A City in Terror

by Rosalind Russell

  Meanwhile Curtis was conferring with a subcommittee of three members of the city council chosen at the request of Councilor Moriarty by Acting Mayor Ford—Peters still being on his yacht somewhere in Maine. The commissioner received them with stubborn amiability. After the meeting, which lasted until 1:00 p.m., the councilors released a statement summing up Curtis’s position:

  The Commissioner while admitting to the right of all employees to organize and endorsing the aims and objects of labor unions in general holds that police officers are not employees in the ordinary sense of the word, but that they are public officials of the state of Massachusetts, and in his opinion membership in a labor organization is not compatible with their duties to the people and to the state as such officials.

  He further stated that the question as to whether the police officials were employees or public officials would probably be determined by the courts and if the decision were adverse to his contention, of course the rule he had promulgated would not be legal, and any man discharged for a violation would be reinstated.

  Curtis felt that this was a reasonable account of his somewhat blunter view that membership in a union “unfits” a man for the proper performance of his police duties. But to avoid any misunderstanding, he told the press that he as commissioner “must not be understood as having intimated that any member of the police force who, denying the authority of the rules, abandons his duty by a strike or a walk-out would be reinstated if discharged for that reason.”

  After the councilors had left, Curtis met privately for two hours with three men whose identity and business he refused to make known. All he would say was that they had not come from the governor. When questioned further by a reporter he said he had not heard from Coolidge in the last six months. He now found himself as occupied as a general preparing for battle. Late that afternoon he issued General Order 119 canceling the vacation of “division commanders, lieutenants and sergeants, including the Bureaus of Criminal Investigation.” All captains, lieutenants, and sergeants already on vacation were to prepare to return to duty, as were retired members of the force. Any patrolman willing to give up his vacation was invited to do so and promised that this would stand him in good stead.

  It was clear now, if it had not been already, that Curtis had no intention of backing down. On their side the patrolmen were so deeply committed to affiliation with the AFL that no compromise would seem reasonable to them. That same evening more than eight hundred members of the police union returned to Fay Hall and defiantly installed the officers they had elected the night before. Two patrolmen carried McInnes triumphantly up the double flight of stairs on their shoulders. After the meeting Frank McCarthy announced somewhat reluctantly that the police union was now a fact. The union, he took pains to point out, would not and could not “in any manner interfere with the executive direction of the department.” Its sole function was to “lend assistance within legal lines in protecting the economic condition of the Boston Police and establishing within the department the principle of collective bargaining in all matters affecting the working conditions of the police.” He boasted that the union now had between thirteen hundred and fourteen hundred members. They and he wanted nothing more than an amicable settlement of the dispute with the commissioner. If this, however, was not reached, “the responsibility would not rest on the Police Union.”

  The police crisis had by now pushed aside the other news of that turbulent month to emerge on the front page of the Boston papers. “WAR ON POLICE UNION IS ON,” the Herald headlines blazoned. The directors of the Boston Chamber of Commerce wrote to Curtis praising his courage and promising him their fullest support. They followed this up with a letter to Coolidge expressing the faith that the public, no less than the chamber, endorsed the commissioner’s stand and urging the governor to issue a “plain” statement that unionization of the police would render them incapable of performing their duties.

  On Thursday, August 21, Curtis, after meeting with the captains and division commanders, announced that “charges have been preferred against eight men for violation of Rule Thirty-five and that a hearing will be held Tuesday next.” Nothing else could be learned except that these were the same eight men who had appeared at headquarters the day before. The commissioner remained isolated. Meanwhile the committee from the Boston Central Labor Union met with the governor at the State House. The committee took their by now familiar position that the controversy was not just a police affair but concerned all organized labor. Coolidge listened with silent impassivity, merely remarking afterward that he stood by his earlier statement. For the union leaders it was a rebuff. So grave did they now find the situation that they called for a special meeting of the BCLU on Sunday afternoon. Curtis was expected to suspend the eight patrolmen at once. He did not do so, but left for his summer home at Nahant. Four dragging, speculative days followed in the increasingly tense city. There were some who thought Curtis might already have come to a secret agreement with the union to make a test case in the courts of the policemen’s right to unionize. Police headquarters and the union both denied this. Three years earlier patrolmen had been ordered to discontinue carrying their night sticks except on dress occasions, using instead a “pocket billy.” Now Superintendent Crowley called in all night sticks, ostensibly as a routine matter but actually to arm emergency police in the event of a strike. On Friday Crowley summoned eleven more patrolmen for interrogation. Headquarters remained silent, but one of the officials there tipped off a reporter that “you’d better be around in the morning.”

  The hint was well placed. Next day headlines stated that Curtis would call up a volunteer police force in case of emergency. Former Police Superintendent William Pierce had emerged from retirement to “organize and equip” a volunteer force, and had already ordered five hundred badges. Within the next few days small black-margined Volunteer Police advertisements appeared on the front pages of the Boston papers asking for:

  Able-Bodied Men willing to give their services in case of the necessity for part of the day or night for the protection of persons or property in the City of Boston.

  Apply to me at Room B, Third Floor, Chamber of Commerce Building, Boston—daily except Sundays.

  William H. Pierce

  Supt. of Police (retired)

  Over the weekend rumors blazed up that the police were planning action to forestall Pierce’s volunteers. In any case a strike was seen as inevitable if the commissioner found against the eight men about to stand trial. The Boston Federal Reserve Bank requested additional United States marshals, and it was reported that criminals were converging on Boston in anticipation of disorders. Meanwhile the two lawyers for the police union, Vahey and the curly-haired, pugnaciously square-jawed John P. Feeney, were preparing their arguments, relying chiefly on a wartime draft ruling that police were municipal employees rather than officials.

  Sunday’s meeting of the BCLU was tumultuously enthusiastic. The three hundred delegates voted unanimously to support the police union in whatever action it might take. Speaker after speaker attacked Curtis, the city administration, Governor Coolidge, and the chamber of commerce, and promised that in spite of them all the police would win. The wispy Frank McCarthy, though warning against rash action and noting that the union officers were still working for an “amicable adjustment of the controversy,” accused Curtis of trying to intimidate the police and charged that he had bullied the men called in for interrogation. McCarthy could see no justification for setting up a force of volunteers, since the police in their new union had never even mentioned the word “strike.” He warned the delegates: “We have a serious situation to face if Commissioner Curtis goes through with his program, and I have no doubt that he will try, as he has the support of those higher up and the organized interests of capital. He is trying to create the impression that the ultimate direction of the affairs of the city will be by the militia, but I want to warn him and his backers that the time when a soldier takes orders to work against his brothers
and sisters is past….” He hoped that a break could be avoided but “any peace that comes must come with honor.”

  Moriarty, hoarse with anger, told the delegates to “bring victory to the police or quit.” He warned them that the struggle was a class struggle, as could be clearly seen when the chamber of commerce offered its building as “a recruiting station for strike-breaking police.” But he predicted that in a showdown, the other Massachusetts police would give the governor the fight of his life. Bringing up the question of whether police are employees or officials, he told the cheering delegates that “if they had been treated like officials there never would have been a thought of a union.” “If one policeman is discharged,” he concluded, “every organized man and woman in the city will be ready at the call to quit work and tie up the industry of the city so tight that it will take a lot of work on the part of the big interests to untie it, even after every man is reinstated in his position…. Mr. Curtis has thrown his hat into the ring and it is up to us to climb into the ring and kick it out.”

  Police leaders themselves, still hoping that the unbending Curtis would bend, were mute about what they might do if he should discharge any of the union organizers. Other unions were less reticent. The Boston plumbers, the Hyde Park mechanics, the local teamsters, the Boston typographers, the sheet metal workers—all agreed to support the Boston police by taking any action requested.

  Returning to his Pemberton Square office early Monday morning, Curtis started off his week by holding a short sterile interview with Vahey and Feeney. Then he sent a set of twenty-three questions, similar to those the summoned patrolmen had already answered, to each captain, ordering him to interrogate every man in his district and to have a stenographer take down the replies. While the captains were so occupied, the police held another meeting at Fay Hall and again announced defiantly that they would fight the commissioner to a finish.

  It had been customary in the police department for three captains to make up a trial board. But in the trial of the eight patrolmen, Curtis at Vahey’s request agreed to act as sole judge. Vahey and Feeney wanted the full responsibility for the decision to fall on the commissioner. Curtis in turn was more than willing to take such responsibility.

  The trial opened on Tuesday morning in Pemberton Square in a small headquarters room to which only the defendants, the lawyers, and a reporter from each Boston paper were admitted. It lasted a mere two hours and a quarter. Opening for the defense Feeney, a firebrand speaker with flashing eyes, denounced Rule 35 as contrary to a Massachusetts law prohibiting anyone as a condition of employment from being forced to agree not to join a labor organization. There was no legal foundation, he held, to Curtis’s assertion that the police were officers and not employees of the city. He pointed out that Rule 35 was needless, since the commissioner always would have the full power to act if a policeman failed to do his duty. Membership in the AFL would no more affect a policeman’s actions than would membership in the Masons, the Knights of Columbus, the Elks, or the Odd Fellows.

  The resonant-voiced Vahey called Curtis’s rule “the greatest invasion of a man’s personal liberty and the most far-reaching attempt to restrict his freedom of action I have ever known.” He saw the trial as an attack on union patriotism, even though as he pointed out, the AFL had always stood for peaceful and orderly progress as opposed to violence. Union membership, he repeated, would never hinder a policeman from doing his duty.

  Curtis’s secretary, James H. Devlin, defended Rule 35. Under it, as Curtis saw it, the men were free to join outside organizations, but as public officers they were not free to affiliate with a central labor organization. Devlin went on to mention that the commissioner had frequently consulted the grievance committee and that his relationship with his men had been good. As the last speaker of the day, Union President McInnes told Curtis that the first question considered at union meetings had been whether affiliation with the AFL would lessen the efficiency of the police force. The men were certain it would not. Curtis, suffering from twinges of angina, showed the strain of the two-and-a-quarter-hour hearing. Toward the end he grew increasingly testy. He announced, as McInnes concluded, that he would take the cases under advisement. There was little doubt what his decision would be. To his secretary he confided that he thought he had shown a great deal of patience.

  Later that same day the chamber of commerce renewed its support of the commissioner. Stung by the charge that the chamber represented only business interests, its spokesman maintained that it represented “the whole community” and, speaking for that community, held that it was as impossible for a policeman to be affiliated with labor unions as for a judge upon the bench. “A man cannot serve two masters.” A committee from the chamber visited Curtis to suggest that he engage the services of the best lawyer available. To the dismay of the members, Curtis told them that he was appointing Herbert Parker as his chief legal adviser. Realizing that the appointment of the intransigent and self-assertive Parker would undermine any hopes of a compromise, they begged the commissioner to choose someone more amenable, more sympathetic to labor. Curtly, he refused. The same day McInnes issued his union’s first public statement, declaring that “the members of the Boston Policeman’s Union intend to do their duty as police officers in the future as they have in the past and retain their full membership in the American Federation of Labor.”

  Not until Wednesday morning did a suntanned Peters return from North Haven. “I am here,” he said expansively, “to do everything possible to bring about an agreeable settlement to the police situation.” To Peters “everything possible” meant appointing a committee to ease the burden of decision. That afternoon he prepared a lengthy statement in which he admitted that although the issues were clear, “the merits of the question are not perhaps so clear.” He praised the police and that “bulwark of patriotism and strength against bolshevism,” the AFL, with whose “fundamental aims” he claimed to be entirely in sympathy. Nevertheless, he felt compelled to say that he thought Curtis was right and that policemen should not be affiliated with the AFL, since “complications might and probably would ensue.” He urged the AFL and the police to relinquish their plans and promised he would do all in his power to see that justice was done them.

  Peters’s aim to please fell far short of the target as far as the police were concerned. They were further incensed by his claim that any additional pay increase for the police would have to be met by dropping other employees from the city’s payroll. Feeney and Vahey, bristling with indignation, visited the mayor Wednesday afternoon. What they said was intended to be kept private, but an eavesdropping City Hall employee told reporters that “Mayor Peters was told just what labor men think of his endorsement of commissioner Curtis, and don’t you forget it!”

  Convinced that he had done all he could, that he had done all that any conscientious mayor could be expected to do, Peters prepared to return to North Haven that evening. Before leaving he announced that he was appointing a citizens’ committee of thirty-four to examine the whole question of a police union and to make whatever recommendations it saw fit. “I do not think,” he wrote optimistically, “the police will strike nor can I believe that the labor unions will join in a sympathetic strike, but it is plainly my duty to see that the citizens are protected and law and order maintained in any event. The public is entitled to this precaution and the public welfare demands it. With this situation in mind I have appointed a citizens’ committee….”

  As chairman of this committee he named the State Street investment banker James Jackson Storrow. Recognized even by his enemies as one of Boston’s most exemplary citizens, Storrow was a Brahmin who had somehow transcended the provincial limitations of his city even to his appearance, for with his clipped grey moustache and oval face he looked more the New York financier or even the stereotyped Hollywood banker. For Boston he felt an inclusive affection that went beyond Beacon Hill and the Back Bay to embrace the anonymous little streets and the slums. Related to the Higgin
sons and the Cabots and the Lees, descendant of one of those ingeniously acquisitive Yankees who had founded the Massachusetts mill cities, he lived all his life in the Beacon Street town house of his childhood. As a Harvard undergraduate of the class of 1885, he had been captain of the crew that had beaten Yale, on graduation the second marshal of his class. From 1897 to 1909 he was an overseer of Harvard and in 1910 chief marshal of the Alumni Association, and one of the founders of the Harvard Club of Boston.

  After finishing Harvard Law School in 1888, he formed his own law firm, soon numbering among his clients that most proper of Boston banking houses, Lee, Higginson & Company, with which he was intimately connected. In 1900 he abandoned the law to represent his family’s interests in Lee, Higginson. Born rich, he grew to be one of the wealthiest men in New England, director of several dozen corporations. In 1910 he reorganized and became president of General Motors, then returned to his native city to head Lee, Higginson.

  With Storrow’s business interests went a devotion to public service that continued until his death. In 1902, backed by the high-minded Public School Association, he was elected to the Boston School Committee and later became its president and chairman. He founded the Boston Chamber of Commerce, expanded the City Club, where men of all backgrounds could meet, and gave a fortune to build playgrounds and such amenities in the slums as the West End House and the Newsboys’ Club. In 1909, although a poor public speaker, he let himself be persuaded to run for mayor against the glib-tongued Honey Fitz. “Manhood against Money,” was Honey Fitz’s response as he conducted his usual slashing campaign, backed this time by his old enemies Curley and Lomasney. Fitzgerald spoke ten times to Storrow’s one, capered on the roof of a hack to sing his theme song, “Sweet Adeline,” and plastered Boston with blown-up photographs of City Hall on which was superimposed: NOT FOR SALE MR. $TORROW. Storrow countered by coining the term “Fitzgeraldism,” and brought unaccustomed tears to Honey Fitz’s eyes by publishing photographs of Fitzgerald with GRAFTER stamped on the forehead. In the largest vote in the city’s history, Honey Fitz defeated Storrow by a mere 1402 votes and only then by juggling ballots and insinuating a straw candidate.