Wednesday, August 10, 1927
Terror in New York — Sacco and Vanzetti
There are police everywhere.
Bombs are exploding in the New York subways . . . in a church in Philadelphia . . . in the mayor’s house in Baltimore . . . and more bombs and explosives are being found every day.
Everybody is on edge.
On the radio tonight they said the big insurance companies have been churning out bomb insurance policies in cities across America — they said in Boston alone, where Sacco and Vanzetti await execution, over $100 million worth of bomb insurance policies has been purchased.
The Roaring Twenties seem to have two very different roars: one the sound of partying by the rich, the other the sound of protesting by the poor.
Apparently, in the the midst of the most prosperous time in the history of the world, those who haven’t been invited to the dance are getting angrier and angrier.
Unions led by socialists and communists are marching all across the country. In New York today, 400,000 protested all over the city. Fifteen thousand gathered in Union Square, where they were watched by 4,000 policemen. Scores of police arrived mounted on horseback and motorcycles to corral the crowd, and to ensure that if things turned violent — if this was the moment when the anger of those on the outside finally turned to rage — that none of that rage burned beyond Union Square.
As for those of us who have been invited to enjoy the party that is the Roaring Twenties — Steven and his Wall Street swells, Stanwyck and her Broadway crowd, Schoolboy and the rest of us Yankees — no one seems too concerned by the protests. It’s just not something anyone talks about while we’re swimming in gin at two o’clock in the morning.
But the bombs have gotten to us all. Among the fortunate crowd who don’t have to work with our hands, there is now a palpable sense of fear and distrust of foreigners — and it’s colliding with the anger of the masses.
For those of us whose parents were born in America, it’s hard not to feel fearful of the foreign laborers we pass on the street. Hard not to wonder if any man with an accent might not be the next Sacco or Vanzetti, the next anarchist waiting to set off a bomb — perhaps even planning to detonate it at midnight tonight, right after the original Sacco and Vanzetti are finally electrocuted.
S unday night, as we were walking out of the Stadium, just before we got into his car, Schoolboy Hoyt looked back at the ballpark and thinking out loud said, “You know, if I were a political anarchist, I’d definitely plant a bomb in the Stadium.”
“You might want to keep that thought to yourself.”
“I will,” he said as we sat down in the front seat and broke out a pack of cigarettes. “And, anyway, I’m not that kind of anarchist.”
I was having trouble lighting my smoke. Either my lighter was low on fluid or the thought of Schoolboy’s bomb plot had unnerved me just a bit.
“Damn it,” I said, just before I finally got it to light, and Schoolboy started up the car.
“You say you’re not that kind of anarchist — what kind of anarchist are you?” I asked.
“Well, for one, I’m not political. But I like to think that I have non-violent, and spiritual, anarchist tendencies,” Schoolboy explained, as he waved goodbye to Skipper, the security guard who stands by the player’s gate.
“And just how do these tendencies manifest themselves?”
“Mostly in bed,” he replied.
Baseball players don’t make a habit of talking about politics or religion with one another.
Of course, most of us don’t make a habit of talking about those subjects at all, simply because we’re too busy talking about baseball and broads, though not in that order. But conversations about politics and religion are actively avoided, because when it comes to those two subjects even the smallest difference of opinion can fracture a locker room.
How do you feel about the Scopes Monkey Trial?
How do you feel about the League of Nations?
How do you feel about all the farm foreclosures?
How do you feel about people on Wall Street making millions while most of the country is struggling to feed themselves?
How do you feel about women having gotten the right to vote?
How do you feel about Negroes?
How do you feel about Coolidge not running for reelection?
None of those questions is as important to a ballplayer as, “How do you feel about winning?”
Still, even guys on the team who normally don’t read the newspapers are reading about Sacco and Vanzetti. And my guess is just about every Yankee, except maybe one, Lazzeri, thinks they’re guilty — and they also probably think it’s already taken far too long for the Italians to be executed.
It’s been seven years since Sacco and Vanzetti murdered two men in a robbery just outside of Boston, back in 1920.
Most people believe they pulled off the robbery to finance Italian anarchists who hate American capitalism — the same anarchists who set off a massive bomb on Wall Street just two days after Sacco and Vanzetti were indicted.
The Wall Street bomb exploded right outside the J.P. Morgan Bank and killed 38 people, most of them young messengers, clerks and stenographers — none of them the millionaire bankers that the anarchists hate so much. But then that wasn’t the anarchists’ point. Their point was to create terror.
That’s why anarchists love bombs.
Back in 1919 the government uncovered a plot to mail more than 30 bombs to J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and government and immigration officials. Then, later that summer, bombs exploded in eight cities.
The events of 1919 detonated the Red Scare and new anti-immigration laws, signed first by President Harding and then by President Coolidge, that limited the number of immigrants coming into the country down to a trickle — though for my pal Steven it still feels like a flood.
“The rest of the world is just dumping all their problems on us,” Steven’s frequently grumbling. “These aren’t the best and the finest. The best ones, the successful ones, stay back in their home countries. We get the problems. We get the criminals and rapists.”
“But Steven,” I’ll say to him, “your whole new business with Rothstein is based on creating stock out of immigrant ideas. Do you really hate all of them?”
“No, there are some good ones. I’m just saying we just can’t keep letting them in. We can’t let in every single W*p, Pol*ck, Kra*t, Russk*e, K*ke and Ch*nk who floats over here. It’s just common sense.
“America is for Americans.”
Herb Pennock feels the same way, although he doesn’t grumble too loudly about it, especially with Lazzeri on the Yankees. But every now and then, out on the ballfield or on the train away from the other players, I’ll catch him talking about it.
Back in the 1600s, Pennock’s family shared a boat over from England with William Penn, and now our millionaire on the mound from Pennsylvania — or the Squire of Kennett Square, as the press calls Pennock — seems to think that ship his family sailed on should have been the last one allowed to dock on this side of the Atlantic ocean.
It’s funny how just about everybody thinks their family’s boat should have been the last one. Old Mick, who runs McDonald’s Restaurant on Broadway and 72nd, was born some 50 years ago in the Five Points, but if you listen to him and his daughter Kelly jawing about immigration, you’d think they’d been cabin mates with Pennock’s family.
Of course, Mick and Kelly have nothing in common with Sacco and Vanzetti.
It seems like Sacco and Vanzetti ceased to be men years ago. They have become symbols.
Unionists and immigrants across the country — even mine workers in Colorado — believe they were framed, and that they’re being put to death as part of a war against not just the anarchists but any political opposition to our raging capitalism. For them, Sacco and Vanzetti are victims of a criminal justice system that’s a tool of the capitalists, oppresses the poor, and purposely victimizes immigrants.
A number of intellectuals who believe Sacco and Vanzetti didn’t receive a fair trial have published articles and letters, and have spoken out against their executions. Albert Einstein, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and perhaps most notably Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter.
Still, last week the Governor of Massachusetts announced he wouldn’t halt the executions.
That’s what sent the unions, the socialists and the communists into the streets. That’s what set off the latest roar of protest.
According to Ford Frick, the press box math professor, there are over six million people living in New York. And that a full third of them are immigrants.
If America is a Melting Pot, as they tried to teach us in school, then New York City is the place where all the ingredients get poured in . . . and Yankee Stadium has become the place where it’s all stirred together. More and more each day it seems, Yankee fans come in all languages and even colors.
It used to be that just the Italian fans yelled, “Poosh ’em up, Tony!” but now, since the newspapers started writing about it, even the non-Italians do it.
I’ve heard, “You can do it, Lou!” yelled in German, Gehrig’s mother tongue. But I’m sure I’ve also heard Lou cheered in Yiddish, Polish, French and even Chinese.
The most amazing thing is that the third roar of the Twenties — the roar of the crowd — has no accent.
It’s one voice blended together.
- Felix Frankfurter
- LOU Gehrig
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
- WAITE Hoyt
- TONY Lazzeri
- J.P. Morgan Jr.
- HERB Pennock
- John D. Rockefeller
- Supreme Court of the United States
- Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti
- STEVEN
- 1927 Yankees
- 1920 Wall Street Bombing
- Immigration Act of 1924
- NEW YORK TIMES, August 6, 1927: “Bombs Explode in Two Subway Stations Here; Walls Shattered, Many Are Hurt, One Dying; Sacco Reprisals Are Suspected by the Police”.
- NEW YORK TIMES, August 6, 1927: “Church Is Bombed In Philadelphia”.
- NEW YORK TIMES, August 7, 1927: “Baltimore Mayor’s Home Bombed.”
- NEW YORK TIMES, August 10, 1927: “15,000 At Union Square”.
