Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird

I asked him what line of work his father had been in.

"He was a bank president in Montpelier, Vermont," he said. This was an old man in a war-surplus United States Army overcoat.

Al Capone, the famous Chicago gangster, thought Sacco and Vanzetti should have been executed. He, too, believed that they were enemies of the American way of thinking about America. He was offended by how ungrateful to America these fellow Italian immigrants were.

According to Labor's Untold Story, Capone said, "Bolshevism is knocking at our gates . . . We must keep the worker away from red literature and red ruses."

Which reminds me of a story written by Dr. Robert Fender, my friend back in prison. The story was about a planet where the worst crime was ingratitude. People were executed all the time for being ungrateful. They were executed the way people used to be executed in Czechoslovakia. They were defenestrated. They were thrown out of altitudinous windows.

The hero in Fender's story was finally thrown out of a window for ingratitude. His last words, as he went sailing out of a window thirty floors up, were these: "Thanks a miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiillionnnnnnnnn!"

Before Sacco and Vanzetti could be executed for ingratitude in the Massachusetts style, however, huge crowds turned out in protest all over the world. The fish peddler and the shoemaker had become planetary celebrities.

"Never in our full life," said Vanzetti, "could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man, as now we do by accident."

If this were done as a modern Passion Play, the actors playing the authorities, the Pontius Pilates, would still have to express scorn for the opinions of the mob. But they would be in favor rather than against the death penalty this time.

And they would never wash their hands.

They were in fact so proud of what they were about to do that they asked a committee composed of three of the wisest, most respected, most fair-minded and impartial men within the boundaries of the state to say to the world whether or not justice was about to be done.

It was only this part of the Sacco and Vanzetti story that Kenneth Whistler chose to tell — that night so long ago, when Mary Kathleen and I held hands while he spoke.

He dwelt most scornfully on the resonant credentials of the three wise men.

One was Robert Grant, a retired probate judge, who knew what the laws were and how they were meant to work. The chairman was the president of Harvard, and he would still be president when I became a freshman. Imagine that. He was A. Lawrence Lowell. The other, who according to Whistler " . . . knew a lot about electricity, if nothing else," was Samuel W. Stratton, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

During their deliberations, they received thousands of telegrams, some in favor of the executions, but most opposed. Among the telegraphers were Romain Rolland, George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, John Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis, and H. G. Wells.

The triumvirate declared at last that it was clear to them that, if Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted, justice would be done.

So much for the wisdom of even the wisest human beings.

And I am now compelled to wonder if wisdom has ever existed or can ever exist. Might wisdom be as impossible in this particular universe as a perpetual-motion machine?

Who was the wisest man in the Bible, supposedly — wiser even, we can suppose, than the president of Harvard? He was King Solomon, of course. Two women claiming the same baby appeared before Solomon, asking him to apply his legendary wisdom to their case. He suggested cutting the baby in two.

And the wisest men in Massachusetts said that Sacco and Vanzetti should die.

When their decision was rendered, my hero Kenneth Whistler was in charge of pickets before the Massachusetts State House in Boston, by his own account. It was raining.

"Nature sympathized," he said, looking straight at Mary Kathleen and me in the front row. He laughed.

Mary Kathleen and I did not laugh with him. Neither did anybody else in the audience. His laugh was a chilling laugh about how little Nature ever cares about what human beings think is going on.

And Whistler kept his pickets before the State House for ten more days, until the night of the execution. Then he led them through the winding streets and across the bridge to Charlestown, where the prison was. Among his pickets were Edna St. Vincent Millay and John Dos Passes and Haywood Broun.

National Guardsmen and police were waiting for them. There were machine gunners on the walls, with their guns aimed out at the general populace, the people who wanted Pontius Pilate to be merciful.

And Kenneth Whistler had with him a heavy parcel. It was an enormous banner, long and narrow and rolled up tight. He had had it made that morning.

The prison lights began their dimming.

When they had dimmed nine times, Whistler and a friend hurried to the funeral parlor where the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti were to be displayed. The state had no further use for the bodies. They had become the property of relatives and friends again.

Whistler told us that two pairs of sawhorses had been set up in the front room of the funeral parlor, awaiting the coffins. Now Whistler and his friend unfurled their banner, and they nailed it to the wall over the sawhorses.

On the banner were painted the words that the man who had sentenced Sacco and Vanzetti to death, Webster Thayer, had spoken to a friend soon after he passed the sentence:

DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID TO THOSE

ANARCHIST BASTARDS THE OTHER DAY?

Sacco and Vanzetti never lost their dignity — never cracked up. Walter F. Starbuck finally did.

I seemed to hold up quite well when I was arrested in the showroom of The American Harp Company. When old Delmar Peale showed the two policemen the circular about the stolen clarinet parts, when he explained what I was to be arrested for, I even smiled. I had the perfect alibi, after all: I had been in prison for the past two years.

When I told them that, though, it did not relax them as much as I had hoped. They decided that I was perhaps more of a desperado than they had at first supposed.

The police station was in an uproar when we arrived. Television crews and newspaper reporters were trying to get at the young men who had rioted in the gardens of the United Nations, who had thrown the finance minister of Sri Lanka into the East River. The Sri Lankan had not been found yet, so it was assumed that the rioters would be charged with murder.

Actually, the Sri Lankan would be rescued by a police launch about two hours later. He would be found clinging to a bell buoy off Governor's Island. The papers the next morning would describe him as "incoherent." I can believe it.

There was no one to question me at once. I was going to have to be locked up for a while. The police station was so busy that there wasn't even an ordinary cell for me. I was given a chair in the corridor outside the cells. It was there that the rioters insulted me from behind bars, imagining that I would enjoy nothing so much as making love to them.

I was eventually taken to a padded cell in the basement. It was designed to hold a maniac until an ambulance could come for her or him. There wasn't a toilet in there, because a maniac might try to bash his or her brains out on a toilet's rim. There was no cot, no chair. I would have to sit or lie on the padded floor. Oddly enough, the only piece of furniture was a large bowling trophy, which somebody had stored in there. I got to know it well.

So there I was back in a quiet basement again.

And, as had happened to me when I was the President's special advisor on youth affairs, I was forgotten again.