With the fullest appreciation for the high responsibility that rests upon you, I must also have in mind the safety and security of the people. The importance to the public of having the question settled satisfactorily impels me to ask you to postpone action for a few days only until the development of the impending conferences may be seen. If they succeed in solving the problem without requiring you to reach a final decision, friendly discussion will have achieved the result satisfactory to all concerned.
Curtis’s instant reaction was that Peters should mind his own business. He and Parker talked with Storrow briefly but refused to allow Choate in the room.
Still angry at what he felt was the Storrow committee’s and Peters’s unwarranted interference in police department discipline, Curtis sent for Superintendent Crowley, Vahey, Feeney, and seven officers of the police union. When they arrived at headquarters, he led Feeney and Vahey into his private office. Parker and Devlin were already there. The commissioner’s frayed temper was apparent.
“What right has the mayor of Boston to send me a letter asking for a continuance?” he demanded, handing the letter to the union lawyers. Then, when they had glanced at it, he told them that he was going to make his finding now, but if they could give him any good reason for postponing the penalty, he was willing to listen to them.
“Do you mean,” Feeney asked, “that you are going to make a finding of guilty today no matter who objects?” Curtis said that he was.
“Well,” Feeney snapped back, “if you are going to make a finding today, I don’t care when you impose the penalty. You will then have undone everything the mayor and his committee together with counsel have undertaken to do in order to adjust this matter in a friendly way to the end that Boston may have a satisfied police force. And now I want to speak plainly to you. I think that in a matter as important as this the mayor and his committee after working day and night with your knowledge and consent to settle this matter have a perfect right to ask for a postponement and you have no damn right to get upon your high horse about it.”
“Mr. Feeney,” Parker broke in suavely, “I don’t think you understood the commissioner. He means that if counsel ask for a continuance of the entire matter, he will listen to the argument with an open mind.”
“Look, Parker,” Feeney told him, his face reddening, “that is not what the commissioner said. He told us he was going to make his finding anyway. He would listen to the matter of postponement of penalty only. Isn’t that true, Curtis?”
Curtis said it was, and Parker broke in again, this time urging the commissioner to consider a postponement of both the finding and the penalty.
Suddenly Curtis seemed to wilt. “I’ll do that,” he said. “In fact, if you lawyers just ask for a postponement, I’ll grant it without requiring you to give any reasons.”
“Request for postponement has been made,” said Feeney. “You do as you see fit with it; so far as we are concerned, we will take no sides.”
“Well,” said Curtis, “I will go into that hearing room and read the mayor’s letter and then ‘put it up to you’ as to whether you object or not.”
“Go ahead,” said Feeney, “and I will tell you then that counsel for the police stand indifferent.”
Again Parker broke in, tossing his aloof white head and scarcely concealing his contempt. “That won’t do at all,” he told Feeney in his irritatingly precise voice. “Your counsel must ask for the continuance.”
This time Vahey rose to the challenge. “Well now we’ll settle it for once and for all,” he said, his voice quivering. “We won’t ask for a continuance. You can do as you see fit about it. The trouble with you, Parker, is you are too damn vain, and you are vain too, Curtis…. This matter can be settled to your satisfaction and the satisfaction of all the men. But it looks to me as though you don’t want to settle it. It looks to me as though you are seeking trouble.”
“Well, I don’t see the need of any hearing at all,” said Curtis finally. Vahey replied that that was all the mayor, Storrow, and the police had been waiting to hear for the past twenty-four hours. At that point Curtis gave the mayor’s letter to the press along with a statement that “having received the following letter from his honor the Mayor, and having read the same to the attorneys for the defendants and they making no objection, my finding will be postponed until Monday next at 9:15 a.m.”
That same afternoon Choate on behalf of the Storrow committee gave a draft of their compromise plan to Vahey and Feeney for their suggested alterations. Even as Vahey and Feeney deliberated, a growing number of volunteers were making their way to the Chamber of Commerce Building. Over three hundred and fifty had now enrolled, “some of them superb specimens of physical manhood,” according to Pierce. Already they had begun to receive training in the fundamental duties, responsibilities, and rights of a police officer. Union leaders now told reporters that the police would strike on Tuesday “if the nineteen are even reprimanded.”
Another humid rumor-ridden weekend followed, one which Storrow sensed with increasing dismay would probably end in a police strike. On Saturday Vahey and Feeney returned the compromise plan with their revisions, and Storrow’s executive committee voted to accept it. Storrow showed the plan to the president of the chamber of commerce, the managing editor of the Post, General Cole, Murray Crane, and his right-hand man, former Senate President William M. Butler, all of whom expressed their approval. He then sent his final version on to Mayor Peters. There would not be too much difficulty there. Of that he was certain. But to get the inflexible commissioner and the autocratic Parker to unbend even a little would indeed be a “delicate” task. Storrow’s report to the mayor read:
The citizens committee appointed by you to consider the police situation begs to report as follows.
We recommend the following basis of settlement which we hope will commend itself to your Honor, the Police Commissioner and the members of the police force.
1. That the Boston Policemen’s Union should not affiliate or be connected with any labor organization but should maintain its independence and maintain its organization.
2. That the present wages, hours and working conditions require adjustment and should be investigated by a committee of three citizens, who shall forthwith be selected by concurrent action of the mayor, the commissioner and the Policemen’s Union, and their conclusions communicated to the mayor and the Police Commissioner, and that thereafter all questions arising relating to hours and wages, and physical conditions of work which the Policemen’s Union desires to bring before the commissioner shall be taken up with the Police Commissioner by duly accredited officers and committees of the Boston Policemen’s Union, and should any differences arise relating thereto which cannot be adjusted it shall be submitted to three citizens of Boston selected by agreement between the mayor, the Police Commissioner and the Boston Policemen’s Union. The conclusions of the three citizens thus selected shall be communicated to the mayor and the Police Commissioner and to the citizens of Boston by publication. The provisions of this section shall not apply to any questions of discipline.
3. That nothing should be done to prevent or discourage any member of the Boston police force from becoming or continuing to be officers or members of the Boston Policemen’s Union, and that there should be no discrimination against them or preferential treatment of them or their officers because of membership in the union.
4. That there should be no discrimination on the part of the members of the Boston Policemen’s Union, or any of them against a police officer because of his refusal to join the Boston Policemen’s Union or to continue a member thereof.
5. That no member of the Boston Policemen’s Union should be discriminated against because of any previous affiliation with the American Federation of Labor.*
Peters approved the plan at once and sent it on to Curtis for his “consideration, criticisms, and suggestions.” There was no reply all that long Saturday. In the afternoon, still silent, the commissioner left for Nah
ant, while Storrow and his executive committee spent the day conferring among themselves, with Peters, and with Feeney and Vahey. So struck were they by the sense of urgency that they did not even take time for lunch but had sandwiches sent in. Hour by hour they waited for some response from the commissioner. Finally at eleven in the evening Storrow, looking worn and haggard, announced that his efforts for a peaceful settlement had failed and that he and his committee could do nothing more. “I am inclined to look for the next event at nine-thirty Monday morning,” he said as he dismissed the other committee members. While the Storrow committee waited, Peters sent a special messenger to Curtis with a personal letter in which he described the compromise as offering “a speedy and satisfactory settlement of the whole question,” and begged Curtis to consider it favorably. Peters’s letter reached Curtis in Nahant early Sunday morning.
During the twelve days that the Storrow committee was struggling to find a way out of the police impasse, Governor Coolidge was touring the state, attending a Methodist gathering, speaking at Plymouth, and visiting Westfield for its 250th anniversary. Those concerned about a police strike found him consistently unavailable. “Governor getting tired of seeing people,” Secretary Long recorded in his diary. “He is planning to visit institutions.” On that hectic Saturday while Storrow and Peters and the police lawyers were conferring, Coolidge had slipped away again in his chauffeur-driven Packard Twin-six limousine that he—a nondriver—found one of the more enjoyable perquisites of office. Neither Storrow nor Peters nor the press knew where he had gone. What concerned him chiefly was to be away from Boston. First he drove to Abington on the way to Cape Cod, then doubled back north to Andover, in both places merely to attend Welcome Home gatherings for returned soldiers. He appeared his usual laconic self, quacking a few words, giving his limp handshake, and moving on, but there was no trace of worry in his Vermont-granite features. At Andover he spent some time talking with General Cole. He arrived back in Boston secretly late Saturday night and left early Sunday morning for his Massasoit Street duplex in Northampton, where he could be reached only by the elect who knew the code name “Grace.” On Monday he planned to motor twenty miles north to Greenfield to speak before the state convention of the American Federation of Labor. Sunday night he held a long conversation with Murray Crane.*
With the governor beyond reach on Sunday morning, two friends of Storrow’s—one a lawyer, the other a businessman—begged Coolidge’s intimate friend and adviser, the opulent Boston drygoods merchant Frank Waterman Stearns, to use his influence to persuade the governor to intervene. Stearns, a fretful, prissy little man known behind his back as Lord Lingerie, had an avuncular, almost a paternal, devotion to Coolidge, derived in part from their mutual attachment to Amherst College, from which he himself had graduated in 1878. With a faith transcending reason he had long held that the sandy-haired Northampton legislator with the stage-Yankee voice was destined to become President of the United States. He did not want to see his protégé burned by the police strike. “Gentlemen, I am not a lawyer,” he told the two emissaries at an early morning meeting at the Copley Plaza, “but I have heard the matter discussed by eminent lawyers and have arrived at the conclusion that the compromise which you suggest—which amounts to an agreement on the part of the Police Commissioner of Boston to give the deserters a written promise to put the whole matter to arbitration—is not worth the paper on which it would be written. I do not believe that sworn officers of the law can leave a matter of this kind to arbitration.”
Storrow spent all Sunday with his committee in Room 601 of the Copley Plaza waiting hopefully from morning until evening for some sign from Curtis. He waited in vain. Earlier he had sent Curtis’s friend Ratshesky to Nahant only to learn that the commissioner had already left for Lancaster to visit Parker. Meanwhile the Boston Central Labor Union was holding a stormy session in the afternoon, the officers doing their best to hold down the angry and rebellious members from committing themselves to a sympathy strike before Curtis acted. Although most of those present were now convinced the police strike was inevitable, President O’Donnell managed to persuade them to leave any final decision as to what action they might take to their committee of seventeen. Just before the two o’clock meeting opened, Peters telephoned to say that the Storrow committee was still in session and that there was still hope of a peaceful settlement. Councilor Moriarty commended the delegates for not declaring their intentions until after the commissioner had acted, then launched a savage attack on the mayor. The whole problem could have been solved two weeks before, he told them, if Peters “had kept his mouth shut instead of rushing before the public saying that he had every confidence in Commissioner Curtis and supported him in any move he might make.” He charged that the leaders of the chamber of commerce were the real source of the mayor’s statements, and saw this as an attack against the union.
At the day’s end and at the end of their rope, Storrow and his committee followed Peters’s suggestion and released the text of their report to the press in time for Monday editorial comment, hoping in desperation to influence Curtis by the pressure of public opinion. Such opinion, reflected in the morning papers, showed itself all for compromise. Even the Herald, previously enthusiastic over Curtis’s “firm, swift action” in placing the union leaders on trial, reluctantly agreed to the Storrow plan. The Post, the unofficial spokesman for the Roman Catholic hierarchy, called it “a wise solution” by which the police would organize within the “letter and spirit” of Curtis’s regulations. Its editor was “quite sure that this way out will be endorsed by the citizens of Boston as reasonable and wise.” Hearst’s American, “the paper for people who think,” most read by the working class, including the police, warmly approved. The independent Globe, its readers a cut above those of the Hearst paper, recognized “the fairness of the proposition of the Citizens’ Committee…. For either the commissioner or the police to refuse this solution of the difficulty would be a grave mistake.” Only the Evening Transcript remained adamantly opposed to any such “surrender” and called the plan one of the most deplorable documents in Boston’s annals.
Monday arrived as a sweltering aftermath of summer. Before the day was over the temperature would rise to the mid-90s. Early in the morning Curtis from his Pemberton Square office sent his answer to the mayor:
The Police Commissioner begs to acknowledge receipt of your communication under date of September 6. The commissioner has given to it that careful consideration which the occasion demands. It will be obvious to your Honor that the commissioner cannot consider this communication as having relation to the present duty of the commissioner to act upon complaints now pending before him.
The commissioner can discover nothing in the communication transmitted by your Honor and relating to action by him which appears to him to be either consistent with his prescribed legal duties or calculated to aid him in their performance. The commissioner approves necessary betterment in the economic condition of the police force of the City of Boston and has theretofore expressed such approval, but these are not the conditions which require his present action.
The commissioner has therefore felt compelled to proceed to make his findings upon the complaints pending before him pursuant to the adjournment of such action heretofore declared.*
Beneath the stilted legalistic phraseology carefully framed by Parker, the answer was a blunt “no compromise.” He would accept no solution that might impinge on his authority or “that might be considered as a pardon of the men on trial.” It was not generally expected before the day’s end that Curtis would discharge the nineteen patrolmen. At two-thirty in the afternoon the police held another union meeting at Fay Hall. Brashly confident, unintimidated by Curtis’s morning statement, they were eager to accept the commissioner’s challenge. When the nineteen banned patrolmen arrived they were again cheered and applauded. President McInnes himself was given a prolonged ovation. Within the sweltering hall the men removed their blue coats and sat in their
shirtsleeves, mopping their foreheads. They were prepared to take a strike vote at once, but McInnes held them back, wanting no such action until after Curtis had imposed sentence. So intense was the heat that at four-fifteen the meeting was recessed for an hour.
Following the five-forty-five roll call at the various station houses the division heads read out Curtis’s verdict. Contrary to expectations he had not discharged the nineteen men outright but merely suspended them, leaving at least the possibility of reinstating them later, whereas if he had discharged them outright he could not legally have taken them back. Earlier the nineteen had left for the afternoon roll call. On learning of their suspension they cleaned out their lockers, turned in their badges, revolvers, clubs, and signalbox keys. Their pay had already been stopped, and their names removed from the roster.
In front of the downtown stations sympathetic crowds had gathered ready to applaud the suspended patrolmen on their way out. When the nineteen reappeared at Fay Hall they were welcomed with cheers and clapping, their swaggering arrival bolstering the determination of the others. President McInnes issued an interim statement to the press thanking Storrow for his courteous and understanding attitude, giving a summary of his conferences with the citizens’ committee, repeating the now familiar list of police grievances, and concluding that without the shelter of the AFL the police position would be hopeless and that the union “has once and for all come to stay.” To the sweating, angry policemen the difference between suspension and discharge seemed negligible. The challenge had been issued from Pemberton Square, and they were ready to meet it. At nine-forty-five strike balloting began. The men had received two ballot sheets, one for a no-strike, the other for a strike vote. It was soon clear from the enormous quantity of discarded no-strike ballots littering the floor that the men were prepared to defy the commissioner. By midnight over a thousand had cast their votes, with an overwhelming majority favoring a strike. So strong was strike sentiment that McInnes and the other union officers had difficulty in keeping the men from declaring a walkout to take place at the roll call three quarters of an hour after midnight. It seemed that the 1544 patrolmen on the force, the overwhelming majority—including a number of nonunion members—would take part.*
A City in Terror Page 13
