There is a provision in the constitution of this association which provides as follows:
“It shall be deemed inadvisable to strike, or take active part in strikes, as our position is peculiar to most organized workers, as we are formed to protect the lives and property of the communities in case of fire or other serious hazards.”
This position we shall keep. Organized labor and its representatives have not sought to change that position and we make this statement so that the public may know just where the firemen stand. If it tends in any way to allay fears of a firemen’s strike, we want to emphasize it in large letters.
The statement concluded with expressions of sympathy for the police and the hope that “a calm and careful survey of present events when it is made, as undoubtedly it will be made, will take the human element into consideration with reference to the Boston police and their strike.”
Firemen were swayed as well by certain practical considerations, not the least of which was the volunteer fire-fighting force formed from the state guard, First Motor Corps, and instructors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then, too, many firemen had been so harassed by false alarms and hostile crowds during the two nights of disorder that their sympathy for the striking police had soured. In addition, there were minor but telling incidents such as the wrecking of a newsstand run by a fireman’s widow across the street from a fire station.
Taking their cue from the firemen, the other unions of the BCLU proceeded to backtrack vigorously. The telephone operators, who had been balloting all that day, now decided to withhold the results of their balloting and to strike only in case of “a general strike … not confined to any particular group of unions.” Other unions followed suit. The bartenders, the Hebrew traders’ union, the electrical workers, and the rest were willing to take action, but only if the others did. No one union expressed any wish to start a sympathy strike on its own. The Boston typographical union referred the strike question to its various chapels. Members of the municipal sewer workers’ union declared themselves unalterably opposed to a general strike. Earlier in the week the carmen, in a mass meeting at Fay Hall, self-righteously announced that they owed their first duty to the public and hence could not strike.
McCarthy still insisted that the policemen’s struggles for “right and justice” would continue “until victory perches on their banner.” At the same time Oyster, Vahey, and Feeney renewed talk with police union officers about petitioning for a writ of mandamus to demand reinstatement for the discharged men. In a Wednesday afternoon press release, Oyster described the policemen as the “finest body of men as ever I saw. Three hundred of them ex-doughboys in Uncle Sam’s army, and their president, John F. McInnes, the proud possessor of four honorable discharges from the U.S. army, and four wounds received while fighting under the Stars and Stripes, now being called ‘deserters’ because they had the manhood and the courage to strike, after two weeks’ notice, for their human rights and constitutional guarantees, after being assured by the statements of the police commissioner that any situation caused by the form of protest then adopted, could and would be taken care of.”
He did admit, however, the impossibility of a general strike of Boston’s organized labor. His chief would not come to Boston, Oyster explained loftily, because “the situation is sufficiently delicate without implicating matters.” On leaving that evening on the Federal Express for Washington to report to Gompers, he called out to waiting newspapermen, “You can say that we [the AFL] are a hundred per cent behind these policemen in their fight to maintain their rights as American citizens and that we will be with them to the finish.” What he meant by this enigmatic pledge no one really understood, least of all the striking policemen.
Oyster’s weasel words, the firemen’s broken pledge, and the backtracking by other unions meant that any real chance of a successful outcome to the police strike was gone. Talk of court action, the only alternate recourse left, was a mere whistling in the dark. Public opinion had congealed in anger against the police, and that anger—fanned by the press—was something the other unions had no wish to court. Coolidge underlined this on Wednesday in a letter to Fire Commissioner Murphy thanking the firemen for their “loyalty to the city in its time of need.” At a press conference in the afternoon an out-of-town reporter asked him if he had not “always been a friend to the working man since becoming governor.” Coolidge replied wryly that he had signed every bill that had come before him for the benefit of the working people, “except to raise the pay of the members of the legislature.”
While the unions were disengaging themselves from the police imbroglio, Curtis continued his preparation for enlisting a new force. Replacements for those passing their summer examinations had been negligible, and the commissioner needed a thousand additional recruits. On Friday he placed advertisements in all the Boston papers asking prospective volunteers to report Monday morning to former Superintendent Pierce at Kingsley Hall in the Ford Building on Beacon Hill. Determined to tighten discipline, he amended Rule 40, which had allowed him to punish members of the force only by discharge, a reprimand in general orders, reduction in rank, or punishment duty. He now restored fines or suspension up to thirty days in his list of punishments—something that O’Meara had eliminated because of the hardship to the men’s families. He also announced that the new force would have a new uniform of a more modern cut, with a short tunic and a military-type visor cap to replace the high-domed helmet. Then he sent loyal policemen to the homes of the strikers to collect their brass uniform buttons, the property of the department.
Even as the commissioner’s advertisement appeared in the papers, forty-six Metropolitan Park patrolmen were appearing on trial before the Metropolitan Commission, charged with refusing to go on street duty in Boston on September 9. The next day, nineteen of them were dismissed from the service; the other twenty-seven, being found guilty of insubordination, were merely reprimanded and fined thirty days’ pay. There was no further talk among the park police of solidarity with their striking brothers. That afternoon McInnes, in an effort to persuade ex-servicemen not to join the new police force, spoke to the All-Dorchester Post of the American Legion at the Strand Theatre, Uphams Corner. He charged that the attempt to recruit a new force from servicemen was meant to split the ranks of labor. “Are you going to keep a Kaiser licked,” he asked the legionnaires, his voice hoarse from days of speaking, “or are you going to keep a Kaiser in existence? Are you going to take the bread and butter out of the mouths of the men who fought with you?”
On that very afternoon, President Wilson sent a telegram from California to the commissioners of Washington, D.C., saying that the organizing of the police forces of the country to bring pressure against the public “should not be countenanced or permitted.” Harvard’s President Lowell at about the same time made public the “pride of the university in the men who did duty during the police strike.” Vahey and Feeney, announcing that they had given up any attempt at legal action, made public an indignant letter they had written to Peters, Curtis, Herbert Parker, and Storrow demanding that they tell the truth about how and why the compromise plan was turned down. The letter had little effect. The striking police were scapegoats.
This was unhappily clear to the members of the BCLU gathering at Wells Memorial Hall on Sunday. Their meeting was the largest in the central union’s history. Every seat was taken, and delegates wedged themselves onto windowsills and in odd niches, even on the fire escapes. President O’Donnell, after calling the meeting to order for some brief routine business, turned it over to his vice-president and retired to the BCLU’s general offices on the floor above with the committee of seventeen and representatives of the police union. There they remained in seclusion for an hour and a half while various delegates reported on the actions taken by their unions. Six young women delegates then took up a collection for the police, and $220.30 was donated. As the speakers droned on unheeded, all eyes kept fixed on the closed door at the end of t
he hall. There was a sign of anticipatory relief when the door finally opened and the committee, led by O’Donnell, filed in. Congratulating the delegates, the president admitted that the member locals—he did not name them—had almost all declared their willingness to respond to a general strike if the BCLU demanded it. Nevertheless, he and the committee had decided that “the time is not opportune for ordering a general strike.” O’Donnell tried to palliate the reversal by telling the delegates that they must realize that “the eyes of the nation are upon this meeting today—for this and other reasons we are to act in a manner that will not give the prejudiced press or the autocratic employers a chance to criticize us…. We don’t intend to give anybody a chance to say we have not used good judgment, as has been said of the police.” Resignedly the delegates voted to accept the committee’s recommendations. From now on they were willing to continue to give the police “their moral and financial support”—but nothing more.
Doubt and dismay were spreading among the strikers in spite of McInnes’s bold words. Edward Kelleher, a striking policeman who had been three times wounded as a soldier overseas, told reporters:
I want to say that I joined the union because we could not get our grievances redressed, or even listened to, any other way.
I didn’t want to strike, and I don’t know any other man who did want to. I went out because 19 men were discharged by the commissioner because I and the others had elected them officers of the union. They were no more guilty than I was and I wouldn’t be yellow enough to leave them to be the goats for all of us. I’m proud of it.
I wouldn’t have gone on a strike if I thought the city was undefended and there was going to be a riot, and neither would the rest of the fellows.
I want to go back to my work. I think it is honorable work. But I don’t want to go back unless the whole crowd goes back.
Recruiting for the new force began on Monday morning. By eight-forty-five when the doors opened at Kingsley Hall, candidates had formed a long line in front of the Ford Building. A number of them still wore their army uniforms, and one man even appeared in the dress blues of a Marine Corps sergeant. They were first given a physical examination and then screened by an examining committee whose key question was, “Have you ever stated that in the event of a so-called strike of the Boston Police you would not accept a position?” Those who passed were sent to the State House to apply for noncompetitive civil service examinations scheduled for Friday. By five o’clock, 180 aspirants had passed their preliminary tests. Guardsmen patrolled the Ford Building and the route to the State House all day, but there was no trouble either from the police or from organized labor.
Contributions for the striking police were niggardly, yet a quarter of a million dollars had already been raised for the guardsmen through the Fund for the Defenders of Public Safety. In the cold aftermath of the second week, destruction in the city appeared far less than the original heated estimates. Claims filed by merchants with the city clerk for damages amounted to only thirty-five thousand dollars. Monday also marked the beginning of the great steel strike, a labor struggle that overshadowed the dwindling news from Boston, even though there were rumors that Gompers might try to tie it in with the Boston strike.
Tuesday, September 23, was primary day in Massachusetts. Although the weather was seasonably mild, the voting was the lightest in years, the only extraordinary feature being the presence of guardsmen with bayonets at the polling places. Coolidge remained unopposed for the Republican nomination, as he had been the year before, but he received almost thirty-five thousand more votes than he had in 1918. His Democratic opponent was again Richard Henry Long, who had overwhelmingly defeated the elderly and discredited Old Boy Foss for the nomination with the tacit support of the Democratic leaders. They particularly favored Long, since he was ready to finance his own election campaign.
Coolidge, fortified by the primary results, was irritably aware of rumors, promoted by police-union officers, that there would still be a general strike, that Gompers would act after all, that the climax of the struggle was still in the offing. Blown about in gusts, the rumors were mostly the wishful thinking of defeated men, yet they created an uneasy mood in a city that would not readily forget those two nights of violence. Grasping at any straw now, the striking policemen saw Curtis’s amendment to Rule 40 as a back-door way to their reinstatement; however, the commissioner scotched this the next day by announcing that his new rule did not apply to the strikers, who would never be reinstated. There was talk among the politicians at the State House and in City Hall of a belated compromise, hints that state and city officials would soon meet with union heads and that most of the policemen would be taken back, gossip that the canny Coolidge would not want to alienate the labor vote just before an election. McInnes predicted knowingly that his men would be back at work on Saturday. Coolidge himself feared that sentiment in the state might be turning against his stand, and he felt the need to justify himself against charges that he had been a tyrant.
The evening of the primaries he listened to the returns with Frank Stearns and William Butler in Stearns’s library. The fussy Lord Lingerie had grown to be the governor’s most intimate associate, his closest friend—if he could be said to have a friend—while Butler was a confidential adviser second only to Murray Crane. Yet never could Coolidge bring himself to call them by their first names, never break that formal barrier. They would remain “Mister” to him, while for them he was “Governor.” As they sat tabulating the results that evening, Coolidge mentioned the movement to reinstate at least the more innocent strikers. Then he said with sudden vehemence: “This propaganda is still going on. I think I must say something publicly.”
Neither Stearns nor Butler made any comment at the time, but Stearns mulled the matter over all night and at breakfast time he telephoned Butler. “I have thought the matter over and I believe the governor should say something,” he told the other breathlessly. “I agree,” Butler replied, “only tell him to make it strong!”
Fretful as ever, Stearns was waiting in the anteroom when Coolidge arrived at his office at nine o’clock. He told of what had been bothering him all night, of how he feared the strike might damage Coolidge’s re-election chances and added, “If you do decide to speak, make it strong and, if proper, put it in the form of a proclamation by the governor, and then you will get the front page of the newspapers for it.”
Cautiously Coolidge asked, “What does Mr. Butler think of it?”
Sterns, fiddling nervously with his expensive watch chain, answered, “Why not call him on the telephone and find out?”
After talking briefly to Butler, Coolidge turned to Stearns and said, “If possible, Mr. Butler is even stronger than you about it.”
A glowingly relieved Stearns then trotted off to his Tremont Street department store. Within an hour Coolidge sent for him, gave him several typewritten pages, and remarked dryly, “That has gone to the newspapers. You can show it to Mr. Butler if you want to.”
Stearns hustled down to Butler’s State Street office and handed him the proclamation. Butler read it aloud, then, as he finished, remarked dubiously, “I wanted it strong, but he can’t say that!”
“There’s no help now,” Stearns told him; “the newspapers have it.”
Coolidge’s statement was indeed front page news to vie with the national accounts of violence and death as two hundred seventy-nine thousand steelworkers left their jobs. The governor had proclaimed:
There appears to be a misapprehension as to the position of the police of Boston. In the deliberate intention to intimidate and coerce the government of this Commonwealth a large body of policemen, urging all others to join them, deserted their posts of duty, letting in the enemy. This act of theirs was voluntary, against the advice of their well wishers, long discussed and premeditated, and with the purpose of obstructing the power of the government to protect its citizens or even to maintain its own existence. Its success meant anarchy. By this act through the opera
tion of the law they dispossessed themselves. They went out of office. They stand as though they had never been appointed.
Other police remained on duty. They are the real heroes of this crisis. The State Guard responded most efficiently. Thousands have volunteered for the Guard and the Militia. Money has been contributed from every walk of life by the hundreds of thousands for the encouragement and relief of these loyal men. These acts have been spontaneous, significant and decisive. I propose to support all those who are supporting their own government with every power which the people have entrusted to me.
There is an obligation, inescapable, no less solemn, to resist all those who do not support the government. The authority of the Commonwealth cannot be intimidated or coerced. It cannot be compromised. To place the maintenance of the public security in the hands of a body of men who have attempted to destroy it would be to flout the sovereignty of the laws the people have made. It is my duty to resist any such proposal. Those who would counsel it join hands with those whose acts have threatened to destroy the government. There is no middle ground. Every attempt to prevent the formation of a new police force is a blow at the government. That way treason lies. No man has a right to place his own ease or convenience or the opportunity of making money above his duty to the State.
This is the cause of all the people. I call on every citizen to stand by me in executing the oath of my office by supporting the authority of the government and resisting all assaults upon it.
Once more the press of the nation poured out its praise for the strong man from Massachusetts—as he seemed from afar. Coolidge’s words had a tocsin ring: “There is no middle ground”; “That way treason lies”; “No man has the right …”; “The cause of all the people …”; brief, resounding phrases, blunt, direct. Such a man, many were soon saying, ought to be the next President of the United States. Without fully realizing the effect of his words, Coolidge had dramatized the issue, simplified it, turned it to a legend. After his proclamation the striking policemen, although they were slow to face the fact, had lost their last shred of hope.
A City in Terror Page 24