Sunday there were no more casualties. Crowds of sightseers came into the city to look over the damage and gape at the citizen-soldiers who had replaced the police. Throngs of friends and relatives crowded into the armories and stations to talk with the guardsmen not on duty. The strike was the principal topic of Boston sermons, and in almost every pulpit the police were condemned either directly or by implication. South Boston’s St. Augustine’s, St. Vincent’s, and Gate of Heaven churches echoed with their priests’ denunciation of the rioters, and though the police were not specifically mentioned, the congregations—with many a striking policeman squirming in his pew—understood that they were included in the denunciation. Cardinal O’Connell refused even to listen to any strikers’ appeal. Episcopal Bishop William Lawrence, representing Brahmin Boston ex officio, condemned the erring police out of hand. The Reverend Dr. Edward Cummings of the Arlington Street Church, speaking for the Unitarians, accused them of betraying both organized labor and the public they had taken an oath to protect. At Episcopal Trinity Church on Copley Square the rector, the Reverend Dr. Arthur Mann, deplored the “muddy thinking” that led the police to believe they could serve two masters. Dismissing the matter of working conditions and the question of the union as irrelevant, he held that the strike posed the question of whether Americans would be governed by laws controlled by “constituted authority” or “controlled by some irresponsible organization.” From Boston to the suburbs and beyond, the pulpit messages—backed by appropriate texts—were condemnatory. One had to go as far as St. Patrick’s Church in Fall River, forty-eight miles to the south, to hear Bishop James Cassidy speak the single clerical good word for the striking policemen.
Beyond Massachusetts, across the United States, luridly exaggerated reports of mob rule in Boston, of machine guns turned on crowds, of insurrection verging on civil war made the strike seem the climax of a perilous year, more ominous even than the Seattle strike because in Boston the law itself had abdicated. Haunting fears of Bolshevism, of revolution spreading from the streets to the seat of government, gripped the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans, who only ten months before had been hailing the war’s end with such joyful optimism. “The situation in Boston is of the gravest kind,” Senator Lodge wrote on Friday to his daughter, Mrs. Augustus Gardner. “It is a tremendous issue, and if the American Federation of Labor succeeds in getting hold of the police in Boston it will go all over the country, and we shall be in measurable distance of Soviet government by labor unions. I have faith to believe that the American people will not stand for it. It is hard to tell much at this distance but I think public opinion seems right and will win.” Lodge’s premonitions were echoed by editors and business and political leaders from coast to coast. Wilson in Spokane, Washington, continued to denounce the strike, calling it evidence of the “poison of unrest that is spreading to America from Europe.”
Yet, whatever the extent of the violence, the rioting in Boston appeared chaotic, without a focal point, a blur of names and figures. Only after three days did an identifiable presence emerge in the resolute figure of the governor of Massachusetts. So it seemed from a distance. That was the way the press played it up. No one bothered to ask what the governor had been doing for the last month, what indeed he was still doing. When the ship of state had begun to founder, a leader appeared. That was enough. Hundreds of telegrams arrived at the State House congratulating Coolidge—from governors and United States senators, from the American Legion, the Masons, Granges, the Massachusetts Insurance Exchange, the Massachusetts Real Estate Exchange, chambers of commerce, business organizations, and the solid, articulate middleclass groups of middle America. Novelists Margaret Deland and Booth Tarkington added their approbation. A week before, scarcely anyone beyond Massachusetts had heard of Calvin Coolidge. Now he appeared full blown as a legend, his sharp-eyed Yankee features staring from front pages, a laconic presence, folksy, appealing, the minuteman from Vermont translated to Massachusetts. Round him sentiment rallied, coalesced. Who is this man Coolidge, they asked, the granite-faced Yankee with the quaintly nasal voice out of the New England past, the governor who still lived in a two-family house—as if the question answered itself. Across Washington they asked it, throughout the government departments, in clubs and hotels. Senators and congressmen buttonholed their Massachusetts colleagues to learn more about this governor. On Capitol Hill the talk was all of Coolidge, Democrats showing themselves as enthusiastic as Republicans. With little or no concern for facts, he was hailed as “the man who defied Bolshevism and more.” The Coolidge myth sprang up almost overnight, rapidly eclipsing the man.
When Gompers on Saturday afternoon was told that Curtis had declared the posts of the striking policemen vacant, he muttered ominously, “I suppose he is willing to assume the responsibility for the consequences of his action.” Then he gave out a prolix apologia, claiming that the unionization of the Boston police was not the AFL’s doing but the “‘natural reflex’ of futile attempts by the policemen to improve their working conditions.” Curtis, he reiterated, was the real culprit, since he “at any time might have honorably settled the dispute…. Even now vested with individual autocratic authority with which even the governor states he has no power to interfere, he declared the places of approximately 1400 policemen vacant. Surely there is some weight of justice in Boston that will prevent this individual whose vision and interests do not extend beyond the scope of the Boston Police area from openly antagonizing the great American labor movement.” Gompers ended with the implied threat that “if the authorities give no consideration to the human side of the question or to the advice and suggestion which I had the honor to make, then whatever betide is upon the head of the authorities responsible therefore.”
Before going on to his father’s funeral, he drafted an answer to Coolidge’s telegram, declaring that “the question at issue is not one of law and order, but the assumption of an autocratic and unwarranted position by the Commissioner of Police who is not responsible to the people of Boston, but who is appointed by you. Whatever disorder has occurred is due to his order in which the right of the policemen has been denied, a right which has heretofore never been questioned.” He then appealed to the governor “to honorably adjust a mutually unsatisfactory situation in accordance with the suggestions by the President of the United States in a similar case…. May I not further appeal to you,” he concluded, “to take a broad view of the entire situation and give the opportunity for cool deliberate consideration when the passions aroused shall have subsided.”
Reading this over, Coolidge with his innate political awareness realized that Gompers had blundered into a web of his own spinning. Sunday, with Secretary Long at his side, he sat in his office in the empty State House drafting his answer with methodical slowness on heavy block paper, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence. After he had finished, he showed it to Attorney General Wyman, who read it through but made no suggestions. Long then telephoned in the text to the telegraph office, taking care to send copies to the newspapers in time for the early Monday morning editions. In words as spare as the hill country of his native Vermont, in sentences devoid of the McKinley-baroque oratory of his contemporaries, Coolidge in unforgettable phrases justified his police strike actions.
Replying to your telegram [he told Gompers], I have already refused to remove the Police Commissioner of Boston. I did not appoint him. He can assume no position which the Courts would uphold except what the people have by the authority of their law vested in him. He speaks only with their voice. The right of the police of Boston to affiliate has always been questioned, never granted, is now prohibited. The suggestion of President Wilson to Washington does not apply to Boston. There the police remained on duty. Here the Policemen’s Union left their duty, an action which President Wilson described as a crime against civilization. Your assertion that the Commissioner was wrong cannot justify the wrong of leaving the city unguarded. That furnished the opportunity; the criminal element furnished the
action. There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time. You ask that the public safety again be placed in the hands of these same policemen while they continue in disobedience to the laws of Massachusetts and in their refusal to obey the orders of the Police Department. Nineteen men have been tried and removed. Others having abandoned their duty, their places have, under the law, been declared vacant in the opinion of the Attorney General. I can suggest no authority outside the Courts to take further action. I wish to join and assist in taking a broad view of every situation. A grave responsibility rests upon all of us. You can depend upon me to support you in every legal action and sound policy. I am equally determined to defend the sovereignty of Massachusetts and to maintain the authority and jurisdiction over her public officers where it has been placed by the Constitution and laws of her people.
Featured on Monday’s front pages from coast to coast, the telegram confirmed Coolidge as a national figure, a sudden folk hero. One sentence burned itself into the popular awareness: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” Those blunt one- and two-syllable words leaped out of the page.* Repeated, reiterated, they became part of the public vocabulary, a slogan that would head its maker toward a destiny far beyond Massachusetts. The response was like a whirlwind. All over the land men and women, from the famous to the unknown, dashed off letters and telegrams to express their admiration for the champion of law and order. Sixteen deliveries a day were not enough to bring the laudatory mail to the State House. The governor’s staff was swamped in trying to get out replies. Telegrams arrived by the thousands; telephone lines were jammed by eager well-wishers.
The strikers were now looked on as their country’s enemies, as base and evil as the wartime Germans. Their grievances were not considered worth discussing. No issue remained but the challenge to authority and Coolidge’s response. “The nation has chosen,” the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger editorialized. “If it was ever vague in its conception of the Bolshevik horror, the vision is clear-cut now.” The Ohio State Journal felt that the striking policemen “should consider themselves lucky if they are permitted to escape with only the loss of their positions. When a policeman strikes, he should be debarred not only from resuming his office, but from citizenship as well. He has committed the unpardonable sin; he has forfeited all his rights.” Democratic Senator Charles Thomas of Colorado, eulogizing Coolidge on the floor of the United States Senate, told his fellow senators, “It is to such men that we must look for the preservation of American institutions,” and he asked that Coolidge’s telegram to Gompers be inserted in the Congressional Record.
While Gompers prepared to leave on Sunday evening for Washington, his secretary, the oddly named Guy Oyster, was making ready to take the midnight express for Boston with Frank McCarthy, who had come to New York the day before, ostensibly to attend the elder Gompers’s funeral. The AFL head had taken him aside and told him flatly that there was not going to be a general strike in Boston and that he had better get back in a hurry and explain this fact of life to the BCLU and the Russell Club. Oyster, a head taller than Gompers, was a dapper, not to say sportive presence, from the cut of his sleek double-breasted suit to the moiré bow tie that set off his high collar. Square-jawed, his wavy hair parted in the middle, his fingernails ostentatiously manicured, he looked less like a labor official than a reincarnation of Richard Harding Davis’s Van Bibber. Meeting him, one had the uneasy feeling of having seen him somewhere before, until one suddenly remembered—the Arrow-Collar Man! Deftly, urbanely, he stood beside the stubborn Gompers, guiding him as one might guide an irascible uncle. To the reporters who flocked to AFL headquarters after word of Coolidge’s Sunday message, Gompers said that he had sent a telegram in reply. Oyster interrupted emphatically to say that the telegram had been rescinded. “Yes,” said Gompers lamely, “it has been rescinded.” Then Oyster, as he left for Boston, glanced down at his manicured nails and murmured, “There will be no general strike.”
When Oyster and McCarthy arrived at the South Station early Monday morning, they were met by O’Donnell and Jennings. On seeing Oyster, the other two could scarcely trust their eyes—his pearl-grey hat, his double-breasted suit with the jacked-up shoulders, his yellow gloves, and—to top it off—spats and a malacca cane. A dude no less! In the obsolescent term of their younger days, a lounge lizard! The four walked to AFL headquarters in the Kimball Building. Oyster, swinging his cane jauntily, did not fail to notice the red-and-black IWW stickers pasted on many of the poles. At the mention of a general strike, his all-American face turned hard. “That would be,” he told the others, “most unfortunate.”
Vahey and Feeney were waiting for them at headquarters. For the inner circle of labor leaders the question of union affiliation and the redress of grievances had already become subordinate to the cold practical problem of how to help the striking policemen retain their jobs. An AFL official in New York had already let reporters know that Gompers “does not want a general strike and the Federation does not want a general strike.” One of the purposes of Oyster’s visit was to relay this message even more bluntly to the firemen. After a by-now ritual denunciation of Curtis, the lawyers discussed the possibility of getting the police reinstated through court action, but it seemed a forlorn hope, scarcely worth pursuing. While the leaders and their lawyers conferred, Richard Reemts’s funeral was being held at St. Joseph’s Church in Roxbury. The pallbearers were officers of the policemen’s union. A hundred striking patrolmen formed a guard of honor. After the service the men, all in civilian clothes, stood in line at either side of the church entrance as the coffin passed.
At midday McCarthy, O’Donnell, Jennings, and the dapper Oyster were joined by McInnes in Pemberton Square for their conference with Curtis. Briefly they reproposed Gompers’s terms: the police to return at once to duty, and no further action to be taken until after the October 6 Washington conference. The commissioner listened to them, aloof and silent. “I have heard whatever you may have wished to say to me,” he wrote immediately afterward to O’Donnell in a letter that he at the same time made public. “The action which I have taken is the only one I could take under the law and the obligations of my office. I shall be guided in further official action by the same requirements of the law in every particular. It is to be always remembered that I exercise only those authorities which the law of the Commonwealth have imposed upon me. I could not even if I would permit any other considerations to control or direct my action.”
Curtis felt much encouraged by the mail he was receiving praising his stand. Heads of firms wrote him to say they were gladly paying the differences in salary for their employees in the state guard. Others were organizing a committee for various kinds of assistance. An optician offered free eye examinations to prospective policemen. Again and again writers expressed their fears of a total breakdown in the government if the strike succeeded. Through the letters ran a streak of nativism. “Would it not be a fine thing,” E. L. Thompson of Baldwinville, Massachusetts, wrote, “when appointing new police officers to select a few old-fashioned Yankees—full blooded Americans on the force to instil a little Americanism into the situation? There seems [sic] to be altogether too many Irishmen in these positions to impart the true Americanism which we so much need in these trying times.” James Grimes of Boston urged the commissioner to “discharge every one of the strikers and go back in the country towns and get some husky Yankee boys to put in their places. Good Americans and Yankees do not strike. The Public is with you.” A. H. D., who preferred to shelter behind his initials, admired Curtis’s courage “to stand out with that bunch of Irishmen.” A scattering of union members wrote in their congratulations, but there were few Irish names among them. What Curtis most prized was a telegram from the faculty of Bowdoin College praising his handling of the strike as “in accordance with the best traditions of your college, the kind of courageous citizenship which Bowdoin has endeavored to teach her son
s.”
Later in the afternoon, Oyster and his reluctant labor associates conferred with Peters at City Hall. But the mayor told them no more than that he could do nothing for them, since the governor’s action had placed matters beyond his control. McInnes and his union officers still pinned their final hope on union solidarity. Mae Matthews had come running to him as he left the commissioner’s office to assure him that the telephone girls were massively behind the police. The firemen’s vote on Tuesday would be crucial, but had not Looney, their president, promised that what the police demanded of them they would deliver?
On Tuesday morning, Oyster talked on the telephone for a long time with Gompers, still in Washington. What they said remained a secret, but following consultation of Oyster with union officials the scheduled meeting of the firemen’s union was canceled. The counsel for the union, former Assistant District Attorney Thomas Lavelle, then stated that “the firemen have not voted on the question of a general strike. They will not vote. There is no need. They have decided not to strike and they have decided not to participate in any way in a general strike.” Suddenly the fire-breathing firemen, who the week before had been raging like lions, turned meek as lambs. Their formal statement declared that
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