sunday. Social commentators attributed the breakdown of family values and piety as much to the negative influence of cars as to the movies.
Auto-related industries like rubber, oil, steel, petroleum and gla.s.s-and the cities they were based in-boomed. Detroit expanded by 126 percent between 1910 and 1920; Akron, Ohio, the tire capital, grew 173 percent in the same period; the wealth and population of oil-producing cities like Houston and Los Angeles ballooned.
With fuel prices reaching record highs in the early 1920s, oil companies aggressively pursued potential new fields in the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Iran, between them dividing regions into the provinces of individual companies and exploiting them ruthlessly. The Government"s noninterventionist policies allowed them to integrate vertically, controlling every aspect of oil production and distribution from refineries to petrol stations.
By 1930 the car industry accounted for a tenth of America"s manufacturing wages and more than a tenth of all its manufactured goods. An English visitor to the States wrote, "As I caught my first glimpse of Detroit, I felt as I imagine a seventeenth century traveler must have felt when he approached Versailles." The age of steam had been vanquished by the age of petrol.
The self-made pioneers of the motor trade-the Dodge brothers, Billy Durant, John Jakob Raskob, the Fisher brothers, and Walter Chrysler-were hailed as modern-day buccaneers and their work was called "our greatest industry": "Business has become the last great heroism . . . a conflict of the hard-muscled and strongwilled, for only they will survive."
One man in particular was credited with developing this uniquely American industry: that irascible, eccentric genius, Henry Ford. Ford had invented the self-starting car in 1912, perfected the a.s.sembly-line production method at his Highland Park plant near Detroit two years later, and by 1924 controlled over half the motor industry. Vanity Fair Vanity Fair hailed him as a member of their annual Hall of Fame the following year: "Because he has changed the whole rural life of America by lowering the price of motors cars; because he has made some of the most ludicrous statements ever conceived by a public man; and finally because the benevolent paternalism prevailing in his factories is enormously applauded and admired by everyone except his employees." hailed him as a member of their annual Hall of Fame the following year: "Because he has changed the whole rural life of America by lowering the price of motors cars; because he has made some of the most ludicrous statements ever conceived by a public man; and finally because the benevolent paternalism prevailing in his factories is enormously applauded and admired by everyone except his employees."
Henry Ford"s revolutionary idea was to provide farmers with a cheap, practical car that would replace their horse. The first Model Ts-fondly known as Flivvers or Tin Lizzies-were sold in 1909 for about $850 (by the mid-1920s falling to less than $300), as compared to several thousand for other, more sophisticated marks. His main problem was keeping up with demand. In the year that his a.s.sembly-line system was installed at Highland Park, which allowed his workers to put together a car every ninety-three minutes, he produced more cars than every other manufacturer combined. By the time the Ford plant produced its ten-millionth vehicle, nine out of every ten cars on the road worldwide were Fords.
What was later called ma.s.s production was the key to Ford"s success. "The way to make automobiles is to make one automobile like another automobile, to make them all alike . . . just as one pin is like another pin, when it comes from the pin factory," he said. Making individual parts-and thus whole cars-exactly identical and interchangeable was as important for repairing existing cars as for manufacturing new ones.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the machine he had made available to millions of Americans was changing society irretrievably-hastening the march of the urbanization and new codes of morality he deplored-Ford was incurably romantic about the simple pastoral America into which he had been born. He held on tightly to the populist values of a late nineteenth-century Midwestern farmer throughout his life.
At his birthplace of Dearborn, Ford constructed a replica nineteenth-century farming community, supported a back-to-the-soil movement, collected Americana and encouraged old-fashioned folk dancing. He himself was an enthusiastic and energetic dancer. In 1918, Ford bought his local newspaper, the Dearborn Independent Dearborn Independent, which he intended to use as the mouthpiece for his homespun philosophy. "Mr. Ford"s Own Page"-which he did not write-discussed homilies like "Opportunity will not overlook you because you wear overalls."
But there was a darker side to Ford"s nostalgia for a lost rural heartland. For two years, between 1920 and 1922, the Dearborn Independent Dearborn Independent took on an overtly anti-Semitic tone. The "International Jew" was described as "the world"s foremost problem" and blamed for the high rents, low morals, short skirts, gambling and drunkenness that Ford believed were destroying America. His outspoken views earned him an interesting fan: Adolf Hitler was said to have had Ford"s picture on the wall by his desk in Munich in 1922 and copies of his books scattered around his office. The flow of anti-Semitic articles stopped as suddenly as they had started, probably because Ford was thinking of running for president and realized that a hate campaign would not serve his interests. Lawsuits had been threatened. took on an overtly anti-Semitic tone. The "International Jew" was described as "the world"s foremost problem" and blamed for the high rents, low morals, short skirts, gambling and drunkenness that Ford believed were destroying America. His outspoken views earned him an interesting fan: Adolf Hitler was said to have had Ford"s picture on the wall by his desk in Munich in 1922 and copies of his books scattered around his office. The flow of anti-Semitic articles stopped as suddenly as they had started, probably because Ford was thinking of running for president and realized that a hate campaign would not serve his interests. Lawsuits had been threatened.
It was typical of Ford"s contrariness that although he openly expressed his anti-Semitic views, he also had a number of Jewish friends. In 1927 Ford shut down the Dearborn Independent Dearborn Independent altogether, running a long apology for everything he had written against Jews in past issues; this did not stop him accepting the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from the German consul in 1938 on his seventy-fifth birthday. altogether, running a long apology for everything he had written against Jews in past issues; this did not stop him accepting the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from the German consul in 1938 on his seventy-fifth birthday.
With his distrust of foreigners, bigoted views and pride in his limited education, Ford represented the successful side of political fundamentalism. "Facts mess up my mind," he said; one might add that abstract thought seems to have done the same. Despite his hypocritical contempt for "big business," he was a single-minded businessman with the morals of a robber baron, who spared scant consideration for the workers who made him rich. To him, they were simply cogs in the machine. His factory was an altar to capitalism, "a vast, satanic cathedral of private enterprise."
There were some ways in which Ford was a good boss. One book he had read was Ralph Waldo Emerson"s essays, which inspired him with a strong sense of social justice. As long as they could do the job required of them, he was happy to hire black workers, women, the disabled, immigrants (including Jews) and ex-convicts. A sociological department at Highland Park urged Ford"s workers to be clean, healthy and family minded, rather than spending all their money in speakeasies; foreigners were encouraged to learn English. Ford also paid his workers generously-a previously unheard-of $5 a day for factory work-because, he said, he wanted them to be able to afford the cars they were making. Ford"s paternalistic philosophy epitomized the idea of "welfare capitalism" that 1920s politicians hoped would arise out of a business-dominated society.
But Ford expected an awful lot for his $5: he was known for raising "the pain threshold of capitalism." Obsessively high standards of workmanship, as well as of behavior, were insisted upon. Philanthropic innovations were intended less to please his workers than to make them more efficient. From Ford"s point of view, the most important advantage of the high wages he offered was that however much he demanded from his workers, there would always be others waiting to replace them if they could not keep up.
By the early 1920s Ford was motor manufacturing"s Colossus. The Tin Lizzie had proved so dominant that between 1917 and 1923 Ford hadn"t even needed to advertise her merits. As the industry liked to say, "If you could deliver automobiles you could sell them." Production was the only issue. Slowly, though, other motor manufacturers were beginning to think of ways to weaken Ford"s ascendancy, grasping in a way that he did not that cars needed to be sold, not merely distributed.
In 1924 the single-color, single-model Model T was knocked off her pedestal. General Motors had started to offer rainbow colored cars in a variety of styles, including enclosed bodies and self-starting motors-realizing that the next challenge to the automotive industry was not how to get people to buy a car (most of those who could afford it already had one) but how to get them to buy another, and then another.
As the market became more compet.i.tive, cars became more sophisticated and the range of people they were targeted towards broadened. Improved engine technology and fuel made driving smoother, quieter and easier. Crank shafts were replaced by electric starter motors. New developments in lacquers that dried in twenty-four hours rather than up to thirty days allowed customers to buy a car in Liberty Blue, Versailles Violet or Apache Red rather than black.
At first Ford refused to accept that the common man didn"t want to remain the "common" man-that he aspired to something greater and more elusive than cheap and efficient uniformity. His market troubles were compounded by conflict with his son, Edsel, who had been president of Ford Motors since 1918, over the direction the business should take. Finally convinced by arguments that he needed to adapt to this strange new desire for choice, Ford shut down his plant and modernized it, sacking all his workers. Since his was the only factory in town it was almost impossible for them to find new jobs without leaving their homes. When he was ready, Ford hired them back-at the same rate they had received before they were fired, $5 a day, and without any compensation for the $50 million they had collectively lost in missed wages.
Although it was the conglomerate General Motors who had ousted Ford from his position as market leader, the most interesting car manufacturer of the 1920s was Walter Chrysler. He had started out as a railway engineer before joining Buick (part of General Motors) as works manager in 1912, where he was described by one of his team as the "greatest production man in the industry," and quickly rose to become company president. While Ford was developing his a.s.sembly line, Chrysler was innovating in other directions. The introduction of electric lights and starter motors made him think for the first time that the new breed of emanc.i.p.ated women might be potential car buyers.
Chrysler left Buick in January 1920. At his farewell dinner he was lavished with the highest possible praise, lauded as "a real American and one who understands Americanism and keeps things in the main current of American life." He took over Maxwell Motors which began selling the first Chrysler cars in 1924 and became the Chrysler Corporation the following year.
While Ford was (both to its advantage and its detriment) a one-man band, and while General Motors, an amalgamation of various smaller companies like Buick, depended on its organizational capacity, the Chrysler Corporation"s success was founded on Walter Chrysler"s extraordinary management skills. Chrysler himself personified "traditional American qualities of initiative, courage, leadership and resourcefulness." He believed "in the dignity of work." Not only was he unfailingly energetic and driven, but he was "absolutely fair to his people, square with his customers, and faithful to his stockholders." Most importantly of all, he created an atmosphere in which his workers were encouraged to be inventive, dynamic and responsive.
His engineering team, in particular, flourished under Chrysler"s guidance. The first Chrysler car they created was a tribute to his high standards and commitment to the consumer"s needs. It was stylish, luxurious, quiet, smooth-driving and easy to handle-but although reasonably priced it was still in the midrange bracket as too few could be produced each year.
Chrysler was determined to capture the low-price market dominated by General Motors and Ford, while giving the customer a high-quality car. "The person who prefers to drive a small car is ent.i.tled to every consideration that can be given him," he said, "comfort, roominess, easy riding and long life." To this end he brought out the affordable Plymouth in 1928. Hoping for it to appeal to women as well as men, Chrysler invited the aviator Amelia Earhart to launch it in Madison Square Garden.
The name Plymouth was chosen to evoke the "endurance and strength, the rugged honesty, the enterprise, the determination of achievement and the freedom from old limitations of that Pilgrim band who were the first American colonists." To underline the message, Chrysler salesmen were sent Pilgrim costumes in which to promote the new car.
As manufacturers like Chrysler realized, advertising and marketing were crucial elements of retailing success. Entranced customers were sold freedom, speed, glamour and romance along with their motors. Perhaps the most famous car advertis.e.m.e.nt of the 1920s was for the Jordan Motor Company. It showed a girl in an open Jordan racing a cowboy through wilderness, her scarf flying out behind her. "Somewhere west of Laramie," read the tagline, "there"s a bronco-busting, steer-roping girl who knows what I"m talking about. She can tell what a sa.s.sy pony, that"s a cross between greased lightning and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he"s going high, wide and handsome. The truth is-the Jordan Playboy was built for her."
Celebrity endors.e.m.e.nts also attracted valuable consumer attention. Cadillac was famous for the bullet-proof limousine it built for Al Capone. Movie stars commissioned custom-built cars in striking colors and finishes. Pola Negri liked to be driven around Hollywood in her white velvet-upholstered white Rolls-Royce, complete with white-liveried driver-except when it rained, when he wore black.
In January 1928, Walter Chrysler made a public declaration explicitly linking car-owning and road-building to prosperity and progress-to the march of civilization itself. "My a.s.sociates and I have looked ahead and we failed to see any reason for change [in current levels of growth]. We could find no economic justification for cycles of depression. All the indicators we could see were that times were good and would continue good." It looked as though the pro-business att.i.tudes of the U.S. Government, and indeed of the country as a whole, had triumphantly succeeded in creating an economy that could not fail.
But even in the years of what felt like unbridled prosperity, cracks were beginning to show. Partly because cars made possible the development of the suburbs, reached by newly built roads, property was another booming industry, funded by new methods of financing. Florida, made newly habitable by air-conditioning and refrigeration, was its epicenter; vacationers and investors rushed to purchase property there. Developers began converting Florida"s salt-water swamps into a web of streets and houses. Addison Mizner, creator of Boca Raton, built ever more extravagant houses in a style that came to be known as "b.a.s.t.a.r.d-Spanish-Moorish-Romanesque-Gothic-Renaissance-Big-Bull- Market-and-d.a.m.n-the-Expense." There were 30,000 people living in Miami in 1920. Five years later that number had soared to 75,000-of whom it was said that a third were estate agents.
Stories of the money that could be made abounded. One man had bought a building lot near Miami for $25 in 1896 (when Miami had only had sixty inhabitants) and sold it in 1925 for $150,000; another cursed himself as he watched land he had sold for $12 an acre being successively sold on for $17, then $30, then $60. An evangelizing estate agent lectured prospective buyers on the property market"s three cardinal sins: fear, caution and delay. "If Jesus Christ were alive today," he declared, "he"d buy a lot right here!"
The frenzied speculation came to a halt in September 1926 when a violent hurricane laid waste to the state of Florida. Four hundred people were killed; 40,000 were left homeless; tankers were beached on Miami"s streets. The man who had watched his property value rise from $12 to $60 an acre found that the entire string of payments was in default and he couldn"t even lay hands on his original sale price-he was forced to take the land back himself in lieu of payment.
Somehow America"s faith in its inexorable good fortune remained undampened. "The Florida boom was the first indication of the mood of the twenties and the conviction that G.o.d intended the American middle cla.s.s to be rich," wrote the economist John Kenneth Galbraith thirty years later. "But that this mood survived the Florida collapse is still more remarkable."
In 1926 Andrew Mellon"s Revenue Act pa.s.sed into law, lowering taxes for everyone-but especially the rich. Before the new laws, a man with an income of a million dollars had paid $600,000 in tax; afterwards he paid just $200,000. Three quarters of one percent of the population paid 94 percent of the Government"s tax revenue-but then again, the top 5 percent of the population earned a third of the nation"s income.
Mellon could argue that with the pa.s.sage of his tax package he had accomplished his aims. Government spending had been reduced by nearly a half, government debt was down by $6 billion, taxes were minimal and the economy was booming. By the time Mellon"s new tax system came into effect in 1927 a few people were starting to worry about the effects of over-speculation and the over-extension of credit, but neither Mellon nor Coolidge would countenance an interest-rate rise; they believed the market should be self-regulating. This would have grave implications in the coming years.
Perhaps more serious still was the general acceptance of a two-tier society in which, despite America"s escalating wealth, discrepancies in income were growing ever wider. America"s vast new national wealth was deceptive. Its burgeoning prosperity was distributed unevenly and depended either on high levels of business investment or astronomical luxury spending or both. In 1929, 71 percent of American families lived on annual incomes of less than $2,500, which was the generally accepted minimum standard for decent living; of these, 42 percent survived on less than $1,500. Immigrants in particular were the victims of this gross economic inequality.
Anarchists Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, shackled together, on their way to their retrial shackled together, on their way to their retrial for robbery and murder in 1927 for robbery and murder in 1927
7.
FEAR Of THE FOREIGN IN THE MID-1910S, AN ITALIAN IMMIGRANT NAMED BARTOLOMEO Vanzetti was living in Plymouth, Ma.s.sachusetts, and working for the local cordage company which dominated the town. I Factory conditions across the United States were harsh-twelve- or fourteen-hour days, six- or seven-day weeks, heavy, dangerous labor, desperately poor pay, fetid, filthy conditions-and Plymouth was no exception. To add insult to injury, foreign factory workers were often paid as much as a third less than their American-born colleagues, reflecting the popular a.s.sumption that, being of different "racial stock," they were less intelligent and less capable.
When in 1916 the cordage workers decided to strike for better conditions, Vanzetti (who was no longer working for the factory) led the protest. He had lived in America for eight years, doing one wretched job after another. Over the years he had absorbed the radical ideas of men like Giuseppe Mazzini and Karl Marx who spoke of a time when all men would have decent jobs, roofs over their heads and food on their tables. As Vanzetti would later write, "I sought my liberty in the liberty of all; my happiness in the happiness of all. I realized that the equity of deeds, of rights and of duties, is the only moral basis upon which could be erected a just human society." When he stood on a soapbox and told his fellow workers that they deserved better, they believed him. The company grudgingly raised their wages by a dollar. Afterwards Vanzetti was the only person who was explicitly barred from ever working for the factory again.
From this point onwards, Vanzetti worked for himself, selling fish from a hand-pulled cart and, when money was tighter than usual, building roads, cutting ice or shoveling snow for the Board of Public Works-earning his bread in the open air and, as he put it, "by the honest sweat of my brow." His interest in radical politics and activism continued. Knowing he could not pursue his intellectual and social interests in a conventional job, he preferred to work for himself. Later he would say that he disdained business because it was a form of speculation using human lives.
During the cordage strike, Vanzetti had met one of his communist-anarchist heroes, Luigi Galleani, a pa.s.sionate advocate of violent revolution, who came to Plymouth to encourage the protesters. For several years Vanzetti had been a subscriber and contributor to Galleani"s Italian-language journal, the Subversive Chronicle Subversive Chronicle, which plotted the overthrow of the capitalist regime and argued in favor of terrorism and political a.s.sa.s.sination. The Chronicle Chronicle had also published the Italian translation of Leopold Kampf"s had also published the Italian translation of Leopold Kampf"s On the Eve On the Eve, a play examining the lives of Russian revolutionaries who were radicalized during the years following 1905, and a widely distributed bomb-making manual with the innocent t.i.tle Health Is Within You Health Is Within You.
Americans had feared radicals before the war, and distrusted foreigners-people from Southern and Eastern Europe, Russians and Italians, as well as Germans-during it, but the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 aggravated existing fears and prejudices. Floods of new immigrants, many from Russia, many with established communist sympathies and inspired by events at home, began to dominate the American communist movement in the late 1910s. Labor unions began to ally themselves with international radical groups; their militancy scared employers. Although the total number of active communists in the United States was probably well under 40,000, they were a vocal minority and the threat of a communist revolution on American sh.o.r.es began to seem a very real one. "If I had my way, I"d fill the jails so full of them [Bolsheviks] that their feet would stick out of the windows," declared the evangelist Billy Sunday.
Because radicals, whether they were communists, anarchists, socialists or "Wobblies" (members of a group called the Industrial Workers of the World), were usually pacifists who had opposed the war, and because so many of them were new to American sh.o.r.es, they were labeled unpatriotic-potential traitors who ought not to be allowed to remain in the United States. Respectable politicians started saying things like, "My motto for the Reds is S.O.S.-ship or shoot. I believe we should place them all on a ship of stone, with sails of lead, and that their first stopping place should be h.e.l.l." (In March 1920 the New Republic New Republic attributed this quotation to General Leonard Wood, who stood against Warren Harding for the Republican presidential nomination that year; Wood publicly denied saying it.) attributed this quotation to General Leonard Wood, who stood against Warren Harding for the Republican presidential nomination that year; Wood publicly denied saying it.) Intolerance, as the historian Frederick Allen observed ten years later, "became an American virtue." Any individual or activity that cast into question "America" or "American values" was deemed suspicious. In popular parlance a Bolshevik was anybody "from the dynamiter to the man who wears a straw hat in September" while the name "radical" covered all those whose shades of opinion ranged "from a mild wonderment over "what the world is coming to" to the extremists of the left wing.""
This anxiety about outsiders, especially non-Northern European foreigners, was given pseudo-scientific credence by a series of books and studies claiming to prove that certain "races" were physically and mentally inferior to others. Writing in the popular Sat.u.r.day Evening Post Sat.u.r.day Evening Post, published from Philadelphia, Kenneth Roberts called Polish Jews "human parasites" and denounced free immigration on the grounds that it would produce "a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and South-Eastern Europe."
In the spring of 1919 post-war inflation hit hard. Workers had less to live on; they needed higher wages just to keep up with rising prices. But the companies they worked for were making less and had little inclination to pay them more. A wave of hard-fought strikes, like the one Vanzetti had helped coordinate in Plymouth three years earlier, swept the United States. It is estimated that four million people-ship-builders in Seattle, construction workers in New York, policemen in Boston, steel workers and coal miners all over the country-went on strike over the course of 1919. These strikes took place against a background of anarchist violence and rioting which allowed local leaders to crush walk-outs by exaggerating the Red menace and discrediting the striking workers as radicals.
Sixteen bombs were found in a New York post office that April by a worker who had read about a brown-paper package exploding in the hands of Senator Hardwick"s maid in Atlanta and remembered that he had set aside identical packages at his sorting office because of insufficient postage. On his information, eighteen more were intercepted at post offices across the country.
On the evening of 2 June bombs were set off in eight cities at carefully planned destinations. The most significant was the one aimed at the front door of the Washington house of the new Attorney-General, Mitch.e.l.l Palmer. The bomber, who apparently stumbled as he went up the steps to Palmer"s house, was killed by his own blast. He was an Italian activist, an adherent of Galleani and an a.s.sociate of Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Galleani and eight of his closest followers were deported three weeks later, but although the authorities were desperate to root out more of his a.s.sociates it was almost impossible to penetrate their tight-knit circles and find evidence that would incriminate them.
After this incident Palmer, known before his appointment to the Attorney-General"s office in March 1919 as a Wilsonian progressive who had supported women"s suffrage and laws to protect child workers, lost no time in mounting a campaign against "enemy aliens": the "blaze of revolution," he said, was sweeping across America "like a prairie fire." He requested and received extra funds of $500,000 to set up Edgar Hoover (no relation to Herbert) in an anti-radical division of the Department of Justice. Twenty-four-year-old Hoover, a former librarian, quickly built up a meticulously cross-referenced card catalogue of 250,000 suspects. As a subscriber to Galleani"s Subversive Chronicle Subversive Chronicle, Bartolomeo Vanzetti"s name was on Hoover"s list.
Using a Labor Department law set up to allow the Government to deport radicals during wartime, Palmer started rounding up suspected anarchists and revolutionaries in November. Despite the appropriation of the Wartime Sedition Act, his tactics were savage and unlawful. Scant attention was paid to individual warrants. Crowded tenement houses were virtually demolished during the raids, staircases ripped out, men beaten and physically torn away from their wives and children. Even the a.s.sistant Secretary of Labor admitted that the attacks were "intended to be terrifying" and noted that "the whole red crusade seems to have been saturated with "labor" spy interests"-that is to say agents hired by big companies to generate and intensify industrial tensions.
In Detroit, where eight hundred men were held for ten days in unheated stone cells, sharing a single toilet and water fountain, the Justice Department"s agent gleefully announced to reporters that, "We didn"t leave them a sc.r.a.p of paper to do their business." Between November and January over five thousand people were arrested in Palmer"s raids, of whom five hundred were deported and another third prosecuted.
The Government and the Establishment were united in their support of Palmer"s extreme measures. "There is no time to waste on hair-splitting over infringements of liberty . . ." said the Washington Post Washington Post. Warren Harding, at the start of his campaign for the presidency, delivered a tub-thumping speech to the Ohio Society. "Call it the selfishness of nationality if you will, I think it is an inspiration to patriotic devotion-To safeguard America first. To stabilize America first. To prosper America first. To exalt America first. To live for and revere America first . . . Let the internationalist dream and Bolshevist destroy . . . We proclaim Americanism and acclaim America."
The Palmer raids were conducted particularly vigorously around Boston. A large community of immigrants, especially Italians, lived in the Bay area, their presence greatly resented by longer-established residents. About eight hundred people were arrested on 2 January 1920 and half were taken in chains to the immigrant station on Deer Island in Boston Harbor where they too were held in unsanitary, freezing conditions. Two of the prisoners died of pneumonia; another went mad; a third plunged to his death out of a fifth-story window. Later it emerged that a group of thirty-nine bakers arrested in Lynn, Ma.s.sachusetts, had been gathered together not to ferment revolution, but simply to establish a cooperative bakery.
It was at this time, and in this atmosphere of suspicion and fear, that two crimes in particular were committed near Boston. In Bridgewater on Christmas Eve, 1919, four men had unsuccessfully attempted to hold up a payroll truck, and fired at the truck as it fled. Four months later, in April, a gang murdered a paymaster and his guard at a South Braintree shoe factory, escaping the scene with $15,000. Suspicion rested firmly on the immigrant community, and the police were under enormous pressure to find and convict the murderers.
The following month, the body of Andrea Salsedo, an Italian anarchist printer, was found smashed on the ground beneath the windows of the Department of Justice"s New York office. He and an a.s.sociate had been held without warrants and probably tortured since their arrests eight weeks earlier. It was unclear whether Salsedo had jumped or was pushed. During his captivity, Bartolomeo Vanzetti had traveled to New York as a delegate from his local Italian society, hoping to stand bail for Salsedo and his friend.
Back in Boston two days after Salsedo"s death, Vanzetti and a fellow anarchist, Nicola Sacco, went to get an a.s.sociate"s car out of the garage so that they could drive to the homes of various anarchists, warn them of Salsedo"s fate and tell them to hide away any incriminating political pamphlets-probably including the bomb-making manual, Health Is Within You Health Is Within You. They had heard that the area was going to be raided again. Finding that the car did not have a current license plate, they left the garage and boarded a trolley-bus heading home. The garage owner, acting on official instructions to inform on any Italians who owned cars, called the police as soon as they had left. The police apprehended Sacco and Vanzetti on the trolley-bus and took them into custody.
Visibly nervous, aware that the authorities probably knew of their anarchist connections, the two men lied about the fact that they were carrying weapons and who their friends were. The officers who arrested them interpreted this as "consciousness of guilt"-although John Dos Pa.s.sos, who later wrote an impa.s.sioned appeal for their release, suggested that it might have been "consciousness of the dead body of their comrade Salsedo lying smashed in the spring dawn two days before."
The Department of Justice quickly realized that by convicting Sacco and Vanzetti for the Bridgewater and South Braintree crimes they would be getting rid of two central members of the Galleanist group they had long hoped to smash. Even before they were arrested, Sacco and Vanzetti had been the focus of Justice Department interest. Once they were in prison awaiting trial the Department stepped up its efforts to incriminate them. As many as a dozen spies were placed near them and their friends and families-in neighboring cells in prison; boarding with Sacco"s wife, Rosa; one even sat on the committee formed for their defense (and pocketed funds from it for himself). A letter to one of the spies later showed that he was offered $8 a day for his work-two or three dollars more than Vanzetti had earned per week as a dishwasher when he first arrived in New York. But the agents" efforts went unrewarded.
Maybe no one knew anything; certainly they weren"t telling. As Sacco, who worked for a shoe factory, had a stamped time-card for Christmas Eve 1919, Vanzetti alone was tried for being part of the attempted robbery in South Braintree. The court case was staged in Plymouth, where he was a known anarchist. Despite the eighteen mostly Italian witnesses Vanzetti produced to testify to his whereabouts selling fish on 24 December (eels are an Italian Christmas delicacy), nine of whom had actually spoken to him, Vanzetti was convicted on evidence such as that of a fourteen-year-old boy who admitted he had not seen the face of the fleeing man purported to be Vanzetti, but swore he "could tell he was a foreigner by the way he ran." One witness was asked whether he had ever heard any of Vanzetti"s entirely unrelated political speeches to the striking cordage workers, four years earlier. Judge Webster Thayer-who asked for and received permission to preside over the South Braintree case as well-told the jury in his summing-up that the crime was "cognate" with Vanzetti"s radical ideas.
After Vanzetti was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years for attempted robbery at Bridgewater, he and Sacco were tried for their part in the South Braintree murders in a courtroom heavily and dramatically fortified against a potential bomb attack. Twenty-two of the thirty-five eyewitnesses to the crime were certain that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had been there; seven were unable to make any kind of identification; of the four who identified Sacco, two were discredited and the other two changed their first accounts to incriminate him; only one, who had elsewhere contradicted the evidence he gave in court, positively identified Vanzetti. Both men had alibis for that day, but these were disregarded by the jury. Although many of the Justice Department agents apparently thought that the theft and murders had been committed by professional highway robbers, one of the detectives working on the case was later quoted as saying, "They were bad actors anyway and got what was coming to them." Off the record, Judge Thayer was said to have said that he wanted to see the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds hanged.
The two men were convicted and sentenced to death by Thayer in July 1921. "There was not a vibration of sympathy in his tone when he did so," said Vanzetti later. "I wondered as I listened to him, why he hated me so. Is not a Judge supposed to be impartial? But now I think I know-I must have looked like a strange animal to him, being a plain worker, an alien, and a radical to boot. And why was it that all my witnesses, simple people who were anxious to tell the simple truth, were laughed at and disregarded? No credence was given to their words because they, too, were merely aliens."
Over the next few years, while Sacco and Vanzetti waited for a retrial, the Red Scare fueled by Palmer"s brutal raids abated. The threat of a widespread Bolshevik rising seemed less and less likely as stability returned to Europe. Despite Palmer"s dire warnings of imminent revolution on American soil, the chaos he had predicted did not come to pa.s.s. Americans wanted to forget the recent turmoil and concentrate on the future. When Warren Harding came to office seeking "a return to normalcy" he declared, "Too much has been said about Bolshevism in America."
But immigrants continued to flood into America. Between June 1920 and June 1921, the year of Sacco and Vanzetti"s first trial, 800,000 people, 65 percent of them from South-Eastern Europe, landed in Ellis Island. Incoming ships had to be diverted to Boston because the facilities for dealing with new arrivals were overwhelmed. Almost unanimously, Congress pa.s.sed an emergency act to stall the incursion. "America must be kept American," declared the Vice President, Calvin Coolidge. Supported by the trade unions, the National Origins Act of 1924 was unabashedly discriminatory, limiting immigrants from South-Eastern Europe to pre-1890 levels and prohibiting Asian immigration. On hearing the news j.a.pan declared a day of mourning.
Prejudice, ignorance and intolerance were gradually being inst.i.tutionalized. One senator declared that the bill would mean "that the America of our grandchildren will be a vastly better place to live in. It will mean a more h.o.m.ogeneous nation, more self-reliant, more independent, and more closely knit by common purpose and common ideas."
Only a few lone voices, like that of the Baltimore Evening Sun Baltimore Evening Sun, dared express disapproval of the bill, pointing out that the United States had finally abandoned "that old and admirable tradition that this land was to serve as a refuge for the oppressed of all nations. No longer is the foreigner, to American eyes, a welcome fugitive from the political, economic and religious oppression of the Old World."
From the start, liberal intellectuals and political progressives recognized Sacco and Vanzetti"s cause as their own. In late 1921 Anatole France wrote an open letter to the people of the United States, describing Sacco and Vanzetti"s crime as one of "opinion" and their sentence as "iniquitous." "It is horrible to think that human beings should pay with their lives for the exercise of that most sacred right which, no matter what party we belong to, we must all defend," the French writer wrote, urging Americans to save the two men "for your honor, for the honor of your children, and for the generations yet unborn."
The following year, in an article in Harper"s Harper"s, the writer Katharine Gerould declared that America was no longer a free country. "No thinking citizen, I venture to say, can express in freedom more than a part of his honest convictions," she wrote. "I do not of course refer to convictions that are frankly criminal. I do mean that everywhere, on every hand, free speech is choked off in one direction or another." Her piece provoked hundreds of responses, as many denouncing her as a dangerous radical as rejoicing that someone had at last dared tell the truth.
For the six years following their conviction, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco were held in different prisons, Vanzetti serving hard labor in Charleston and Sacco in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours out of twenty-four in Dedham, Iowa. Both were affected profoundly by their incarceration. At one point Sacco went on hunger strike, refusing food for thirty days; Vanzetti became so depressed and paranoid that he spent four months in a prison asylum.
When they were well, the two men wrote to each other from their cells with fraternal affection. They had known one another since 1917, when they had spent six months in Mexico avoiding the draft. Neither had supported what they saw as a war to defend capitalist interests. From that point on, bolstered by their shared ideals and commitment to Galleanist principles, their friendship had flourished.
Burly Nicola Sacco, at thirty years old in 1921 three years Vanzetti"s junior, had arrived in America in 1908, within months of Vanzetti, but he had gone straight to Boston. His family were prosperous peasant farmers from the foothills of the Apennines in southern Italy. Unlike Vanzetti, Sacco was married with two young children and had a steady and relatively well-paid job; like his friend, though, he had been a socialist and anarchist since 1913. On the day he was said to have committed the South Braintree robbery and murders, Sacco claimed he had been at the Italian consulate in Boston, getting pa.s.sports for himself and his family to return to Italy for good. He had saved almost $1,500, enough to start a new life at home.
Vanzetti had no plans to return to Italy, although like Sacco he had been frustrated, humiliated and demoralized by the discrimination and hostility he had encountered in the United States. After a seven-day crossing in steerage, he had sighted New York from the ship, looming "on the horizon in all its grandness and illusion of happiness." But from his first steps on land he was shocked to find that he and his fellow arrivals were treated like animals. In his characteristically idiosyncratic prose, Vanzetti remembered seeing terrified children weeping as they went through immigration procedures. "Not a word of kindness, of encouragement, [were given] to lighten the burden of tears that rests heavily upon the newly arrived on American sh.o.r.es. Hope, which lured these immigrants to the new land, wither [sic] under the touch of harsh officials."
Friendless, empty-handed and unable to speak or understand English, twenty-year-old Vanzetti was typical of many Southern and Eastern European immigrants to the United States. Al Capone"s family, which had arrived fourteen years earlier, had at least had each other. "Where was I to go? What was I to do? Here was the promised land. The elevated [railroad] rattled by and did not answer," remembered Vanzetti, his words unwittingly echoing Charlie Chaplin"s first frightened response to New York. "The automobiles and the trolleys sped by, heedless of me."
The single contact Vanzetti had in New York could not find him s.p.a.ce to sleep in his crowded, rat-filled tenement, so Vanzetti slept in the park. He did help him get work as a dishwasher, for which Vanzetti was paid $5 or $6-as much as a worker on Ford"s plant would earn in a day, a few years later-for an eighty-eight hour week. Although he hated baking, Vanzetti eventually managed to find work as a pastry-chef (the trade he had been trained in as a boy), but time and again he was sacked for no reason after a few months in the job. It turned out that the head chefs were paid by the employment agencies every time they hired a new worker, so they never kept anyone for long. Over the next few years, as he made his way slowly eastwards towards Boston, Vanzetti preferred to find manual labor under the open sky in furnaces, quarries and rail yards.
Vanzetti never married; his life was spent alone. What sustained him through these hard years was his inner life, his almost spiritual understanding of social justice. He read everything he could get his hands on (in Italian), from the Divine Comedy Divine Comedy to Charles Darwin to Maxim Gorky to the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta. Vanzetti started to see himself as a champion of "the weak, the poor, the simple and the persecuted": the character of the man who would inspire the Plymouth cordage workers and then a generation of discontented intellectuals began to take shape. to Charles Darwin to Maxim Gorky to the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta. Vanzetti started to see himself as a champion of "the weak, the poor, the simple and the persecuted": the character of the man who would inspire the Plymouth cordage workers and then a generation of discontented intellectuals began to take shape.
"I understood that man cannot trample with impunity upon the unwritten laws that govern his life, he cannot violate the ties that bind him to the universe," he wrote while he was in prison. "I grasped the concept of fraternity, of universal love. I maintained that whosoever benefits or hurts a man, benefits or hurts the whole species . . . I wanted a roof for every family, bread for every mouth, education for every heart, light for every intellect . . . I maintain that liberty of conscience is as inalienable as life . . . I am and will be until the last instant (unless I should discover that I am in error) an anarchist communist, because I believe that communism is the most humane form of social contract, because I know that only with liberty can man rise, become n.o.ble, and complete."
Neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had spoken, read or written English with any fluency when they were arrested. Sacco did not read or write much until 1922, but Vanzetti began to study from the moment he was imprisoned. Visitors commented on his "keen interest in world affairs, and his thirst for knowledge."
Smiling benevolently beneath his substantial walrus moustache, in prison Vanzetti became an icon of the left. In letters to friends and supporters, he embraced his role as a political symbol, developing and expanding his philosophy and almost mystical sense of mission. "I cannot share your confidence in "better government, " because I do not believe in the government, any of them, since to me they can only differ in names from one another," he wrote to one new friend in the spring of 1925. "Mutual aid and cooperation and cooperatives shall be the very base of a completely new social system, or else nothing is accomplished."
To another, later that year, he made it sound almost as if arrest and imprisonment had allowed him to serve his principles: "We did not come to [be] vanquished but to win, to destroy a world of crimes and miseries and to re-build with its freed atoms a new world. I am disappointed, but not crushed. I have not become a rat or a renegade. And I can carry my burden to the last, and only that counts." He refused to recant his beliefs and continued to call for vengeance, which he hoped would be realized as freedom for all. "But till then, the struggle goes on . . . till then, to fight is our duty, our right, our necessity."
The Department of Justice would have seen these words in the context of Vanzetti"s links to the violent anarchist movement-and so they were meant; doc.u.ments signed by Vanzetti and Sacco while they were in prison contain pointed references to Health Is Within You Health Is Within You. But they also inspired their liberal supporters with a vision of Vanzetti, in particular, as a "philosophical" anarchist, a harmless dreamer, a would-be intellectual. Instead of a ferocious activist, they saw a poet and an idealist behind the large moustache.
Vanzetti contemplated his end with serenity and dignity. "Were I to recommence the "journey of life," I should tread the same road, seeking, however, to lessen the sum of my sins and errors and to multiply that of my good deeds." With all the lyricism of the incarcerated, he wrote of his lost hopes of living "free among the green and in the sunshine under an open sky."
He thanked well-wishers who had sent him flowers for his cell: "My window here is peopled of recipients, it is a riot of blissing colors and beauties forms: A giranium plant, a tulip and plant both from Mrs. Evans. White flowers, pink carnations, roseate peaches buds and flowers, bush-yellow flowers from Mrs. Jack, and a bouquet of May flowers from Mrs. Winslow." How could Mrs. Evans or Mrs. Winslow see this gentle, nature-loving man as a murderer?
Sacco and Vanzetti"s adherents focused on the "n.o.ble" characters of the accused men, swearing that no one who knew them could believe either man capable of committing the crimes with which they were charged. Visitors and correspondents described them as warm, poetic, simple-hearted and sincere; every contact they had with them, they claimed, made the conviction of their innocence stronger. Judge Thayer, however, thought differently.
After six appeals their case was reopened in 1927. One of Sacco"s fellow prisoners in Dedham, Celestino Madeiros, had confessed to being part of the South Braintree gang and specified that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had been there. He named his fellow conspirators as the Morelli brothers-one of whom bore a striking similarity to Nicola Sacco. Madeiros was able to demonstrate that he had received a large sum of money, his fifth-part share of the robbery. No money had ever been a.s.sociated with either Sacco or Vanzetti, the alleged thieves.
Madeiros"s evidence corroborated the generally held opinion of the Boston Department of Justice agents that the South Braintree crimes had been committed by a professional gang of highway-men, but Judge Thayer (again presiding) dismissed it. The Department of Justice refused to open their files to disprove evidence gathered against them of spying and manipulating evidence and witnesses. A Justice Department agent who had placed a spy in prison with Sacco insisted that his "only motive in trying to clear up the mystery was to aid justice."
Sacco and Vanzetti"s lawyer protested: "A government that has come to honor its own secrets more than the lives of its citizens has become a tyranny whether you call it a republic or a monarchy or anything else," but there was nothing he could do to change Thayer"s mind. As the journalist Heyward Broun would later point out, Thayer was acting out of a genuine commitment to what he saw as the public interest. His belief in Sacco and Vanzetti"s guilt was that of a "solid and substantial" citizen, and it chimed "with all our national ideals and aspirations." Whether as ungrateful, un-American immigrants, common criminals, dangerous radicals or G.o.dless anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti could not be allowed to triumph. A woman in the courtroom cried out, "It is death condemning life!"
"There could not have been another Judge on the face of this earth more prejudiced and more cruel than you have been against us," said Vanzetti later. "We know, and you know in your heart, that you have been against us from the very beginning, before you see us. Before you see us you already know that we were radicals, that we were underdogs, that we were the enemy . . ."
Vanzetti spoke proudly in court after Thayer had pa.s.sed sentence. "My conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical, and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I am an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved country than for myself; but I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already." Sacco echoed him, but with a more overtly political tone. "I know the sentence will be between two cla.s.s, the oppressed cla.s.s and the rich cla.s.s, and there will always be collision between one and the other . . . That is why I am here today on this bench, for having been the oppressed cla.s.s."
After sentencing, the two men were moved into the same prison for the first time. Between April and July they were held in Dedham, and for the final six weeks before their execution they were moved to Charleston. Still both refused to renounce the political ideals they had held so dear and for which they believed they were being punished. "Both Nick and I are anarchists-he radical of the radical-the black cats, the terrors of many, of all the bigots, exploiters, charlatans, fakers and oppressors," said Vanzetti in May. "Consequently we are also the more slandered, misrepresented, misunderstood and persecuted of all."
He proudly rejected a suggestion that they recant in order to sue for pardon. "We cannot make it [a refutation of their ideals], because it is a thing against our understanding and conscience...I cannot explain you why . . . But we too have a faith, a dignity, a sincerity. Our faith is cursed, as all the old ones were at their beginning. But we stick to it as long as we honestly believe we are right . . . We have renounced voluntarily to almost all of even the most honest joys of life when we were at our twenties. Lately we have sacrificed all to our faith. And now that we are old, sick, crushed, near death: . . . should we now quack, recant, renegate, be vile for the love of our pitiable carca.s.ses? Never, never, never . . . We are ready to suffer as much as we have suffered, to die, but be men to the last."
Interviewed by the New York World New York World at about the same time, Vanzetti expressed the strange sense of vindication that accompanied their final defeat. The newspaper chose to emphasize his foreign accent and imperfect English. "If it had not been for these thing, I might have live out my life, talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for joostice, for man"s onderstanding of man as now we do by accident." at about the same time, Vanzetti expressed the strange sense of vindication that accompanied their final defeat. The newspaper chose to emphasize his foreign accent and imperfect English. "If it had not been for these thing, I might have live out my life, talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for joostice, for man"s onderstanding of man as now we do by accident."
Despite the efforts of their Defense Committee and a vocal international group of prominent supporters including Eugene Debs, H. G. Wells, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, Sacco and Vanzetti"s death sentences were confirmed. The journalist William Allen White was among those who wrote to Ma.s.sachusetts governor Alvan Fuller pleading for clemency, but to no avail. "I now know why the witches were persecuted and hanged by upright and G.o.dless people . . . This is a tremendously important case for America. It seems to me that our courts would be vastly more discredited before the world if we executed innocent men than they would be if we refrained to execute innocent men when there was even a shadow of doubt as to their guilt."
On 21 August Sacco and Vanzetti formally thanked the Defense Committee that had supported them since their arrest. "That we have lost and have to die does not diminish our appreciation and grat.i.tude for your great solidarity with us and our families. Friends and Comrades, now that the tragedy of this trial is at an end, be all as of one heart. Only two of us will die. Our ideal, you our comrades, will live by millions; we have won, but not vanquished. Just treasure our suffering, our sorrow, our mistakes, our defeats, our pa.s.sion for future battles and for the great emanc.i.p.ation."