Memorializing Sacco and Vanzetti in Boston

While the plans for the doomed Freedom House were still in the works, the Sacco-Vanzetti Memorial Committee ran into trouble for their second anniversary memorial event. The Scenic Auditorium, where their first anniversary meeting was held, was badly damaged by fire. The Scenic Auditorium was the only venue in town whose owner, himself an immigrant, would stand up to social, economic and constabulary threats and allow the Memorial Committee to use the space. On August 7, 1929, the Committee ran an advertisement on the front pages of the Boston Herald, the Boston Traveler and the Boston Post listing the names and affiliations of its most esteemed speakers, asking if the citizens of Boston should fear the words of such respected intellectuals. The ad went on to describe the situation in which the Committee found themselves. Their applications had been rejected from more than 35 hotels, theaters and halls with capacity of 1,000 or more, including Faneuil Hall, otherwise known as the Cradle of Liberty, and the Old South Meeting House, reputedly a haven for unorthodox and unpopular ideas. A week later, their call unanswered, they announced to their mailing list that they were going to be holding their memorial event at Town Hall in New York City.xxiii

Final draft of Borglum’s bas-relief in bronze. Courtesy of the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society.

Borglum had completed his bas-relief of Sacco and Vanzetti in bronze by 1930 in a special alloy that was both bullet proof and ‘axe proof.’xxv This version was slightly different from the first draft, a plaster cast of which had been sent to Boston two years earlier. Conceptually it was the same image, showing the two men in profile confronted by an arm holding the scales of justice with ‘archaic law’ outweighing ‘justice,’ accompanied by a quote from Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The main visual difference was that the new version had leaves breaking up what was negative space in the first. Yet with the Freedom House doomed, there was nowhere for the bronze relief to go, relegating it to storage at the foundry.xxvi

For the 10^th anniversary of the execution, Borglum’s bas-relief was back in the news. On August 22^nd 1937, Mayor Mansfield and Governor Hurley received identical letters from the old guard of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. Calling it ‘a symbol by which the people of our state may be constantly warned in the decades to come,’ the letter gifted Borglum’s bas-relief to be placed upon Boston Common. The letter was signed Aldino Felicani, Gardner Jackson, Mary Donovan, Powers Hapgood and Michael Flaherty.xxvii In statements to the press, the incredulous politicians, neither of whom had read the Committee’s letter, declared that the idea was outside both their jurisdiction and their approval. Said Mayor Mansfield, ‘Such a proposal might have to go before the council. If I have final say on the matter, however, it has no possible chance of acceptance.’xxviii Similarly, Governor Hurley attributed responsibility for public art approval to another department and opined that the Defense Committee’s gesture was ‘patently absurd.’xxix

This was not the only time Hurley would publicly denounce Sacco and Vanzetti and their sympathizers. The WPA Guide to Massachusetts had been released four days earlier on August 19, 1937. Its discussion of the immigrant workers’ case caused an uproarious controversy to erupt in the press and among many Bostonians. The Governor responded by delivering anti-immigrant, anti-radical tirades, vilifying the Guide and its creators.xxx Even before Hurley began his public attacks, Roger N. Baldwin of the ACLU commented, ‘The fuss over the statement in the WPA Guide Book strikes an outsider as nonsensical, for the Guide Book merely credited disbelief in the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti to “many people.”’xxxi

Borglum died in 1941. In 1943, the war effort needed the space in the foundry that was occupied by his bas-relief. The piece was moved to Borglum’s studio in North Stamford, Connecticut and appeared in the news again on the 20^th anniversary of Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution. The bas-relief was once more presented to the local governments for placement on Boston Common, but joining the old guard of the Defense Committee in writing to Governor Bradford were 150 ‘prominent Americans’xxxii among them Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein and representatives of Ivy League universities. These had all signed a 2,500 word manifesto which,

on the basis of its sponsors and content is looked on as a manifesto of American liberals even more than as a memorial to Sacco and Vanzetti. It attempts to chart a course midway between communism on the one hand and the current wave of anti-Communist sentiment on the other.xxxiii

According to a September 9th telegram Gardner Jackson sent to Mary Borglum, the sculptor’s widow who was acutely interested in being relieved of the massive plaque, an appointment was secured with Governor Bradford. xxxiv Nevertheless, on October 4, 1947, Bradford announced to the press his rejection of the artwork, citing it as outside his jurisdiction as well as saying that he saw ‘no useful purpose in stirring up the bitter passions and prejudices of 20 years ago, particularly at a time when the world is striving for unity, not discord.’xxxv

Mary Borglum died in August 1955. By the time her surviving family went to sort out the contents of Gutzon Borglum’s studio a month later, they discovered that the space had been vandalized repeatedly. Finding the bronze bas-relief of Sacco and Vanzetti, the sculptor’s son Lincoln Borglum contacted Felix Frankfurter, now a Supreme Court justice, who coldly insisted that he ‘did not commission it’ and ‘could not help with the disposition of it.’xxxvi Frankfurter did send the note on to Gardner Jackson, but not hearing from Jackson by February 1956, Lincoln Borglum wrote to a cousin who had expressed interest in the piece, asking $200, ‘worth $300 for the bronze.’ The check ultimately had to be returned because, through an incredibly confusing scuffle that Robin Borglum Carter was able to partially reconstruct from legal, personal and business correspondence, the bronze bas-relief had been lost.xxxvii By the time Jackson wrote in August 1957 about possibly having the piece installed publicly in Boston, it was long gone.

Jackson probably had not yet received his reply from Lincoln Borglum when, on the 30^th anniversary of the execution on August 23, 1957 he, Felicani and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. once more gifted Borglum’s bas-relief to the city and state governments. The mayor forwarded the proposal to the Parks & Recreation Department whose Commissioner, Frank R. Kelley, wrote to Felicani on September 11, 1957, ‘The Board voted unanimously to disapprove your request.’xxxviii While ideologically disappointing, logistically, of course, this was just as well given that the artwork was not accounted for.