A City in Terror

by Rosalind Russell

  O’Meara had indeed created an efficient and smooth-running police department, but his tightly organized system inevitably kept him remote in spite of all his efforts to make himself available. Proud of the esprit de corps of his men, he felt like a military commander faced with imposing tasks. Duty came first; no burden was too difficult! In a dozen years his force grew from 1358 to 1877. Yet the weight of work increased proportionately far more. In 1906 the police had made 49,906 arrests; in 1917 the number was 108,556. By order of the legislature the Boston police were assigned the task of checking the backgrounds and character of some twenty thousand prospective jurors. As auto traffic increased, they were called to regulate it. Other special functions required special details. The war greatly expanded the demand for police services. In 1917 O’Meara’s men did twenty thousand tours of duty exclusively related to the war effort. During the war years grumbling and discontent in the police department, though shunted aside and belittled by the captains and the superintendent, finally reached the ears of the commissioner. In O’Meara’s last year there was enough talk of the police forming a union for him to notify Governor McCall and to issue General Order Number 129 on the subject. His order, dated June 28, 1918, met the current rumors head-on:

  It is probable that the printed rumors to the effect that members of the police department are discussing the advisability of organizing a union to be affiliated with the American Federation of Labor represent no substantial sentiment existing among them. Under ordinary conditions no attention would be paid to such rumors, but even though unfounded, they are so likely to injure the discipline, efficiency, and even the good name of the force, and the times are so favorable to the creation of discontent among men who are bearing their share of the war burdens, though still at home, that I feel it to be my duty to make the situation clear.

  There is no substantial disagreement as to the wisdom and even the necessity of maintaining unions among persons following the same industrial occupations.

  Though a union of public employees, as distinct from those composed of employees of private concerns, is in itself a matter of doubtful propriety, such union in any case and at the worst could affect the operations only of a particular branch of the city service. The police department, on the other hand, exists for the impartial enforcement of the laws, and protection of persons and property under all conditions. Should its members incur obligations to an outside organization, they would be justly suspected of abandoning the impartial attitude which heretofore has vindicated their good faith as against the complaints almost invariably made by both sides in many controversies.

  It is assumed erroneously that agents of an outside organization could obtain for the police advantages in pay and regulations. This is not a question of compelling a private employer to surrender a part of his profits; it has to do with police service which is wholly different from any other service, public or private—a service regulated by laws which hold to a strict responsibility certain officials, of whom the Police Commissioner is one. The policemen are their own best advocates, and to suppose that an official would yield on points of pay or regulation to the arguments or threats of an outside organization if the policemen themselves had failed to establish their case would be to mark him as cowardly and unfit for his position.

  I cannot believe that a proposition to turn the police force into a union, subject to the rules and direction of any organization outside the police department will ever be presented formally to its members, but if, unfortunately, such a question should ever arise, I trust that it will be answered with an emphatic refusal by the members of the force who have an intelligent regard for their own self-respect, the credit of the department and the obligations to the whole public which they undertook with their oath of office.

  On December 30, 1918, the Boston Social Club members again met at Intercolonial Hall to take up the salary question. After an individual roll call to assure that no strangers were present, the seven hundred present voted unanimously to reject Mayor Peters’ proposal of December 26 and declared that they would accept nothing less than their $200 demand. There was still no mention of a strike nor any hint of any approach to the American Federation of Labor, but it was clear that in their frustration the men were growing increasingly militant. At the close of the meeting President Lynch, to correct rumors circulating in the press, issued a statement pointing out that the present wage scale had been voted over twenty years before and had not gone into effect until 1913; that when the war broke out and prices rose, the men had bided their time because of Boston’s financial difficulties; that when in 1917 they had gone to the commissioner, he had advised them to postpone their demands; that when they had taken his advice, they had found no special consideration a year later for their patience.

  Earlier on that same day the outgoing Governor McCall had administered the oath of office to Commissioner Curtis. In his first public statement the new commissioner announced bluntly that any member of the police force so dissatisfied that he could not perform his duties properly and cheerfully was free to resign. His sole advice to his men was to be patient. “No increase in salaries can be given the police department,” he told them, “except by concurrent action of the mayor and the police commissioner. Undoubtedly we shall consult on the subject. Meanwhile, everyone should talk and act with moderation with regard to the matter. Knowing the membership of the department by reputation we are confident that they will gratefully accept our final decision.”

  Even Curtis realized that something must be done about the policemen’s pay. In February, after Peters’ piecemeal wage offer had been rejected, the commissioner suggested a compromise plan of a flat 10 per cent increase, amounting to an average $140-a-year raise. The men rejected the compromise, holding to their original demand while at the same time pointing out that salaries were only one of a number of their grievances.

  In March Clarence W. Rowley, the lawyer for the Boston Social Club, challenged Curtis to debate whether the salaries of the policemen should be increased to meet the cost of living. Curtis refused. “Being in touch with the committee of the men themselves,” he replied, “I know that my attitude on this question is satisfactory to the men and I see no useful purpose to be gained in debating the matter. I do not share your fear that there is danger that our Police Department will be demoralized.”

  Rowley answered him tartly:

  Boston police officers have worked faithfully more than 60 hours per week throughout the war; they have received no increase in pay for more than five years, while the pay of thousands of alien workmen has been advanced from 50 to 70 per cent or more, during the same period. The pay of carmen has advanced very materially and the cost of living has increased 72 per cent.

  I wish you would consider whether it would be fair, both to the city and the men, to increase salaries in the same proportion that the cost of living has increased since July 1, 1914, which date I take because it seems to be a normal time before the disruption of the great war….

  The effect of a demoralized Police Department will be immediate and will endanger life and property. The maintenance of law and order and the prevention of crime demands [sic] a properly governed and fairly paid Police Department.

  To this Curtis did not reply. Finally in May Governor Coolidge signed a bill increasing Boston’s tax limit from $6.52 to $9.52, a limit that, like the police department, was controlled by the legislature. With the prospect of additional revenue, Mayor Peters announced on May 10 that police and firemen would now receive their $200 increase. Senior officers would get $200 by the end of the month, while privates in the lower grades would get the regular $100 advance plus $100.

  But what might have been a cause for rejoicing two years earlier, and quite acceptable even in the previous year, now seemed inadequate under the lengthening shadow of the High Cost of Living. Some of the policemen were as much as five hundred dollars in debt. Policemen could read in the papers that government economists had now set $1575 a year as
the subsistence minimum for a family of five. Even that minimum was still beyond the reach of the majority of the police. Nevertheless they were not yet prepared to challenge the commissioner. At a meeting of the Social Club on May 9, resolutions were unanimously adopted thanking Curtis for providing “at [his] personal expense” refreshments for police assigned to the Yankee Division parade. “This kindness as well as many others for their welfare put into active operation by you since assuming your important office, is highly appreciated by the patrolmen of the Police Department, for which we sincerely thank you.”

  In spite of their formally polite resolutions, the police found their new commissioner cold and unapproachable. When shortly after he had taken office a committee from the Social Club came to him to suggest a review of working conditions, he refused to deal with it. Instead he set up his own grievance committee, made up of men elected by ballot, one from each of the station houses. Since the division captains counted the ballots in the privacy of their offices, there was much suspicion that many of the elections were rigged. The new committee met only once, and at the commissioner’s order. After that he scheduled no further meetings, and when the committee’s president, the same Michael Lynch who was president of the Social Club, asked him when they would meet again to discuss departmental problems, he replied, “Search me!” Those members who went directly to Curtis with their complaints received scant satisfaction. When one such delegation complained that certain men in Division Sixteen earned forty to sixty dollars a month for extra duty while others with larger families were bypassed, he not only did nothing about it but saw to it that the complaining grievance officer was transferred and given strike duty at a shoe factory. Nor was anything done about the condition of the station houses. Curtis merely selected a committee of officers to inspect them and submit a report on their condition, which he then forwarded to Peters. Nothing was heard of it further in the mayor’s office.

  While the police simmered in their grievances, Boston itself moved from spring to summer. As the elms on the Common budded and then leafed, the turbulence of the country and the world outside impinged on the city only in headlines. Bostonians, proper and improper, were engrossed in casual day-to-day events: the opening of the baseball season at Fenway Park, the flight of the great navy seaplane, the NC-4, with its crew of five across the Atlantic from Halifax to Horta in the Azores, the intrepid aviators of the Flying Circus who looped the loop over the State House at over seventy miles an hour as a spur to the lagging Victory Liberty Loan drive. The last of the American Expeditionary Force was leaving France. Sergeant Alvin York of Pall Mall, Tennessee, the most decorated American soldier of the World War, again made the headlines by marrying. Governor Coolidge vetoed the Massachusetts legislators’ efforts to raise their pay from $1000 to $1500. In the United States Senate, the debate on President Wilson’s peace treaty opened, with Massachusetts’ Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and other Republican stalwarts vindictively eager to separate the treaty from the League of Nations. Of more emotional concern to Boston were the mass meetings held to demand Ireland’s freedom, some of which Cardinal O’Connell graced with his presence.

  For several June weeks the city sweltered under a heat wave that was finally broken by the east wind. The plate glass windows of the sedate houses on Commonwealth Avenue and Beacon Street were boarded up as usual for the summer while their owners left for the North Shore or Bar Harbor. Children again rode on the swan boats that glided decorously under the bridges in the Public Garden. Macullar, Parker’s Tremont Street window had its annual display of Harvard club hat bands.

  Few in the city gave much thought to the police. The patrolmen had changed their blue winter helmets for summer grey; there seemed to be no other change. They walked their beats, highheaded, staid, reliable, “Boston’s finest.” Those passing them so casually on the streets would have been surprised to learn that anything like a crisis was developing within the police department, a confrontation looming up between the stubborn Yankee commissioner and his resentful Celtic force. Whatever their grievances, the members of the Boston Social Club still hoped to avoid such a confrontation. On July 16 the grievance committee wrote to Curtis: “We want to thank you sincerely in behalf of all the patrolmen of the Boston Police Department for the many vital and important benefits obtained and which were championed by you, including the non-contributory pension, corrections in the rule relating to unnecessary reporting by night men on their off days and excuses from different roll calls. We desire to express our deep sense of gratitude for your efforts in our behalf in obtaining the increase in salary.”

  The June reversal by the American Federation of Labor of its policy of not granting charters to police unions was seen as a great opportunity by the Boston police to turn their innocuous Social Club into an aggressive union. Unionization was in the air. In the preceding four years, aided by wartime prosperity and a friendly national administration, union membership had increased by 60 per cent. In 1919 alone almost a million new members had joined the AFL. The Boston firemen now had their affiliated union as did the clerks and office workers of City Hall. Police in other cities were rushing to sign up. An undercurrent of persuasive discussion ran through the Boston Police Department even as petitions for an AFL charter gathered signatures at the various station houses. When Curtis in his Pemberton Square office learned of this, he issued a statement to the press expressing his disapproval of the movement. Then he walked the hundred intervening yards to the governor’s office to consult with Coolidge’s officiously efficient secretary, Henry Long, left in charge while the governor was away on vacation. Curtis told Long of the strong unionization movement within the police force. As commissioner he planned to oppose any union and wanted to know if Coolidge would stand behind him. He declared he was ready to take whatever action was necessary but would nevertheless like the assurance of the governor’s support. The secretary offered the assurance on his own. Curtis said this was not enough. The governor himself must make the statement directly. Long then telephoned Coolidge and gave him Curtis’s message. Coolidge told Long to “tell the Commissioner to go ahead in the performance of his duties.”

  The remark, terse as it was ambiguous, was typical of the austere Vermont Yankee who occupied the austere, elegant governor’s office in the Federalist State House. For Calvin Coolidge was a cautious man who measured his words with a teaspoon, put on his long winter underwear in mid-October and took it off in mid-May, and summed up his philosophy by remarking that if you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you. Harvard’s self-consciously aristocratic Barrett Wendell described him as “a small hatchet-faced, colorless man, with a tight-shut, thin-lipped mouth; very chary of words but with a gleam of understanding in his pretty keen eye.”

  He was born John Calvin Coolidge in the remote hill-bound hamlet of Plymouth Notch, Vermont, the one state in the Union that always voted Republican, and that had fewer people in it than at the time of the Revolution. His father, a farmer and storekeeper, was also the local justice of the peace. The flinty Coolidge features had been honed by a slight admixture of Indian blood. Even in the waxworks museum that was Vermont the family had seemed atavistic, their very speech deriving from a remote psalm-singing Calvinist past. Young John Calvin’s nasal accent had a twang that had made his Plymouth schoolmates giggle. He was said to be the last New Englander who pronounced “cow” as a three-syllable word. When the boy was fifteen, his father enrolled him in Black River Academy, one of the small pathetically named academies scattered across the New England landscape in the wake of the Greek revival, this one in Ludlow, twelve miles to the south of Plymouth and equally overborn by the Vermont hills. A shy and lonely boy, thrown back on himself, he took no part in sports or recreation, made no mark even in that petty world. After graduating from Black River he went on to Amherst, seventy-three miles to the south but still within his hill range, for the Berkshires are only an extension of Vermont’s Gre
en Mountains. There in upland Massachusetts the taciturn, diffident freshman hoped for acceptance, without knowing how to go about it. No one sought him out. No fraternity bothered to rush him. “I don’t seem to get acquainted very fast,” he wrote wistfully to his father. Sometimes in writing to Plymouth Notch during those first months he found his hand trembling from homesickness.

  By his senior year he had won at least a half measure of acceptance. In that year he was asked to join a newly formed fraternity. Enough of his classmates had become aware of a certain caustic wit that lurked beneath his Vermont-granite exterior to elect him Grove Orator, the senior chosen to give the classday humorous oration. He managed to graduate cum laude. No soaring ambition filled him as he faced the world, no restless urge to move beyond the familiar range of hills that had always hemmed him in. He considered storekeeping and law as careers, finally deciding on the latter. When a friend asked him where he planned to settle, he replied laconically, “Northampton’s the nearest courthouse.”

  Northampton was seven miles away. He moved there in September 1895. In the more primitive tradition of the early Republic he read law on his own, serving as a clerk in the Northampton firm of Amherst graduates John C. Hammond and Judge Henry P. Field, sitting at a table in the outer office learning to prepare writs, deeds, and wills, while reading Kent’s Commentaries and legal textbooks in his spare time. Judge Field thought the pinch-faced, sandy-haired clerk, who was already showing signs of baldness, a queer stick. Sometimes Field on coming out of his office would catch him leaning back in his swivel chair staring out into space. The judge did not find his new clerk a very hard worker, but then he was not paying him anything. Coolidge spent some twenty months at Hammond & Field’s, an unobtrusive, solitary, inscrutable figure. Then one morning his table was clear of his books, and he was gone.