Law and Order
Mayor Menino has it easy.
Knee-deep he may be in an increasingly bitter imbroglio with the police union over a new
contract. Pressured he may be to solve this dispute with a very visible and vocal group
with the Democratic Convention – and with it the national spotlight - coming next month
to Boston. Hot though it may seem in this summer of 2004, what Tom Menino is
experiencing doesn’t come close to the heat of 1919.
Eighty-five summers ago the police department was in revolt over long hours, horrendous
working conditions, and low pay. A former police commissioner, Stephen O’Meara, had
formed an ad-hoc bargaining unit, called the Boston Social Club, but the current
commissioner, Edwin Curtis, refused to deal with it, choosing instead to create a
grievance committee of his own design, made of men from each station in the city. The
Boston Social Club, whose members still felt it spoke for the force at large (and deciding
that Curtis was not going to accede to the policemen’s demands, no matter who was
negotiating for them, anyway) applied for and received a charter for a local in the
American Federation of Labor.
Curtis, seeking control of the situation, then slipped an amendment into the police charter
banning patrolmen from joining any external organizations, except those related to
veteran’s affairs. Then he brought the 19 police officers who had formed the AF of L
chapter up on charges for violating his order about external organizations. Curtis’s
confidence for a resolution was clearly low – he simultaneously brought in a former
police superintendent to assemble a volunteer police force. (Among the many citizens
who took up the call were several members of Harvard’s football team.) As tensions rose
that summer, Boston Mayor Andrew J. Peters stepped in to offer the services of a
committee he had created of Boston and suburban citizens that was headed by the
prominent businessman James Jackson Storrow. Curtis angrily rejected the committee’s
proposed compromise and instead, on September 8, 1919, he suspended the 19 police
officers. The next day, 1117 of the 1544 police officers in the department walked off the
job in protest.
With just a fraction of the necessary force needed to maintain the peace, several parts of
the city, including Scollay Square and South Boston, were subject to several nights of
lootings, assaults, and general lawlessness. The crowd in Scollay Square, which one
newspaper estimated at 15,000 people, got so rowdy that a regiment of cavalry was sent
in to restore order. Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge had several regiments of
the Massachusetts State Guard deployed, and order was eventually restored, although it
was not before five people were killed by police and dozens more were wounded. None
of the striking policeman got their jobs back - an entirely new police force was created,
mostly from World War One veterans.
The events on the streets of Boston sent shock waves throughout the country.
Remember that this was just two years after the Russian Revolution toppled a
government, five years after the Ludlow Massacre (when a number of women and
children were killed during a strike at a Colorado mine,) and seven years after the “Bread
and Roses” strike crippled the textile factories in Lawrence. The Haymarket bombing in
1886 was by then a generation ago, but fears of anarchy and Bolshevism were very much
on the minds of much of America.
So it’s no surprise that for their stand against the striking policemen, Curtis, Peters, and
Coolidge became heroes. It was Coolidge who delivered the sound bite that would
catapult him to national status (yes, I recognize that lacking even radio in 1919, this is an
anachronism.) Replying to AF of L President Samuel Gompers’s request that the striking
workers be reinstated and negotiations begun again, Coolidge refused, stating that “there
is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, at anytime.” It was
concise, strong, and reassuring. When the Republicans needed a running mate for the
unknown but pliable Warren G. Harding in 1920, they chose Coolidge. Three years later
Harding died of thrombosis and Coolidge was President, perhaps the most spectacular
result of the Boston police strike.
No one is suggesting that 1919 Boston, its problems with a police union, and an
upcoming national election have any equivalency today, other than at their highest level
of abstraction. But, as Curtis, Peters, Coolidge, and the 1117 striking members of the
Boston Police Department found out then – as every politician now knows – in the glare
of the spotlight, these are the moments when futures are made or broken.
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David Kruh’s new book on Scollay Square is due out this fall.