A City in Terror

by Rosalind Russell

  At the height of the rioting some ten thousand persons were milling up and down Broadway. Throughout South Boston, as the aimless destruction spread, the store fronts disintegrated: Connor’s and O’Keefe’s, the Irish-American grocery chains; Wallenheim’s bakery; Louis Alphas’s fruit store and spa; the Budnick Creamery; bicycle shops, pawn shops, tailors, cleaners, haberdashers. In the Bay View section the saloons and bars fell an easy prey, raiders bursting in, grabbing whatever bottles they could lay hands on, and tossing the glasses out into the street.

  Near St. Augustine’s a squad of loyal Metropolitan Park police was cornered by one of the larger street gangs and stoned. After one patrolman dropped to the ground, his forehead split open, the others drew their clubs and revolvers. Still the crowd did not budge but began to shout, “Kill them! Kill the dirty sons of bitches!” Picking up their wounded comrade, the police began a slow retreat. Those inhabitants who were not on the streets seemed to be hanging out the windows of the massed three-deckers cheering the others on. At Andrew Square the several dozen small proprietors found their premises stripped bare even to the gas and electric fixtures. The unwary driver of a fruit wagon was stoned, his fruit dumped into the street, and his horse lashed until it bolted. Parked cars were overturned. More false alarms added to the din, unionized firemen being pelted as they attempted to get their apparatus through the clogged streets. Even the mail trucks were brought to a stop and spattered with mud and egg yolk. During the height of the violence, patrons of the Waldorf Lunch on Broadway knocked out the manager when he tried to get them to pay their checks, then dashed into the street, stripping the counters of cakes and pies as they left.

  Crowley, egg-smeared, waving his revolver, led a band of reserves and some fifty park police in repeated sallies to clear Broadway. By midnight he and his outmanned force had managed to separate the spectators from the rioters and drive the latter into the side streets and alleys, where they hung on, sullen and threatening, yet not quite prepared to meet the challenge of live bullets. The revels now seemed over for the night, and gradually the rioters broke away, heading for their homes in the ubiquitous three-deckers that were themselves almost the symbol of South Boston.

  By one-thirty in the morning the core city was beginning to quiet down, the mob losing its coherence in a crowd that thinned out as more and more individuals wandered away through the littered streets, either out of weariness or conviction that the show was over. Crowley had ordered the street lights to be kept on all night, and the frayed city in the early morning hours looked disjointedly empty under the still-falling rain.

  Even as the mob ransacked the streets, Mayor Peters was preparing another press release in which he defensively insisted that he was not to blame, that he had given the police a $200 increase in the spring as soon as additional revenues had been available. “To impute in any manner that I have not given the men what they wish is a direct misrepresentation of the facts,” he concluded in a mixture of self-righteousness and self-pity. “I am by law deprived of any control of the working hours of the patrolmen and I repeat that the only request for an increase of salary by the men had been granted.” Then he disappeared. No one knew where he was. No one could find out. Actually, he had his chauffeur drive him aimlessly through the tranquil outer suburbs. Not until after one in the morning did he return to his Jamaica Plain home. At half past two his secretary arrived breathlessly on the doorstep to tell him of the downtown tumult and to beg him to call out the local state guard. Peters telephoned General Cole and asked him to arrange a conference of state guard officers first thing in the morning. Then, after listening to several disheartening telephone reports about the rioting, he went to bed.

  Wednesday morning was lowering, with the threat of showers, the Custom House tower blocked out by mist. Shortly after eight o’clock the mayor’s high-pitched voice could be heard in the corridors of City Hall. Striding into his office, gesticulating nervously, his tufted eyebrows twitching like porcupine quills, he was now resolved to show himself to his shaken and apprehensive advisers as a model of decisive action. Curtis, his confidence of the day before dissolved overnight, had already written him that he was of the opinion that “tumult, riot or mob is threatened and that the usual police provisions are inadequate to preserve order and to afford protection to persons and property.” Masking his humiliation behind icily formal language, the commissioner “respectfully” suggested that “if the facts which I call to your Honor’s attention appear to your Honor to exist you will exercise the powers and the authority specified by the statute.” For Peters it was a moment of triumph. The man who had denigrated him was now begging for help. At once he consulted with Colonel Thomas Sullivan of the state guard—who also happened to be his public-works commissioner—and his corporation counsel and Harvard classmate, Alexander Whiteside, and the now supernumerary members of the Citizens’ Committee. Then he issued an order calling out the state guard within the Boston area: the Tenth Regiment under command of Colonel Sullivan, the First Cavalry Troop, the First Motor Corps, and the Ambulance Corps.

  The Massachusetts State Guard had been formed as a militia organization in 1917 after the National Guard Yankee Division was called into federal service. Made up of underage enthusiasts, the physically unfit, and the overaged who saw in domestic military service a recompense of sorts for the war they had missed, the state guard was officered for the most part by old-line Yankees and commanded by Brigadier General Samuel Parker, lawyer, Harvard graduate, and amateur soldier. Parker had served eighteen years in the state militia, was inspector on the staff of three governors, and had retired as inspector general until called back to the state guard. A gentleman farmer, whose family fortune had been woven in Massachusetts textile mills, his long-jawed face could have matched Uncle Sam’s if the latter’s chin whiskers had been shaved off. Once a week for two and a half years, his five thousand Massachusetts guardsmen, from the pustular to the pot-bellied, had been donning their makeshift uniforms—some khaki, some olive-drab—to march and countermarch in the empty armories, to learn at least the elements of close-order drill, rifle, and bayonet practice for the unlikely emergency that had now arrived. Many of the officers had served in the Spanish-American War. Peters ordered the Boston guard to mobilize by five that afternoon. At the same time he sent a letter to the governor asking for three thousand additional guardsmen.

  The mayor topped off his morning of belated zeal by taking over the police department, something he could do—as corporation counsel Whiteside pointed out to him—under the provision of Section 6, Chapter 323, of the Acts of 1885, which allowed the mayor to assume control of the police whenever “tumult, riot, and violent disturbances of public order have occurred within the limits of the City of Boston.” Placing General Cole in command at Pemberton Square, he dispatched a unit to Curtis “to execute all orders promulgated by me for the suppression of tumult and the restoration of public order.”

  Curtis, a civil servant far more familiar with the acts than was the superficial mayor, marked his chagrin in his brief reply: “Sir—Your note of September 10 notifying me that you assume control for the time being of the City of Boston is received. I respectfully wait your action.”

  Beaming and satisfied that he had put both the governor and the commissioner in their place, Peters went out to lunch. To his enormous gratification, a small group of spectators applauded him as he left City Hall. All day Tuesday, volunteers had been coming in increasing numbers to the temporary office ex-Superintendent Pierce had set up next to the Chamber of Commerce reading room. Seated at a massive desk, flanked by two retired officers, he interviewed each applicant, meanwhile scanning long lists of names and mysterious printed sheets which his clerks from time to time took from his blotter and mailed off in double-sealed envelopes. Many of the trimly tailored volunteers looked as if they had just strolled over from the Somerset or Union club, men for the most part in their solid early middle age, brokers, bankers, lawyers, established businessmen. Conspi
cuous among them were old Harvard athletes whose names had made the headlines in other years: Huntington “Tack” Hardwick, 1914’s legendary halfback; John Richardson, Jr., captain of the crew that had beaten Yale ten years before; Bartlett Hayes, no-hit pitcher of 1898; and scores of other football, baseball, crew, and track stars. Pierce proudly released to the press the names of such distinguished volunteers. He felt honored by the presence of General Francis Peabody, whom Curtis had defeated for mayor twenty-four years before and who since then, without ever having seen active service, had become a brigadier general in the National Guard, a title he nursed in his retirement. As a counterbalance, the navy was represented in the person of retired Admiral Francis Bowles. Former officers of the Yankee Division far outnumbered the enlisted men. No one could miss the Social Register tone of the recruits any more than one could miss the presence of Godfrey Lowell Cabot, cousin and classmate of Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, with a brace of pistols strapped on and wearing a naval cape.

  Once again, if briefly, the old Bostonians were achieving physical control of their city. Yet though Back Bay and Beacon Hill seemed to predominate among the volunteers, all walks of life were represented, including a few odd walks. An Oklahoma rancher staying at the Parker House appeared before Pierce wearing a sombrero and high-heeled cowboy boots to announce with loud casualness that he was joining up because he wanted some excitement. Laurence Davis, a Red Cross worker just back from overseas, offered his services, although he had only one arm. The oddly named Patsy Soldier, a naturalized Italian recently discharged after twenty-seven months in the army and still wearing his army uniform, arrived and told Pierce in somewhat broken English: “I want to be a cop. I had one job for eighteen a week. I look for work all around, no luck.” Helen Coran, a tall brunette wearing a fur boa, was the sole woman volunteer.

  On Tuesday afternoon Louis Frothingham, in his twin role of Harvard man and volunteer policeman, sent a telegram to Harvard’s president asking what the college was prepared to do in the event of a strike. President Lowell replied: “In accordance with the traditions of public service the University desires in time of crisis to help in any way it can to maintain order and support the laws of the commonwealth. I therefore urge all students who can do so to prepare themselves for such service as the governor of the commonwealth may call upon them to render.”

  The college’s fall term would not open for another week, but some summer-school students were still there and others, including the members of the football squad, had arrived early. A hastily formed Harvard emergency committee of three acting deans and two seniors, after posting calls for volunteers on the various bulletin boards, opened an all-night recruiting office at University Hall. On Wednesday morning every student found an announcement from the emergency committee tacked under his door, TO ALL HARVARD MEN, containing Lowell’s statement and an appeal for any man who could offer his personal services or who could furnish a motor car or motorcycle with or without sidecar to report at once to University 2.

  On learning of this, one labor-minded alumnus telephoned University Hall to ask with asperity when Harvard had become a training ground for strikebreakers. Indignantly the committee replied: “We want it understood that the Harvard students are not going into this matter merely for the sake of defeating the policemen. It is not as strike-breakers that the undergraduates are offering their services. They are enrolling solely to protect life and property.”

  By midnight Tuesday at least fifty undergraduates had enrolled. The following morning as the news of the rioting spread, there was a rush to join. Harvard head coach Bob Fisher dismissed his 125-man football squad, telling them “to hell with football, if men are needed to protect Boston.” Carloads of students left for Boston, buoyed up by Professor Hall’s promise of “sport and diversion,” among them pudgy Bill Hoffman from Tuxedo Park, New York, a cousin of the Roosevelts, who crammed his Stanley-steamer touring car with like-minded Harvard friends and set off across the river with boisterous enthusiasm. Over one hundred fifty eager undergraduates arrived at the Chamber of Commerce Building before noon, causing the Boston Globe later to remark that “some of the students in times past had considerable experience with the police but until now few of them had experience as policemen.”

  Undaunted by the weather, the first volunteer patrolmen reported at eight o’clock to their assigned stations, drawing badges, revolvers, and the old-fashioned night sticks. Station 2, so conveniently located between the State House and the financial district, became the most sought-after post, attracting the elite and the adventurous. Smiling, self-assured, dressed in trench-coats copied from the wartime British officers, they gathered in front of Captain Sullivan’s desk. The captain instructed them as he handed out cartridges: “See? These are what they call riot pills!” General Peabody in a rakish tweed golf cap saluted smartly on receiving his ammunition, as did George von L. Meyer, the son of the late ex-secretary of the navy, and Francis Lee Higginson, the Boston banker of bankers. When Peabody left the station, Sullivan assigned a loyal patrolman to show him his beat. Smoking a large cigar, a billy protruding from his pocket, the general followed the patrolman across the street and received his first lesson in how to ring up from a box. So interested was Peabody in the mechanism that he insisted on trying it himself. Farther on, just beyond City Hall, he met Admiral Bowles, also sporting a badge and billy, and they stopped to shake hands. “Watch us tonight,” said the Admiral. “I’ve got the greatest crowd of fellows you ever saw. Young, brawny college fellows—athletes!”

  More cautious citizens flocked to police headquarters for pistol permits—several thousand were issued in the course of the day—while in the financial district the insurance companies did a land-office business in riot, fire, and theft insurance. One group of volunteers sounded a note that in the next few days would echo across the country. Placing an advertisement on the front page of each Boston paper, they urged others to join them. They themselves bore no hostility, they said, to the striking policemen, but had obeyed a call of duty, since “in the absence of its appointed and sworn defenders, means must be adopted for the protection of life and property…. We are convinced that the real issue now is whether organized, properly constituted democratic government representing all the people, shall be sustained and perpetuated, or whether any element, no matter what, shall assume control of the destinies not merely of our city, but inevitably, of the republic itself.”

  “A night of disgrace,” a Herald editorial writer called it the previous evening, and went on to say: “Somebody blundered. Boston should not have been left defenseless last night … it was a sickening scene and no hand was available to arrest the unlawfulness.”

  Wednesday brought no renewed violence, but there was a sense of menace in the air, of unknown forces gathering strength. Although those arrested the night before were promptly tried and sentenced in the municipal courts, they were only a token number, and it was obvious that the city was still not under control. Volunteers leaving Station 2 had to make their way through a hostile group of spectators who shouted “Scab!” and occasionally spat at them. Led out to their beat by an instructing sergeant, they were preceded and followed by jeering street urchins. The devastated streets, the smashed windows now being hastily boarded up, and the barbed wire being strung across the damaged entrances gave the city “a wide-open look,” like that of some western mining town. Sightseers and idlers remained thickest in and around Scollay Square. Near the Old Howard with its leggy display of the Crackerjack Burlesquers, some thirty young men started a crap game in the middle of the street, waving their dollar bills with bravado as they rolled the dice. Rolling dice seemed to have become the preoccupation of Boston’s anonymous citizenry. From the Common across the Public Gardens to Copley Square, and even on the steps of the Public Library and at the doors of Trinity Church, ribald games were in progress. A marathon crap game drew the most eager and determined gamblers to the corner of Avery and Washington Streets. Avery Street
remained completely blocked off by the fluctuating ring of men in the center of the road, shaking the dice to the cries of “Fifty cents to open! Who’ll shoot?” Spectators jammed both sidewalks until it became impossible to pass. Even a few women took part in the game. But there were noticeably fewer women on the Boston streets. Crowley begged the curiosity-seekers to stay home. The Globe gave a front-page warning that “there is no such thing now as ‘an innocent bystander.’”

  Nevertheless, the life of the city went on much as usual. The larger department stores opened, their armed guards keeping a finger on the trigger and a wary eye on the shoppers. Festoons of barbed wire partially blocked the bank entrances, but the banks remained open, as did the Boston Stock Exchange. In the upper window of Iver Johnson’s (the lower windows had been smashed) an ex-soldier salesman, Alan Flynn, sat with a shotgun across his lap and noticed how the pedestrians scattered to the other side of the street as soon as they saw him. Most of the restaurants and cafeterias stayed open except for Walton’s Lunch, whose employees were already on strike. To children’s disappointment, none of the Boston schools closed. Other events took their scheduled course. Waldron’s Casino’s Hip-Hip-Hooray and the Old Howard’s Crackerjack Burlesquers, and B. F. Keith’s with its vaudeville turns prepared to open their doors as did the legitimate theaters. At the Colonial the brand new musical Hitchy Koo, 1919, starring Raymond Hitchcock, advertised itself as “a national necessity.” Henry Jewett continued to appeal to his proper Anglophile audiences with the old London hit Clothes and the Woman. On the screen the Modern & Beacon was showing Billie Burke as The Misleading Widow. However, a mass meeting against the League of Nations scheduled that evening at Symphony Hall and sponsored by William Randolph Hearst, with Senator James Reed of Missouri the principal speaker, was canceled. The Roxbury Historical Society could see no reason for canceling its monthly meeting and heard Charles F. Read, clerk of the Bostonian Society, speak on “A Boy’s Memories of the Civil War and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.”