This rebuff ended the striking policemen’s last effort at vindication, although they continued to meet each month, invited political candidates to address them at election time, and endorsed their choices. During World War II the more active served as air-raid wardens and even as members of Boston’s auxiliary police. Thirty years after the strike, half of those who had walked out in September 1919 were still alive. That year 375 members of the Boston Social Club held their annual reunion and banquet at Elks’ Hall on Huntington Avenue. From then on their numbers dwindled with actuarial speed. Their monthly meetings were now more veterans’ get-togethers than discussions of strike issues. Even vindication was no longer a vital concern. Many were growing too old to attend the meetings, and in 1963 the Social Club ceased, although the survivors continued to send each other Christmas cards and sometimes a few of them managed to meet informally. They still continued their memorial mass, holding it now on September 9, the anniversary of the strike.
By the beginning of the seventies the Social Club, the memorial mass, and the strike as an event had faded away. Every few years a feature writer would resurrect the police strike for an article in the Globe or the Herald. For a time it became almost a fad for college term papers and master’s-degree theses. Nothing more, except a few old men—living in the more anonymous suburbs with their children or grandchildren if they were lucky, or in a Medicaidfinanced nursing home if they were not—thinking back through a haze of years to the time when they were young and patrolled the streets of Boston.
From being one of the most respected police forces in the country, the Boston Police Department after 1919 became one of the least, often accused—according to the candid admission of its own commissioner—of “corruption, dishonesty and inefficiency.” Lacking the morale of the old, the new force bent to the temptations of the lax Prohibition era, something that even O’Meara’s men might not have been wholly able to resist. It took the department a decade to recover from the effects of the strike. The hasty recruiting brought in numbers of unsuitable men. In the year following the strike 238 patrolmen resigned, many with only a few days’ or a few months’ service, and 73 were discharged. The commissioner’s report for 1921 concluded: “The period following the strike was one which tried the mettle of overburdened officers and loyal men. Many of the new men were unequal to their tasks and had to be watched with special care. The police officials felt that they were doing well if they kept the system from breaking down completely.”
In 1920 the department numbered 1846 men of all ranks. Fifty years later it had increased by only about four hundred, and the foot patrolmen and even the traffic officer had all but disappeared. In 1962 the power of appointing the police commissioner was restored to the mayor of Boston. Once a means by which the Republican state administration kept a leading string on City Hall, such control had no meaning in a solidly Democratic state, even though the electorate out of whimsy or pique occasionally elected Republican governors. This same year President Kennedy’s executive order allowing federal workers to organize was followed by the collective-bargaining law giving these rights to state and municipal employees as well. For a long time after the 1919 strike Boston policemen had shown little inclination to form any kind of internal organization, but under the spur of this new law they founded their own union in 1965, the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association. The BPPA immediately began to demonstrate that it was no company creature but as militant as any union with outside affiliations in standing up for what it considered the rights of its members.
In 1968 the patrolmen’s association secured a labor contract with the city. Later in the year the 1919 statute forbidding the police of Massachusetts to affiliate with an outside labor organization was repealed, except for the state police (the former state constabulary).* After half a century the state’s policemen were free to affiliate with the AFL. They showed no great eagerness to do so. The six hundred members of the Metropolitan District police—the old Metropolitan Park police—did join the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, as did the hundred or so patrolmen of the State House’s Capitol police. But the chief recruits were the minuscule forces of the small towns of southeast Massachusetts: Swansea, Rehoboth, Dighton, Westport, and several others. The police of the larger cities such as Fall River, Worcester, and the mill cities of the north remained aloof. That the Boston police declined to affiliate with the State, County and Municipal Employees was explained by one of the officers of the patrolmen’s association, who said that they felt that no outside union could do so much for them as an inside one knowing all the intricacies of the department. Since the police were in any case barred from striking, an outside union had nothing much to offer them.
In 1973 the patrolmen’s association turned its official newsletter into a tabloid newspaper, Pax Centurion. Since its first issue the paper has been savaging Mayor Kevin White for his forced economics in the police department which it claims are endangering the safety of the city. But Pax Centurion reserves its particular venom for the new police commissioner, Robert di Grazia, a “small-time sheriff faced with problems he can’t handle.” Di Grazia, a man of pleasant personality but limited police experience, who sees his present post as a stepping stone to things higher, has been in controversies with his department ever since Mayor White imported him two years ago from the West. He is probably as disliked as was Curtis at the beginning of the 1919 strike, and less respected. Pax Centurion does not spare him.
Statistically speaking there have been four police strikes in the country’s history. Actually there have been only two, for the first and the last were merely small-town comic interludes. The first police strike took place in Ithaca, New York, in 1889, when the city council voted to lower the men’s pay. The police thereupon resigned in a body, the pay cut was hastily rescinded, and the men returned to work.
The second strike, the first police strike to cause any national interest or concern, broke out in Cincinnati, Ohio, on September 14, 1918, after four patrolmen who had conferred with an AFL organizer about forming a union and obtaining pay increases were suspended for “conduct unbecoming an officer.” Eight hundred policemen walked out in protest on the day set for a parade of fifty thousand draft registrants, the largest parade in the city’s history. Their places were at once taken by three thousand members of the home guard who had been armed and drilled for just such an emergency. Though the streets were thronged, there was not even a semblance of disorder, much less any rioting or looting. The patrolmen claimed they had a right as American citizens to form a union, but they found public opinion against them and when they learned that plans were being made for a new police force, with preference being given to returned soldiers, they went back to their jobs before they could be replaced. All were allowed back except for the four who had been suspended. The Cincinnati police were then required to take new oaths that they would not affiliate with any outside labor organization, though even as they did so an American Federation of Labor charter was on its way to them.
The last strike, in the little town of Rockville Centre, Long Island, in January 1920, was farcical. Six of the nine members of the police department walked out demanding fifteen dollars a month pay increase. Chief Joseph Russ planned to raise a volunteer force, but the men returned to duty next day before anyone realized there was a strike on.
Following the Boston Police Strike, laws were passed in a number of states forbidding the police to join unions. Even when those laws were relaxed or repealed, the policemen showed none of the compulsive union enthusiasm of 1919. As a publication of the International Association of Police Chiefs observed in 1949, “Through the years it [the Boston strike] has served as a public reminder to police employees of the nation that divided allegiance can bring nothing but sweeping public resentment against, and destructive criticism of, the police profession as a whole.” Twenty-five years after the police of Boston struck, at a time when organized labor claimed some fifteen million members, there wer
e a mere fifteen police unions chartered by the AFL in the 168 American cities with a population of over fifty thousand, and of these only three—Augusta, Georgia; Flint, Michigan; and Portsmouth, Virginia—had been recognized by city officials. After World War II, leaders of the AFL-CIO toyed for a time with the idea of a national police union but gave it up for lack of response. The Service Employees International Union does have a branch, the National Union of Police Officers, that has granted charters to a negligible number of police departments, but most of the police prefer to remain independent. And whatever their attitudes today toward union affiliation, they do not conceive of any circumstances that would justify a strike. Those few departments with AFL-CIO affiliations are barred by their charters from striking. No American city in over half a century has again been threatened by a walkout of its police. This, at least, is the legacy of the Boston Police Strike.
* By 1959 the trustees had dispersed about $400,000 and they petitioned the state Supreme Court to terminate the trust by giving $75,000 to a police-administered athletic program for Boston’s teen-agers, $90,000 to five hospitals for medical care of police officers and their dependents, and $10,000 to the Boston Police Relief Association. Surviving guardsmen and widows objecting, the court refused to grant the petition. In 1963 the fund still amounted to $191,900 in spite of annual disbursements of over $12,000. Grants continued to loyal policemen and their widows and to the guardsmen who “performed police functions during the crisis.” By 1973 the fund had diminished to $90,150. Grants that year were $13,301.
* A full account of Starr Faithfull is given by Morris Markey in his chapter in The Aspirin Age.
* Curley’s predecessor, Joseph Ely, though a Democrat, detested and was detested by Curley. As Governor Ely left office, he and Curley exchanged blows within the State House. Knowing Curley’s hatred of Hultman, Ely moved the commissioner to the chairmanship of the Metropolitan District Commission and replaced him with Leonard.
† A number of these of course merely wanted formal reinstatement but had no intention of going back into uniform.
* In 1972 the law was amended to include the state police.
THE GHOST OF SCOLLAY SQUARE
For a generation after the police strike (granted a generation is about thirty years), downtown Boston remained unchanged except that each year it grew a little shabbier, a little dirtier. The flaking grey paint on the State House dome—the gilt having been camouflaged over in World War II—seemed in its morose way a symbol of the fading seaport. As if to sum it all up that aged blusterer James Michael Curley was rounding out his fourth term as mayor amidst the encrusted grime of City Hall, broadcasting that he was going to stay there until he was 125 to bury all his enemies. Boston was too poor for a new City Hall, too poor to refurbish the old, too poor to do anything but to elect Curley and decay.
Suddenly, like a pantomime transformation scene, everything changed. Curley, five months of his four-year fourth term having been spent in the Federal Correctional Institute at Danbury, was out of office, defeated in 1949 by his own city clerk. Then Edward Logue arrived fresh from demolishing and more or less rebuilding New Haven to take charge of the Boston Redevelopment Authority. Deft manipulator of the federal money spigot with its gold pipeline running to Washington, Logue turned that spigot on in Boston full force. A Danaän shower! Suddenly, a municipal government that could not keep up its moldering City Hall found itself presented with a streamlined modern one; a city that could not afford the old was demolished by the new. For several Logue years much of inner Boston resembled sections of London hit by the Blitz: gutted houses, bare walls traced with the outlines of vanished rooms and stairs, piles of brick and rubble, gaping holes where streets had been. Scollay Square, that hazard point of revel and riot—its name derived from a sedate eighteenth- century merchant—magnet for men in uniform and for the seamen of the world, was high on the demolition list of those with the gleam of alabaster cities in their eye. When James Michael gave his last hurrah in 1958, forty-two years before he had promised to, a whimsical suggestion was made to change the ill-reputed name to Curley Square. To the urban renewers the remedy seemed worse than the disease. They were resolved to obliterate both the name and the place. So effectively did they carry this through that today it requires an old map and a compass to trace where Scollay Square really was.
As I walk up Tremont Street on this February midmorning, a northeast wind cuts against my face from across the brick acres of the Government Center plaza that has absorbed the lower end of what was once Scollay Square. T. S. Eliot must have known the square as a Harvard undergraduate, recalling in his exile the
… faint stale smell of beer
from the sawdust-trampled streets.
Even those streets have been bulldozed away, along with the gaudy landmarks. They are all gone—if not into the world of light, at least gone—the Crawford House, vibrating to the raucous intimacy of its floor show; the musties* slopped on the counter of the Hotel Imperial across the street with its fly-specked crayon sketches of Generals Patton and Ike in the twin windows; the flaring lights and brassy countermen of Joe & Nemo’s all-nite hotdog stand; the Star Theatre, admission a dime, its interior a blended odor of the Franklin Park elephant house and the gents room at the South Station, showing old films twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but shutting down for twenty minutes at 1:00 a.m. to see if anyone had died there the previous day; the huge steaming kettle hanging over the entrance to the Oriental Tea Company, its claimed capacity 227 gallons, 2 quarts, 1 pint, 3 gills, or 8 men; the musky—or perhaps “mustie”—dungeon that was the New Ritz Café; the tattoo parlors, passport photographers, shooting galleries, penny arcades, painless dentists, instant oculists, poolrooms, bars, cafés, flophouses, and the unforgettably named St. Marx and St. Leon hotels. And above and through it all a kind of gusto. Scollay Square was brash and bawdy, like the Old Howard round the corner, the former Millerite Tabernacle that, after the Second Coming proved a dud in 1844, became the staid Howard Athenaeum and then in a more raffish day, the Old Howard—home of burlesque, where the striptease originated, where something was always doing “from 9 to 11.”
There are congealed patches of dirty snow in the gutter as I cross through the stalled traffic. The yellow light flashes DON’T WALK. No one in Boston bothers with that. In 1919 the state guard was going to put down jaywalking once and for all, but over half a century later it is still an ingrained Boston habit. Picking my way among the cars I find myself walking over the very ground where the First Troop of Cavalry charged so gallantly across the cobblestones on that September night to set the rabble flying. Not a marker to remember that charge! The wind picks up, curling across the brick expanse between the new City Hall and the John F. Kennedy Federal Building. The sunken fountain is still snowbound. A splay-rumped girl in a miniskirt shivers as she dashes for the shelter of the Kennedy Building past the bronze lump of abstract sculpture in front of it. How many tons of metal went into that lump, and what was it Bishop Berkeley said about abstractions? More than anything else the sculpture looks like a foundering three-legged horse with an erection. The girl has reached the entrance—neither the rear end nor the weather for that kind of costume! Floor after floor the stone-and-glass Kennedy cube rises to some sort of metal grill at the top, white, austere, functional, like an up-ended air conditioner. Not quite opposite is the state’s similarly white, similarly angular Leverett Saltonstall Building, named after the retired senator. A fair enough pre-humous memorial. For in the second evacuation of Boston some of the retreating Yankees showed a belated talent for taking advantage of Democratic intratribal conflict and conning the Irish into voting for them. Senator Saltonstall was among the earliest and the deftest.*
The Kennedy and Saltonstall buildings are one thing. The new City Hall is something else again. Those sandwich slabs of concrete on stilts, those brick wedges, that disornamentation. It must easily be the ugliest building in Boston, perhaps in New England. As I look at it i
n the morning cold, my mind stirs, a layered memory slowly emerges. Something like it I have seen before. Then all at once I know. The new City Hall is a cubistic version of East Prussia’s Tannenberg Memorial!
What then endures from the great strike? A vague if haunting memory, yet something more substantial as well. Because of it a conservative Yankee became President instead of the Western progressive Irvine Lenroot. Under President Lenroot the country might have been different, though in the end the false summer of prosperity would probably have been too much for him. If the strike had not occurred in Boston, it would have occurred in some other city, though possibly with less violence. That the police should insist on affiliation with the AFL was part of the labor mood of 1919. That they were slated to fail was part of the larger public mood. After the Boston disorders and the ensuing outcry, other police unions turned in their AFL charters.
Curtis’s disciplinary stand, for which he felt ready to die, in which he felt he had triumphed, did not endure. The principle for which the defiant patrolmen lost their jobs did them no good even though in the end it prevailed. Ironically, Boston policemen who may now, if they choose, affiliate their patrolmen’s association with the AFL-CIO, do not so choose. Though they vilify Commissioner di Grazia in each issue of Pax Centurion—the November issue had a fold-out cartoon of a naked di Grazia as Playmate of the Month—they recoil at the word “strike.”
A City in Terror Page 28