The Zinn Reader (59 page)

10

P
LATO:

F
ALLEN
I
DOL

In a course I taught for many years at Boston University, called "Law and Justice in America," I had fun with Plato, one of the gods of Western intellectual thought. I.F. Stone was long one of my heroes for his refusal to be bullied by authority, political or intellectual. So when I saw that he, retired from his remarkable
I.F. Stone's Weekly,
had written a book on Plato and Socrates, I was happy to review it for
Z Magazine,
where it appeared in April 1988 under the title
Perils of Plato.
The piece was then reprinted in a collection of my essays,
Failure to Quit
(Common Courage Press).

Ionce heard I.F. Stone, queried about his extraordinary investigative reporting, say: "I'm having so much fun, I should be arrested." After reading his new book
The Trial of Socrates,
I am willing to testify against him. He is clearly having too much fun.

He is also (though classical scholarship seems far removed from journalism) carrying on the work he did in his famous
Weekly.
He has lowered himself (secretly, guilty of trespass) into the mineshaft, with his lamp, his pick and shovel, dug deep into the documents kept by the authorities, and emerged at the end of a long day with some brilliant nuggets, which he offers to the world, and which damn the authorities.

He shows us that the usefulness of history does not depend on its newness. Events of two thousand years ago can be as illuminating as those of yesterday; the ideas of people in ancient Athens are as familiar as those we read in the daily newspaper.

Stone, who once annoyed presidents and FBI directors, is now irritating professional philosophers. He has moved into their territory, into the house they considered a private dwelling, indeed, into the best room, the one with Plato's
Complete Works,
in the original Greek. Lacking J. Edgar Hoover's resources, the philosophers are unable to let out a contract on I.E Stone except to book reviewers.

One of these, in the
New York Times,
said that Stone is "determinedly unsympathetic" (to Socrates, to Plato), full of "misconceptions," and perhaps even "anti-intellectual prejudice."

For a long time Plato has been one of the untouchables of modern culture, his reputation that of an awesome mind, a brilliant writer of dialogue; his work the greatest of the Great Books. You don't criticize Plato without a risk of being called anti-intellectual.

I can't get excited, I confess, about the scholarly disputations in
The Trial of Socrates.
Like: should you trust Plutarch's or Diodorus Siculus' claim that the philosopher Anaxagorus was also the object of a political trial in Athens, when neither Thucydides nor Xenophon nor Plato mentioned it? Let I.F. Stone have his fun.

What is important is that Stone challenges the intellectual authorities of modern Western culture as brazenly as he has done with the political authorities.

It is easy for liberals and radicals to expose the Best and the Brightest as political advisers, like those Phi Beta Kissingers who gave Machiavellian advice to the warmakers of Vietnam. It seems harder to escape the thrall of the intellectual advisers, the Great Names and the Great Books. And even when we manage to do that, we may substitute our own, the Great Names and Great Books of the Left, thus replacing one cultural hegemony with another.

Surely we need more practice in challenging intellectual authori

ty of all kinds. I.F. Stone sets a good example. And he picks the most formidable of targets, the great Plato.

If you have read Allan Bloom's book,
The Closing of the American Mind,
you will notice that it was written in a state of shock and fear caused by the tumults of the Sixties. There is no evidence of shock at the war in Vietnam, or at police dogs attacking blacks in Bull Connor's Birmingham, but there is hysteria over the fact that his Plato seminar was threatened with interruption by students demonstrating on the Cornell campus where he taught. In page after page, Bloom swoons over Plato.

He and his fellow conservatives have good reason to do so. And Western culture has good reason for making Plato a demi-God, required reading for every educated person who will take his or her proper place in society. It is good to see that I.F. Stone, characteristically, refuses to be intimidated.

Socrates left no writings that we know of. (Maybe that's why he was executed. Publish or perish.) So Plato put words in his mouth. This was shrewd, to
create
a character (we don't
really
know what Socrates was like) who could charm us, a wise, gentle man put to death by the government in Athens because he spoke his mind. The words coming from such a man will be especially persuasive.

But they are Plato's words, Plato's ideas. All we know of Socrates is what Plato tells us. Or, what we read in recollections of another contemporary of his, Xenophon. Or, what we can believe about him from reading his friend Aristophanes' spoof on Socrates in his play,
The Clouds.

So we can't know for sure what Socrates really said to his friend Crito, who visited him in jail, after he had been condemned to death. But we do know that what Plato has him say, in the dialogue
Crito
(written many years after Socrates' execution in 399 B.C.), has been impressed, with or without attribution, on the minds of many generations, down to the present day, with deadly effect.

Plato's message is presented appealingly by a man calmly facing death. It is made even more appealing by the fact that it follows another dialogue, the
Apology,
in which Socrates addresses the jury in an eloquent defense of free speech, saying: "The unexamined life is not worth living."

Plato then unashamedly (lesson one in intellectual bullying: speak with utter confidence) presents us with some unexamined ideas. Having established Socrates' credentials as a martyr for independent thought, he proceeds in the
Crito
to put into Socrates' mouth an argument for blind obedience to government.

It is hardly a dialogue. Poor Crito is reduced to saying, to every one of Socrates' little speeches: "Yes...of course...clearly...I agree...Yes...I think that you are right.... True..." And Socrates is going on and on, like the good trouper that he is, saying Plato's lines, making Plato's argument for him. We can't be sure these are Socrates ideas. But we know they are Plato's because he makes an even more extended case for a totalitarian state in his famous
Republic.

Crito offers to help Socrates escape from prison. Socrates replies: "No, I must obey the law. True, Athens has committed an injustice against me by ordering me to die for speaking my mind. But if I complained about this injustice, Athens could rightly say: 'We brought you into the world, we raised you, we educated you, we gave you and every other citizen a share of all the good things we could.'" Socrates accepts this, saying: "By not leaving Athens, I agreed to obey its laws. And so I will go to my death."

It is Plato's bumper-sticker: "Love it or leave it." Plato was the apostle of civil obedience. He did not live long enough to encounter the argument of Thoreau, who wrote a famous essay on civil disobedience. Thoreau said that whatever good things we have were not given us by the state, but by the energies and talents of the people of the country. And he would be damned if he would pay taxes to support a war against Mexico based on such a paltry argument.

Plato, the Western world's star intellectual, makes a number of paltry arguments in this so-called dialogue. He has the state say to Socrates (and Socrates accepts this so humbly one cannot believe this is the defiant orator of the
Apology):
"What complaint have you against us and the state, that you are trying to destroy us? Are we not, first of all, your parents? Through us your father took your mother and brought you into the world."

What complaint? Only that they are putting him to death! The state as parents? Now we understand those words: The Motherland, or The Fatherland, or The Founding Fathers, or Uncle Sam. It's not some little junta of military men and politicians who are sending you to die in some muddy field in Asia or Central America; it's your mother, your father, or your father's favorite brother. How can you say no?

Socrates listens meekly to the words of The Law: "Are you too wise to see your country is worthier, more to be revered, more sacred, and held in higher honor both by the gods and by all men of understanding, than your father and your mother and all your other ancestors; that you ought to reverence it and to submit to it...and to obey in silence if it orders you to endure flogging or imprisonment or if it send you to battle to be wounded or to die?"

Crito is virtually mute, a sad sack of a debater. You would think that Plato, just to maintain his reputation for good dialogue, would give Crito some better lines. But he took no chances. And so the admirable obligation one feels to one's neighbors, one's family, one's principles, indeed to other human beings wherever they reside on the planet, becomes confused with blind obedience to that disreputable artifice called government. And in that confusion, young men, going off to war in some part of the world they never heard of, for some cause that cannot be rationally explained, would say: "I owe it to my country."

These arguments are important, not because we want to make a judgment about Socrates or Plato or ancient Athens (it is too late for that), but because they are a way of thinking which every nation-state drums into the heads of its citizens from the time they are old enough to go to school. And because they show the perils of placing our trust, and the lives of our children, in the hands of the Experts, whether in politics or philosophy. It is not too late to try to overcome that.

And I was provoked to all of this by I.F. Stone, who was just having fun.

11

U
PTON
S
INCLAIR AND
S
ACCO &
V
ANZETTI

As a teen-ager starting to read serious books, I became a fan of Upton Sinclair, the socialist muckraker who wrote with the kind of clarity and passion that appeals to young readers. After reading
The Brass Check, The Jungle, Oil,
and several other books, I came across one of his lesser-known novels,
Boston,
which was about the famous case of Sacco and Vanzetti. I had already become interested in that extraordinary, tragic episode in American history, and I just devoured the novel. It remained out of print for a long time, but a small publisher in Boston, Robert Bentley, also an admirer of Upton Sinclair, decided to re-issue it in a new, handsome edition in 1978, and asked me to write an Introduction, which is reprinted here.

Upton Sinclair's novel,
Boston,
long unavailable, is being reprinted, and it is a gift to have it back. Fifty years have passed since Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were strapped into a chair at Charlestown Prison, near Boston, and electrocuted. There is a need to recall what happened, and to understand why
Boston,
classified as fiction, is so true an account of that case, that time, and so unsettling in its closeness to our case, our time.

The story of Sacco and Vanzetti, whenever revived, even after half a century, awakens deep feelings. In the summer of 1977, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts officially pronounced that the two men had not had a fair trial, and immediately there were outcries in the state legislature, letters to the newspapers.

One citizen wrote: "By what incredible arrogance do Governor Dukakis and Daniel A. Taylor, his legal adviser, dare to put themselves above Gov. Alvin T. Fuller of Massachusetts, who declared that Sacco and Vanzetti had a fair trial, were fairly convicted and fairly punished for their crime?"

Another, signing his letter "John M. Cabot, U.S. Ambassador, Retired," expressed his "great indignation" and noted that Governor Fuller's affirmation of the death sentence was made after a special review by "three of Massachusetts's most distinguished and respected citizens—President Lowell of Harvard, President Stratton of MIT and retired Judge Grant."

Heywood Broun put it a bit differently, in his column in the
New York World
fifty years ago: "It is not every prisoner who has a President of Harvard University throw on the switch for him.... If this is a lynching, at least the fish peddler and his friend the factory hand may take unction to their souls that they will die at the hands of men in dinner jackets or academic gowns..."

Governor Fuller's son, Peter Fuller, Boston's leading Cadillac dealer, as well as a racer of thoroughbred horses, called Dukakis' statement "an attempt to besmirch a guy's record that we believe in and love, whose memory we cherish." He added: "We're sitting here in the last building my father built, and it's the most beautiful car agency on the Eastern Coast and perhaps in the United States."

In New York, a few days before August 23, 1977, the fiftieth anniversary of the execution, the
New York Times
reported: "Plans by Mayor Beame to proclaim next Tuesday 'Sacco and Vanzetti Day' have been canceled in an effort to avoid controversy, a City Hall spokesman said yesterday."

There must be good reason why a case fifty years old, its principals dead, arouses such emotion. It is not the kind of history that can be handled comfortably, in harmless ceremonies, like the Bicentennial celebrations of 1976, in which the revolutionary doctrines of the Declaration of Independence were lost in a Disneyland of pageantry. Sacco and Vanzetti were not Washington and Jefferson, not wealthy insurgents making a half-revolution to replace a foreign ruling class with a native one, to exchange a limited monarchy for a limited democracy. They were (as Upton Sinclair reminds us, using the harsh word so often as to irritate us, to make us feel the insult ourselves) "wops," foreigners, poor workingmen.

Worst of all, Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists, meaning they had some crazy notion of a full democracy in which neither foreignness nor poverty would exit, and thought that without those provocations, war among nations would end for all time. But to do this, the rich would have to be fought and their riches confiscated. This is not like killing to rob a payroll. It is a crime much worse, and the story of two such men cannot be recalled without trouble.

Therefore, let us recall it. But let us not concentrate on that question which is the center of most discussion of the Sacco-Vanzetti case: were they guilty of the robbery committed April 15, 1920, at the Slater & Morrill shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts, and the murder of the paymaster Frederick Parmewnter, and the guard, Alessandro Berardelli? Let us go beyond that question to ask others, more important, more dangerous. That is what
Boston
does.

Not that we can neglect the question of guilt or innocence: the trial, the witnesses, the defendants, the judge, the jury, the lawyers, and all those appeals to the higher courts, the governor, the presidents of Harvard and MIT, to the Supreme Court of the United States. It is, indeed, the suspiciousness surrounding all that which leads us further.

Why, three weeks after the holdup at South Braintree, were Sacco and Vanzetti arrested on a streetcar in Brockton? True, they had been at a garage to pick up a friend's car, and a getaway car had been used in the robbery, but no one knew what kind of car that was. True, they were both armed when picked up, but they had some reason to be worried for their safety. They were aliens and anarchists, and for months there had been raids carried out by order of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, in which Department of Justice agents all over the country invaded meetings of suspected radicals, broke into homes in the middle of the night, held people incommunicado and without warrants, beat them with clubs and blackjacks.

In Boston, five hundred were arrested, chained together, and marched through the streets. Luigi Galleani, editor of the anarchist paper
Cronaca Sovversiva,
to which Sacco and Vanzetti subscribed, was picked up in Boston and quickly deported.

Something even more frightening had happened. A fellow anarchist of Sacco and Vanzetti, also a follower of Galleani, a typesetter named Andrea Salsedo, who lived in New York, was kidnapped (the proper word for illegal seizure of a person) by members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and held in their orifices on the fourteenth floor of the Park Row Building. He was not allowed to call his family, friends, or a lawyer, was questioned and beaten, according to a fellow prisoner. During the eighth week of his imprisonment, on May 3, 1920, the body of Salsedo, smashed to a pulp, was found on the pavement near the Park Row Building, and the Bureau announced that he had committed suicide by jumping from the fourteenth floor window of the room in which they had kept him. (In 1977, one recalls an incident of the 1950s, disclosed recently: the mysterious death-fall of a scientist named Frank Olson from a sixteenth story hotel window in New York, after being surreptitiously dosed with LSD by the Central Intelligence Agency.)

It was May 5, 1920, having just learned of Salsedo's death, that Sacco and Vanzetti were found, armed, on a Brockton street car, arrested, and interrogated. They responded to police questions with lies, and these would later, at the trial, be considered as "consciousness of guilt," and form an important part of the evidence that would send them to the electric chair.

What did the police question them about, and why would they lie? Here is a sample:

Police: Are you a citizen?

Sacco: No

Police: Are you a Communist?

Sacco: No.

Police: Anarchist?

Sacco: No

Police: Do you believe in this government of ours?

Sacco: Yes. Some things I like different.

Police: Do you subscribe for literature of the Anarchist party?

Vanzetti: Sometimes I read them.

Police: How do you get them, through the mail?

Vanzetti: A man gave one to me in Boston.

Police: Who was that man?

Vanzetti: I don't know him.

Were the police intent on finding two robbers, who then turned out to be anarchists? Or two anarchists, who turned out to have enough that was suspicious about their behavior—carrying guns, lying to the police—to make them vulnerable? Conviction would be easy if they were Italians, and almost everyone who placed them far from the scene of the crime on that day—six of seven who testified they saw Sacco in Boston, all of the five who testified they saw Vanzetti in Plymouth—were Italians, speaking in broken English to a totally Anglo-Saxon jury, before an Anglo-Saxon judge who declared his hatred for radicals several times during the trial, outside the courtroom.

It would be helpful too, if the judge kept overruling the defense and supporting the prosecution, and if he mis-stated the evidence in summing up the case for the jury, especially on so crucial a question as: did the fatal bullets come from Sacco's gun? Felix Frankfurter, then a professor at Harvard Law School, would describe one of Judge Webster Thayer's opinions as "a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions, and mutilations."

The trial began immediately after Memorial Day, a year and a half after the end of that orgy of death and patriotism that was World War I, the newspapers still vibrating with the roll of drums, the jingo rhetoric. Twelve days into the trial, the press reported the bodies of three soldiers transferred from France to Brockton, the whole town turning out for a patriotic ceremony, and all of this in newspapers which the jury could read, only the reports on the trial having been cut out. On the fourth of July, in the midst of the trial, the papers reported a gathering of 5,000 veterans of the Yankee Division, in Plymouth.

This mood would be sustained during the cross-examinations of Sacco and Vanzetti by prosecutor Katzmann:

Katzmann (to Sacco): Did you love this country in the last week of May, 1917?

Sacco: That is pretty hard for me to say in one word, Mr. Katzmann.

Katzmann: There are two words you can use, Mr. Sacco, yes or no. Which one is it?

Sacco: Yes.

Katzmann: And in order to show your love for this United States of America when she was about to call upon you to become a soldier you ran away to Mexico?

At no point in the trial did the prosecution establish any motive that Sacco and Vanzetti may have had for the robbery. Neither had any record of criminal activity. The stolen money was never found.

It is not hard, however, to establish a motive for the prosecution. After the trial two long-time agents of the Department of Justice, Weyand and Letherman, gave affidavits saying: "The names of Sacco and Vanzetti were on the files of the Department of Justice as 'radicals to be watched'...the Department was eager for their deportation...the case against Sacco and Vanzetti for murder was part of a collusive effort between the District Attorney and agents of the Department of Justice to rid the county of these Italians because of their Red activities.... For it was the opinion of the Department of Justice agents that a conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti for murder would be one way of disposing of these men."

The affidavit said a deal was made: federal agents were to help the prosecutor get evidence on the criminal charge, and the prosecutor in turn would try to get information from Sacco and Vanzetti which might help deport their associates. Twelve agents were at one time assigned to the case, and an informer was placed inside of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee.

All of this rings even more true in the 1970s than in the 1920s. We know now, on the basis of FBI records disclosed reluctantly in recent aggressive lawsuits by black and radical groups, that the FBI, in its war on radicalism, has resorted to informers and spies, forged letters, and murder. We know that the FBI collaborated with a local District Attorney in 1969 in planning an armed attack on a Chicago apartment, in which police shot to death two black militant leaders.

Too many defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti are embarrassed by their radicalism and concentrate on the "who-done-it?" of the robberymurder. But the determination to get rid of them was too persistently fanatical to be an oddity of Boston or Harvard, an unfortunate judicial slip, a prejudice of one person or another. It is best explained by the powerful resolve of the American capitalist system after World War I to eliminate all radical threats on the eve of a new and uncertain era in world history. This fear of opposition seems exaggerated, knowing the weakness of revolutionary movements in America, but there is considerable historical evidence that the American ruling class, with so much at stake—control of the greatest aggregate of wealth in the world—takes no chances.

Consider the situation in the United States in 1920, when Sacco and Vanzetti were first arrested on that streetcar in Brockton. Between 1877 and 1914, the nation had experienced the most violent rebellions of working people in the history of the modern state: the railroad uprisings of 1877 (including a take-over of the city of St. Louis), the anarchist-led demonstrations in Chicago in 1886, the Homestead steel strike of 1892, the nationwide Pullman strike of 1894, the victorious Lawrence textile strike of 1912, and, finally, the bloody warfare in the Colorado mine districts in 1914, where federal troops had to be called in after the Ludlow Massacre to control a state-wide insurrection of armed, angry miners.

In the years before the first World War, the Industrial Workers of the World was born—militant, revolutionary, uniting all sorts of workers the system had worked so hard to separate (skilled and unskilled, black and white, native and foreign), resisting vigilantes and police, arousing nationwide attention with its work in the Lawrence strike. In the electoral counterpart of those labor struggles, the Socialist Party, its magazine
Appeal to Reason
read by 500,000 people, was winning a million votes for Eugene Debs as president, and electing socialist officials in hundreds of towns throughout the country. Miners in the Far West, farmers in Oklahoma, and clothing workers in New York City were showing a class consciousness that might spread in a country so crassly dominated by Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Armour, and the other robber barons.