Edna St. Vincent Millay's Fear

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s article “Fear,” published on November 9, 1927 in the New York magazine The Outlook, is written in the form of an open letter to the general public. Millay’s outrage and fear for the fate of humanity rose from the public injustice of the Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were convicted of murdering two guards during a bank robbery in Massachusetts on April 15, 1920. The case, spanning an entire seven years, stimulated widespread controversy and public debate. Writers, artists, and various community figures protested on their behalf; among them was Millay, whose anguish with the failure of both the justice system and humanity can be clearly seen in “Fear.” Millay begins “Fear” by using a second-person

To those brainwashed into complacency, into fear of anything contrary to the norm, fear comes easily. Edna St. Vincent Millay, in her article “Fear,” condemns the general public for being indifferent to blatant injustice. We can see how fear is instilled in the masses by examining prejudice embedded in our society through religious institution and the potency of words. John Weiss, in his essay “Anti-Semitism Through the Ages,” argues that there were five major sources of anti-Semitism in European civilization; these sources providing a foundation for the Holocaust. Without the installment of anti-Semitism in our institutions, the Holocaust would not have occurred. He cites Christian anti-Semitism as the first major source. The “failure” of Jews to accept Christ quickly led to the idea that until the Jews converted “they would suffer a bitter fate.” For the Christian masses, the “truth of Christianity…depended on the conversion of Jews.” By the tenth century, Weiss reminds us, Jews were believed to be a “satanic people” by Christians, priests, and higher clergy (13). In Millay’s article “Fear,” she laments the injustice of two Italian immigrants who were sentenced to death simply for, as she suggests, being Anarchists and a people whose speech and manners “were different from our own” (295). Millay points out that because Christianity is already “so spotted and defaced by the crimes of the Church,” the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti becomes an inconsequential event in a world constantly darkened by religious injustices. What Millay implies directly relates to Weiss’s claim that “Christian hostility reinforced racist anti-Semitic movements…and helped create a culture that allowed them to flourish” (14). The Holocaust would not have occurred without the disease of prejudice deeply ingrained in the culture and religious institution, similarly to how Sacco and Vanzetti would not have been executed for a crime they did not