It was a tense emotional moment, for the men walked out of their station houses torn between loyalty to the department and solidarity with their fellows. Many would admit privately that they disapproved of the strike. There were few signs of disapproval from the scattered crowds outside. The sound of the Hanover Street gong summoning the patrolmen brought a long cheer from those waiting in the street. Before the roll call began Patrolman George Ferreira, one of the original nineteen suspended by Curtis, stepped forward in civilian clothes to announce to Captain Matthew Dailey: “Sir, the Boston police are on strike.”
“Here, wait a minute, Ferreira,” Captain Dailey told him. “You’re already suspended. Get out!”
Ferreira obeyed automatically. At Fields Corner, as the men were preparing to leave Station 11, Captain Charles Reardon spoke to them like a disappointed uncle, telling them that the action they were taking would blacken the record of the Boston Police Department. Now that they were leaving he hoped at least they would not forget that they were still police officers and that people looked up to them, and he urged them not to do anything that would hurt the dignity of the department. When he had finished, the men cheered him, both those who were quitting and those who remained behind. His words must have sunk in, for at Fields Corner only sixty of the ninety-two patrolmen struck. Patrolman John Peters, who had brought the strike notification to the station house, happened to be one of the union officers Curtis had suspended. He too spoke to the men, asking them to behave like policemen and cautioning them not to let ill feeling develop between those who struck and those who stayed. Before the strikers left the station they crowded around Captain Reardon’s desk to shake his hand. Some were so moved that they could not look him in the face. Many walked away with the tears running down their cheeks, and several of the older men muttered that what they were doing was contrary to their own feelings. Frederick Claus was particularly reluctant to go out, for he was slated to be made a sergeant in December. With seven children at home, the youngest two weeks old, he hesitated, yet he did not feel he could stay on when his fellows were on strike, and he consoled himself with the thought that they would all be back at work in a few days.
Meanwhile a group of teen-age boys and their younger brothers had gathered in front of the building. A Greek fruit pedlar happened to pass by with a pushcart of oranges, and in a few seconds his cart was stripped bare. Whenever a streetcar rounded the corner, several urchins dashed off to pull the trolley from the wire. Then the whole crew began pelting the station front with oranges, mud, stones, and hunks of wood. One small boy tied a string from the station doorknob to the iron rail beside the steps. When the first policemen came out, the string broke, but the gesture seemed to please the crowd, which at once began to hoot and jeer and only grudgingly made way for the patrolmen as they inched their way down the steps with their bundles of possessions. “Do your worst,” one of the badgeless bluecoats muttered as he edged away. “No one will stop you now.”
During the last hour before the walkout most of the patrolmen were occupied in turning in the public property charged to them—hat number-plates, badges, keys, revolvers, billies, and manuals—while the captains, lieutenants, and sergeants checked off each item. The strikers left carrying rubber boots, raincoats and capes, helmets and winter uniforms stuffed into boxes and bags. A few walked to waiting autos, most to the nearest el station or streetcar line, where the conductors in a gesture of solidarity allowed them to ride free.
Long before the evening roll call, throngs of the curious, the idle, the mischievous, and the sympathetic had begun to cluster before the various stations in spite of the rain. Some three hundred spectators stood in front of Charlestown’s City Square station, where only one man in seventy-seven answered as Captain Michael Goff called the roll. When the patrolmen straggled out of the building, those outside applauded them. There was a very different mood at Roxbury Crossing, where a truculent crowd, egged on by Lettish agitators, pushed up to the very doors of Station 10. As one of the first striking patrolmen came down the steps carrying his belongings, an urchin picked up a handful of mud from the gutter and hurled it in his face. The man wiped off the mud without a word and walked away sadly. Now the bolder rowdies began to scoop up mud, pelting everyone who left the building, whether a striker or not. When Sergeant Patrick Byrne attempted to drive off the mud-slingers, he found himself plastered from head to foot. Some of the more daring boys attempted to tear down the station house awnings, and the door and windows were soon caked with filth. Though the remaining sergeants and patrolmen were hard put to it, they finally succeeded in breaking up the crowd. At Dudley Street an equally belligerent crowd blocked access to Station 9. Streetcars headed for the terminal were stopped, and one conductor was beaten up when he started after a boy who had dislodged the trolley. Several sergeants attempting to scatter the swirling mass were bombarded with rocks, mud, and bottles. Inside, as Captain Perley Skillings called the roll, silence greeted every name but one. Then in a burst of emotion one striker called out: “You’re the best captain that the Boston Police Department ever had.” The others shouted out their hoarse approval.
As might have been predicted, the most unruly scenes took place in front of the two stations in South Boston. Familiar throughout Massachusetts for its bawdy unprintable song “Southie Is My Home Town,” that Celtic proletarian matrix had been recognized for two generations as the most consistently tough district of the city. Here was located the Gustin Gang—its name abbreviated from St. Augustine’s, the towering brick Gothic-revival Church on Dorchester Street—the most feared gang in all Boston. Here was the spawning ground of politicians and prize-fighters, policemen and plug-uglies.
Over a thousand Southies had assembled in the rain near Station 12 to wait for the hour of decision. Some were relatives of policemen, primed for any patrolmen who dared not to strike. Others had felt the hard hand of the police and were waiting now to settle old scores. Mud, stones, bottles, eggs, and ripe tomatoes filled the air as the first strikers walked out the door onto East Fourth Street. One patrolman had his helmet knocked off. The station house was soon splattered with mud and garbage, and many of the windows were smashed. The Gusties began shouting for Patrolman Florence O’Reagan, an amateur boxer who had built up a reputation for knocking out malefactors with his bare fists. Fortunately for him, he was still away on vacation. A squad of Metropolitan Park police dispatched to aid the loyal patrolmen could not control the surging crowd. Four sergeants and the ten patrolmen who had remained on duty were forced to retreat into the station under a barrage of stones after a vain attempt at clearing the steps. An even larger and equally unruly crowd gathered in front of Station 6 on D Street. Some of the departing patrolmen were in civilian clothes, some in their badgeless uniforms. A few even wore their numberless helmets. As one of the policemen headed down the steps, his arms encumbered by his possessions, a young man in a tweed cap pushed forward to face him. “I waited eleven years to get you,” he shouted. “You’re not a cop now.” And he punched him in the jaw. The policeman staggered, dropping his bundles. No one moved to help him. The spectators jeered.
Other malcontents elsewhere found the strike a heaven-sent chance to get even with authority. One striker leaving Station 2 carrying a pair of rubber boots and an extra uniform was confronted by a heavy-built truck driver who shoved his way through the crowd, bawling, “Give me a traffic ticket the other day, would you?” then struck the bluecoat in the face. The policeman winced but kept on going.
Yet for the most part those who had clustered before the stations showed themselves well disposed to the striking police. The crowd in front of Station 14, Brighton, waited with noisy approval. Captain Forest Hall had ordered his men there to answer Yes or No as to whether they were going on duty. There were only three Yeses. After the roll call Patrolman Edwin Lavequist stepped from the ranks to announce that the strike was on. Then he conveyed his good wishes to the officers and proposed three cheers for Captain Hall. After t
he strikers had left, Hall turned to the three remaining patrolmen. “Well,” he said shaking his head, “this is something I never would have believed could happen in the police department.”
At Station 2, near City Hall Avenue and close to police headquarters, an odd consortium of sympathizers and mischief-makers wedged into that alley between School Street and Court Square. A number of toughs idled in front of the steps, waiting for the Harvard volunteers who were rumored to be on their way. As soon as the first strikers emerged, truckers sounded their horns and teamsters shouted approval; young swaggerers began shooting craps beneath the station windows, while others crowded up the steps jeering and shouting, and still others climbed lampposts or clambered onto the window sills of nearby buildings. Captain Jeremiah Sullivan twice appeared in the doorway to beg the crowd to be orderly. Union President McInnes, out of uniform, circulated through the throng, trying to restrain the mischief-makers while speaking an encouraging word to each emergent patrolman. Standing near McInnes, Mae Matthew, secretary of the telephone union, declared loudly, that “the girls will back up the police and will go out, if necessary, to help them win.” Vahey, passing confidently by, was warmly applauded. Eighty-six of the 128 police in Station 2 struck. At Joy Street station on the far side of Beacon Hill the percentage was even higher, only sixteen being left behind out of a hundred. As the men headed down the hill, the unionized firemen in the firehouse on the other side of Cambridge Street let loose with sirens and whistles. The traffic officers, on quitting their downtown posts, marched in platoon formation to the LaGrange Street station, calling out to each patrolman they passed to join them. They were trailed by bumptious hangers-on who cheered each additional recruit. Ninety-five of the 120 LaGrange Street men quit. Most of them had left the station when Patrolman James Long arrived several hours after the roll call, having only just received orders to return to duty on getting back from his vacation late that afternoon. Only a dozen patrolmen remained, all older men with service stripes running halfway up their arms. One of them, Joseph Ray, a giant of a man whose beat was in the South station, sidled up to Long. “I don’t know what to do,” he said in great distress. “You just stay exactly where you are,” Long told him. “You’re too close to your pension. Let us younger men go.”
Long stepped to the desk and saluted. Captain James Canney looked at him sharply and asked him what he was going to do. “I’ll do what I think you would do if you were my age,” Long told him. “What’s that?” Canney asked. For answer Long handed over his keys, badge, and revolver. “I don’t know but what you’re right,” the captain said slowly. Only the City Hall police detail stood solidly against the strike. The twelve patrolmen there, all with years of service, had charge of guarding the mayor and the collector’s and the treasurer’s office, escorting paymasters, and patrolling City Hall outside office hours. They looked on themselves and were looked on by others as an elite contingent. Nor had they forgotten the proximity of their pensions.
At the suburban stations there were neither crowds nor confusion. In Mattapan only a few children waited outside Station 19. Many of the men there had tears in their eyes as they shook hands and said goodbye to Captain James Watkins, among them three “five-stripers.” (Policemen received a stripe for each five years of service.) One patrolman in going out handed his helmet to a small boy. The steps of Hyde Park’s Station 18 and the West Roxbury station were deserted at roll call, although only a handful of nonstrikers remained in both stations. At Station 13 in primly suburban Jamaica Plain small boys shouted to one another, “Come on out and steal apples—no more cops!” as the policemen walked out. A little girl paraded up and down in front of the station house wearing a policeman’s helmet. In the equally quiescent Back Bay the patrolmen whiled away the minutes before five-forty-five singing “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here,” and “Till We Meet Again.” When the roll call bell rang, they burst out into the chorus of “Farewell, Farewell, My Own True Love.” Meanwhile strikers made efforts to picket each station. McInnes had warned them not to interfere with any loyal patrolmen or volunteers.
Most of the striking policemen after returning home with their belongings and changing into ordinary street clothes, made their way to strike headquarters at Fay Hall. Councilor Moriarty and Frank McCarthy were already there. McInnes appeared later after a tour of the nineteen stations. Earlier McCarthy had telephoned O’Donnell at Greenfield and extracted a promise from the Central Labor Union president to call a special meeting on Wednesday or Thursday to give the member unions time to back the police. O’Donnell reassured McCarthy that the unions were determined to make the policemen’s fight their own. Peter McHugh of the Lagrange Street station was the first striker to arrive at the Hall, showing up at six-fourteen. By eight o’clock the men were pouring in by streetcar and elevated train and private auto.
Governor Coolidge had placed 100 of the 183 state-controlled Metropolitan Park police in the Boston area at Curtis’s disposal for the duration of the emergency. Fifty-eight of these now refused to do Boston police street duty and were at once suspended. Defiantly they marched in a body to Fay Hall in their grey uniforms but minus their hat shields and badges. A number of policemen from other Massachusetts towns and cities were already there to show their solidarity. The striking policemen, their spirits undampened by the rain, had no worries or premonitions about what the night might bring.
Shortly after finishing his letter to the mayor, Coolidge left the State House by the rear entrance, where his car and driver were waiting for him in the arched and covered roadway. He then drove to the Hotel Touraine in the Back Bay for a leisurely if uncommunicative dinner with Attorney General Henry Wyman, Colonel Dalton, and Frank Stearns. Although an excited messenger arrived from City Hall to inform the governor as he was eating that hundreds of policemen were “walking off,” the governor never so much as mentioned the strike during the meal. At that point Commissioner Curtis feared there would be conflict if he sent even token volunteers to the station houses while the regulars were still there. In any case he felt the volunteers were too hard to reach, too scattered to be mustered sooner than the following morning. This was why, he explained later, he did not have them ready for duty when the police walked out.
For the rest of the afternoon and early evening Peters continued bustling about in a frenzy of ineffectuality. As he now knew, the General Acts of Massachusetts, Chapter 327, Part 1, Section 26, gave him the right to call out the local state guard “in case of a tumult, riot or mob,” or when such “tumult, riot or mob is threatened.” But how could one know whether a tumult, riot, or mob is threatened until after the event? So sternly convincing had been Curtis’s assurance of having everything under control that the mayor could not bring himself to affront his Democractic supporters, his labor half-friends, and the loudmouths in the city council by rashly calling out the guard. Curtis had informed him that under Section 20, Chapter 26, of the Revised Laws of Massachusetts, he could in an emergency borrow policemen from other towns. Toward sundown he telephoned the police chiefs of adjacent Newton, Brookline, and Milton. All very politely—and quite legally—turned him down.
After a messenger had brought him a copy of the governor’s letter, Peters penned a plaintive reply: “I had hoped that you would consider that the recommendations of the Citizens’ Committee pointed a way toward a practical solution of the problem.”
“I am sorry that you have not viewed them in that light and that no countersuggestion has been presented.”
When reporters, apprised of Chapter 327, Section 26, asked him what he would do in case of a riot, he had replied that he would make his plans when the emergency occurred. “Police Commissioner Curtis,” he told them, “assured me that he was in a position to give the people adequate protection. Governor Coolidge said he was fully prepared to render support to the Police Commissioner in any measures which might be instituted by the Police Commissioner. I am relying on them.” Curtis and Coolidge, as he could now see, were hand in gl
ove. As the hours wore on, the mayor grew more and more convinced that they were using the whole police crisis to destroy him politically. Even as the mobs gathered, Peters could think of nothing more to do than to prepare another press release. As if he were talking to give himself courage, he repeated that he had been trying to improve the hours and working conditions of the police, that he had given them a $200 raise in the spring. “To impute in any manner that I have not given the men what they wish is a direct misrepresentation of the facts,” he declared plaintively, adding in an even more plaintive conclusion, “I am by law deprived of any control of the working hours of the patrolmen and I repeat that the only request for an increase in salary submitted by the men has been granted.” Then for the rest of the evening he went out of sight as completely as had the governor over the weekend.
That same evening the motor corps and the First (and only) Cavalry Troop of the state guard were holding their regular weekly drill in the fortress-like brick building that was the Commonwealth Armory. Peters, informed earlier of the drill, still could not make up his mind about calling out the guard. Aimlessly he had his chauffeur drive him through the night and aimlessly he meditated. Why should he take the blame for the unreasonableness of the governor and the commissioner? The lurking question remained unanswered. Shortly before the end of the drill period the mayor from some remote way point finally telephoned the armory to request that the guardsmen be held in readiness after the drill.
A City in Terror Page 15
