And he went seamlessly from talk of such dangerous work in such a dark place to a recollection of a tea dance at the Ritz fifteen years before, where a Harvard classmate named Nils Johannsen had been caught using loaded dice in a crap game in the men's room. This was the same person who was now the president of Johannsen Grinder, who had fired all these workers. Johannsen's grandfather had started the company. He said that Johannsen had had his head stuck in a toilet bowl at the Ritz, and that the hope was that he would never use loaded dice again.
"But here he is," said Whistler, "using loaded dice again."
He said that Harvard could be held responsible for many atrocities, including the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, but that it was innocent of having produced Nils Johannsen. "He never attended a lecture, never wrote a paper, never read a book while he was there," he said. "He was asked to leave at the end of his sophomore year.
"Oh, I pity him," he said. "I even understand him. How else could he ever amount to anything if he did not use loaded dice? How has he used loaded dice with you? The laws that say he can fire anybody who stands up for the basic rights of workers — those are loaded dice. The policemen who will protect his property rights but not your human rights — those are loaded dice."
Whistler asked the fired workers how much Johannsen actually knew or cared about grinding wheels. How shrewd this was! The way to befriend working people in those days, and to get them to criticize their society as brilliantly as any philosopher, was to get them to talk about the one subject on which they were almost arrogantly well-informed: their work.
It was something to hear. Worker after worker testified that Johannsen's father and grandfather had been mean bastards, too, but that they at least knew how to run a factory. Raw materials of the highest quality arrived on time in their day — machinery was properly maintained, the heating plant and the toilets worked, bad workmanship was punished and good workmanship was rewarded, no defective grinding wheel ever reached a customer, and on and on.
Whistler asked them if one of their own number could run the factory better than Nils Johannsen did. One man spoke for them all on that subject: "God, yes," he said, "anyone here."
Whistler asked him if he thought it was right that a person could inherit a factory.
The man's considered answer was this: "Not if he's afraid of the factory and everybody in it — no. No, siree."
This piece of groping wisdom impresses me still. A sensible prayer people could offer up from lime to time, it seems to me, might go something like this: "Dear Lord — never put me in the charge of a frightened human being."
Kenneth Whistler promised us that the time was at hand for workers to take over their factories and to run them for the benefit of mankind. Profits that now went to drones and corrupt politicians would go to those who worked, and to the old and the sick and the orphaned. All people who could work would work. There would be only one social class — the working class. Everyone would take turns doing the most unpleasant work, so that a doctor, for example, might be expected to spend a week out of each year as a garbage man. The production of luxury goods would stop until the basic needs of every citizen were met. Health care would be free. Food would be cheap and nourishing and plentiful. Mansions and hotels and office buildings would be turned into small apartments, until everyone was decently housed. Dwellings would be assigned by means of a lottery. There would be no more wars and eventually no more national boundaries, since everyone in the world would belong to the same class with identical interests — the interests of the working class.
And on and on.
What a spellbinder he was!
Mary Kathleen whispered in my ear, "You're going to be just like him, Walter."
"I'll try," I said. I had no intention of trying.
The most embarrassing thing to me about this autobiography, surely, is its unbroken chain of proofs that I was never a serious man. I have been in a lot of trouble over the years, but that was all accidental. Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.
People who had heard Kenneth Whistler speak before begged him to tell again about leading the pickets outside Charlestown Prison when Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. And it seems strange to me now that I have to explain who Sacco and Vanzetti were. I recently asked young Israel Edel at RAMJAC, the former night clerk at the Arapahoe, what he knew about Sacco and Vanzetti, and he told me confidently that they were rich, brilliant thrill-killers from Chicago. He had them confused with Leopold and Loeb.
Why should I find this unsettling? When I was a young man, I expected the story of Sacco and Vanzetti to be retold as often and as movingly, to be as irresistible, as the story of Jesus Christ some day. Weren't modern people, if they were to marvel creatively at their own lifetimes, I thought, entitled to a Passion like Sacco and Vanzetti's, which ended in an electric chair?
As for the last days of Sacco and Vanzetti as a modern Passion: As on Golgotha, three lower-class men were executed at the same time by a state. This time, though, not just one of the three was innocent. This time two of the three were innocent.
The guilty man was a notorious thief and killer named Celestino Madeiros, convicted of a separate crime. As the end drew near, he confessed to the murders for which Sacco and Vanzetti had been convicted, too.
Why?
"I seen Sacco's wife come here with the kids, and I felt sorry for the kids," he said.
Imagine those lines spoken by a good actor in a modern Passion Play.
Madeiros died first. The lights of the prison dimmed three times.
Sacco died next. Of the three, he was the only family man. The actor portraying him would have to project a highly intelligent man who, since English was his second language and since he was not clever with languages, could not trust himself to say anything complicated to the witnesses as he was strapped into the electric chair.
"Long live anarchy," he said. "Farewell, my wife, and child, and all my friends," he said. "Good evening, gentlemen," he said. "Farewell, Mother," he said. This was a shoemaker. The lights of the prison dimmed three times.
Vanzetti was the last. He sat down in the chair in which Madeiros and Sacco had died before anyone could indicate that this was what he was expected to do. He began to speak to the witnesses before anyone could tell him that he was free to do this. English was his second language, too, but he could make it do whatever he pleased.
Listen to this:
"I wish to tell you," he said, "that I am an innocent man. I never committed any crime, but sometimes some sin. I am innocent of all crime — not only this one, but all crime. I am an innocent man." He had been a fish peddler at the time of his arrest.
"I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me," he said. The lights of the prison dimmed three times.
The story yet again:
Sacco and Vanzetti never killed anybody. They arrived in America from Italy, not knowing each other, in Nineteen-hundred and Eight. It was the same year in which my parents arrived.
Father was nineteen. Mother was twenty-one.
Sacco was seventeen. Vanzetti was twenty. American employers at that time wanted the country to be flooded with labor that was cheap and easily cowed, so that they could keep wages down.
Vanzetti would say later, "In the immigration station, I had my first surprise. I saw the steerage passengers handled by the officials like so many animals. Not a word of kindness, of encouragement, to lighten the burden of tears that rest heavily upon the newly arrived on American shores."
Father and Mother used to tell me much the same thing. They, too, were made to feel like fools who had somehow gone to great pains to deliver themselves to a slaughterhouse.