America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Fighting with All Our Might

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Following the catastrophic stock market crash of October 29, 1929, many American artists committed themselves to using the expressive power of their art in the struggle for social change. By 1933, one quarter of the workforce was unemployed and signs of the Great Depression were everywhere: homeless men, women, and children; soup kitchens; shantytowns; protests, strikes, and lockouts.

Artists worked to document these problems and also to ameliorate them. Some joined the government programs formed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which aimed to revive the nation by creating jobs, aiding farms and small businesses, and regulating finance. Photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were hired to document farm life for the Resettlement Administration; printmakers working for the Federal Art Project made more than 11,000 prints. Some of these artists were committed to Roosevelt’s progressivism, while others went so far as to become members of the Communist Party of the United States. As the printmaker Mabel Dwight observed: “Art has turned militant. It forms unions, carries banners, sits down uninvited, and gets underfoot. Social justice is its battle cry.” As military preparations for World War II revitalized industry and the economy recovered, many artists shifted their attention to the war and the threat of fascism, continuing to agitate for a more just and humane world.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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BEN SHAHN (1898-1969), THE PASSION OF SACCO AND VANZETTI, 1931-32

Ben Shahn, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1931–32

In America Is Hard to See

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Ben Shahn, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1931–32

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Adam Weinberg: Alan Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Alan Dershowitz: Felix Frankfurter was the lawyer who in fact tried to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti after they had been falsely convicted, falsely in the sense that the evidence used against them was questionable.

The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, by Ben Shahn, shows four villains, judges, very distinguished Massachusetts citizens, standing over the coffins of the recently executed victims of the injustice, Sacco and Vanzetti. The people standing over the coffin, in the center, A. Lawrence Lowell, the bigoted president of Harvard University, who was appointed by the governor of Massachusetts to be the chairman of the commission to review the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Lowell was an admitted racialist. He believed in racial quotas. He established them at Harvard. His two compatriots were the president of MIT and a retired judge named Grant. 

Standing over them, almost hovering above them, is the Judge Webster Thayer who presided over the trial, and made a mockery of justice. He told people he was out to get these radical Italians, and he would not rest until they were in their graves. 

The case itself was a simple armed robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. A paymaster was shot and killed. Nobody will ever know whether Sacco and Vanzetti, or Sacco or Vanzetti, were responsible for the killings. That’s become lost in the evidence that was distorted and destroyed by the state. 

They were sentenced to death, and the execution was carried out after many many protests and much turmoil. And the legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti will live on. And we will long understand the real villains of the case were the judges and the university presidents who lent the legitimacy and the legitimacy of their institutions to a case of racism and injustice.

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