Dismayed but undeterred by this rejection, Storrow continued to work for the Bigger, Better, Brighter Boston of Honey Fitz’s tongue-in-cheek slogan. He served as chairman of three arbitration boards, settling disputes between the Boston Elevated Company and the carmen’s union. In 1915, backed by the Good Government Association and opposed by Mayor Curley, he managed to get himself elected to the city council. Whenever a mayor or governor fell back on a commission or committee to solve the insoluble, Storrow’s name was the first to be considered. In 1915–1916 he served on a state cost-of-living commission. The next year he was appointed chairman of the hundred-member Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety that reorganized the National Guard and instituted the state guard after the Yankee Division had been sent overseas. As federal fuel administrator for New England during the grim winter months of 1917 and 1918, he saw to it that his region received at least the minimum amount of coal necessary for homes and industry, even using his own personal credit to cut red tape and start shipments.
For Peters it was as natural to turn to Storrow as to God, with the advantage that Storrow was more accessible. After consulting Curtis, with Storrow’s assistance he enrolled a committee that he felt encompassed all interests and ethnic groups in the city, although critics would consider it weighted in favor of business. Known variously as the committee of thirty-four, the citizens’ committee, and more generally as the Storrow committee, it brought together old-line Yankees like Charles F. Choate, Jr., and Charles Bancroft, Irishmen like the broker James J. Phelan and the contractor Harry Nawn, and wealthy upper-crust Jews like the merchant A. Lincoln Filene and the banker Abraham Ratshesky. Vincent Brogna represented the Italians, General Charles Cole, former commander of the Yankee Division’s Fifty-second Infantry Brigade, the military. Several labor leaders were included, as well as ten bankers and six lawyers, but whatever the committee’s composition, Storrow as chairman intended it to be his committee with himself in complete control. His goal, as he saw it, was to evolve some sort of compromise that would avoid the threatening strike while satisfying both the police and the commissioner. Suave and confident, he was sure this would be possible.
Having prepared his statement and appointed his committee, Peters left that evening for his fog-shrouded Maine island well satisfied with himself.
ON A TUESDAY IN SEPTEMBER
James Storrow was the Storrow committee. The other members, half of whom merely lent their names, were window dressing. Before the first formal committee meeting, on Thursday evening, Storrow released a mild and conciliatory statement. He spoke of his own warm affection for the police, assuring the men that he wanted to see the dispute from their “side of the fence.” He praised the patriotism and wisdom of the AFL. But he held firmly that it would not be fitting for the police to join an AFL-affiliated union. “We would think it improper for a judge to join a labor union,” he concluded, “so too it would be improper for a policeman who like the judge also is engaged in the administration of the law.” Belonging to a union would, he felt, force a policeman to take sides in labor disputes, would cast doubt on his credibility as a witness, and would undermine the public’s confidence in impartial law enforcement.
Vahey, much distressed that Storrow had apparently made up his mind in advance, immediately wrote him that he felt such a statement was made without a knowledge of all the facts. Storrow’s reply was as courteous as it was open-minded: “Thank you for your letter of this morning. I am extremely anxious to see this question from both sides and it would be a great favor to me if you could arrange for me today a conference with you and Mr. Feeney and the officers of the Policemen’s Union. I am anxious to hear the policeman’s side of the question.”
Even as Storrow was answering Vahey’s letter on that Friday morning, August 29, the eleven additional patrolmen charged with violating Rule 35 appeared at police headquarters for trial. Their hearing lasted only ten minutes. Vahey, Feeney, and secretary Devlin (for Curtis) waived all debate, holding that their arguments did not differ from those of the first hearing. The young, lighthearted patrolmen, who seemed to regard the hearing almost as a joke, entered and left headquarters laughing, confident, and apparently not in the least worried. Again the commissioner postponed his findings.
At midday Friday the Storrow committee held its final meeting at the Boston City Club. Only seventeen members were present. They quickly endorsed Storrow’s statement of the night before, then adopted several resolutions. First they commended the police and the AFL for past services and loyalties. Then, after this preliminary buttering-up, they set forth that they did not oppose any police organization as such but did oppose affiliation with the AFL on the grounds that this would divide the men’s sole allegiance to the community they served. Finally they resolved that “the citizens committee in all friendliness urge the members of the force and the American Federation of Labor to recognize the reasonableness of this position and ask their cooperation in maintaining it.”
Before adjourning, the committee reduced itself to more manageable size by appointing an eight-man executive committee, headed of course by Storrow. Following the meeting Storrow told reporters that as yet there were no plans for protecting the city in case of a police strike, since the committee’s purpose was to avoid such a strike.
August drifted into September, in stagnant heat-heavy weather. Throughout Boston the ensuing days took on a hypnotic inevitability. Storrow reduced his executive committee still further to a subcommittee consisting of himself, George Brock, and James Phelan. On Saturday of that long weekend the officers of the police union met with the subcommittee in Room 28 of the Parker House. Storrow then questioned the policemen about their work, their wages and hours and was shocked by much of what he learned. That such conditions persisted beneath the smoothly efficient façade of the Boston Police Department, he had never even suspected. He found it incredible that even after the new wage scale, night patrolmen were getting only twenty-five cents an hour for an eighty-three-hour work week, day men an hourly twenty-nine cents for a seventy-three-hour week, and wagon men only twenty-one cents an hour for a ninety-eight-hour week. Afterward he said with his usual smooth precision that “perfect frankness and good nature characterized the conference, and we are trying to reach an amicable adjustment.” But for all their talk on Saturday the committee and the police did not get to the crux of the matter: whether the policemen would withdraw from the AFL if their other demands as to pay and conditions were met. President McInnes and the other officers were more determined than ever to keep their union, convinced that with the backing of organized labor they were bound to win in a showdown. On Saturday night McInnes summed up his union’s position: “If a struggle is inevitable, it will not be of our own seeking. But if we must strike for our rights, it will be a struggle to the finish. We hope for a victory without a struggle and such a victory would be a double victory.” What he meant by “rights” he did not define, but for the first time the word “strike” came into the open.
On Sunday Storrow met at the Parker House for eight hours with McInnes, Vahey, and Feeney. At the end of their extended session they called in various reporters who had been waiting in the lobby. Vahey was the first to speak. He admitted they were at an impasse, the police insisting on affiliating with the AFL, whereas the subcommittee “questioned their right in unmistakable language to join any union or unions.” Storrow interrupted him to say that he recognized the right of any laboring man to form a union and to use the strike as a weapon but, he went on to say, “my view is that the police go out armed to protect the public and to make arrests and if necessary to shoot, and I haven’t been able to see so far that the state can permit such officials to undertake that duty and yet reserve the right which inheres to laboring men.” Without commenting on Storrow’s interjection, Vahey said he hoped that the committee would consider means of avoiding trouble. When a reporter asked him if by “trouble” he meant a strike, he hedged, declaring that “no one is committed to any
plan.” He did admit though that both sides had discussed many proposals for a peaceful solution. Storrow and his subcommittee recommended that the police form their own unaffiliated union. McInnes replied that this would merely be another Social Club, a club that in fifteen years had gained nothing for the force. Finally Vahey threatened that if Curtis should suspend the eighteen patrolmen, he would take the matter to court.
That evening orders came from police headquarters for all night and day men to appear at their station houses at eight Monday night. The order was the result of disturbances in the theatrical district following an actors’ strike, but on that uneasy weekend it set off a flurry of rumors and speculations. One “reliable source” had it that on Monday morning the division captains would give their men the choice of either resigning from the union or resigning from the force. The Herald predicted dourly that “the officers will positively decline to withdraw from the union or from one without affiliation with the American Federation of Labor.”
Monday, the predicted day of decision, passed off inconsequentially. Peters had hurried back from Maine to review a Labor Day parade. Tophatted, tanned, and beaming, he stood in front of City Hall with Councilor Moriarty beside him as several thousand metal trades workers paraded by, booing Curtis as they passed and giving out cheers for the policemen’s union. Storrow met the mayor after the parade to give him a summary of the weekend’s deliberations. Then he talked briefly with Feeney and Vahey, who were on their way to a union meeting at Fay Hall. The rest of the day he spent with his subcommittee at the Parker House. Curtis came up to the almost empty city from Nahant to talk with him late in the afternoon. The commissioner was quite willing to discuss wages, hours, and working conditions. But the question of union recognition he considered beyond discussion. Even an independent union, he felt, might interfere with his authority over his department. After the meeting Storrow told reporters that he still hoped to “find a way out.” He understood now how both sides felt, and he was optimistic. Whether the police would accept the committee’s “most generous offer” on wages, hours, and conditions, he could not say. Nor did he know how the city’s finances could absorb another pay raise. Prudently he warned that in the end his committee’s efforts might fail. “If we can’t hit upon a plan in a day or two,” he concluded, “I can’t see what we will do.”
That night at a meeting of the police union the members debated and then discarded a motion to disband the Social Club. Nevertheless it was overwhelmingly clear that the policemen wanted no more of an organization that they had come to feel was “weak-kneed” and dominated by the commissioner. For some time they had failed to pay their dues, and now even the club’s president and vice-president had come over to the union.
After three days of conferences Storrow and his committee had acquired a realistic picture of the workings of the police department. But for all their sympathy with the ordinary patrolman, they could see no settlement without the men’s surrender of the AFL charter, since “on no other basis could their retention as policemen be countenanced.” If the men stuck to the union and went on strike, Storrow warned the leaders, his committee would do everything in its power to defeat them. By Tuesday the obstacles in the way of a settlement seemed all but insurmountable. The police were adamant in refusing to yield their AFL charter. Curtis declined to consider any union at all. Yet beneath the surface adamancy, conciliatory forces were at work. The police union council indirectly admitted this when the members argued that it was up to the Storrow committee to produce some alternate plan that would give the police the bargaining power necessary to assert their rights. Without such a plan the council could not ask the men to withdraw from the AFL. That would be like telling the patrolmen to “go back to your twenty-one-to-thirty-cents-an-hour jobs and your dirty beds or get other employment!” The union leaders now proposed that the police be allowed to keep their AFL membership until this should prove detrimental to the functioning of the department. “When that time occurs, let a rule be made and these men will obey that rule and will stay out.” Storrow’s countersuggestion was that the police “withdraw from the AFL and form a real organization of [their] own, safeguarded by this committee and by the mayor in such a fashion that Headquarters cannot tamper with it.”
Calculating realists that they were, Feeney and Vahey had come to realize that any practical settlement would entail severing the union’s AFL affiliation. They now saw the AFL charter as a bargaining counter, and this was even more apparent to them after the police of New York City and of Buffalo had given up their proposed AFL affiliation even as the District of Columbia commissioners were ordering the Washington police to sever their connection with the AFL or face discharge. The tentative plan that the lawyers drafted provided that the policemen would leave the AFL and form their own independent organization safeguarded by the committee and the mayor from any “tampering by headquarters”; grievances would be arbitrated to protect the officers of the new union from unfair treatment; in the matter of promotion, the commissioner would select candidates from the first three names on the civil service list, and if he bypassed any of those three names he would have to explain why in writing; finally, a patrolman’s standing in the department would not be affected, whether or not he chose to join the union.
Vahey and Feeney submitted their plan first to the Storrow committee, then on Wednesday to the union officers, who agreed not to come to any decision until Curtis had made his. They also agreed to wait until the still-tentative plan had reached its final form before submitting it to the full body of the union. Vahey was then prepared to urge the plan’s acceptance. Meanwhile the headlines of the Boston papers continued to flare with news that “NO PEACE SIGN MARKS POLICE CONTROVERSY.” Police volunteers continued to appear at the Chamber of Commerce Building. Volunteering began to seem a summer adventure of sorts, and already over two hundred recruits had signed up: ex-army officers, Harvard athletes of yesterday’s fame, businessmen, everyone except labor union members—who were considered unacceptable. The first to volunteer had been a sixty-three-year-old Harvard physics professor, walrus-moustached Edwin Hall, who announced loudly that the police were wrong and that he hoped his example in volunteering would be followed by hundreds of others. On August 28 he wrote to the Herald praising Curtis for his proper and valiant stand but regretting the absence of long lines of volunteers. “Come back from your vacations, young men,” Professor Hall called out to his undergraduates, “there is sport and diversion for you right here in Boston!” Seventy-five of the ablest volunteers were being trained by drill master Captain Patrick King at the castellated South Armory on Irvington Street.
Curtis had planned to announce his decision on the nineteen already-tried patrolmen Thursday morning, September 4. What Storrow now feared was that he would find the men guilty and proceed to sentence them before the compromise plan had taken final shape and before Vahey and Feeney could persuade the union members to accept it. Once Curtis had taken such action, the police would refuse to withdraw and a strike would be inevitable. Storrow, faced with this urgency, sent Curtis’s close and persuasive friend, the banker Charles Bancroft, to the commissioner with a letter begging him to postpone his decision until the citizens’ committee could conclude its conferences with the officials of the “Police Officers Union,” conferences that he hoped and expected would find “an amicable and satisfactory solution of the present situation.”
Bancroft found his entrée to the commissioner blocked by watchdog Herbert Parker, who took the letter, read it, and declined to deliver it. Whether or not Curtis read the letter, officially he never received it, and it was never answered. In any case, he was incensed that an outsider should attempt to interfere with the discipline of his department. Where his orders had been violated, he refused to be swayed. Later he might be willing to consider Storrow’s compromise plan. But disobedience was not a matter of compromise. He notified Vahey and Feeney that he would deliver his judgment the following morning, Thursday, at nine-f
orty-five.
Dismayed but still hoping to avoid a strike, Peters—back again from Maine—hurried with the Storrow subcommittee to the State House to beg the governor to intervene. Coolidge, obviously annoyed at being injected into the police controversy, dismissed them with the curt observation that he did not consider it his duty to communicate with the commissioner. Privately Coolidge maintained he had “no direct responsibility for the conduct of police matters in Boston.” A word from him to Curtis at that point would probably have led to a compromise, but as his semiofficial biographer, Claude Fuess, admitted, “that word he would not utter.” In contrast to Coolidge, Mayor Peters, though uncertain of what to do, was willing to communicate with any and everybody. Early Thursday morning he sent a letter to the commissioner which Storrow, accompanied by his committee counsel, Charles Choate, personally delivered to Parker at Pemberton Square.
I have been watching with keen interest [the mayor wrote] the conferences which have been taking place between the committee appointed by me a short time ago and the members of the Boston Police Force, looking to a solution of the problems presented by the affiliation of the police with the American Federation of Labor and impressed with the belief that a solution may be found, honorable and satisfactory to the men and consistent with the principles which must be observed in the orderly administration of the police force.
A City in Terror Page 12
