The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A New England Legend Read Online Free PDF Page B

must have been born and seen her time of life and growth, all of her time of life and growth, during the seven years which Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had spent in prison. This realization came as a most profound shock to the newspaper man, and indeed moved him more than anything which had happened to him that morning.
    He was different, and he would never again be as he had been before. Bitter change had begun to fester. He had come too close to death—and thereby too close to life—and it had taken his youth from him.

Chapter 4
    A T TEN MINUTES to nine, on the morning of August 22nd, the Professor, who was also one of the noted lawyers of the Commonwealth, crossed the lawn toward the Law School building where he would conduct the sixth and last lecture of the series he was giving for the summer session. It was the first time he had ever taught in the summer session, and all through the uncomfortable summer weeks, he found himself torn between a desire for a real vacation in the mountains or at the seashore, and a feeling of relief that he could, after all, be here in Boston, seeing, watching and observing the final developments in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti.
    Only rarely did he allow himself to admit, even to himself, how much this case meant to him; and this was because there was a certain danger in admitting this fact—even to himself. When, however, he was provoked by one thing or another into accepting the Sacco-Vanzetti case as a central force in his present day to day existence, his anger at certain forces would become almost uncontrollable. This, perhaps, disturbed him more than anything else. Ever since he had been a young man, he had set his face solidly and determinedly against uncontrollable anger in any situation.
    Yet on this special and tranquil and particularly tragic morning, his anger was present, but latent, like a steel spring compressed within him. Only the evening before, he had heard that the President of the University where he taught, who was also the head of an advisory committee inquiring into this case, had connected him with it in a singularly unpleasant fashion.
    The President of the University had referred to him, the Professor, as “that Jew,” and had gone on to say that there was a little more than met the eye in the eagerness of Jews to leap to the defense of “two Italian communists.”
    There was nothing either new or particularly revealing in the knowledge that the President of the University did not like Jews. Ever since he had come to the university, the Professor had been acutely aware of the fact that the President of the University had a most pointed dislike for Jews. It must be added that the President of the University practiced an equal dislike for most other minorities of the United States; if his dislike for Jews was more frequently and sharply expressed, it was only because the gates of the university could be less easily closed against Jews than against certain other groups.
    The Professor, hurrying across the lawn, was acutely aware of all these things—just as he was most acutely aware of his own appearance.
    That awareness rode him with a spur, constantly pricking his sensitivity. All things that the President of the University was, this Professor of Criminal Law was not. The Professor was not a Yankee; he was not even a native-born American; and he was neither blue-eyed nor aristocratic in his bearing. When he spoke, a trace of foreign accent clung to his speech. His dark, piercing, narrow eyes hid themselves behind heavy glasses, and his big head hung loosely from his shoulders. Even if he could have exorcised his own awareness of his appearance, life in Boston in 1927 would not have permitted it.
    â€œVery well,” he said to himself this morning as he crossed the lawn. “I march forward as a Jew. Now, this Jew will do a brave or a stupid thing and deliver his last lecture of a series, and the subject will be the case