The Agony of the Triumph
Still protesting their innocence, Sacco and Vanzetti went to meet Old Sparky for the first and last time in April 1927, almost seven years after the crime for which they'd both been convicted. Another victory then for truth, justice and the American way then? Something like that!
It is fitting for any number of reasons to let one of the two men at the centre of this trial have the last word, whom we can safely say is not only speaking on behalf of both of them, but is looking way beyond their fate to a higher significance. In a statement to reporter Philip Strong just prior to being executed, after noting that "[I]f it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men", Vanzetti had the following to say:
"I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words -- our lives, our pains -- nothing! The taking of our lives -- lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler -- all! That last moment belongs to us -- that agony is our triumph."
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once famously mused: "That which does not kill us makes us stronger". We don't know if either men were aware of Nietzsche's insight. But in light of Vanzetti's last words, we might opine [that] he at least had some inkling of what Nietzsche was referring to, albeit with a twist, to wit: "That which does kill us, makes us stronger than those who arranged our final dispatch".
Nietzsche also observed the following:
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
It appears safe to say both Sacco and Vanzetti -- two figures who seem eternally emblematic of everything that is wrong with the American Dream and everything that can and does go wrong with said "Dream" -- would have little quibble with this either. If indeed innocent, they paid the highest price indeed for "owning" themselves, and one might also say for seeking from the off to own a piece of the American Dream.
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