Connor filed deportation orders against Massimo Pardi in district court and argued his case before the judge on the grounds that Pardi had violated the Espionage and Sedition Act under the antisyndicalist laws of the Commonwealth and therefore should be deported back to Calabria where a local magistrate could decide if any further punishment were necessary.
Even Connor was surprised when the judge agreed.
Not the next time, though. Certainly not the time after that.
What Connor finally realized—and what he hoped would hold him in good stead as long as he practiced law—was that the best arguments were those shorn of emotion or inflammatory rhetoric. Stick with the rule of law, eschew polemic, let precedent speak for you, and leave opposing counsel to choose whether to fight the soundness of those laws on appeal. It was quite the revelation. While opposing counsel thundered and raged and shook their fists in front of increasingly exasperated judges, Connor calmly pointed out the logical strictures of justice. And he could see in the eyes of the judges that they didn’t like it, they didn’t want to agree. Their seepy hearts held for the defendants, but their intellects knew truth when they saw it.
The Massimo Pardi case was to become, in hindsight, emblematic. The ironworker with the big mouth was sentenced to a year in jail (three months time served), and deportation orders were filed immediately. If his physical eviction from the country were to occur before he finished his sentence, the United States would graciously commute the remainder of it once he reached international waters. Otherwise, he did the full nine months. Connor, of course, felt some sympathy for the man. Pardi seemed, in the aggregate, an inoffensive sort, a hard worker who’d been engaged to be married in the fall. Hardly a threat to these shores. But what he represented—the very first stop on the road to terrorism—was quite offensive. Mitchell Palmer and the United States had decided the message needed to be sent to the world—we will no longer live in fear of you; you will live in fear of us. And that message was to be sent calmly, implacably, and constantly.
For a few months that summer, Connor forgot he was angry.
The Chicago White Sox came to town after Detroit and Ruth went out with a few of them one night, old friends from the farm league days, and they told him that order had been restored to their city, the army finally cheesing it to the niggers and putting them down once and for all. Thought it would never end, they said. Four days of shooting and pillaging and fires and all because one of theirs swam where he wasn’t supposed to. And the whites hadn’t been stoning him. They’d just been throwing rocks into the water to warn him off. Ain’t their fault he wasn’t a good swimmer.
Fifteen whites dead. You believe that? Fifteen. Maybe the niggers had some legitimate grievances, okay, yeah, but to kill fifteen white men? World was upside down.
It was for Babe. After that game where he’d seen Luther, he couldn’t hit shit. Couldn’t hit fastballs, couldn’t hit curves, couldn’t hit it if it had been sent to him on a string at ten miles an hour. He fell into the worst slump of his career. And now that the coloreds had been put back in their place in D.C. and Chicago, and the anarchists seemed to have gone quiet, and the country might have been able to take just one easy breath, the agitators and agitation sprang up from the least likely of quarters: the police.
The police, for Christ’s sake!
Every day of Ruth’s slump brought more signs that push was coming to shove and the city of Boston was going to pop at the seams. The papers reported rumors of a sympathy strike that would make Seattle look like an exhibition game. In Seattle it had been public workers, sure, but garbagemen and transit workers. In Boston, word was, they’d lined up the firemen. If the cops and the jakes walked off the job? Jeepers Crow! The city would become rubble and ash.
Babe had a regular thing going now with Kat Lawson at the Hotel Buckminster, and he left her sleeping one night and stopped in the bar on his way out. Chick Gandil, the White Sox first baseman, was at the bar with a couple fellas, and Babe headed for them but saw something in Chick’s eyes that immediately warned him off. He took a seat down the other end, ordered a double scotch, and recognized the guys Chick was talking to: Sport Sullivan and Abe Attell, errand boys for Arnold Rothstein.
And Babe thought: Uh-oh. Nothing good’s going to come of this.
Around the time Babe’s third scotch arrived, Sport Sullivan and Abe Attell removed their coats from the backs of their chairs and left through the front door, and Chick Gandill walked his own double scotch down the length of the bar and plopped into the seat next to Babe with a loud sigh.
“Gidge.”
“Babe.”
“Oh, right, right. Babe. How you doing?”
“Ain’t hanging with mutts, that’s how I’m doing.”
“Who’s the mutts?”
Babe looked at Gandill. “You know who the mutts are. Sport Sullivan? Abe Fucking Attell? They’re mutts work for Rothstein and Rothstein’s the mutt of mutts. What the fuck you doing talking to a pair of mutts like that, Chick?”
“Gee, Mom, next time let me ask permission.”
“They’re dirty as the Muddy River, Gandil. You know it and anyone else with eyes knows it, too. You get seen with a pair of diamond dandies like that, who’s going to believe you ain’t taking?”
“Why do you think I met him here?” Chick said. “This ain’t Chicago. It’s nice and quiet. And no one’ll get wind, Babe, my boy, long as you keep your nigger lips shut.” Gandil smiled and drained his drink and dropped it to the bar. “Shoving off, my boy. Keep swinging for the fences. You’ve gotta hit one sometime this month, right?” He clapped Babe on the back and laughed and walked out of the bar.
Nigger lips. Shit.
Babe ordered another.
Police talking about a strike, ballplayers talking to known fixers, his home-run-record chase stalled at sixteen because of a chance sighting of a colored fella he’d met once in Ohio.
Was anything fucking sacred anymore?
The BOSTON POLICE STRIKE
CHAPTER thirty-three
Danny met with Ralph Raphelson at the headquarters of the Boston Central Labor Union on the first Thursday in August. Raphelson was so tall he was one of the rare men with a face Danny had to look up into as he shook his hand. Thin as a fingernail, with wispy blond hair racing to depart the steep slope of his skull, he motioned Danny to a chair and took his own behind his desk. Beyond the windows, a hot-soup rain fell from beige clouds and the streets smelled like stewed produce.
“Let’s start with the obvious,” Ralph Raphelson said. “If you have an itch to comment on or give me the rough work about my name, please scratch it now.”
Danny let Raphelson see him consider it before he said, “Nope. All set.”
“Much appreciated.” Raphelson opened his hands. “What can we do for the Boston Police Department this morning, Officer Coughlin?”
“I represent the Boston Social Club,” Danny said. “We’re the organized-labor arm of the—”
“I know who you are, Officer.” Raphelson gave his desk blotter a light pat. “And I’m well acquainted with the BSC. Let me put your mind at ease—we want to help.”
Danny nodded. “Mr. Raphelson—”
“Ralph.”
“Ralph, if you know who I am, then you know I’ve talked to several of your member groups.”
“Oh, I do, yes. I hear you’re quite convincing.”
Danny’s first thought: I am? He wiped some rain off his coat. “If our hand is forced and we have no choice but to walk off the job, would the Central Labor Union support us?”
“Verbally? Of course.”
“How about physically?”
“You’re talking about a sympathy strike.”
Danny met his eyes. “Yes, I am.”
Raphelson rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. “You understand how many men the Boston Central Labor Union represents?”
“I’ve heard a shade under eighty thousand.”
“A shade over,�
�� Raphelson said. “We just picked up a plumbers local from West Roxbury.”
“A shade over then.”
“You ever known eight men could agree on anything?”
“Rarely.”
“And we’ve got eighty thousand—firemen, plumbers, phone operators, machinists, teamsters, boilermakers, and transit men. And you want me to bring them into agreement to strike on behalf of men who’ve hit them with clubs when they struck?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
That brought a smile to Raphelson’s eyes if not his lips.
“Why not?” Danny repeated. “You know any of those men whose wages have kept up with the cost of living? Any who can keep their families fed and still find the time to read their kids a story at bedtime? They can’t, Ralph. They’re not treated like workers. They’re treated like field hands.”
Raphelson laced his hands behind his head and considered Danny. “You’re pretty swell at the emotional rhetoric, Coughlin. Pretty swell.”
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment. I have to deal in practicalities. Once all the essential-dignity-of-the-working-class sentiments are dispensed with, who’s to say my eighty thousand men have jobs to come back to? You seen the latest unemployment figures? Why shouldn’t those men take my men’s jobs? What if your strike drags on? Who’s to keep the families fed if the men finally have the time to read those bedtime stories? Their kids’ stomachs are rumbling, but glory hallelujah, they’ve got fairy tales. You say, ‘Why not?’ There are eighty thousand reasons and their families why not.”
It was cool and dark in the office, the blinds only half open to the dark day, the sole light coming from a small desk lamp by Raphelson’s elbow. Danny met Raphelson’s eyes and waited him out, sensing a caged anticipation in the man.
Raphelson sighed. “And yet, I’ll grant you, I’m interested.”
Danny leaned forward in his chair. “Then it’s my turn to ask why.”
Raphelson fiddled with his window blinds until the slats let in just a bit more of the damp day. “Organized labor is nearing a turning point. We’ve made our few strides over the past two decades mostly because we caught Big Money by surprise in some of the larger cities. But lately? Big Money’s gotten smart. They’re framing the debate by taking ownership of the language. You’re no longer a workingman fighting for his rights. You’re Bolsheviki. You’re a ‘subversive.’ Don’t like the eighty-hour week? You’re an anarchist. Only Commies expect disability pay.” He flicked a hand at the window. “It’s not just kids who like bedtime stories, Coughlin. We all do. We like them simple and comforting. And right now that’s what Big Money is doing to Labor—they’re telling a better bedtime story.” He turned his head from the window, gave Danny a smile. “Maybe we finally have an opportunity to rewrite it.”
“That’d be nice,” Danny said.
Raphelson stretched a long arm across the desk. “I’ll be in touch.”
Danny shook the hand. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet, but as you said”—Raphelson glanced at the rain—“‘why not?’”
Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis tipped the printer’s courier a nickel and carried the boxes to his desk. There were four of them, each the size of a brick, and he placed one in the center of his ink blotter and removed the cardboard cover to consider the contents. They reminded him of wedding invitations, and he swallowed a sour and sad reflection of his only daughter, Marie, plump and dull-eyed since the cradle, now fading into spinsterhood with a complacency he found sordid.
He lifted the top slip of paper from the box. The script was quite handsome, utile but bold, the paper a heavy cotton bond the color of flesh. He placed the slip back on the top of the stack and decided to send the printer a personal letter of thanks, a commendation on such a fine job delivered under the stress of a rush order.
Herbert Parker entered from his office next door and said not a word as he crossed to Curtis and joined his friend at the desk, and they stared down at the stack of slips on the ink blotter.
To:____________________
Boston Police Officer
By authority conferred on me as Police Commissioner, I hereby discharge you from the Boston Police Department. Said discharge is effective upon receipt of this notice. The cause and reasons for such discharge are as follows:
Specifications:____________________
Respectfully,
Edwin Upton Curtis
“Who did you use?” Parker said.
“The printer?”
“Yes.”
“Freeman and Sons on School Street.”
“Freeman. Jewish?”
“Scottish, I think.”
“He does fine work.”
“Doesn’t he, though?”
Fay Hall. Packed. Every man in the department who wasn’t on duty and even some who were, the room smelling of the warm rain and several decades’ worth of sweat, body odor, cigar and cigarette smoke so thick it slathered the walls like another coat of paint.
Mark Denton was over in one corner of the stage, talking to Frank McCarthy, the just-arrived organizer of the New England chapter of the American Federation of Labor. Danny was in the other corner talking to Tim Rose, a beat cop from the Oh-Two who pounded the bricks around City Hall and Newspaper Row.
“Who told you this?” Danny said.
“Wes Freeman himself.”
“The father?”
“No, the son. Father’s a sot, a gin junkie. The son does all the work now.”
“One thousand discharge slips?”
Tim shook his head. “Five hundred discharge slips, five hundred suspensions.”
“Already printed.”
Tim nodded. “And delivered to Useless Curtis himself at eight sharp this a.m.”
Danny caught himself tugging on his chin and nodding at the same time, another habit he’d inherited from his father. He stopped and gave Tim what he hoped was a confident smile. “Well, I guess they took their dancing shoes off, uh?”
“I guess they did.” Tim gestured with his chin at Mark Denton and Frank McCarthy. “Who’s the swell with Denton?”
“Organizer with the AFL.”
Tim’s eyes pulsed. “He bring the charter?”
“He brought the charter, Tim.”
“Guess we took off our dancing shoes then, too, eh, Dan?” A smile exploded across Tim’s face.
“We did at that.” Danny clapped his shoulder as Mark Denton picked the megaphone off the floor and stepped to the dais.
Danny crossed to the stage, and Mark Denton knelt at the edge to give Danny his ear and Danny told him about the discharge and suspension slips.
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. They got to his office at eight this morning. Solid info.”
Mark shook his hand. “You’re going to make a fine vice president.”
Danny took a step back. “What?”
Denton gave him a sly smile and stepped up to the dais. “Gentlemen, thank you for coming. This man to my left is Frank McCarthy. He’s your New England rep with the AF of L. And he’s come to bring us something.”
As McCarthy took the dais and the megaphone, Kevin McRae and several other officers of what was about to become the extinct BSC stopped at each row to hand out ballots that the men passed down the rows, their eyes pinwheeling.
“Gentlemen of the Boston Police Department,” McCarthy said, “once you mark those ballots ‘yay’ or ‘nay,’ a decision will have been made as to whether you remain the Boston Social Club or accept this charter I raise before you and become, instead, the Boston Police Union Number sixteen thousand eight hundred and seven of the American Federation of Labor. You will, with some measure of sadness I’m sure, be saying good-bye to the notion and the name of the Boston Social Club, but in return, you will join a brotherhood that is two million strong. Two million strong, gentlemen. Think about that. You will never feel alone again. You will never
feel weak or at the mercy of your bosses. Even the mayor, himself, will be afraid to tell you what to do.”
“He already is!” someone shouted, and laughter spread through the room.
Nervous laughter, Danny thought, as the men realized the import of what they were about to do. No going back after today. Leaving a whole other world behind, one in which their rights weren’t respected, yes, but that lack of respect was at least predictable. It made the ground firm underfoot. But this new ground was something else again. Foreign ground. And for all McCarthy’s talk of brotherhood, lonely ground. Lonely because it was strange, because all bearings were unfamiliar. The potential for disgrace and disaster lay ahead everywhere, and every man in the room felt it.
They passed the ballots back down the rows. Don Slatterly rounded up the stacks from the men collecting them like ushers at mass and carried the entire fourteen hundred toward Danny, his steps a bit soggy, his face drained of color.
Danny took the stack from his hands, and Slatterly said, “Heavy, uh?”
Danny gave him a shaky smile and nodded.
“Men,” Frank McCarthy called, “do you all attest that you answered the ballot question truthfully and signed your names? A show of hands.”
Every hand in the room rose.
“So that our young officer to stage left doesn’t have to count them right here and right now, could I get a show of hands as to how many of you voted in favor of accepting this charter and joining the AF of L? If all of you who voted ‘yay,’ would please stand.”
Danny looked up from the stack in his hands as fourteen hundred chairs pushed back and fourteen hundred men rose to their feet.
McCarthy raised his megaphone. “Welcome to the American Federation of Labor, gentlemen.”
The collective scream that exploded in Fay Hall pushed Danny’s spine into the center of his chest and flooded his brain with white light. Mark Denton snatched the stack of ballots from his hands and tossed them high above his head and they hung in the air and then began to float downward as Mark lifted him off his feet and kissed his cheek and hugged him so hard his bones howled.
The Given Day Page 54