On Friday, Gompers, faced with the added bleak prospect of backing a national steel strike that he considered doomed before it started, followed up Woll’s ambivalence by urging the Boston policemen to go back to their posts. Unaware of how completely Peters had been shunted aside, he telegraphed the mayor:
No man or group of men more genuinely regrets the present Boston situation than do the American Federation of Labor and I.
You have undoubtedly been apprised of President Wilson’s suggestion to the commissioners of the District of Columbia, who adopted a similar regulation to that adopted by the Boston authorities ordering policemen not to become members or to retain membership in a union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The President requested that such order be held in abeyance and the entire matter remain in statu quo until after the conference which he has called for October 6 for the consideration of all matters affecting the relations between workers and employers. The commissioner of the District of Columbia complied with the president’s request.
I therefore appeal to you and to the authorities who issued the order that its enforcement be deferred until after the presidential conference.
I am telegraphing the representative of the American Federation of Labor in Boston, Mr. Frank McCarthy, 30 Wheatland Avenue, to appeal to the Policemen’s Union to cooperate and return to their posts just as if the order had not been issued at all, upon information that the enforcement of the order has been postponed to await the outcome of the presidential conference.
Then he sent a copy of the telegram to McCarthy, at the same time urging him to see that the policemen cooperated in carrying out “the spirit and purpose” of his message.
Peters replied with petulant irrelevance that “the situation in Boston differed from that of the District of Columbia as the policemen here left their posts and gave the city over to forces of disorder.” “The governor as commander-in-chief of the state’s forces,” he concluded, “has now charge of the Police Department. Your communications should be directed to him.” Without bothering to reply, Gompers sent off an identical telegram to Governor Coolidge, who answered immediately:
Under the law the suggestions contained in your telegram are not within the authority of the Governor of Massachusetts, but only of the Commissioner of Police of the City of Boston.
With the maintenance of discipline in his department, I have no authority to interfere.
He has decided that the men have abandoned their sworn duty and has accordingly declared their places vacant.
I shall support the commissioner in the execution of law and maintenance of order.
Meanwhile the members of the policemen’s union met again in Fay Hall, where McCarthy read them Gompers’s telegram. However equivocal it was, they sensed uneasily a bugle call for retreat. After listening grim-faced to half a dozen speakers, including the almost hysterical Mae Matthew, who promised the telephone operators’ union’s unconditional support, the patrolmen voted unanimously to go back to duty if the governor would cancel the commissioner’s suspension order of September 8 and reinstate the nineteen union officers, “pending the adjustment of grievances at issue.” There was still no apparent break in the strikers’ ranks. But as their doubts expanded, they fell back on the consoling thoughts of labor rallying to their cause. Eighty-five per cent of the firemen were reported to be in favor of a strike. The percentage reached a hundred among the thirty thousand members of the United Hebrew Trade Unions. Boston bartenders through their local 77 declared that whenever the BCLU issued the call, their reply would be, “Ready, Sir.” If the carmen and the electrical workers and the other Boston unions backed the police as the firemen and the telephone girls had so fervently promised, there was still hope.
Even among the most fervent, doubts were seeping in. Without explanation the Russell Club, the firemen’s AFL-affiliated union, called off a meeting scheduled for Friday to vote on the question of a general strike. Union leaders, announcing that the meeting would be held on Tuesday instead, refused to say why it had been postponed and whether Gompers’s telegram had had anything to do with it. At about the same time some two thirds of the Metropolitan Park policemen who had refused to go on duty in Boston on Tuesday night reported back to Metropolitan Police Superintendent Herbert West, expressing their regret at their earlier action and offering, if they were reinstated, to serve in any place they might be sent. West told them to put on their uniforms and report for duty at the Pemberton Square headquarters, and by evening the Metropolitan greycoats were patrolling the city streets. Those Boston policemen who had been on vacation or on sick leave and had been waiting to see which way the wind blew began to have second thoughts. Sometimes those thoughts proved of little avail. They were of small help to Patrolman Walter Crocket of the Field’s Corner station. With almost twenty-five years of service, and with eight children plus his mother and mother-in-law at home to look after, he had refused to consider going on strike. But as his vacation was coming up anyway, he had left Tuesday morning for a three-day fishing trip down Boston Harbor. When he returned, he cut short his vacation, got into his uniform, and went down to the station house. Captain Reardon, with whom he had never hit it off, ordered him off the premises as a striker. Dejectedly Crocket handed over his badge and went home.
On Saturday morning Curtis received an official ruling from the attorney general:
Confirming the oral opinion expressed to you yesterday upon the statement of facts as presented, I beg to advise you that the situation amply warrants a finding by you that the policemen in question have abandoned their offices. In the event of your decision that such abandonment has taken place, the offices abandoned are to be treated as vacant, to be filled by you as provided by law.
Armed with this, Curtis announced that
the places in the police force of Boston formerly held by the men who deserted their posts of duty have by this action been rendered vacant. I am advised by the Attorney General that upon the existing facts the offices formerly held by the members of the police force to whom I have referred are in fact and in law, vacant. I shall accordingly proceed in accordance with law and in strict compliance with the requirements of the civil service laws to fill these vacancies with new men….
I have further requested the Civil Service Commission to grant to me authority to appoint to the police force any veterans as defined by Chap. 150 of the General Acts of 1919. The Attorney General has ruled that such veterans must be a resident of the Commonwealth and need not be a resident of the City of Boston.
With the issuance of this statement, Curtis prepared to advertise for a new police force. In the postwar cycle of unemployment he expected a rush of ex-servicemen for the vacancies. He specified that recruits must have served honorably in the army, navy, or Marine Corps during the war, must not be under twenty-five or over thirty years, under one hundred forty pounds or shorter than five feet eight inches. In addition to the new starting wage of $1400 a year, he added that uniforms would now be furnished free. Those who could pass a noncompetitive civil service examination would be appointed at once.
While Curtis was laying out plans for recruiting his new police force, the leaders of the old striking force and the BCLU executive committee arrived at the governor’s chambers to confront him with the resolution adopted by the police union the night before. From ten to eleven-fifty-five they sat before the unresponsive Coolidge, going over the same ground, asking for reinstatement of the policemen on the terms of the resolution, and getting the new threadbare reply that this was in the hands of the commissioner. McInnes was so wrought up on leaving that he could scarcely control his voice. “The situation is now in the hands of the governor,” he told reporters. “You can make it plain that John F. McInnes, president of the Policemen’s Union, will never go back on the police force of Boston except as a union policeman. The American Federation of Labor charter will never leave my hands!” From Coolidge came merely the brief statement that the committee of the polic
emen’s union and the accompanying labor leaders had asked for another conference with him and Curtis and that he had undertaken “to transmit that request.” Curtis on being notified replied that though he was willing at any time to confer with the governor, he did not “deem it advisable under the existing circumstances to join in the suggested conference.” Later, at Coolidge’s prompting, he unbent sufficiently to agree to meet with the group on Monday but only as private individuals, not as members or representatives of any labor organization.
Saturday afternoon the striking policemen held a desultory meeting at Fay Hall, then broke off for a long recess. The ensuing evening meeting had a sinister aspect to it. As the strikers filed in they found Captain John King and Sergeant George Augusta of police headquarters standing at the doors handing out discharge notices to the nineteen suspended union officers. Ranged on the street behind them, a crew of guardsmen had set up a machine gun to command the doorway. The delegates appeared agitated, but there was no sign of trouble as they took their places. Farther down the street several Roxbury Letts were distributing copies of The New England Worker with articles denouncing the Boston press and calling for an immediate general strike.
The policemen did their best to keep up their spirits, but it was an increasingly forced effort. First, by a unanimous rising vote they pledged themselves to retain membership in the AFL and to do everything in their power to bring about their reinstatement. Then McInnes informed them that since he was no longer a member of the force, he could no longer preside over the meeting. He and his eighteen fellow officers offered their resignations. At once they were re-elected, again by a unanimous rising vote. Arrangements were then made to send a guard of honor to the funeral of Patrolman Reemts, the charges against him having been labeled fabrications. Delegates subscribed almost a thousand dollars for his family. For the rest of the evening speaker after speaker denounced Curtis and his order of that morning. At the end of the meeting the men filed out of the hall into the range of the machine gun, laughing and singing the wartime favorite, “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag.”
McInnes himself was neither laughing nor singing as he left the hall. Stern-faced, more radical than he had ever been before, he told reporters that “the policemen are not wavering as in the false reports from the monied interests now so forcibly trying to deprive us of our American freedom. In the home and hearth of the policemen we remain undaunted in our struggle for the recognition of our union and our right to affiliate with the A.F. of L.” But by the very tone of his voice the reporters sensed that he had come to doubt his cause.
By Saturday the pied khaki and olive drab of the state guard, the rifle and fixed bayonet had become taken for granted as part of the Boston scene. For the city, obviously and firmly under control, it was like awakening after a nightmare to the reassurance of daylight. Strollers again walked casually across the Common. Saturday morning shoppers took the el in from the suburbs. The stores, for all their shattered windows, did a rushing business. Under the shadow of Faneuil Hall the pushcart vendors held their weekly open-air market. Traffic under the direction of guardsmen and converted auto salesmen seemed to move more smoothly than it had before the riots. The danger points of Tuesday and Wednesday remained passive, inert. In South Boston a furtive figure threw a brick through the Waldorf Lunch window, one of the few intact windows on West Broadway. Nothing more. There was even less to report on Scollay Square, still occupied by a guard company with stacked arms. Loiterers, few in number, were urged on at bayonet point. Clusters of curious bystanders waited in front of the downtown police stations to see the soldier reliefs fall in, as if they were watching a ceremonial changing of the guard, but there was no hostility. Spectators lustily applauded as two battalions of the Twentieth Regiment went through close-order drill on the Common. Superintendent Crowley had forbidden open-air rallies “or anything calculated to draw a crowd.” He now closed the all-night restaurants to disperse the “floating night population.”
Trucks, blankets, uniforms, and additional equipment, even riot guns on loan by the state of Vermont, kept arriving in the city. The adjutant general was buying up boots at nine dollars a pair, the highest ever paid for army boots in the history of the state. Obviously the guard was preparing for a long stay. Understrength units filled up quickly. So eager were many recruits for this novel adventure that former officers even joined up as privates. The First Troop of Cavalry had two of its former captains serving in the ranks. In their summer encampments the guardsmen were allowed $.45 a day ration allowance. This was now raised to $1. Their daily base pay was $1.55. The Employers’ Association of Eastern Massachusetts, comprising several thousand firms, announced that all members of the association would pay full wages to their employees on duty as guardsmen. A Fund for the Defenders of Public Safety was started to help the loyal police and their dependents and/or the families of less-favored guardsmen who might suffer through the absence of the breadwinner. Boston matrons who during the war had run Victory Court, the soldiers’ and sailors’ canteen on the Common, now reopened it for the members of the state guard.
Quickly, with makeshift ease, the guardsmen settled in for what seemed initially a lark, a novel exercise in authority before it became routine and finally a bore. Some eight hundred of the Twentieth Regiment, barracked in Faneuil Hall, were forced to make do with the decrepit single-gas-stove kitchen of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, while those who could not fit in there found themselves in the easier quarters of the City Club. The cooks at the huge East Armory kitchen began to prepare hot meals for distribution at the various police stations. Nevertheless, in the first day or two of mobilization, many guardsmen had to subsist on coffee and doughnuts or sandwiches that they could snatch up quickly at one-arm lunch rooms. The managers of the Waldorf cafeteria chain advertised that all guardsmen would be served at half price. Company A’s Flying Twenty at the Roxbury Crossing station had to make shift with a secondhand gas stove to cook their meals. The rest of the company, at Dudley Street, fared better after Captain Crowell commandeered the Waldorf Lunch across the street. About a thousand men of the Eleventh Regiment were billeted in the South Armory, where they slept on the ground on sacks they themselves stuffed with straw. Not for another month would they get cots. From the armories patrols were sent out for street duty wherever needed. At first there were the inevitable confusions. Chilled and hungry guardsmen found themselves patrolling without relief. Harry Cross went on duty at the corner of Summer and Winter Streets at four in the afternoon and was not relieved until eight the next morning. Company I of Lawrence was kept on continuous duty around City Hall for twenty-one hours. Such lapses were soon corrected. By Saturday routine schedules had been established by the guardsmen—eight hours of walking beats, sixteen hours in reserve, with three hot meals a day and sandwiches and coffee brought to each man on street duty.
In South Boston guardsmen of the Tenth Regiment were quartered in the two police stations and in the Municipal Building. Colonel Sullivan set up portable messes on a vacant lot near the D Street gymnasium and on Emerson Street to feed his five hundred men. Within the nineteen police districts units were moved about like pawns. Sergeant Hermann’s Newton squad, after two days in South Boston, found itself quartered in the Roxbury Boys’ Club and assigned to patrol the area of Roxbury’s Station 9 along with Captain Crowell’s earlier arrivals. Sergeant John Underhill of Newton’s belatedly mustered Company B was quartered in Mechanics Building and attached to Station 16 on Boylston Street. His routine became as typical and uneventful as that of most of the guardsmen called to duty. From four in the afternoon until midnight he and his men patrolled the Back Bay, from the Public Gardens to Huntington Avenue and beyond. The following day they covered the same route from midnight to eight in the morning. This alternation they would continue for the next six weeks.
Once bedded down and secure in rations, the guardsmen began to give some thought to recreation. Captain J. Randolph Coolidge, Jr., back from
a year and a half abroad with the army engineers, started an entertainment program. Each armory soon had its evening moving-picture show. To those off duty the Shubert Theatre trust offered several hundred free tickets for the Wilbur and Plymouth theaters. On Saturday afternoon the men at the First Corp Cadet Armory organized an indoor baseball game. The various regimental and unit chaplains arranged services for Sunday.
Saturday, for all its apparent calm and orderliness, was still to take its toll of casualties. The fledgling soldiers showed themselves not only awkward in handling their weapons but occasionally—as in Jamaica Plain on Thursday night—trigger-happy. Sometimes the incidents were merely comic, as when a guardsmen at the corner of Milk and Federal Streets, on giving his officer a rifle salute, accidentally fired off the rifle. No one was injured. In South Boston a sergeant of the Tenth Regiment shot himself in the hand as he was demonstrating the stripping of a revolver, and a private in the Fifteenth Regiment wounded himself in the leg in cleaning his rifle. Such occurrences might be considered inevitable when large numbers of semitrained men are given weapons, but others could not be dismissed so casually, for one man was to die on the streets of Boston before the placid-seeming day was over, four other persons would be shot, and one would receive a bayonet slash in the cheek when he tried to snatch a rifle from a guardsman in front of Keith’s Theatre on Tremont Street. The dead man was twenty-one-year-old Gustave Geist, who had served overseas with the Thirtieth Engineers. Geist, for no apparent reason, got into a violent argument with a guardsman at Brimstone Corner just before noon. As he raised his hands to grab the guardsman’s rifle, another guardsman on the opposite corner dashed across the street and fired several shots at him. Geist fell dead near the subway entrance. A passerby, forty-two-year-old Mary Jacques, was hit in the knee and taken to the Haymarket Relief Station. Later in the day James McCourt of the South End was shot in the ankle by a guardsman he had challenged. In the North End, a small boy, Michael Russo, was hit in the left forearm by a stray bullet when overapprehensive guardsmen broke up an adolescent crap game. Saturday’s final shooting took place in the evening as James Donnelly, twenty-two, was caught attempting to steal a car near the corner of Beach and Washington Streets. After he refused to obey the order to get out of the driver’s seat, a guardsman shot him through the chest, the bullet piercing his right lung.
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