#Immigration

The Ghosts of Sacco and Vanzetti, Or Fear of the “Other”

Enduring Gloucester 8 Comments

Judith Winslow Walcott

Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco.  Ben Shahn (1898–1969) © MOMA

“Deep in my subconscious the names Sacco and Vanzetti struggle to reach the surface. Their pain and sacrifice are mirrored in the news I see everyday about travel bans, the exclusion of Muslim ‘terrorists’ and Mexican ‘rapists’ from the US, and the push to build a wall along the US-Mexican border to prevent ‘undesirables’ from entering our country.”

I wrote the above in January a year ago, and the fear of immigrants is ever present this year as we watch the painful struggle over the Dreamers. If we look back to Immigration Reform in 1924, the parallels to today are striking.

Vivian Yee, writing in the New York Times on January 13, 2018, sheds light on this:

The argument was genteel, the tone judicious, the meaning plain: America, wrote the senator leading Congress’s push for immigration reform in 1924, was beginning to “smart under the irritation” of immigrants who “speak a foreign language and live a foreign life.”

There were some familiar refrains in the 1924 immigration debate. Cheap immigrant labor had depressed wages, the restrictionists said. Immigrants had seized jobs from Americans, they said. But it was also heavy on racist rhetoric aimed at preserving what eugenicists and social theorists of the time called the “Nordic” race that, in their telling, had originally settled the United States. 

Just a couple of weeks ago “Nordic” appeared in the national conversation between the President and the Prime Minister of Norway. Paul Thornton says this in the New York Times, on January 11, 2018:

By now, we’ve all probably heard that Trump used a scatalogically charged epithet to say what he really thinks of those countries in Latin America and Africa that, contrary to all available evidence, continue to send their wretched refuse to our shores. What the roughly 4 million of us with parents, grandparents or long-ago Viking descendants from the smallest Scandinavian nation also noticed was Trump’s idea of the prototypical non-shithole country: our humble Norway.

The names Sacco and Vanzetti have now been forced into my consciousness as I see and read about the same bigotry, racism, and hate that surrounded their case in the news today.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, an Italian fishmonger and a shoemaker, were accused and later convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during the April 15, 1920, payroll robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, Massachusetts. The case dragged on for over seven years before they were executed in the electric chair here in Massachusetts at the Charlestown State Prison, on August 23, 1927.

The arguments against them are not very different from what we are hearing today. Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian and Anarchists. The country was stirred up by the Palmer Red Raids of 1919-1920, during which suspected radicals, many of whom were immigrants, were detained and deported from the US. The Establishment in Boston was terrified of these immigrants and what they feared they might do.  But there was a Defense Committee for Sacco and Vanzetti with many supporters here in Boston and around the world.  We thought The Women’s March the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated was enormous; but pictures taken during the seven years the two immigrants suffered in jail show massive crowds also.

Funeral procession for Sacco and Vanzetti in Boston, August 28, 1927.

As a child, there was a strangeness surrounding certain things to do with family—my own family of Republicans, and my paternal aunts and uncles, Democrats. The lightning rod was my paternal grandmother Gertrude L. Winslow, a supporter and defender of the innocence of these two men.

In the last years before they were executed my grandmother was allowed into the jail to visit them. It is from this correspondence that we see their humanity. In August of 1927, my grandmother and a good friend who spoke Italian made the trip to Italy to visit both Sacco and Vanzetti’s families.

Gertrude Winslow (right) leaves the Charlestown State Prison with Mrs. Glendower Evans (left) and Mrs. Rosina Sacco (center) after a visit to Sacco and Vanzetti.

In a letter from the Dedham Jail House June 27, 1927, Bartolomeo Vanzetti writes to my grandmother:

“Dear Friend Mrs. Winslow:

Now, when you will reach my native home-just think to be at your own. You will be tired by the long trip and that is a good place for rest and restor. To went and left in a day, would be a senseless fatigue and there would not be time enough to explain things to my people. Besides that, the interpreter could be out of home or busy-while if you can stay there longer, all of you will have time to understand and explain one another. My sisters will be happy to have you there-they love all who help us and are proud of them. So please, just think to be at home and don’t leave the place until you feel well.”

As a child, I didn’t have these letters as a testament to the defendants’ humanity.  I only had concrete objects like the pink and blue baby blanket knitted by Mrs. Sacco for my brother Nick. He was 14 years older than me, born in 1927, the year they were executed. That blanket wrapped me as a baby many years later.  It was a blanket that fascinated me because it had blue yarn on one side and pink on the other, possibly knitted that way before we were able to determine the sex of the unborn baby, so it was a true gender-neutral gift. The importance was the new life, not the gender.

I also had other experiences.  It was the innuendos and comments that were difficult for me to understand.  I was being taught something, but I was not sure what.

Mary Martin, stirring up controversy in racist America of the 1950’s, sang loud and clear in the musical “South Pacific,”

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

The insidious thing is that the teaching is not overt and a child is left to figure out the subtext often denying their own humanity.

When my grandmother called “Nana” by our family and “Windblow” by all the cousins because, as children, they could not pronounce “Winslow,” would be coming to dinner, my parents would say, “We will not talk politics”.

Then there is a very clear image of meeting Mrs. Sacco on Mt. Vernon Street in Boston. I think I was with my mother; but there was a strangeness to the encounter and somehow it is intermingled with the Hurdy Gurdy man I was fascinated with, who was always near that spot and also happened to be Italian.

Looking back now, I see the tensions that must have existed between my father, an investment banker, and my mother’s father, a successful electrical engineer, and my paternal grandmother— this radical feminist, who was also one of the founders of the ecumenical Community Church of Boston.   Fear of difference and loss and “other” was at the root of it all, then as it is now.

I see this mirrored so clearly today as the Republicans and the corporate world they represent are so terrified that their vast wealth will somehow be diminished by opening our country to immigrants that they are blind to the rest of the world, a world that is already diminished by poverty, bad health care, racism, horrific natural disasters, and so much more.

The poet Emma Lazarus understood the vision that this country was founded upon.  In 1883 she wrote these lines, which appear on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The power and vision of that lamp is what we must never let be extinguished.

So once again the brave and courageous among us outraged by this inhumanity must speak up. More importantly, the Congress of the United States must speak out.

A thread that runs through the letters of both Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti to my grandmother is the need to be brave, and so I leave you with the words of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, written four months before he was executed:

“April 19, 1927, Dedham Jail

Dear Mrs. Winslow:

Oh! Your mayflowers are dear and sweet and most heartly accepted. They remember me of Plymouth and of the woods: the woods which I love so much. They are the flowers of the woods. I thank you very much.

Was not that foolish and unjust to deny you admission? It seems impossible. I was sorry for me and for you. Let’s hope that I may see you again before to die.

Meanwhile keep up a brave heart, dear Mrs.  Winslow.”

My grandmother was never to see him again, as she writes in her memoir:

“…when we reached Rome having successfully concluded our visits to the homes of both Italians, we sent a cable to them in the Death House in Charlestown, telling them that we had seen their families and delivered their messages. I have always hoped that this may have brought them a ray of comfort in their last hours.

“Mrs. Ratcliffe and I read of their execution on August 23rd in an Italian newspaper as we sat on a bench in the little village of Argentiere in the French Alps.”

 

Judy Walcott retired in 2014 after over 20 years of teaching at the Adult Learning Center at North Shore Community College. She also taught reading in the Gloucester Public Schools and is a Certified Dyslexia Therapist. Before becoming involved in education focused on reading, she worked at Facing History and Ourselves, an education project dedicated to the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide. It was here that the parallels concerning racism and bigotry and the work of her grandmother began to germinate.

All from Somewhere Else

Enduring Gloucester 20 Comments

Peter Anastas

Old Gloucester           Theresa Bernstein (1890-2002)

In 1908, my father arrived in America wearing his mother’s shoes.  He had come to join his father, who was working at the Massachusetts Cotton Mill in Lowell.

He was wearing his mother’s shoes because he didn’t own any.  When the officials at the port of Piraeus saw that my father was barefoot, they refused to let him on the ship to America.  It was then that his mother took off her own shoes and handed them to her son.  He would never see his mother again.

When my father arrived in Lowell, he discovered that his father had died from consumption, his lungs packed with textile fibers.  Dad was 9 years old.

A year later, my father was hawking newspapers on the corner of State and
Court streets in Boston.  When he had earned enough money, he bought a shoeshine stand.  At night he taught himself English using Webster’s New International Dictionary and the Boston Evening Transcript.   I still have that dictionary.

At the age of eighteen Dad enlisted in the army and was sent to Europe as a medic, where he remained for the duration of the First World War.   After the war, Dad began to pursue his dream of owning his own business.  He entered the wholesale candy business, eventually coming to Gloucester where he and a partner bought Johnny’s Morgan’s Candy Company on the Boulevard.   When the city took the properties to create an esplanade for Gloucester 300th anniversary in 1923, Dad relocated the business to the corner of Western and Centennial avenues, calling it the Boulevard Sweet Shop.   In 1949 he sold that business and we moved to Rocky Neck, where Dad opened a luncheonette and S.S. Pierce gourmet grocery store called Peter’s.  The store, which for many years became the social center for Rocky Neck life, exists today as Sailor Stan’s.

Papou the Elder. Rocky Neck

Years after he had come to Gloucester, Dad continued to speak English with a strong accent.   I remember once when Eddie Bloomberg, whose father owned Bloomberg’s clothing store and the Strand Theater on Main Street, joked that Dad, like his own father, “murdered the English language.”

“I’d like to know what you would do,” Dad shot back. “Alone in a strange country and no one to turn to.”

My father never went beyond fourth grade in school, but he valued learning.  He sent my brother and me to college, not because he wanted us to do better than he did, but because he wanted us to become “educated,” as he often said.  When I was studying Greek in college, Dad and I used to translate The Iliad together.  He hadn’t forgotten the Ancient Greek he learned in grade school and he could still recite from Homer’s great epics.

After Dad sold the store on Rocky Neck in 1964 and retired, he spent most of his free time collecting and reading books about Greece.

I have a photograph of my mother’s family.  It was taken in front of the Fitz Henry Lane house, where they lived.  It is dated April 6, 1914.  The photograph shows the entire household, my maternal grandparents, all my aunts and uncles, except my uncle George Polisson, who wasn’t born yet.  There are other people in the picture, relatives from Boston and a couple of the men who boarded with the family.

Everyone in the picture is Greek.  Two men are seated playing “bouzoukia,” Greek mandolins; another holds a pitcher of wine and a tray with glasses.  Still, another holds a whole leg of lamb on a skewer.  It is Greek Easter.  It says so in the lower corner of the picture.  In the upper left corner it reads, “Christos Anesti,” which means “Christ is Risen.”

Polisson Family – Lane House. 1914.

The people in the photograph are “different,” the men swarthy, the women exotic with long dark hair done up in buns.  They are holding objects from their own culture, the wine and the lamb, the “bouzoukia.”  The writing on the photograph is in Greek.

I didn’t think I was different until once, in Miss Parks’ second-grade class at the Hovey School, we were asked where our parents were born.  When I told the teacher that my mother had been born in Gloucester but that my father came from Sparta, Greece, one of the kids (I’ve never forgotten her name) piped up: “Sounds like a can of grease.”   After that my brother and I were called “Greasy Greeks” or “Greaseballs.”  When I went home crying one day, my father said, “Tell them that you’re proud to be Greek.  Tell them that the democratic system of government they live under was invented in Greece.”   This happened during the Second World War and I cannot help but think that the war had colored people’s attitudes toward immigrant families like my own.

In the Gloucester of my childhood one heard many different languages and smelled many different kinds of cooking on the way home from school:  Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Yiddish, French Canadian, Finnish, Polish and Russian, among others.   Our grandmothers learned enough of each other’s language to converse over the backyard fences.   Growing up down the Cut or at the Fort, we and our friends had a working knowledge of Italian, exchanging some pungent swearwords in Greek and Italian.  The first African-Americans I saw were jazz musicians, who came to perform at the Hawthorne Inn Casino, in East Gloucester, beginning in the early 1950s, when my brother and I sneaked up the back stairs to listen to this wild new music, which we soon began to play ourselves.  It wasn’t long before we heard Spanish on the street and even Vietnamese and Cambodian.  Though it has always been a cosmopolitan city due to its many ethnicities and art culture, Gloucester has continued to change.  Yet the incredible diversity that defines us has remained the same.

We are all superficially different, and we all came from someplace else.  What brings us together are the stories we tell.  The people in those stories may have different names or speak in languages we do not know, but the tales of arrival and loss, of recognition and assimilation, pain and joy, are uncannily alike.  And so are we fundamentally.

 

Peter Anastas, editorial director of Enduring Gloucester, is a Gloucester native and writer. His most recent book, A Walker in the City: Elegy for Gloucester, is a selection from columns that were published in the Gloucester Daily Times.