I can sum up the United States in two words: Prohibition and Lindbergh!
—Benito Mussolini
NOEL’S FANTASY AMERICA was a land of boundless opportunity, free from the Old World’s stagnant class system and its savage wars. All Noel knew of this distant land he had heard from his father.
Harvard in September 1922 was a shock to the young man. The most privileged sanctuary of American higher learning, it did not match Noel’s fantasies.
Many undergraduates in those days arrived with trunks containing dinner jackets, tennis rackets, golf clubs, and the swagger of those born to privilege. The sons of the nouveau riche shunned Harvard Yard for the more opulent new dormitories on the “Gold Coast,” Mount Auburn Street. In their sophomore year, the social clubs picked the brightest stars from the new crop—the Crimson’s editors, the Lampoon’s wits, and the man who might score the final, memorable touchdown against Yale. There were still other Harvards—for scholars, for carousers, for those already decided on a Wall Street career. Noel did not fit in with any of these Harvards.
Instead of a dorm, Noel lived at home, in the faded gentility of a Berkeley Street row house. With three younger siblings, and a matriarch presiding, this was not a place the freshman would bring new friends. Filial obligation had brought him to Harvard; he treated it as a place to get through honorably, but as fast as possible. Taking twice as many courses as required, he earned his BA with highest honors in two years.
As awkward outsider in the hail-fellow world of the Yard, Noel’s social conscience deepened. In a 1923 term paper entitled “On the Present Distribution of Property” he submitted for his Social Ethics course, the nineteen-year-old raised issues that still seem strikingly relevant. “There are two very dark spots . . . in the existing system . . . which have led to the crying injustice of the present distribution of wealth. It is not right to pass on to the heir enormous wealth without the latter’s moving a finger for it. Inheritance of property seems to be as old as mankind; and yet I think it is a great evil and must be changed if social injustice is to stop.
“And as for interest on capital,” he wrote, “its injustice appears to me self-evident. If a man can live off this interest, while his capital is increasing without his doing any work, while millions of others have to work for every crumb, it is clear that the fundamental justification of property is completely disregarded.”
Later, he would regret his Harvard years as a missed opportunity. Four years after graduating, he wrote Hermann, “Nobody has ever been interested in the fact that I graduated with distinction . . . whereas the fact that I raced through college without mixing in its life and without learning its practical life lessons has caused me endless embarrassment.” Social embarrassment fueled Noel Field’s alienation from American life.
Noel’s deepest estrangement from his country occurred outside the classroom. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, rarely recalled today, in the 1920s came to symbolize the political volatility of the Depression. A shoemaker and a fish peddler, the pair of Italian immigrants were charged with robbery and murder in a Braintree, Massachusetts, payroll holdup in a case that grew from local crime story to an international cri de coeur. Sacco and Vanzetti—names redolent of ethnicity and the immigrant experience—turned into a chant that galvanized the Depression era.
Class resentments that normally simmer below America’s surface exploded in the trial of the two self-declared anarchists. In the witness box, the two immigrants mangled their English and reeked of stubborn unassimilation, a couple of “greasy wops,” in the era’s ugly vernacular. Facing an all-Anglo-Saxon jury and a judge who freely declared his hatred of radicals, Sacco and Vanzetti never had a chance at a fair trial. (“Did you see what I did with those anarchist bastards the other day?” Judge Webster Thayer was heard to remark at a Dartmouth football game, after he had turned down a defense motion for a new trial. “That will hold them for a while!”)
The Boston trial became one of those not-to-be-missed events, a magnet for the day’s celebrities, pundits, poets, and radicals of all shades, some of whom were actually interested in getting Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco a fair hearing. For much of the population, one and a half years after World War I, pumped by patriotic fever and growing isolationism, love of country was on trial.
“Did you love this country in the last week of May, 1917?” the prosecutor asked Sacco, referring to the week of the crime.
“That is pretty hard for me to say in one word,” the shoemaker answered, sealing his fate. The prosecution never established a motive, nor was the stolen money ever found. A jury not of their peers sentenced the accused to die in the electric chair. The case took seven agonizing years to resolve—seven years during which Sacco and Vanzetti languished in prison and young idealists like Noel Field grew more estranged from their country.
On August 23, 1927, far from the searchlights and machine-gun-wielding guards of Boston’s Charlestown State Prison, Noel huddled by his shortwave radio and waited for the announcement of Sacco and Vanzetti’s death by electrocution. Then he wept.
Field later recalled the moment—and its impact on his life. “From that midnight of the two martyrs in a Boston jail, there is a chain of events leading in an almost straight line to the present,” Field wrote. “I am no Sacco, no Vanzetti. . . . But in my own much smaller way I have remained true to the beliefs that began to take shape . . . during the ghastly wake, when hope changed to despair.”
In 1977, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their executions, Massachusetts governor Michael S. Dukakis ordered a reexamination of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. “It is my conclusion,” the governor’s chief legal counsel, Daniel A. Taylor, wrote, “that there are substantial, indeed compelling, grounds for believing that the Sacco and Vanzetti legal proceedings were permeated with unfairness, and that a proclamation issued by you would be appropriate.”
The governor obliged, but no proclamation fifty years later could heal the terrible injury done to America, or its devastating impact on Noel Field’s generation. “America our nation,” wrote John Dos Passos, “has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul.”
For Field, the fact that the president of his own university, A. Lawrence Lowell, was head of a commission to review the death sentence, and affirmed it, made the case even more personal and more deeply disillusioning.
Across the Atlantic, in Berlin, Willi Münzenberg, a rumpled but brilliant agent of Lenin, the father of the Russian Revolution, saw opportunity and hatched his plan. The Sacco and Vanzetti case was Münzenberg’s unexpected gift from a land he barely knew. Münzenberg—electric with ideas for manipulating global public opinion—had been chosen by Lenin to spread the message of Marxism to Western intellectuals.
Arthur Koestler, the future author of Darkness at Noon, the work that did much to unmask Stalinism’s sinister face, worked for Münzenberg’s Paris-based agitprop machine, and recalled Münzenberg as “short and stocky, a man of proletarian origin, magnetic personality of immense driving power and a hard, seductive charm.” Known as the Red Eminence of the international anti-fascist movement, Münzenberg swiftly organized international committees, congresses, and movements to protest Sacco and Vanzetti’s executions. Though Münzenberg’s name or actual affiliation never appeared anywhere, his was the invisible director’s hand that exploded Sacco and Vanzetti’s executions into a global cause.
For Communism to flourish outside Russia, “the myth of America”—land of opportunity, final sanctuary for the world’s hopeless—had to be destroyed. Supported by a web of agents, Münzenberg’s Comintern—the Communist International—organized “Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committees” in world capitals. Even before the executions, crowds surged down Paris’s great boulevards, tore lampposts from sidewalks, and hurled them through shop windows. For the first time in history, tanks ringed the American embassy in Paris. Sixty policemen were injured by an angry mob of protesters. Similar scenes played out all over Europe and Asia. None of this was spontaneous. Münzenberg choreographed it all. Blessed with a dream cast of Yankee villains, led by the arch-WASP judge Webster Thayer, Münzenberg galvanized idealists worldwide. Co-opting such Western celebrity intellectuals as Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Arthur Koestler, Lillian Hellman, and Dorothy Parker, Münzenberg more or less invented the art of the ideological spin. Noel Field may not have heard of Münzenberg, but he made an ideal target for the latter’s campaign.
The executions of Sacco and Vanzetti sparked a generational revulsion, stoked by Münzenberg. With Noel, alienation grew in step with his romantic yearning for a radical transformation of society. He was not alone. Lincoln Steffens, Malcolm Cowley, and Upton Sinclair agreed with Edmund Wilson, who declared that Russia “is the moral top of the world where the light really never goes out.” The lure of a distant and mysterious land that had recently cleansed itself of a tired, corrupt tyranny was powerful. In the Russian Revolution’s aftermath, disaffected youth like Noel Field wondered why their own country couldn’t cast down capitalism and militarism as easily as the Soviets had. Communism seemed on the brink of a worldwide explosion. Russian literature, Russian music, and the Russian sages Lenin and Trotsky were all the rage among liberal intellectuals. Few were aware of the human cost of the “cleansing” that brought the Communists to power, and kept them there.