Frank McCarthy, after a short speech to the union, telephoned BCLU President O’Donnell at Greenfield to give him a running account of what had happened. O’Donnell assured him that the other unions regarded the police struggle as their own, and said he would call a special meeting of the Central Labor Union for Wednesday or Thursday to let them register their decision on a sympathy strike. After talking to O’Donnell, McCarthy told a group of reporters that “the men of this union have been and are gentlemen and the entire issue is up to Commissioner Curtis.” Some of the more impetuous patrolmen were now clamoring for a seven-forty-five morning deadline, but McInnes persuaded them to postpone it until the afternoon roll call. The voting continued through into the morning as the night men appeared after duty. In the final vote 1134 voted to strike, with two opposed. Strike headquarters were set up at Fay Hall, and the union leaders spent the rest of Tuesday preparing for the by now inevitable denouement, only a few hours away.
The Boston Police Strike would come to seem to many the climax of a year of violence. Conservatives like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge would view it as a first step toward sovietizing the country. The police themselves saw nothing political, nothing radical, in their act, nothing that would challenge the established order of which they were the guardians. They were simple men of small education. Most of them had left school at the then legal age of twelve with a grammar-school diploma. As transplanted Celts, their Catholicism was part of their group identity. To stray beyond the bonds and rules of the church was unthinkable. Members of local Holy Name societies and the Knights of Columbus, they attended mass each Sunday with an unreflecting piety that the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno had called the “coal-heavers’ faith.” Without any preframed political theories, they bore a clan allegiance to the Democratic party that had its roots in their dislike and resentment of the entrenched Republican Brahmins, a resentment that Honey Fitz and Curley so adroitly exploited at each election. That they might be considered social revolutionaries would have moved them to profane astonishment. Nevertheless, an invisible Red thread did run through the strike, introduced by those who truly hoped that the event in Boston might bring about the decisive revolutionary situation on this side of the Atlantic for which they had been waiting ever since the October days in Petrograd. According to Ben Gitlow, one leading figure of the police union was a close sympathizer of the Communist party and collaborated with the Communists in the conduct of the strike. Gitlow wrote that
the Communists were active in the strike. Some of the most violent episodes of the strike took place in Roxbury where the Communist Letts were concentrated. Emissaries from the Boston Communists were hurriedly dispatched to New York to report on the situation to Communist leaders and to get advice and orders on how to proceed. Communist organizers were rushed to Boston. Rank-and-file members who were footloose were directed to go to Boston to help the local comrades intensify the strike violence, to work for the calling of a general strike, and to politicalize the strike by directing it against the government.
Unofficially the American Communist party had come into being in June 1919, after Louis Fraina—who had returned to New York—had called a National Council of the Left Wing, made up of dissidents from the Socialists. These formed the nucleus of the Communist Party, U.S.A., although the party itself would not be officially proclaimed until a few days before the police strike.* As a party manifesto explained: “Strikes of protest develop into general political strikes and then into revolutionary mass action for the conquest of the power of the state … the Communist Party shall participate in mass strikes, not only to achieve the immediate purposes of the strike but to develop the revolutionary implications.” When the shadow of the coming Boston police strike had grown sufficiently large, Ludwig C. A. K. Martens, for over a year the official representative of the Soviet Government in the United States, sent Fraina and John J. Ballam to Boston with eighty-five thousand dollars in funds to aid the strikers. Most of this money derived from the sale of Russian crown jewels smuggled into the United States.
Fraina and Ballam, as members of the National Council of the Left Wing, looked at the strike through the flame-colored glasses of revolutionaries. The Seattle strike had been only an overture; this in Boston would be the climax of the convulsive year, the prelude to an American October Revolution. So Fraina saw it on the way from New York, impervious to the irony of his rushing to assist those who had battered down his Lett comrades only four months previously. The police, in the stress of their struggle, were equally willing to let bygones be bygones. Short on funds and lacking experience, they were ready to accept money and directives from any source. Much of the Russian money went to pay for halls, printing, propaganda, and in some cases subsidies for the families of the striking police. Much of the advice would sharpen the edge of strike violence. But not more than a handful of the police leaders were aware of Fraina and Ballam moving with stealthy assurance behind the scenes.
Coolidge in Northampton remained unruffled by any Boston eventualities. He had planned to spend several days visiting institutions in the western part of the state. Stearns telephoned him early Monday morning at Massasoit Street, begging him to return as soon as possible, and he agreed to cut his tour short. After a leisurely breakfast he drove on to Greenfield to the American Federation of Labor convention. His speech to the convention was short and at best lackadaisical. The delegates had expected him to make some comment on the Boston crisis, but he did not so much as mention the police or the possibility of a strike. Instead he fell back on his store of laconic platitudes, urging those present to take back to the men and women they represented the gospel “that upon all rests the responsibility of doing all that may be done to make the name America stand for mighty endeavor and strenuous effort.” Hardly had he left the hall before the impatient delegates adopted a resolution condemning “the Hunnish attitude of Police Commissioner Curtis” and offering full moral and financial aid to the policemen’s union.
On his way back—a three-hour drive—Coolidge stopped at Fitchburg to telephone his office for the latest news. He arrived in Boston in a belting rainstorm just as the police were settling in at their Fay Hall meeting and went directly to the two-room suite in the Adams House that he had graduated to after becoming lieutenant governor. There, sour in mood, he met at last with Storrow and Peters, who had been frantically trying to reach him since Saturday. Peters’s fluttery voice turned almost contralto with excitement as he urged Coolidge to endorse the compromise plan. Coolidge refused, suggesting ironically that Peters instead call the city council together to vote whatever pay raise they felt the police should have, rearrange their work hours, and “fix up the old police stations.” Finally they asked him to mobilize three or four thousand troops of the state guard. No, said Coolidge. He felt that the situation could safely be left in Curtis’s hands. The commissioner did not think that a strike would amount to much; in any case the history of strikes showed that disorder did not come until after the third day, which would give them plenty of time to act.
At this point only the governor could have forced the commissioner to unbend. In hindsight the solution seems reasonable and fair to all: the police to have their unaffiliated union; the suspended patrolmen to be returned to duty; the men to call off their strike, and Curtis to agree to take no disciplinary action against the leaders; and grievances to be submitted to an impartial board. But when a group of friends called on Coolidge at the State House to warn him that unless he now spoke out he might be defeated in the November election, he remarked that it was not necessary for him to be re-elected, and stared out the window in glum silence until his embarrassed visitors slipped away. To his stepmother in Vermont, to whom he was devoted, he wrote at about this time that he was determined to support the commissioner even at the risk of not being re-elected.
Long ago at Black River Academy John Calvin had been in bed one evening in the dormitory as several other more prankish boys pitched an old stove down the stairs.
In spite of the din he stayed in bed. When next morning a master asked him if he had not heard the noise, he allowed that he had. When the master asked further why he had not done anything, he replied, “It wa’n’t my stove.” The impending police strike “wa’n’t” his strike. As he told Crane testily on Sunday, he “didn’t want to get mixed up in it.” He did admit though to a reporter that he could not blame the police “for feeling as they do when they get less than a streetcar conductor.” And as the strike loomed in its dark immediacy, he was nagged by the thought that he might get mixed up in it whether he wanted to or not. “E.U.,” he appealed to Curtis at a private meeting just after his return from Greenfield, “we have to give in or there will be trouble.” Curtis had no doubts. “If we give in now,” he told the hesitant governor, “there will be no army, no police force, no government and this whole great country will fall to pieces—look what happened in Seattle!”
Monday’s Transcript devoted a whole page to the text of Curtis’s findings on suspending the nineteen patrolmen. The commissioner had felt the need of going to some length to explain the reasons and the precedents that had led him to his decision. His elaborate legal argument (prepared by Parker) was drawn from several dozen court decisions and a large number of Colonial and state statutes. Reduced to simple terms it held that the police were officers of the state and not employees. Yet, Curtis insisted, even if one granted that they were employees, Rule 35 could still legally prevent them from joining a nationally affiliated union. He concluded:
This separation and protection against the possible taint of disqualifying interest is recognized as essential to the apparent, and real, requirements of public confidence in public officials. It guards the justices of our courts, our jurymen, and all others who are to exercise authority over us. It is a salutary principle of our law. Adhering to it, I deem that I am required by the duties and obligations of my office, and in obedience to my conception, to enforce the regulation, for violation of which the accused have been brought to trial.
Exhausted in body and mind, Curtis toward the end of the afternoon collapsed at his desk. Recovering somewhat by evening, he pledged his subordinates to secrecy about his condition and returned to Nahant. Before leaving he sent a mutual friend, Arthur Chapin, vice-president of the American Trust Company, to Coolidge to sound him out as to what he would do if the police struck. Chapin reported that the governor had thought a moment and then said, “I am very friendly to Ned Curtis. I am told that he feels that enough policemen will remain loyal so that he can handle the situation, but you may tell him from me that if any emergency arises whereby it becomes necessary for me to act, I will stand back of him to the fullest extent.”
Coolidge had dinner that evening with Peters, Storrow, and several members of the citizens’ committee in a large private room at the Union Club. The governor declined to consider intervening. To the impotent fury of Peters and the dismay of Storrow he again refused to speak the word that would have meant compromise. It was a chilly occasion, made the more so by Peters’s growing hatred for the laconic Coolidge and the governor’s scarcely concealed contempt for the dilettante mayor. Nothing new was said around the table. The impasse was all too obvious. Coolidge left early and was in bed at his usual time of ten o’clock. As a precaution against what might happen, Massachusetts Adjutant General Jesse F. Stevens, Colonel R. O. Dalton in charge of state guard intelligence, and Secretary Long remained overnight at the Adams House.
That afternoon a hundred volunteer policemen had gathered in the Chamber of Commerce Building awaiting orders. Pierce took their names and telephone numbers, gave them written instructions, and told them to remain in readiness. Once they returned to be officially sworn in, they would receive night sticks, badges, and revolvers. Pierce also informed them that under Massachusetts law they could when on duty call on bystanders for help if necessary. Anyone who refused to assist them was liable to a month’s imprisonment or a fifty-dollar fine!
Within the city’s restless, uneasy atmosphere preparations for disaster were being made. Hospitals cooperated with the police department to set up emergency-care stations, and their location and telephone numbers appeared in the morning papers. A fleet of fifteen ambulances was distributed strategically throughout the city. Fearful of vandalism, the larger industrial firms, banks, and stores armed their male help, many of whom had handled weapons in the army. Jordan Marsh, E. T. Slattery, Shephard’s, and other department stores formed special guard detachments of their younger employees, while at the same time claiming that such preparations did not reflect any hostility toward the police but were merely intended to protect life and property. To warn off any influx of criminals, the press informed the public that bank messengers were receiving firearms instruction from Marine Corps sergeants.
On Tuesday morning Peters arrived at City Hall at an unwontedly early hour. Curtis, pale and blue-lipped, was already at his desk at Pemberton Square, his flabby cheeks sunk into his wing collar, a loaded revolver lying in front of him to protect him, he said, from any assassination attempt. Coolidge did not allow events to alter his routine. After his usual breakfast at his usual time, he strolled from the Adams House up Winter Street, across the Common, and along the mall to the State House. If he had any apprehensions, he kept them to himself. During the course of the day he received a telegram from the secretary of the Massachusetts branch of the AFL demanding that he remove Curtis as “a man who has insulted organized labor.” The governor replied politically: “I have no authority over the appointment, suspension or removal of the police force of Boston. I earnestly hope circumstances will arise which will cause the police officers to be reinstated. In my judgment it would not be wise to remove Commissioner Curtis.”
Peters had learned of the commissioner’s findings from reporters, but he refused to comment. At midmorning he sent for Storrow and his executive committee. Storrow met the others at his State Street office before leading them, like a shepherd, to City Hall. Following an inconclusive hour in the mayor’s office, he went on to the first formal meeting of the full committee of thirty-four to give them a detailed account of the last ten days. After hearing Storrow, the committee unanimously endorsed his report to the mayor. By now Peters felt he could do no more. As mayor he did have the power in an emergency to call out the units of the state guard within the Boston area. Characteristically he was not aware of this. At one o’clock he bustled into Curtis’s office querulously asserting that he was entitled to know what preparations state officials had made to preserve law and order in the city in case of a strike. Curtis told him that he himself could take care of any situation that might arise and that he did not need anyone else’s help or advice. The commissioner remained convinced that in the final count the majority of the men would remain loyal to him. However, he did agree to meet with Peters at the governor’s at five o’clock.
Even as the policemen were gathering up their belongings in the various stations, the three principal figures in the unfolding drama held a last meeting in the governor’s austere Federalist office. Curtis, accompanied by a bodyguard, appeared with his revolver strapped to his side. Coolidge sat at his desk, impassive as ever, while Peters, standing by the black-marble mantel, in a voice by now verging on the falsetto, begged him to call out the state guard. “I know you are running for re-election and that you do not want trouble with labor,” Peters urged him. “All right, let me take the responsibility, call out the troops at my request.” Coolidge informed him of the mayor’s powers within the Boston limits, then with equal irony offered to call out the state guard units in Boston if Peters did not care to exercise his own authority. Peters did not reply. Curtis at once insisted that he did not need the state guard or even the volunteers. “I am ready for anything,” he told the governor. The canny Coolidge knew well that to call out the militia prematurely could be political suicide. “I am going to take the assurance of the police commissioner,” he abruptly told the mayor. For Peters there was no more to say. Even his
falsetto voice failed. “They frosted me out,” he complained afterward to anyone who would listen to him. As soon as the other two had left, the governor dictated a letter, ostensibly for the mayor but actually for the record. Whatever the day might bring, whoever else might be exposed, he at least intended to be covered.
Replying to the suggestion laid before me by yourself and certain members of your committee, it seems to me that there has arisen a confusion which would be cleared up if each person undertakes to perform the duties imposed upon him by law.
It seems plain that the duty of issuing orders and enforcing their observance lies with the Commissioner of Police and with that no one has any authority to interfere. We must all support the commissioner in the execution of the laws….
There is no authority in the office of Governor for interference in making of orders by the Police Commissioner or in the action of the Mayor and the City Council. The foregoing suggestion is therefore made, as you will understand, in response to a request for suggestions on my part. I am unable to discover any action that I can take.
The twilight was raw, autumnal, with an overhanging mist that soon turned to rain. As the governor was dictating his letter, the first reports began to reach Colonel Dalton’s office of police leaving their posts. At eleven minutes past five a bulletin came from Station 16 in the Back Bay that all but seven patrolmen had quit. Then the dispatcher at Hanover Street in the Italian district reported that Station 1 was “practically empty except for officers and that a crowd of over a thousand had gathered in front of the building.” Curtis had expected that at least two thirds of his 1544 men would stay on duty, whatever their commitment to the union. He soon learned that scarcely a quarter would remain and these mostly the long-term men fearful of jeopardizing their pensions. In the end only twenty-four policemen patrolled the heart of the city instead of the usual seven hundred.
A City in Terror Page 14