Coolidge (27 page)

Coolidge, Curtis, and Peters understood now that the state guard might not be enough to stop serious violence. And if the Boston police force, the oldest in the country, succeeded in winning concessions through strikes, the police in other cities would follow with strikes of their own.
The Christian Science Monitor
reported the reaction in Washington: “As viewed here the issue in Boston goes further than a mere dispute over the recognition or non recognition of a union.” A Democratic senator from Montana, Henry Myers, waxed hysterical. “Unionization of the police of every city of more than 5,000 population will follow within sixty days,” he predicted. “We will have a Soviet government within two years unless some branch of the government steps in and stops this tendency.” Others were calmer but still aware of the possibility of a fundamental change in American law enforcement. Authorities in the District of Columbia had asked President Wilson to rule against a police strike there.

But Wilson, who happened to be heading west on his special train to sell his League of Nations to the country, had a much bigger strike on his mind: the threatened action by the workers of the steel industry. On the topic of the Washington police, the president punted. Wilson issued a vague notice via an intermediary: “The president suggests the advisability of postponing any issue regarding the police situation until after the forthcoming industrial conference at Washington and hopes the postponement can be effected.” The police of Washington were ecstatic. They did not need to use the great weapon of a strike; they could merely threaten to do so. The conference Wilson mentioned would not take place until October 6, giving them and the police of Boston more time to make their case under a national spotlight.

Complicating matters was a sudden challenge to Coolidge and Curtis, both Republicans, from Mayor Peters, a Democrat. Searching his books, Peters determined that the law gave him the leeway to take over the police force. Peters not only called out the state guard’s 10th Regiment of Boston for active duty, but also announced he was taking over the entire force from Curtis. Henceforward, the mayor would make the calls. Coolidge responded by calling in his attorney general and Albert Pillsbury, a lawyer who had fought for William Lewis of Amherst in the past.

This next choice was simple: Coolidge could back up Peters, or he could back up Curtis. Backing up Peters would not be hard, but sticking with Curtis would be the most controversial move of his career. The picture of the strike in the first days did not flatter the commissioner or the governor. Curtis clearly had not prepared for the extent of the strike or the onslaught in the city. Coolidge could be blamed for that alone. “The system as a whole must be searchingly investigated later on,” muttered the
Springfield Republican
. The police union had singled out Curtis as the villain: Curtis was the one who had suspended their men. They, in turn, had Gompers to back them up, and Gompers was at the height of his power. President Wilson remained in the background, providing cover for Gompers.

Either way, there was not much time for the governor to make a decision. The angry crowds were ready for more and also ready to take advantage of any confusion at the top. At 10:00
A.M.
that September 10, even as
The Boston Globe
extra
was being sold, small groups set out to loot more stores in Boston. When the volunteer police in their mismatched uniforms arrived to stop them, the crowds attacked the police. The police then shot into the crowds. Clothing, shoes, shirts, and men’s collars lay all about the streets amid the broken glass; in many instances young boys broke the windows and scattered the goods about without even taking them. At 1:30
P.M.
, riots broke out at Scollay Square, so large that the replacement police were powerless.

As night fell Wednesday, the striking police were not ready to relent. President Lowell had sided with Curtis and Coolidge, but there was a guest professor at Harvard from England, Harold Laski, who believed that the policemen should enjoy, at least, the right to join the AFL. Laski would shortly argue for conciliation in
The Crimson
. Asked whether he would give in on the key issue, affiliation with the AFL, the proud McInnes said, “Nothing doing. A police union and affiliation with the American Federation of Labor is what we are striking for and what we will accept only as a settlement.” Other unions in Boston were signaling they might support him. Thirty-five hundred cooks and waiters voted to strike in sympathy with the policemen. Only a group vote at the Central Labor Union office stood between Massachusetts and a general strike.

In New York, policemen and firemen were watching closely; they were preparing to press their own city government for raises that took their salaries to $2,000 a year. The New York fire commissioner commented wryly that he promised to present to the City Board of Estimate and the mayor the plea for the higher wage, which the firemen would have loved to get, “provided they remained firemen.” Wilson’s relentless focus on the League of Nations meant the administration was caught off guard by the strikes. Senator James Alexander Reed of Missouri, an opponent of Wilson on the League of Nations, was in Boston to speak at Symphony Hall. Woodrow Wilson’s daughter Jessie, vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, wrote her father, “The police are all on strike and there has been rioting all day. I cannot wish that he [Reed] may escape a few jolts and bruises. I hope the building is stampeded.” But the Symphony Hall debate was canceled, due to the strike.

Boston maintained a small second police force, the Metropolitan police, especially important now that the regular force was gone. But even the Metropolitan police could not be counted on: fifty-three officers refused to cooperate with the governor and headed right over to the union headquarters to join. They too were suspended.

More state troops were hurried in: at 9:51
P.M.
on September 10, Companies E and L of the 14th Regiment departed Fall River, Massachusetts, for Boston. But these troops arrived too late. In the city that night, Wednesday, September 10, thousands were already roaming. On Broadway, amid a mob, Captain C. T. Hadley of the 10th Regiment and his C Company ordered men and boys to stop looting a store. “The crowd laughed and hooted,” reported the
Hampshire Gazette
. No one expected the authorities to fire at people. In Dorchester the guards fired into the air, but Hadley’s men fired at the looters. “And the looters, still laughing and jeering, fell before the shots of the troops.” The crowd panicked and ran, stepping on top of one another to escape. Others came back; the city was alive with people. Rain failed to drive them all home. “Cavalrymen rode the sidewalks on newspaper row,”
The Boston Globe
reported in awe. At 7:15
P.M.
, a young man was killed at Howard Street in the West End; it was not clear whether the troops or a citizen had done the deed. The dead man was brought to a city relief hospital, but no one could identify him. The hospital put out some information in the hope of discovering his name: the man was about twenty-six, wore a gray suit from the Continental Clothing Company, had had his appendix out, and had had some bridgework done on his teeth. A woman, shot in the arm, arrived at the hospital immediately after the dead man. The same night, September 10, a twelve-year-old boy from Whitman, Robert Lallie, died at City Hospital from wounds he had received when police had shot into a crowd of looters. On Devonshire Street, where McInnes had so recently policed traffic, people in a crowd found themselves being forced forward by bayonets. The total deaths rose to four.

Late in the evening those who wandered around saw an amazing sight, described by the
Boston Evening Transcript
:

The department stores were fully lighted up as broad day light and the window curtains up so that the competent appearing men who stood guard inside might have full view of the nearby street. Two guards remained all night at each of the many doors of the Jordan Marsh Company, Filene’s and the RH White buildings.

Well after midnight into early Thursday morning, September 11, many of the state guards were still patrolling, pushing back crowds; the men of A Company in the 11th Regiment who had had nothing to eat since lunch thought the night would never end. At 2:00
A.M.
Thursday, their skipper, desperate, commandeered one store of a new chain, the Waldorf System, on Dudley Street. At 3:00
A.M.
yet another group, the Springfield contingent of the state guard, arrived in Boston with ammunition. Within hours, men from Greenfield, Northampton, Holyoke, Great Barrington, and Worcester were there as well. They carried guns with fixed bayonets.

When Coolidge woke Thursday morning, the police were taking more volunteer officers. At Station 2, Captain Sullivan proudly reported that a number of city leaders who had volunteered to help out in the strike were assigned to his station: Mortimer Seabury, a broker; Archie Hurlburt, the proprietor of the Boston Tavern; Bernard J. Rothwell, a former president of the Chamber of Commerce; and Huntington Hardwick, a bond salesman and former athlete. The thought that citizens and soldiers were lining up on the city’s side was the first great challenge to the strikers. General Francis Peabody, a brigadier in the National Guard, and Rear Admiral Francis Bowles, who had just finished, as he put it, doing “a little dusting and cleaning” for the Emergency Fleet Corporation, ran into each other on their first day as volunteers. The police, veterans and loyal as they had been, were discovering they did not have a monopoly on heroism. The strikebreakers, too, might also play the war hero card.

At the municipal court, a young man was given a year’s sentence in the House of Correction for his participation in the Scollay Square riot. Then, the case was dismissed when authorities discovered the young man was fifteen years old, and he was remanded to juvenile court. The city felt strange—people who had been friends the day before were now enemies. At the courthouse, they encountered one another, strikers mixing with volunteers and lawyers. Some of the police had come to court because old cases of theirs were being heard. Several were also being arraigned on charges of drunkenness and robbery. Another topic was the cost of the battle. The damage of the night of September 9, the first night of rioting, the
Globe
estimated, amounted to around $200,000. Reporters unearthed news for their readers: the law said that Boston itself was liable for damage to the merchants, if the shopkeepers could prove they had taken reasonable precautions.

That Thursday morning, there seemed no news in the world but strikes: steel strikes, police strikes, and the likelihood of the great coal strike. The combination of such news and “the extraordinary rioting in Boston,” as the
Chicago Tribune
described it, set the stock market shivering. By 11:00
A.M.
, Boston saw another death, bringing the toll to five; eighteen-year-old Raymond Barnes, a sailor, was in a group that ran at shooting guardsmen; the bullet hit him in the neck, “making a terrible wound,” as the
Globe
wrote. The
Hampshire Gazette
reporter could scarcely believe it was happening in old Boston: at first he saw hysteria: “Hundreds of women were in the street . . . scores became hysterical and the air was filled with shrieks when Barnes was shot down.” But afterward the crowd quieted down: “Dead silence followed shooting. The mob, awed by the sight of the death, seemed unable to move.” The troops surged forward with bayonets; the crowd dashed for safety, except for a few, who, panicked, lay themselves flat on the ground.

On his League tour, Wilson was finding that the reporters did not want to hear about the League; they wanted to talk about labor. Even his movements were described in terms of the labor conflict and not the League: the press called attention to the fact that the president chose to avoid stopping in Butte, Montana, where the Wobblies were supposed to be especially powerful. Wilson, anxious, then went out of his way to praise, within earshot of a reporter from
The Anaconda Standard
, a well-known tourist draw in Butte, Frank Conley’s fishing lodge, and announce his regret that he could not visit it on that trip. The president dodged the labor question by telling the press that labor’s problems could be solved by applying the principles of the covenant of the League of Nations: talk, don’t fight.

“There is no use in talking about political democracy unless you have also industrial democracy,”
The Atlanta Constitution
reported Wilson as saying in Billings on September 11. The papers’ paraphrases of Wilson conveyed a president aching with the desire for conciliation. “It became known today,” the
Constitution
wrote, “the president is staking all his hopes for an immediate solution to the vexed affairs of capital and labor in this country upon the conference between employer and employees he has called to meet in Washington early in October.” Then Wilson’s train set out for Helena, where he was to deliver another speech.

But Boston could not wait until the sixth of October. And the fact that Wilson had come down on the side of diplomacy and in favor of Gompers made Coolidge’s job that much harder. Each hour of that Thursday that Coolidge waited would be another hour for rioters. That morning there were more applications for gun licenses from companies at Curtis’s headquarters; over the day an additional 846 licenses would be filed. In addition, 369 applications for licenses for guards would be received. At some point on Thursday a group of businessmen visited Coolidge. They warned him that he would not be reelected if he did not compromise. The election was so close, and Coolidge had a good shot at winning. But Coolidge was firm. “It is not necessary for me to hold another office,” he told them. He told the same thing to Governor Clement of Vermont, with whom he talked on the telephone.

Coolidge did not rebuke Mayor Peters again, nor did he remove Curtis. Digging around with the attorney general and Albert Pillsbury, the old ally from Amherst, Coolidge had unearthed his own statute, which gave the governor authority to call on any policemen to aid him. Curtis, a former mayor, also weighed in with considerable knowledge and experience. Coolidge, Curtis, and Pillsbury agreed: they could and would take the position that his statute trumped Peters’s. And now Coolidge’s procedural mastery again demonstrated value. Exercising his own authority under the statute he had found, Coolidge made clear it was Curtis who was in charge, Curtis was the one to exercise authority; if not Curtis, then it had to be the governor. Coolidge took over for both of them and called out every last remaining man in the state guard, so that Curtis would command between five thousand and six thousand men, vastly outnumbering the striking police. All replacement policemen and guards had to follow Curtis’s orders, and not those of Peters, Coolidge said: “The entire state guard of Massachusetts has been called out. Under the Constitution the governor is the commander in chief thereof, by an authority of which he could not, if he choose, divest himself. That command I must and will exercise.”