Transcription Vanzetti to Donovan, Dec 28, 1926

I want to think about this letter in conjunction with Bernadette's post on the Dec 19, 1926 letter.

                               28 Dec., 1926
Mrs. Mary Donovan
Dear Friend,
                     Just few words
in answer to your nice Christmas
card and the good wishes thereby
expressed. They reached me at due
time and were most welcome and
appreciated.
    I hope that everything goes
well with you, that you might have
passed Yuletide at home
and that all of yours are well.
   Have received many letters and
cards this Christmas, but I realize
that many of my good friends,
the most of them, [illegible] just thoughts
and wished good to me and acted
in my behalf but not written.
   I have wished to answer sooner to you,
but am been very busy-- so, please,
excuse my delay. Have not seen Mr.
Thompson for quite a long time and I
know of nothing of now.
[VERSO]
This years I have received very
many letters and cards for Christmas
and New Year.
   I would wish you an  happy
New Year, but it seems idle to
me, for I wish you every day
happy-- not merely the first of
the year, as the less (or is it more?)
fool do.
   Mark Twain has said that
"The only useful holyday that we
have is "April fool," for it remind
us [^of] what we are in the other days of
the year.
   Christmas, whereas, is a cheating
holiday, for we pretend to be good
then-- which, when not a bad
illusion is rank hypocrazy-- holy
macherel (is makerel correctly
spelled?-- I am [^only] sure of holy, though fish peddler.
   Well, hoping to hear or see you
in a near day, I send you hearty greetings.
                          Bartolomeo Vanzetti


Bernadette brought up some insightful  thoughts on the peculiarities of Vanzetti's letters to Mary Donovan, noting the inconsistent spelling errors, illogical structure of topics, and open parentheses and quotes to conjecture on possible censoring intrusions. This letter, written only a week later, is an interesting counterpart- the spelling and grammatical errors seem innocent enough and the sentence structures are fairly sound. As a whole, the letter is focused and tends to imparting warm thoughts on the holiday rather than listing off various and extraneous topics in great detail, as with the previous letter. I wasn't exactly sure what to do with the paragraph about how most of his friends "wished good to me and acted on my behalf but not written" or the emphatic statement "holy macheral." I could imagine the former having been shaved some by a censoring hand, but both cases could be the products of a language barrier. Regardless, pairing these two letters against one another, I find that the fact of the clarity and focus of this letter supports Bernadette's claims of intentional coding and extensive censoring in the previous letter.

In a cursory google search here, I found that Mary Donovan was Vanzetti's recording secretary for the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee. I, like Bernadette, am still curious who Donovan was to Vanzetti more expressively.

From what I can gather, this letter is far less about matters of "business" than the previous.  I'm guessing the December 19th letter had some intention of informing his comrades of the prison conditions, which could be either inciting or pacifying to them, I'm not sure. Unless this letter has been severely censored, it seems kinder and more personal, adding some cynicism towards Christmas perhaps to make Donovan less sad that Vanzetti was separated from herself and the others during it.


Does anyone know how these letters were censored? I'm a bit confused on whether a second party actually changed the letters, which I suppose would require that they be written again, or if Vanzetti wrote them with a censoring hand himself.