The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A New England Legend by Howard Fast

Author:Howard Fast
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

Chapter 11

EVEN BEFORE four o’clock on August 22nd, there were people at Union Square in New York City, hundreds of people, some of them standing quietly in little groups, some of them walking about slowly, and still others moving as if they were looking for something not easily found; and the police were there too. On the rooftops around the square, police had set up observation posts and machine gun nests, and the people in the square, looking up, could see the figures of the police silhouetted against the sky, and the blunt, ugly gun muzzles pointing down at them. People looking up wondered, “Well, now, what do they expect?” Already, there was a thematic silence in the place; did they expect that out of here, out of Union Square in New York City, an army would begin to march to Boston to free Sacco and Vanzetti?

And even if the police thought of anything as crazy as that, they should have realized that it was too late. It was Monday afternoon already. Even a man’s heart would have to fly quickly to reach Boston before midnight.

It was shortly after four o’clock that the square began to fill. Strangely, women came first, many of them; no one understood why that should be. They were mothers and housewives, plain working class women for the most part, poorly dressed, with the dry, hard hands used for the whole sustenance of life. A good many of them had their children with them, some two or three little children whom they led by hand, some smaller children carried in arm—and the children knew that there was no pleasure out of this particular pilgrimage. When the women arrived, two small, informal meetings began, with the speakers standing on boxes, but the police moved in quickly and dispersed those meetings.

At a little after four o’clock, large groups of workers began to arrive in the square. Already in the square were hundreds of fur and hat workers who had laid down their tools for this day in protest and sympathy, and now there moved among them, mixing with them, Italian laborers who had gone on the job at seven in the morning and left it at four in the afternoon. Straight from work they came to Union Square, carrying their lunch pails, hot and tired and dirty with the day’s labor. They came in groups of four and seven and ten, off this job and that job, and at half past four, a meeting began among them. The police moved toward this meeting, but other workers also moved toward it; and it suddenly became too big and the police left it alone.

A group of merchant seamen came into the square, Irish and Poles and Italians, half a dozen black men and two Chinese, and they kept together as they moved through the thickening eddies of people. They came to where two women stood weeping, and then they halted in a sort of embarrassed and impotent respect. Not far

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