For all that Massachusetts controlled the Boston police, the racial center of gravity in the department had been shifting. In 1851 the appointment of the Irish Barney McGinniskin to the force stirred up such violent opposition against “untrustworthy foreigners” that when he appeared at police headquarters, announcing himself as “Barney McGinniskin, fresh from the bogs of Ireland!” Marshal Tukey refused to assign him to duty. Mayor Seaver in his shake-up of the department kept McGinniskin on, but in 1854 he was discharged by the newly elected “Know Nothing” mayor, Jerome Van Crowninshield Smith. In 1861 there were no Irishmen on the force. But eight years later there were forty. Not for a number of years had a policeman’s lot seemed a happy one to the old-line Yankees. But to the emergent Irish a police career was the third and the most practically attainable of the three P’s—priest, politician, policeman. Any Boston Irish mother’s highest ambition was to see her son a priest. A more deviously gifted boy might rise as a politician. Though the policeman might rank third, his was a rank more readily attainable. In his neighborhood he was highly respected. Not only did he embody authority, but his pay was at least double that of the average laborer and somewhat more than that of a teller or bookkeeper. With the new century the Boston police adopted a domed helmet—grey in summer, blue in winter—similar to that of the English police. Splendid in helmet, wing collar, long coat with a row of glittering buttons, polished leather belt fastened by a buckle bearing the city seal, and with a night stick tucked in his belt, the Boston patrolman walking his beat was a figure imposing enough to fill any mother’s or wife’s heart with pride.
Running the police department with three commissioners, often of different views, proved both unwieldy and inefficient. Graft and corruption, while not as blatant as in most American cities, were still evident. Finally in 1906 the legislature abolished the State Board of Police, and the three commissioners were replaced by a single commissioner with virtually complete authority over the department, as defined by the Act of 1906:
The Police Commissioner shall have authority to appoint, establish, and organize the police of said city, and make all needful rules and regulations for its efficiency. He shall from time to time appoint a trial board to be composed of three captains of police to hear evidence in such complaints against members of the force as the commissioner may deem advisable to refer to said board. Said trial board shall report its findings to said Commissioner, who may review the same and take such action thereon as he may deem advisable. Except as otherwise provided herein, all the powers and duties now imposed or conferred by law upon the board of police of the city of Boston are hereby conferred and imposed upon said police commissioner.
Present rules and regulations … for said city shall continue in force until otherwise ordered by said police commissioner.
To fill this post for a five-year term, Governor Curtis Guild named Stephen O’Meara. The new commissioner was that anomaly, a Republican Irishman. Pockets of Yankee Democrats existed, survivors of the pre-Civil War scene, but an Irish Republican seemed an oxymoron. Some thought O’Meara’s political aberration could be accounted for by his childhood in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. But whatever his politics, he was much respected by his fellow Celts and even by the native Yankees.
Tall, of soldierly bearing, he carried himself with an innate air of authority that scarcely any subordinate would feel inclined to challenge. As a man of integrity he ranked with such early Boston Irish leaders as Hugh O’Brien, the poet John Boyle O’Reilly, and Mayor Patrick Collins, who had died in office the year before O’Meara’s appointment. It was of Collins that ex-President Grover Cleveland wrote, “In public life he was strictly honest and sincerely devoted to the responsibilities involved.” The same could be said for O’Meara. It could scarcely have been said of Collins’s successor, John F. Fitzgerald, better known as “Honey Fitz” for his tenor rendering of “Sweet Adeline.” John Cutler, Honey Fitz’s sympathetic biographer, would entitle his chapter on Mayor Fitzgerald’s first term, “Thieves in the House.” Entering office in the same year, the two Irishmen formed a curious contrast: the austere commanding police commissioner and the dapper, venal little mayor.
Stephen O’Meara’s parents brought him from Canada to Charlestown, Massachusetts, when he was ten. He grew up in that rugged Celtic enclave where babies were said to be born with their fists clenched. A bright, eager pupil at Charlestown High School but too poor to go on to college, he found his first job as a cub reporter for the newly founded Globe, then two years later moved to a better job on the Boston Journal, the morning mouthpiece of Republican New England. A few years later he went back to the Globe as a police reporter, then shifted to political and legislative affairs, becoming one of the most skilled and knowledgeable reporters in the city. Returning once more to the Journal, he advanced successively over the next twenty years from city editor, to news and managing editor, to editor and general manager, and finally in 1895 to editor, publisher, and part owner. By 1899 he had secured majority interest in the Journal, holding this until 1902 when he sold his paper to Frank A. Munsey.
O’Meara received a measure of acceptance in frosty Yankee Boston rare for an Irish-American of his era. He was a member of the Exchange, Algonquin, St. Botolph’s, and Union clubs, the latter being only a cut below that Boston club of clubs, the Somerset. He was a speaker much in demand by numerous social, political, and religious organizations. He served as treasurer of the New England Associated Press and as director and vice-president of the National Associated Press. Dartmouth awarded him an honorary degree. Harvard appointed him a lecturer on municipal government. When President McKinley attended the 1898 Atlantic Peace Celebration, he chose O’Meara as the New England speaker. O’Meara numbered among his correspondents Joseph Pulitzer, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was so taken with him that in 1912 he begged him to run for governor on the Bull Moose ticket.
After selling the Journal, O’Meara took his family on an extended trip abroad. He was in Europe when he learned that Governor Guild had appointed him police commissioner. Guild explained that O’Meara was a man above politics. The governor was not, however, unmindful of Boston Irish sensibilities when he appointed him. O’Meara returned to Boston at once and was sworn into office on June 5, 1906.
The new commissioner made his presence felt in the department at once. In his first weeks he tightened up discipline and issued new regulations on appearance. He let his men know that at all times they must be clean-shaven, with boots and belts gleaming, trousers pressed to a razor-edge, white collars spotless. Rough conduct and unjustified assaults on citizens—there had been assorted complaints—were to cease.
While mayors Honey Fitz and James Michael Curley alternated at the municipal trough, the Boston Police Department under its austerely upright commissioner remained a towering exception to the corruption of City Hall. O’Meara in his years as a police reporter had come to know all the ins and outs of the department, the sources of graft and handouts, the links between police and politicians and the underworld. No subordinate could pull the wool over his eyes. He brooked no favoritism or favors, insisting that his policemen were there to maintain order and to keep the law, not to break it. The men found him strict but just, sympathetic to their needs, a man to be trusted. In spite of his Republican aberration, he was still one of their own, a Charlestown boy, an Irishman, a Catholic. Any policeman with a personal problem was free to talk it over in the privacy of the commissioner’s office. He saw to it that all officers were selected and promoted on a merit basis. Discipline was enforced without regard for political connections. “The fairest man anyone could ever hope to deal with,” one of his patrolmen called him years after his death. In his early months in office he encouraged his men to form the Boston Social Club, accurately described by its name, for although he was willing to listen to the suggestions of its various committees, he gave the new organization little or no say in the running of his department.
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t the end of his first year in office the Globe in an editorial, “One Year of O’Meara,” praised his reforms and declared that “members of the whole department are frank in their expression of their unqualified confidence in their ruler…. The Commissioner’s leniency in dealing with offenders in the department has brought the men closer to him…. Today the commissioner is more popular with the men than any commissioner in recent memory.”
In his first annual report, the commissioner himself wrote: “The first efforts of the police commissioner were directed to the task of convincing the men of the admirable police force over which he took control, that they were absolutely free from outside interference; that the commissioner himself in coming to the department had no entanglement and no obligation and that his duty was to the law alone; and that they, in turn were to look only to their department superiors for rewards and punishments.”
When Honey Fitz tried to have four special policemen appointed who did not meet the commissioner’s requirement, O’Meara wrote him that if he as mayor wished to increase the size of the police department, he had the legal right to do so, but the commissioner would still make the appointments. When his friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge interceded for a Francis McDonald who had failed to meet the physical standards, although his own doctor had pronounced him fit, the answer was still No. Lodge wrote, “I take real interest in this case and should be much indebted for anything you can do.” O’Meara replied, “The trouble with Mr. Francis McDonald … is that he walks very badly and for a policeman that is a fatal defect…. We are obliged to be more particular than doctors.”
Boston under Commissioner O’Meara remained and would continue to remain singularly free of the scandals so recurrent in the police departments of most major American cities. Even petty graft all but disappeared. As Raymond B. Fosdick wrote in his study of American police systems, “Particularly after the creation of a single-headed management in 1906, the administration of the Boston police force was conducted with a disregard for political consideration rarely encountered in American cities.”
At the end of his five years O’Meara was reappointed by Governor Eugene Foss, an elderly corporation lawyer who resembled Humpty Dumpty with a moustache, and who was known generally as “the Old Boy.” Long a Republican, Foss had turned to the Democrats in pique after failing to be elected to Congress as a Republican in his own district. The Republican old guard–progressive conflict in 1910 enabled him as newly minted Democrat to get elected governor. Democratic politicians now urged him to replace the commissioner with a loyal Democrat, pointing out that O’Meara had criticized him repeatedly in the Journal and opposed him for Congress. Foss asked them rhetorically to “show me a Democrat as honest, as intellectual as Stephen O’Meara and I’ll appoint him.”
As he began his second term, O’Meara could boast that “in all the criticism to which the police department and its commissioners are sure to be subjected, not one person and not one newspaper has ever alleged in five and a half years that the department as a whole, or any members of it, were concerned in any way with politics, except as voting citizens.” In that time only one police officer had been convicted of taking a bribe.
O’Meara appointed his new men from the certified lists of the Massachusetts civil service. These “reserve men” then served a one-and-a-half- to two-year period of probation. But high rank alone in the competitive examination did not assure a place in the department. The commissioner also considered age, weight, height, health, and above all character. “No written examination,” he wrote, “can possibly disclose the qualities and habits which are of vital importance to a police officer of rank and can be known only to superiors. Among them are judgment, coolness, moral as well as physical courage, executive ability, capacity for the command of men, sobriety and other moral qualities, standing among his associates and in the community, powers of initiative, temper, integrity, energy, courtesy.”
Promotion remained in O’Meara’s hands, based on his personal observations and the reports of ranking officers. While these subjective reports were open to bias and at times caused resentment among the rank and file, the Boston police cadre grew to be among the best in the land. The public-minded Richard Henry Dana, son of the author of Two Years Before the Mast, thought that the Boston police were “physically finer than West Point cadets.”
Every year the annual report of the police commissioner carried lists of punishments and dismissals for violations of discipline and behavior unbecoming an officer. In 1908 the report disclosed that twenty-seven policemen were convicted of wrongdoing and fourteen dismissed. O’Meara recorded with stern pride that “the number is the largest number of dismissals for various reasons of rigid discipline with two exceptions in 55 years and probably since the department was established.” The commissioner was equally alert to root out the violence so taken for granted by most police. He informed his men that the “third degree” had no place in the Boston police force, and in 1916 he even outlawed the use of night sticks. Ernest Hopkins, writing long afterward in Our Lawless Police, noted that “O’Meara trained his men to take verbal abuse or a punch in the jaw without replying in kind. That unrestraint is the spirit of crime, restraint is the spirit of law, is the hardest lesson for Americans or their police to learn.” Under O’Meara the Boston police force became one of the most law-abiding and law-conscious in the country.
O’Meara showed himself a stern moralist, much concerned with enforcing liquor laws, Sunday closing laws, and the “blue laws” still on the statute books. In interviews with newsmen he declined to discuss police matters except such as appeared in his official reports. He did, however, tell a reporter from his own Journal that he was completely opposed to the teaching of “sex hygiene” in the schools, since “a foreknowledge of that subject would serve as a stimulus to curiosity.”
Neither Republican nor Democratic politicians were overly fond of O’Meara with his self-righteous denial of patronage, nor was he of them, for in 1907 he denounced both major parties openly and called for a formation of a third, a citizens’ party. Overwhelmed by the Honey Fitzes and the Jim Curleys, the reform elements in Boston, the Good Government Association in particular, several times appealed to him to run for mayor. Each time he refused, telling them that his only ambition was to improve the performance, discipline, and efficiency of the police department. One of his first acts as commissioner was to forbid police officers to accept rewards for the performance of routine business, until then a commonplace practice and, for strategically located officers, a tidy source of additional income. He also discontinued the presentation of medals to officers who performed heroic acts, maintaining that to give a few individuals excessive recognition detracted from the honorable, if routine, performance of duty by the majority.
In 1916 Republican Governor Samuel McCall reappointed the commissioner almost as a matter of course. After ten years O’Meara could truthfully claim that he had kept his department “free from party politics and graft.” An article in Human Life singled him out as “Stephen O’Meara: Police Chief Extraordinary.” During his tenure the department personnel grew from 1358 to 1877. O’Meara ran his department from his headquarters at 29 Pemberton Square as if he were commanding a ship, subject only to the nominal authority of the governor. Demanding much of himself, he demanded much of his men, with little regard for human frailty. There were those who saw him as essentially a negative reformer. Leonard Harrison, in Police Administration in Boston, wrote:
Warding off political favor seekers, counteracting unfair criticism, preventing injustice to members of the department—these were the defensive activities of the commissioner’s. At this time the police force developed a certain pride in its position in the community. It maintained a high standard of integrity and self-respect, accompanied by a sense of satisfaction that everything was all right as it stood. Tradition for the most part determined the course to be followed. Imagination and experimentation were apparently not encouraged and a deep rut of co
nservatism was worn in this period.
There were problems O’Meara would have had to deal with, chiefly matters of pay, hours, and quarters, that had remained more or less in abeyance during the war. But on December 14, 1918, he died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. The Globe wrote in tribute to its old reporter:
Before his first term had expired it began to be noised about the land that Boston had a police department of peculiar excellence. Mr. O’Meara had impressed it on his men that their’s were not “jobs” but “positions,” and that they had been chosen for their work because of special fitness of which they had a right to be proud and to which they must live up…. Visitors from other cities have commonly remarked a difference in the Boston policemen—their pride of profession, their courtesy, patience, and good temper, and the singular tact with which men were chosen for just the districts where they would best fit in with the temper of the population.
A City in Terror Page 5