“Eternal symbols of a dream”: Upton Sinclair, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the Meaning of Anarchism

From jury selection, through the trial's testimony and eventual verdict, until the numerous failed appeals, the forces of US justice treated the result as a foregone conclusion: two radical immigrants had little hope of receiving fair treatment in the 1920s. In the process, it relegates anarchism-the very reason Sacco and Vanzetti presented a threat extending far beyond the crimes of which they were accused-to an aside, an historical quirk, a relative inconsequence. [...]I argue that Sinclair's blend of journalistic naturalism and socialism deanarchizes Sacco and Vanzetti; the author's marriage of literary form and politics neuters their anarchism, producing a putatively "true" depiction that transforms them into generic symbols for the period's left.' Between Sacco and Vanzetti's arrest in 1920 and their execution, efforts by the SVDC-and the large number of writers, attorneys, union leaders, progressives, and radicals drawn to the men's plight-rightly focused on their trial: the goal was to win their release or, at very least, to keep them alive, so "the SVDC concerned itself with [their] defense ... in the public sphere only insofar as it might affect their legal fate" (Colson 957). Most SVDC publications, therefore, included minimal focus on the men's anarchism but instead directed attention to the legal mechanism deciding their fate: the trial, judicial decisions, legal rights, and the law itself.