A City in Terror

by Rosalind Russell

  McCamant’s voice rumbled on in indistinguishable phrases, then broke clear with, “I nominate for the exalted office of Vice President, Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts.” The murmuring hall suddenly resounded with a thunder of applause followed by shouts of “Coolidge, Coolidge.” For the first and last time in his life Calvin Coolidge had become a symbol of revolt in the most spontaneous convention action since the nomination of James Garfield in 1880. The week-long frustration of the delegates, their sense of impotence as the whip cracked, their rage at being forced through the hoops, suddenly spilled over at the mention of Coolidge’s name. Quickly the nomination was seconded by the delegations of Michigan, Maryland, North Dakota, Arkansas, and Connecticut—all supposedly under senatorial control. Remmel, the old professional, knew a bandwagon when he saw one. As soon as he could get the attention of the chair, he announced that he was withdrawing his seconding of Lenroot in order to second the nomination of Coolidge.

  Only the day before, a friend of Coolidge’s had remarked to the Outlook editor, Frederick Davenport: “If Calvin Coolidge were nominated for the vice presidency, I wouldn’t take the presidency for a million dollars. Because I would die in a little while. Coolidge has been lucky politically. Everything comes to him in a most uncanny and mysterious way. Excuse me from the presidency with him in the vice-regal chair!” It was a hauntingly flip prophecy, for on August 2, 1923, the flaccid Harding died suddenly and Coolidge became President. Luck was with him even in the timing, for he had fifteen months to replace the tarnished Harding administration with his own prim Yankee image. Burgeoning prosperity made him invincible. Nominated in 1924 without opposition, in the election he carried thirty-five states, defeating his Democratic opponent, the conservative New York lawyer John W. Davis, by 7,339,417 votes, a triumph marred only by the personal tragedy of the death of his younger son during the summer.

  Late in the campaign the Democratic National Committee attempted to make an issue of the police strike, charging that Mayor Peters alone by his “courageous, drastic action” was the hero of that event in contrast to the dilatory and inactive Coolidge. Former attorney general Wyman denied this on behalf of the Republican National Committee and blamed the violence on Peters. In reply the Democrats offered a thousand dollars to anyone who could prove its version untrue, an offer at once taken up by the Boston Post. In a lengthy editorial the Post claimed that Coolidge had been willing to assume authority at the beginning of the strike but that “Peters was not willing to let it pass from him.” Peters, now out of office, wrote a letter challenging the Post’s statement. Wyman then challenged Peters. The month passed with Wyman and Peters writing indignant letters and the Post printing new editorials defending Coolidge and castigating the ex-mayor. Even within the state this word battle echoed hollowly, for Massachusetts gave Coolidge 63 per cent of its vote.

  “No doubt it was the police strike of Boston that brought me into national prominence,” Coolidge wrote later. “That furnished the occasion and I took advantage of the opportunity.” His opinion was shared, if mordantly, by a number of strike participants such as James Vahey, who shortly after Harding’s death ran into Herbert Parker at the Parker House. “Oh, Mr. Parker,” he called to him, “see who we made president!”

  The parsimonious Yankee in the White House, presiding over a period of unexampled affluence, soon came to be regarded with affection as a cracker-barrel sage. His laconic remarks were widely quoted and later even collected in a short volume, Coolidge Wit and Wisdom. To the Jazz Age he seemed an amusing anachronism. What was later seen as a fleeting Indian summer then appeared the bright midseason of permanent prosperity, with Coolidge as the pilot who weathered the calm. In 1928 President Coolidge could have had the nomination and the election at the nod of his head. But while spending the summer of 1927 in the Black Hills of South Dakota, he one day handed the reporters at his daily press conference slips of paper with the twelve-word sentence: “I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty eight.” He refused to explain his enigmatic statement further, perhaps out of Yankee puckishness, despite all the debate it caused. Some thought he did not mean it, that he was waiting to be drafted. In any case he was not a candidate the following year, whether from weariness of office, considerations of health, or grief for his dead son, of whom he wrote in his autobiography, “When he went, the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him.” But beyond his more personal feelings, Coolidge was no doubt impelled by his singular political instinct that so often translated itself into the Coolidge luck. Before he left the White House his wife remarked to a friend, “Poppa says there’s a depression coming.”

  In March 1929 Coolidge turned over the presidency to his unfortunate successor, Herbert Hoover. He lived out most of the Hoover administration in retirement in Northampton, dying suddenly of a coronary thrombosis on January 4, 1933. He was buried in the Vermont hills that he had never really left.

  By a special act of the Massachusetts legislature in 1918, the mayor of Boston was made ineligible for immediate re-election. This was not aimed at Peters, for there was never any possibility of his being re-elected, but at the feared political buccaneer James Michael Curley. No act of the legislature could prevent Curley from running again in 1921, after a four-year lapse, against John R. Murphy, Peters’s fire commissioner. Murphy, a man of intelligence and integrity, the highly respected son-in-law of John Boyle O’Reilly, was narrowly defeated in a contest called “the most vicious and vituperative in Boston’s history.”

  Peters left office discredited in almost all eyes but his own. As the Boston newspaper man Joseph Dinneen wrote of him, he was, as mayor, “one of the most trusting souls ever placed in a job that required the quick eyes, ears and instincts of an honest poker player among cardsharps. He believed implicitly everything he was told. He signed his name to documents without reading them, and even repeated into a telephone acknowledgments and commitments which his secretariat called to him, an innocent dupe for a conscienceless corps of bandits…. He never took a wrong nickel while in office and a time came when he looked around blinking, bewildered and uncomprehending, not knowing what had happened. He never did figure it out.”

  After quitting City Hall, Peters went back to his Federal Street office and the practice of law, devoting most of his time to estate management. For a time he was president of the Boston Chamber of Commerce. He also became a director of the First National Bank. Yet visions of political sugar plums still occasionally danced in his head, as he admitted in a little poem, “Reflections Upon Running for Office,” that he dashed off several months after retiring from public life:

  I’ve done my job as Mayor

  And they say I’ve done it well,

  So I’ll give up public life

  And rest and play a spell.

  I’ll return to private practice,

  The practice of the law,

  And with my little graflex

  I’ll literally wage war.

  I may become the president

  Of a small but growing Trust—

  Or I may pull together

  One which recently went bust.

  I may take a fling upon the Street

  With partners all well-known,

  Or maybe run a banking shop

  That’s really quite my own.

  I’ve chances quite a few

  To go out and try my luck

  With just enough of gamble in them

  To let me test my pluck.

  And of course I’ve done my bit

  To keep the Nation going—

  So I’ve no interest at all

  In political winds a-blowing—

  No none at all—and yet—

  There’s the Gold Dome on the hill,

  Perhaps a couple years up there

  Would really fill the bill?

  Not too arduously occupied at the office, he continued his pleasant routine of sailing and yachting, spending long summers in Maine, and enjoying the social
life of his various clubs. He also continued his relations with Starr Wyman, who had taken the name of Starr Faithfull after her divorced mother had married Stanley E. Faithfull, a crank inventor, and moved to New York. During her teens Starr had periods of queerness which her family could not understand. Sometimes she would slip away to see Peters, whom she continued to regard with fear and affection. Once, after spending two nights with him in a New York hotel, she broke down and told her mother about their affair. Either Faithfull or his wife then confronted Peters. The result was that, after signing a formal release of all liabilities for damage done to Starr, the Faithfulls received a large sum of money. Faithfull—who always referred to Peters as Mr. X—said it was twenty thousand dollars. Other sources indicated that it was closer to eighty. In any case it was for years the Faithfull family’s sole apparent source of income. The sedate Boston law firm that negotiated the payment and release merely observed that “if Faithfull wants to say it was only twenty thousand dollars, then we’re satisfied to let it rest at that.”* When Starr was nineteen she spent nine days in a Boston mental hospital. Later she was under the care of various psychiatrists. Once after being found drunk, naked, and apparently beaten-up in a New York hotel room, she was taken to Bellevue. At other times and places she appeared outwardly normal, handsome, well dressed, even vivacious. She had periods of extended gaiety, particularly in London, a city she visited twice. But on her second trip she swallowed twenty-four grains of allonal and was barely revived.

  In the spring of 1931, when she was twenty-five, she fell heedlessly in love with the ship’s surgeon of the Cunard liner Franconia. He neither reciprocated her feelings nor appreciated her all-too-voluble attentions. At the end of May, noticeably tipsy, she boarded the Franconia in New York a few hours before sailing time and made her way to the reluctant surgeon’s sitting room. He tried to send her away just before the ship sailed, but instead she mingled with the passengers, and after an embarrassing scene with the doctor, had to be put ashore by tugboat when the Franconia was down the harbor. The next day, she wrote him a letter, two days later a second, two days after that, on June 4, a third. In her last letter she wrote that she was giving herself twenty-four hours and that she would never see him again. Four days later her body, in a silk dress and nothing else, was washed up on the sands of Long Beach twenty miles from New York.

  Her death was a three-day tabloid sensation, with headlines of rape, murder, and other unfounded suppositions. Somehow she had drowned herself; just how or where would remain a mystery. A policeman going through her possessions in the Faithfull family’s flat found her “Mem Book,” containing scattered sexual passages and references that even the tabloids would not venture to print. In these fragments from a bitter and broken life, one set of initials kept cropping up: AJP. “Spent night AJP Providence. Oh, Horror, Horror, Horror!!!”

  Reporters were not long in associating the letters AJP with that distant relative Andrew J. Peters. No one was ever brash enough to question Peters to his face about the connection, but so widespread were the scandalous innuendoes that he felt compelled to make a formal denial to the press that he had ever had improper relations with Starr Faithfull.

  His personal reputation blackened, he could sense the whispers behind him now when he entered any of his clubs. Yet a certain residual political aura managed to surround him. In 1928 he had been picked to second the nomination of Al Smith for President at the Houston Democratic National Convention. In 1933 he was appointed to the Massachusetts Advisory Committee of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. His last years were sad. In the summer of 1932 his two boys John and Alanson died of polio. Then his son Bradford was killed in a car crash. He himself died of pneumonia on June 26, 1938.

  Under their mild-mannered president, Michael Lynch, the members of the Boston Social Club continued to hold monthly meetings in Hibernian Hall, Roxbury. Each year they commemorated the strike by holding a memorial mass at St. James Church on Harrison Avenue for their comrades who had died in the preceding twelve months. They remained closely knit, fiercely loyal, and stubbornly determined to vindicate themselves by getting their old jobs back or at least the recognition that they could have them back. Their wives formed a ladies’ auxiliary. At its annual June convention, held in 1920 in Montreal, the AFL had pledged the discharged policemen its “moral support,” but this buttered no bread. Over four hundred of them were then still out of work. In 1921 Lynch appealed to Coolidge’s successor, Governor Channing Cox, to give the strikers a second chance, saying that they were now truly repentant. Cox would not even discuss the matter. At last, in the winter of 1923, the policemen appealed directly to the legislature. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives refused to consider a bill to reinstate them. Even those strikers settled down in other careers still felt the sting of the labels “traitor” and “deserter,” still agitated for the vindication that never came. Although barred from the Metropolitan District Police and the newly formed state constabulary, a number of them did find police work in other towns and cities of the state.

  Iron Mike Fitzgibbons and two other Mattapan patrolmen, James Hogan and Daniel Rowley, ended up on the police force of Walpole, a small milltown eighteen miles south of Boston. There on the outskirts Iron Mike bought a run-down farm which he proceeded to restore while raising still more children. In the thirties he became a sergeant and was even offered the job of chief of police but turned it down because there were no civil-service benefits. When he died in the late forties he was a much respected and honored man in that small community, and his funeral was one of the largest that the town had ever seen. Dan Rowley did become Walpole’s chief, while Jim Hogan became police chief of neighboring Medfield. Others were chiefs in Cambridge, Medford, Millis, Sharon, Provincetown, Vineyard Haven, and across the country in California, where Thomas Noone was appointed chief of police of Los Angeles. Several former patrolmen later rose to the rank of captain in the Boston Fire Department. James Long left his bakery route for the New England Telephone Company, where he would stay until he was pensioned thirty years later. Mayor Curley, re-elected mayor in 1921, made jobs for a number at City Hall. Still others became court-house attendants, postal workers, clerks in the Internal Revenue Service. Several built up trucking firms. A few grew rich.

  Among the more unusual transformations was that of rookie Patrolman Frank Lynch, once of Station 7, East Boston, who ended as Brother Timothy of the Redemptorist Order in Asunción, Paraguay. Another rookie, John Rooney, went to medical school and became a well-known Dorchester general practitioner. Patrolman Edward J. Carroll turned to undertaking and later was elected to the state senate. His striking brother Daniel made a fortune as a prize-fight promoter. Frederick Claus was not so fortunate. He left his milk route for a job as carpenter, traveling all over the country in the slacker seasons. After he had located a nearby job, his brother found him night work with the United Fruit Company unloading fruit boats on the East Boston docks, and with this extra money he was finally able to pay off the mortgage on his house. During World War II he made templates at the Boston Navy Yard until, following an operation for a strangulated hernia, he developed cancer, living another tortured two years. In his later years he became president of the Social Club. When he first struck he had thought he would be back in uniform in a few days. Always in after years, whenever he saw a policeman, he would count the service stripes on his sleeve, and if the man had enough to indicate he had been serving at the time of the strike, he would cross to the other side of the street to avoid him.

  In 1931 a legislative committee held another hearing to determine whether the 1919 strikers should be given the right to be restored to the force. Former patrolman Thomas Dowling testified that the “old time policemen would clean up things” if they were given the chance that two hundred fifty to three hundred of them were still waiting for. Though it was opposed by the Civil Service Reform Association, the legislature, on the committee’s recommendations, authorized the police commi
ssioner to reinstate the strikers at his discretion. However, the police commissioner then in office, Eugene Hultman, turned down all 147 applications that he received. In November 1934, after finishing a third flamboyant term as mayor, James Michael Curley was elected governor. In his campaign he had promised—among a multitude of other promises—to reinstate the ex-policemen. Once in the governor’s chair he sacked the Yankee police commissioner James Leonard,* replacing him by the more amenable Boston politician Eugene McSweeney. Some months afterward he notified his new commissioner that he expected at least twenty-five of the old police to be restored to duty, that it was a matter of honor—or so he told a delegation of former policemen headed by Senator Edward Carroll. Yet somehow McSweeney did not get the message. Curley complained that his commissioner had snubbed him and broken his word. McSweeney denied that he had agreed to take any of the 1919 strikers back. He had never yet said what he would or would not do, and he was not going to be “stampeded or hurried” in making his decision. He declared he would conduct his department in his own way “even if it costs me my job.” That is just what it did cost him, for Curley finally forced the disappointingly unamenable commissioner out of office, replacing him with his military aide, Diamond Jim’s son Joseph Timilty.

  With Timilty’s arrival in Pemberton Square, the policemen of 1919 thought their long-postponed hour had at last struck, particularly since Mayor Frederick Mansfield had assured the new commissioner that he would be allowed a budget increase sufficient to add one hundred fifty new patrolmen to the force. But instead of action there was hesitancy. All Timilty would say was that he was not ready to make known whether he intended to reinstate any of the former police. In the end he would prove as disappointing as Hultman and McSweeney to the now middle-aged men, almost eight hundred of whom had filed application for reinstatement.† For his belated decision was to take none of them back. As he explained to the president of the Boston Social Club, John Counihan, the average age of his force was already forty-four, whereas the ideal age was thirty. To take on a group of older men would raise his average to fifty. “If this decision were dictated by my heart I would restore them,” he told Counihan. But his policy called for the appointment of “young, vigorous, alert police officers who will be readily responsive to the training and discipline of modern police methods.” The reinstatement of the strikers “would not be in accord with views I hold relating to the maintenance of an efficient police force.”