There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Hanson’s grandstanding was, if nothing else, timely. Across the country in Washington, a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee chaired by Senator Lee Slater Overman had been investigating pro-Germanism in America; with the peace in late 1918 and then the outbreak of the Seattle strike a few months later, the subcommittee quickly pivoted, obtaining new directions from Congress to look into domestic radicalism. The Overman panel convened for a month beginning in mid-February, hearing witnesses ranging from John Reed and his wife, journalist Louise Bryant (both of whom had traveled to Moscow), to the conservative New York attorney Archibald E. Stevenson, a former intelligence officer and one of America’s leading hysterics on the Soviet menace. Soon it had heard enough to conclude that Communism represented a true global threat, one against which the wide Atlantic and Pacific oceans were no safeguard. In this same season of fear and outrage Eugene Debs was convicted under the Espionage Act for a speech he’d made in Canton, Ohio, denouncing the war, and in March 1919 New York’s legislature, apparently grown self-conscious that the Empire State was home to tens of thousands of aliens and real or potential radicals, created its own anti-sedition task force. The Lusk Committee, named for State Senator Clayton R. Lusk, launched immediate inquiries to discover if radicals were plotting—through labor activism, bombings, and the spread of propaganda—to establish a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”43

  Watching these developments with mounting alarm, the AFL and other national labor groups recommended that the Seattle workers end their general strike. The Seattle Central Labor Council agreed, and after five days the effort was called off. But the fact that labor had essentially policed itself—had itself judged it wise to tamp down a volatile crisis—received little notice or praise in the nation’s press. Instead, the country’s acclaim went to Ole Hanson, “a man who has brought himself up by his own efforts to wealth and power,” sang a New York Times tribute. “[He] was strong enough and brave enough to stand up against the insolent alien efforts to reproduce here the horrible disorders that have ruined Russia. Unconsciously and instinctively Ole Hanson defended and represented the inbred, undying, ineradicable American spirit of ordered freedom.”44

  So enamored was Hanson of his new status that he resigned as mayor and immediately departed eastward on a national speaking tour. At $500 an event he addressed church groups, American Legion posts, ladies’ auxiliaries, and businessmen’s luncheons, denouncing Bolshevism and vying to fight its menace single-handedly if need be. “If the government doesn’t clean them up, I will,” he swore, a line he repeated at each appearance to predictable audience frenzy. Full of sass and seemingly unstoppable, he urged the federal government to “hang or incarcerate for life all the anarchists.” When an aging Samuel Gompers challenged disparaging remarks Hanson had made about the patriotism of the AFL, the Seattle upstart was full enough of himself to dismissively inform the lion of American labor, “I realize that you are old and feeble, and as the body weakens, so does the mind.”45 Over the next seven months Hanson earned the tidy fortune of $40,000 from his lectures, and when asked about his political plans for 1920 and its upcoming presidential election, chose not to discourage speculation.

  OLE HANSON REMAINED IN THE NEWS, although not entirely for his political aspirations; on April 28, 1919, a package arrived in the mail at his Seattle office containing a bomb. He was not present, and the contents were harmlessly disposed of, but the incident marked the beginning of an ominous trend. The very next day a mysterious parcel was delivered to the Atlanta home of former U.S. senator Thomas W. Hardwick, who had co-sponsored the Immigration Act of 1918; upon being opened by his maid, Ethel Williams, it exploded, blowing the woman’s hands off and injuring the senator’s wife, who was standing nearby. A day or two later New York City post office employee Charles Kaplan happened to read in the newspaper about the Hanson and Hardwick bombs, and recognized that their description fit a large number of curious packages he had recently set aside for lack of postage. He immediately notified police, who on investigation discovered that each of the sixteen packages Kaplan had quarantined, all roughly seven inches by three inches, contained a wooden tube loaded with explosives and an acid detonator. Each bore a return address from Gimbels Department Store and was marked NOVELTY—A SAMPLE. Eighteen similar bombs were soon discovered at other post offices across the country, targeting a total of thirty-six people, including J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller Jr., U.S. attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Frederick C. Howe, the immigration chief at Ellis Island. Many of the bombs (which were later found to have come from an Italian anarchist cell centered around Luigi Galleani, publisher of the anarchist periodical Cronaca Sovversiva) were accompanied by notes declaring, “There will have to be bloodshed…. We will kill, we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions,” and similar sentiments.

  The list of targets was somewhat haphazard, but it was assumed that “Reds” were responsible and on May 1, 1919, extensive police raids went forth against left-leaning offices and newspapers in Boston and New York, while in Cleveland wholesale violence and arrests resulted when war veterans broke up a May Day parade and later joined in ransacking a local Socialist Party office. A new rash of bomb attacks began on June 2, targeting the mayor of Cleveland, a federal judge in New York, and a silk manufacturer in Paterson, among others. The most daring was made on the Washington home of Attorney General Palmer. He and his wife were about to turn in for the night at about 11:15 p.m. when a powerful bomb detonated on the front steps of the house, killing the man who had been apparently about to leave it, an anarchist named Carlo Valdinoci, but so obliterating his features he was not immediately identified; based on the body parts investigators gathered, they at first assumed that two men had been involved in planting the device and had been killed. No one else was injured, but there was extensive damage to the Palmer dwelling and neighboring homes had their windows blown out, including the home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then the assistant secretary of the navy, who lived directly across the street. “I had just placed my automobile in the garage and walked home when the explosion took place,” Roosevelt told a reporter later that same night by telephone, mentioning that he was standing on broken glass as he spoke. Palmer, raised in a Quaker family, was so shaken that he addressed Roosevelt as “thee” numerous times as the two men surveyed the destruction to the attorney general’s house. Roosevelt found a fragment of the bomber’s body on his own doorstep, and other neighbors discovered similarly grisly items both inside and outside their damaged homes. The area for blocks around was strewn with leftist pamphlets the bomber or bombers had apparently been carrying and which had been flung far and wide by the blast. Roosevelt referred to them as “Black Hand” leaflets.46

  As in the case of the bombs sent in late April, no evidence was discovered linking the June 2 bombs to a particular source, let alone a radical clique. But if anything, the police failure to expose those responsible for the bombings only fanned anxiety that the conspiracy at work must be particularly diabolical, consisting of “alien enemies … human snakes that are crawling and working their way into the very citadels of our prosperity,” according to the Manufacturers Record.47 Soon the Literary Digest was reporting the existence of “50,000 aliens in the United States who are openly or secretly working for a Bolshevist form of government,” a plot abetted by the “3,000 foreign-language newspapers published here [and] the 8,500,000 residents of this country who are unable to read and write the American language.”48

  While the Progressive press warned against an overreaction and even hinted at a possible frame-up, Palmer’s Justice Department set about establishing the means to confront this new and serious threat, the attorney general’s efforts invigorated by the attempt on his own life and the lives of his family. Palmer named William J. Flynn, former head of the Secret Service, to lead “the most determined war on anarchy the federal government has ever
undertaken,”49 and Congress stepped up to aid the endeavor with a generous half-million-dollar earmark. Since 1908 the department had had a Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner to the modern FBI; on August 1, 1919, Palmer created a new entity within the bureau that he called the Radical Division (later known as the General Intelligence Division) with the exclusive assignment of ferreting out radicals. The attorney general drew up plans for a campaign that would be comprehensive and leave no stone unturned, placing at its head an officious twenty-four-year-old department attorney, J. Edgar Hoover.

  AT THE END OF THE SUMMER OF 1919, the toxic mixture of political paranoia over Bolsheviks and labor unions struggling to manage the postwar economic reconversion erupted in crisis in Boston. City policemen upset over wages and working conditions had founded their own union and sought affiliation with the AFL. The idea of municipal police unions was not new—there were thirty-seven across the country that were part of the AFL, and the Boston Fire Department had an AFL-affiliated union—but in the fearful climate of 1919 a strike threat by society’s most essential public servants in so large and important an American city stirred considerable unease.

  Work stoppages by municipal employees, in 1919 as throughout U.S. labor history, are roundly disliked not only because they deprive citizens of services integral to the public’s safety and well-being, but because government workers are compensated by tax dollars. Public sympathy quickly turns against government employees in such circumstances, and becomes hostile if a strike proves of long duration.

  The Boston policemen’s grievances included pay not commensurate with postwar inflation–they earned $1,100 per annum and were responsible in their first year of employ for $300 worth of uniforms and equipment—and lengthy twelve-hour shifts that often forced them to stay overnight in police stations without pay. Most of the station houses were inadequate as dormitories; some were unsanitary; one had a single bathtub and only four toilets for the use of 135 officers. “The vermin are so numerous in that station,” reported Boston Policemen’s Union president John F. McInnes, “that the leather is eaten off the helmets of the men.” Patrolmen complained of being used by their superiors as errand boys for purposes of casual graft, such as visiting restaurants to pick up free meals, and were prohibited on their one day off each week from leaving the city limits on the chance they might be recalled to duty. “The Policemen’s Union,” stated McInnes, “was formed for the sole purpose of breaking these shackles.”50

  Police commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis reacted to the strike murmurings and the union’s interest in AFL affiliation by ordering that the Boston police could not join any outside organization, with the exception of war veterans’ groups or the American Legion. Lawyers for the commissioner cited the U.S. Supreme Court rulings in Adair v. United States (1908) and Coppage v. Kansas (1915) as precedents that had established that liberty of contract protected an employer’s right to deny employees labor union affiliations with national unions and to discharge employees for union membership. The policemen ignored the commissioner’s edict, and on August 11 obtained a formal charter from the AFL, prompting an enraged Curtis to arrest nineteen of the union’s leaders for insubordination, including John McInnes. Curtis offered to suspend their sentences if the AFL affiliation was dropped, and set a deadline of September 4 for McInnes and the others to choose their fate.

  Boston at that moment was already distracted with multiple labor issues, including the darkening of most of the city’s theaters by a work stoppage involving actors, stagehands, and musicians upset with the lack of a grievance process and a policy of nonpayment for rehearsals. Pictures of striking chorus girls ran on the front page of the Boston Globe juxtaposed with news of a local Labor Day parade that saw eight thousand workers march in disciplined procession through the city, carrying signs reminding spectators of labor’s contribution to the recent war effort.51

  Mayor Andrew J. Peters attempted to intervene in the threatened police strike, charging a committee of prominent local men led by banker James J. Storrow to find some compromise, perhaps the establishment of a union acceptable to the police that would not affiliate with the AFL. Commissioner Curtis, however, backed by Governor Calvin Coolidge and Boston’s business elite, spurned any such deal-making. He did not want his police empowered by affiliation with a national labor union, nor did he believe that policemen, firemen, and other essential municipal employees had a right to strike. Representatives of the mayor’s committee, the Boston Policemen’s Union, and lawyers for the commissioner huddled for five days at the Parker House in late August and early September with no break in the impasse. The standoff gained national attention on September 2, when George T. Page, president of the American Bar Association (which by coincidence was meeting in Boston), denounced the police-AFL affiliation in his annual address. “Men who by the nature of their employment are pledged to the duty of maintaining public health and peace, which depend on the unbroken performance of their duty, now join themselves with an organization whose weapon is the strike,” Page lamented. “It is as true as when Christ walked by Galilee that ‘ye cannot serve two masters.’ ”52

  The Boston police were unfazed by such noble admonitions. Many were former Teamsters or members of the Carmen’s or Longshoremen’s unions; they were no strangers to labor conflicts and strikes, and most were secure in the knowledge they could return to work in their former fields if necessary. “As far as I am concerned,” one confided to a reporter, “I would go back to my old trade, and there are hundreds that feel just as I do.” This confidence among the rank and file was reinforced by the stature of the police union’s president, the stalwart John McInnes, whose regular duties included directing traffic but was “no ordinary citizen and no ordinary private of the police force. His life history,” wrote the Globe, “reads like a chapter of a book of adventure.” An army veteran, McInnes had been wounded in the Indian Wars, and often told the story of having been present at the death of Sitting Bull; he had also served in the Spanish-American War and fought in the Battle of San Juan. Having learned Italian during a minor army diplomatic posting in Rome, he returned to Boston in the early years of the new century to become a police investigator in a series of Black Hand murders, and was highly regarded both inside and outside the department.53

  Commissioner Curtis had already set about enlisting a volunteer force of citizens to replace the police in case of a strike, mostly students, war veterans, and members of the American Legion. Several of the enlistees were well-known former Harvard athletes, such as Huntington R. “Tack” Hardwick of Harvard’s football and baseball squads; John Richardson Jr., captain of a championship Crimson rowing club; Morrill Wiggin, also a renowned Harvard oarsman; Bartlett Hayes, pitcher on the Harvard nine of 1898; and Thomas G. Cabot, described by one news account as “a husky from the class of ’19.” At the urging of President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, about 150 current Harvard students also volunteered. “Harvard Organizing Force for Police Duty in Boston,” read a headline in the Globe. The paper ran display ads offering “Riot, Strike, and Civil Commotion Insurance” to storefront businesses, which were expected to be the targets of looting and vandalism if the police vanished from the city’s streets.54 Curtis had his volunteer recruits put through rudimentary drills at the Irvington Street Armory, and each was issued a pistol, a badge, and a baton.

  The situation worsened on September 8, a day before the union’s announced strike deadline, when Curtis suspended McInnes and the eighteen others arrested earlier. By now it was evident that the commissioner was only aggravating the situation, and the state AFL and other observers began clamoring for his removal; Governor Coolidge, however, vowed to stand by him, and the city braced for the worst as police officers, fed up with Curtis and his mistreatment of union leaders, voted to strike by an overwhelming margin of 1,134–2.

  When, as threatened, most of the force’s fifteen hundred police officers walked off their posts at 5:45 p.m. on September 9 (the only exceptions being those of
ficers nearing retirement, who feared endangering their pensions), criminal gangs, gamblers, and juvenile troublemakers began to roam free. As Bostonians cringed behind locked doors, windows were smashed and stores looted along Washington Street, the main shopping thoroughfare; shoe stores were especially hard hit, looters removing their acquisitions to the curb so they could try them on. Muggings were rampant, while players of craps and other outlawed dice games took over Boston Common. “Boston has never seen such a night,” observed the Globe. “Utterly without police, in the hands of wanton hoodlums, a proud city has fallen into pointless, meaningless disorder.”55 The police stand-ins did their best but proved largely inadequate. Boston authorities may have allowed some of this “crime wave” for its sensational effect, the better to blacken the image of the striking police; if so, it produced the desired result.

  Curtis was all for combating the rowdies tooth and nail, while Mayor Peters, chastening Curtis for provoking the crisis in the first place, again proposed some sort of mediation. Governor Coolidge joined Curtis in refusing any compromise with the traitorous strikers. As shop owners boarded up their windows or sat before their premises armed with shotgun and pistol through a second night of rioting and vandalism, Peters called on five thousand members of the state militia to patrol Boston’s streets.

  The Boston Central Labor Union briefly entertained talk of a general strike in support of the police, but the recent example of Seattle argued against such a move. It was also readily apparent—in the Boston papers as well as in commentary from across the country—that press and public disapproved of the police going on strike, condemning the action in grandiose terms much as it had the Seattle walkout. The Philadelphia Public Ledger decried the “fact” that “Bolshevism in the United States is no longer a specter; Boston in chaos reveals its sinister substance.”56 Even President Wilson was moved to comment, labeling the strike “a crime against civilization.”57