How it dates one actually to remember the police strike! I think of that as I walk from the Kennedy Building toward the subway entrance. The old tea-kettle of the Oriental Tea Company, regilded and with the dents removed, again gives out steam above the entrance to a coffee bar. It is probably the only Scollay Square object left from the riots. The subway entrance is new, massively brick, cubistic, like an air raid shelter for an atom-bomb attack. The old one with its gothic turrets and finials could have served as a chapel for the bones of St. Botolph. Or for the five anonymous bodies found during the leveling of the square.
Though Scollay Square is only a ghost, I cannot pass this way, walk across the Government Center plaza or past the Pemberton Square Courthouse and down School Street to the old City Hall without thinking of the strike, without remembering the amateur soldiers in their misfit uniforms who loomed so heroic to my child’s eye. The principals have lost any currency. Curtis is forgotten; Peters is forgotten; Coolidge is vaguely recalled in the presidential sequence as the predecessor of the unlucky Hoover, a wooden-Indian profile on a postage stamp. Yet that strike, overlaid now by a half century of more massive world disorders, did settle something, did make its axiomatic point in history.
It was a point not so well understood north of the Canadian border. For the Montreal police, who had struck in 1918, struck again in 1946. Then on October 6, 1969—Montreal’s Black Tuesday—the city’s Policemen’s Brotherhood Union, in a sudden gesture of impatience following a wage dispute, called a third strike. Early in the morning the men quit their posts, returning to work at midnight only after the Quebec legislature ordered them back under penalty of heavy fines and prison terms. During that long day and evening a mob formed, turning quickly violent. Two miles of shops were looted along St. Catherine Street, the pavement strewn with glass fragments and discarded merchandise, a large garage burned to the ground, and over a million dollars’ worth of damage done. Two men died, forty-nine persons were injured. The police themselves were dismayed at the sudden consequences, the chastened head of the brotherhood union remarking on the “thin blue line” that separates civilization from chaos and anarchy. Below the border one might tend to forget how thin that blue line is—until one remembers Boston.
* “Mustie” was the indigenous name for a glass of half-ale, half-beer. When James Michael Curley went to Washington as a congressman and first dined at the Willard, he is said to have asked the wine steward for a mustie.
* Oddly enough, in the first evacuation of Boston in 1776, among the loyalists who sailed away into exile rather than renounce their allegiance to King George was one Leverett Saltonstall.
POSTSCRIPT IN BALTIMORE
On Thursday evening, July 11, 1974, and after I had finished writing my last chapter, a police strike occurred in Baltimore, the first such in a major American city in fifty-five years. According to officials of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees—of which a slight majority of the Baltimore police were members—1300 to 1500 of the 2800-man force quit their jobs. Police Commissioner Donald Pomerleau, however, gave out the total as 457 strikers.
The municipal workers’ strike began on July 1 with a walkout of garbagemen in protest against what they considered the inadequate offer by Mayor William Schaefer of a twenty-five cents an hour pay increase. The mayor explained that the city lacked the money for an additional increase and could not count on any supplementary state or federal funds. In spite of a Maryland law forbidding strikes of municipal employees the garbagemen were joined by the unionized jail guards, park and zoo keepers, and highway and sewer maintenance workers. Then, as garbage and refuse piled up in the streets, after several days of a police slowdown in which the mayor’s official car was twice tagged, the more militant policemen made a delayed gesture of solidarity by walking out.
Their walkout was the signal for young blacks to take to the streets, smashing windows and looting, their target chiefly liquor and jewelry stores. Over two hundred stores were vandalized that night. Hundreds of trash fires were set in the streets. Two men died in the tumult, one a looter shot down by an on-duty policeman.
On Friday Governor Marvin Mandel ordered a hundred state troopers of the special tactical force to Baltimore along with an armored police car and a detachment of police dogs. He also alerted the National Guard. Mayor Schaefer, after recalling the Boston strike, accused the police of failing their obligations and betraying their oaths. During the morning he and the commissioner and the governor toured the city. “I have a great deal of emergency power in this situation,” the governor warned union officials, “and I will have no hesitancy in using it.” Commissioner Pomerleau said that the city was under control—as indeed it proved to be—and remarked that the police who stayed on the job were superior to those who struck. During the day many strikers returned to duty. Meanwhile City Circuit Court Judge James Murphy threatened to fine and jail the three top union leaders unless the men were back on their jobs by Monday.
The sweltering weekend passed calmly if odiferously, while mayor and commissioner negotiated with the union leaders. The mayor was willing to make some wage concessions, but the commissioner refused to consider a general amnesty for the strikers. Those, he said, who continued to stay out would be dismissed, including eighty-two probationary patrolmen who had joined the strike.
By Monday afternoon most of the municipal workers, as well as the police, were back on the job. On Tuesday the union leaders, to the indignation of the younger patrolmen, yielded to the commissioner on the amnesty issue as they signed a new contract that increased the pay of officers with five years’ experience. Whatever their private feelings the union members ratified the agreement. At the time the vote was taken, only twenty-four policemen had failed to return to work. An hour later Judge Murphy fined the staff director of the union’s Maryland Police Council $10,000 for one day’s contempt of his back-to-work injunction and fined the police local $25,000.
The Baltimore strike lacked wider implications. Compared with the riots in Baltimore following the murder of Martin Luther King or the uprisings in Watts and Detroit and Harlem, it seemed a minor incident. In half a century the country had become acclimated to riots, mob violence, cities under siege. Most papers beyond the state did not consider the Baltimore strike newsworthy. Mayor Schaefer, Commissioner Pomerleau, and Governor Mandel made no names for themselves nationally. Nevertheless the shadow of that Boston strike, attenuated though it might be, impressed itself on Baltimore in those five days. The mayor and the governor and the commissioner sensed it as they drove through the streets on Friday morning. The officials of the union sensed it, as did Judge Murphy. It gave the striking policemen a feeling of uncertainty to the point that other striking municipal employees felt uncertain of them. “I feel terrible about this strike,” one policeman told a reporter. “It’s the most terrible thing I have ever done.” But he added, unconvincingly, that he felt he was right. Police Commissioner Pomerleau announced that “there will be no general amnesty for those police officers who have failed their responsibility to the public,” though there would be “degrees of consideration” to those who returned promptly. But for the memory of the Boston Police Strike it seems unlikely that the commissioner would have ventured on so fixed a course and even more unlikely that union officials would have acquiesced. Nor would there have been such quick cooperation between the mayor and the governor. Several lessons, at least, had endured, whatever the rights and wrongs.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To the many who were kind enough to reply to my requests for information about the police strike I am most grateful, in particular to Helen C. Bailey, Mildred Beverly, Richard Courtenay, Harry Cross, Alan F. Flynn, A. H. Hermann, John Heskell, Catherine Knapp, James A. Long, John B. O’Neil, Richard M. Russell, Commander Joseph Siano of the Massachusetts State Guard Veterans, George Simpson, and John Underhill. I am also indebted to my uncle Charles Herbert Kent, to Anne Lydon, to Francis Moloney and the staff of the Boston Publ
ic Library, and to Bob McLean and David Farrell of the Boston Globe. The Boston Public Library with its microfilms of newspapers, the Massachusetts State House Library, and the Boston Athenaeum have been indispensable to me. But my most enduring gratitude is to those long dead, my grandfather, my father, my Aunt Amy, and others the memory of whom has sustained me in this work.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Ables, Jules. In the Time of Silent Cal. New York, 1969.
Allen, Frederick L. Only Yesterday. New York, 1931.
Boston Tercentenary Committee. Fifty Years of Boston: A Memorial Volume Issued in Commemoration of the Tercentenary of 1930. Boston, 1932.
Coolidge, Calvin. The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge. Boston, 1929.
———. Have Faith in Massachusetts: Addresses and Proclamations of the Governor. Boston, 1919.
Curley, James Michael, with John Henry Cutler. I’d Do It Again. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1949.
Cutler, John Henry. “Honey Fitz”—Three Steps to the White House. Indianapolis, 1962.
Dates, Data and Ditties: Unofficial Record of the Tour of Duty of A Company, 11th Regiment Infantry, Massachusetts State Guard, During the Strike of the Boston Police. Boston, 1920.
Fosdick, Raymond B. American Police Systems. New York, 1921.
Friedheim, Robert. The Seattle General Strike. Seattle, 1964.
Fuess, Claude M. Calvin Coolidge: The Man from Vermont. Boston, 1940.
Gilfond, Duff. The Rise of Saint Calvin: Merry Sidelights on the Career of Mr. Coolidge. New York, 1932.
Gitlow, Benjamin. I Confess. New York, 1940.
———. The Whole of Their Lives. New York, 1948.
Harrison, Leonard V. Police Administration in Boston. Cambridge, Mass., 1934.
Harvey, R. H. Samuel Gompers: Champion of the Toiling Masses. Palo Alto, Calif., 1935.
Hennessy, Michael E. Massachusetts Politics 1890–1935. Norwood, Mass., 1935.
Hopkins, Ernest J. Our Lawless Police: A Study of the Unlawful Enforcement of the Law. New York, 1931.
Lane, Roger. Policing the City: Boston, 1822–1885. Cambridge, Mass., 1967.
McCoy, Donald R. Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President. New York, 1967.
Malkin, Maurice. Return to My Fathers. New York, 1972.
Markey, Morris. “The Mysterious Death of Starr Faithfull” in The Aspirin Age. Edited by Isabel Leighton. New York, 1949.
Murray, Robert K. Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920. Minneapolis, 1955.
Russell, Francis. The Great Interlude. New York, 1964.
———. The Shadow of Blooming Grove. New York, 1968.
Savage, Edward H. Police Recollections, or Boston by Daylight and Gaslight. Boston, 1873.
Slosson, Preston W. The Great Crusade and After. New York, 1930.
Sullivan, Mark. Our Times, volume vi: The Twenties. New York, 1935.
White, William Allen. A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge. New York, 1938.
Wood, Charles G. Reds and Lost Wages. New York, 1930.
Zizkind, David. One Thousand Strikes of Government Employees. New York, 1940.
Newspapers
Boston American. Boston Evening Record. Boston Evening Transcript.
Boston Globe. Boston Herald. Boston Post. Boston Traveler. Los Angeles Times. New York Herald Tribune. New York Times.
Articles
Bartlett, Randolph. “Anarchy in Boston.” American Mercury, XXVI (December 1935).
“Harvard Men in the Boston Police Strike.” School and Society, X (October 11, 1919).
Lyons, Richard L. “The Boston Police Strike of 1919.” New England Quarterly, XX (July 1947).
Mason, Gregory. “No Bolshevism for Boston.” Outlook, CXXIII (September 24, 1919).
“Police Strike in Boston; and Other Labor Problems.” Current History, XI (October 1919).
“Policemen’s Right to Strike.” Literary Digest, LXII (September 27, 1919).
Public Documents and Official Reports
Miscellaneous circulars, pamphlets, and journals in the State House Library, reports of the adjutant general of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, annual reports of the police commissioner, Harvard class reports, and so forth.
Unpublished Material
Coolidge, Calvin. Collection of clippings and miscellaneous papers, vol. IV. State House Library.
Curtis, Edwin U. Four bound volumes of letters to Curtis on his handling of the strike. Boston Public Library.
Koss, Frederick Manuel. “The Boston Police Strike.” Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1960.
Littauer Public Administration Library, Harvard University. Collection of material on the strike.
Long, Henry F. “The Boston Police Strike.” Mimeographed pamphlet. Boston, 1920.
O’Meara, Stephen. Papers. Boston Public Library.
Peters, Andrew J. Papers. Boston Public Library.
Peters, Robeson, “The Boston Police Strike of 1919.” Master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1947.
A City in Terror Page 29