Coolidge had gone from the Touraine to his suite in the Adams House. There he sat for several hours with secretary Long, Adjutant General Stevens, and Colonel Dalton. A wire had been installed so that the governor could be reached privately at any time. When he learned that Peters without authorization was attempting to hold the cavalry and the motor corps in readiness, he stood up in anger, ordered Long to have his car brought round, and set out with Stevens for the armory.
With the perplexed and silent adjutant general just behind him, Coolidge strode through the armory arch. Fifty or so troopers standing about on the lower floor with their equipment in readiness stared in surprise as the irate governor quacked at their executive officer, Major Dana Gallup, “Who told you people to stay here? Go on home.” With that he stalked petulantly upstairs to the orderly room, followed by Gallup and Curtis.
Then occurred one of the dramatic minor episodes of the strike. Peters, increasingly panic-stricken at the surge of events, had again set out in pursuit of Coolidge. Ten minutes after the latter arrived, the rumpled and excited mayor burst through the armory door demanding to see the governor at the very moment that Coolidge was coming downstairs. The two men met each other face to face on the stairway, Peters stammering high-pitched accusations until Coolidge cut him short with a waspish, “You have no business here!” At that, Peters made a rush for him, swinging his arms wildly and somehow landing his fist squarely in the governor’s left eye. Coolidge did not attempt to strike back nor did he make any move to retreat, but merely leaned against the balustrade with his hand to his face. Troopers seized the gesticulating mayor.*
Those, at least, who saw the governor close to in the next few days were aware of a certain discoloration around his eye. It did not seem to discommode him greatly. From the armory he drove back directly to the Adams House. Leaving word with Long that he was not to be disturbed, he slept soundly through a night of rioting.
* Several members of his committee felt that Storrow was conceding too much to the police. One member, Colonel Robert Goodwin, resigned in protest, writing, “I am firmly convinced that the stand taken by Commissioner Curtis is right and that he should have the frank and open support of every citizen who endorses his course.”
* Robert Lincoln O’Brien, the sharp-nosed editor of the Herald, considered that Coolidge in the police crisis was much influenced by Crane. O’Brien went so far as to call Crane the “Hamlet of the Police Strike drama.”
* In his Commissioner’s Report for 1919, Curtis explained his refusal in detail. He held that the Storrow proposal “was not prepared by the men, and the attitude of the men in regard to it was in no way indicated.” If the proposal showed a change of heart on the part of the nineteen suspended patrolmen, that change “was of importance only in the event of their being found guilty, in mitigation of the sentence to be imposed.” The proposal was “fundamentally incompatible with the responsibility to the public which the law calls upon the commissioner for the government of a police force and with a sense of responsibility to the commissioner which the members of the force must feel if proper discipline and efficiency are to be maintained.” Furthermore, the grievance board proposed by the plan would result in “a reversion to the state of divided responsibility, vacillating policy, and dilatory action” that the legislature had sought to eliminate when it did away with the board of commissioners.
* 1117 policemen struck. 427 did not, including those ill or on vacations.
* Expelled by the executive committee of the Socialist party, the Left-Wing rebels defiantly announced that “humanity can be saved from its last excesses only by the Communist Revolution.” The native-born English-speaking groups formed the Communist Labor party with a membership of about ten thousand; the semi-autonomous foreign-anguage groups such as the Boston Letts, numbering some sixty thousand, withdrew into the Communist party, nine tenths of whose members were aliens. Later, under orders from Moscow, the two groups would combine.
* I am grateful to the late Lawrence Wogan for this unrecorded incident that he witnessed from a few feet away as a young trooper.
THE RIOTS
If shortly after the strike began Governor Coolidge had bothered to look out across Boston Common from the oval windows of his office before leaving for dinner at the Touraine, he would have seen mushroom rings of crapshooters springing up on the slope of the Frog Pond under the shadow of the State House. Boston’s policeman sedately patrolling his beat was gone, and in that astonishing moment of relinquished authority, the first thing that came to mind for the city’s mindless twilight figures—the streetcorner hangers-on, the floaters, the pool-room johnnies—was to start an open-air dice game. As the dusk fell, several score games were in progress on Boston Common, with stakes ranging from a quarter to fifty dollars. After the traffic police had left their posts on Tremont and Park Streets, the biggest game broke out on Brimstone Corner—so-called for the hell-fire preaching emanating from the Park Street Congregational Church opposite. There, by the Neptune fountain, as new players kept joining in, stakes rose to several hundred dollars. A spontaneous announcer barked out a roll-by-roll account of the game to the growing crowd, and the winners were cheered and in some cases lifted up on their friends’ shoulders. One winner walking triumphantly up the mall with three hundred dollars in his pocket had not gone fifty yards before he was set on by three sharp-eyed, quick-fisted bystanders who knocked him down and grabbed his winnings.
For all the boisterous crapshooting there was at first little real violence. A few more players were robbed. The occasional pedestrian belatedly wearing a straw hat had it knocked into the gutter. Small boys shinnied up poles to the red fire boxes and rang in false alarms. Yet commuters hurrying into the Park or Boylston Street subway entrances were unmolested. The evening migration to the suburbs continued as usual. After the rush hour, traffic moved freely in spite of the absence of directing patrolmen, although some drivers began to show a certain sportive urge to violate minor regulations on signaling and turning. A few young rowdies made a game of snatching off spare tires from the rear of parked cars and using them as hoops. Throngs wandered aimlessly in the dampness of those first hours through the twisted streets of the central city, ambling past Faneuil Hall and the Old State House, drawn without any real positive intent toward Scollay Square. That half-world honky-tonk district of burlesque theaters, bars,* clip joints, and all-night cafés, interlaced with tattoo parlors and photo studios and flophouses, had long been a magnet for the sailors of all nations as well as for local drifters and derelicts and petty gangsters. If trouble was to start, Scollay Square with its numerous side alleys would be the apt place for it.
At eight o’clock on Howard Street just off the square, four nonstriking policemen found themselves forced up against a wall by a crew of toughs, who melted away, however, when the police drew their clubs. By ten o’clock the crowds were still growing, in Scollay Square, Adams Square, Haymarket Square, the crossroads of city traffic. Mist-shrouded figures shuffled along, men and a few women, curious, unhurried, talking in low tones. Then a more cohesive group headed down from Scollay Square toward Washington Street, passing Young’s Hotel, edging through City Hall Avenue past Ben Franklin’s pigeon-splattered statue and the grey incongruous Second-Empire City Hall to the lower end of School Street. A gigantic whisper seemed to emanate from the amorphous crowd. One spectator thought it was like the tense few minutes before a funeral. Restlessly the vague throngs trudged through the rain and darkness, waiting only for that unifying act of violence that would turn them into a mob.
Then it happened: a paving brick thrown through a cigar store front; the crash and tinkle of glass; quick eager hands reaching through jagged window frames. Those nearest the displays began to snatch at pipes and cigars and cigarettes, while others more determined battered down the locked door. Within minutes the store was stripped clean. A looter cried out as he sliced his hand open on a glass sliver. A woman screamed. Their cries were like a signal. The mob was of
f.
It seemed as if the brick had shattered the surface of a pond, sending the ripples circling outward. All along Court Street and beyond, the store windows disintegrated: Sal Myer’s Gents’ Furnishings, the Princeton Clothing Company, Lewis Shoes, Peter Rabbit Hats. Men exchanged straw for winter hats, discarded old coats for new ones, strutted along the sidewalk with armfuls of shirts, neckties, socks, handkerchiefs, shoes. Some even sat down on the curb to try on their acquired footwear, swapping or throwing away those that did not fit. Soon the streets were littered with discarded shoes, hats, and clothing. Here and there fist fights broke out over the booty. But by and large the mob remained good-natured, with three or four onlookers to every active looter. It would not remain that way. The mass soon began to shape itself into more purposeful groups, with self-appointed leaders taking over as if they had sprung out of the ground. These smaller mobs expanded, contracted—retreating when faced with too much resistance—re-formed, and moved on to loot and plunder. The wet dark huddle of streets re-echoed to the sound of running feet, jeering laughter, hysterical cries, and occasional pistol shots. Bands of hard-paced bruisers stomped along the sidewalks between Scollay Square, Washington Street, and Faneuil Hall, breaking the straw hats of those men rash enough still to be wearing them, elbowing the more harmless pedestrians into the gutter, stopping here and there to despoil or ransack a fruit stand or smash any remaining windows. Each band seemed to have its uniformed quota of soldiers and sailors.
A little after ten a phalanx of plug-uglies suddenly charged out of Scollay Square down Hanover Street, gathering adherents as they swept along, bursting through the doors of Waldron’s Casino, where a burlesque act was going on, ripping posters and hangings from the walls, and after jeering and hooting at the frightened actors, swaggering away. Coleman & Keating’s liquor store on the next corner limbered up their spirits. After sacking that establishment they continued along the street, hurling bottles through windows as they went. About to wreck the premises of wholesale provision dealer Arthur E. Dorr, they were driven off by the solitary watchman, James Burns, a former policeman, who leveled his revolver and sent them scurrying across the street. By the time they reached Faneuil Hall two hundred had swelled to almost a thousand, some with weapons, almost all carrying stones. There they were confronted by three sergeants and three plain-clothes men. Pushing forward, they began to chant “Kill the cops! Kill the scabs!” As the mob edged closer, the six police drew their revolvers and fired over the heads of the vanguard, then charged in with clubs swinging. The swirling mass gave way, started to break up. Then a paving brick hurtled through the window of the Howard Jewelry Company. The noise of the shattering glass seemed to inflame the rioters. There were shouts of “To hell with the police.” Stones and bottles flew through the air, plate-glass windows collapsed like ninepins. Again the sergeants and the plain-clothes men brandished their sticks and started swinging, but this time the mob refused to yield. Finally the police leveled their revolvers at the turbulent figures, and a hoarse-voiced sergeant warned that he would shoot to kill. At the sight of the glinting revolver barrels pointing directly at them, the rioters broke, the foremost almost sprawling on the ground in their panicky efforts to get away.
Somewhere in the dank higgledy-piggledy of North End streets, the remnants of the mob regrouped and started out again for the core city, avoiding Faneuil Hall this time to march directly on Washington Street. Two sailors and several older men took the lead as they advanced toward the shopping center. Joyce Brothers’ clothing store, the Walk-Over Shoe Company, Jackson the Furrier and Hatter, Posner’s Gents’ Furnishings, all were wrecked and pillaged in rapid succession. Five patrolmen and a sergeant from the Court Square station stood by helplessly. Heaving shoulders burst down doors for the avariciously eager to swarm into the interiors. Shoe and clothing stores, cigar stores and small jewelry concerns were the chief targets, but more calculating individuals headed for the hardware and sporting-goods stores with their stocks of weapons and ammunition. Crowds of hangers-on followed in the wake of the mob to enjoy the pillaging. The looters—many of them bloodied from glass cuts—steered clear of the large brightly lighted department stores like Filene’s and White’s and Chandler’s, where guards with rifles waited at the ready behind drawn curtains. When the mob reached Jordan Marsh’s on Summer Street, there was a pause followed by a burst of gunfire from the guards in the interior, at which the rioters retreated in a panic. As a background accompaniment to the shouts, the crash of glass, and the sporadic shots came the steady insistent clang of fire apparatus responding to false alarms. During the height of the looting two taxis cruised down Washington Street, stopping at advantageous points to load up with merchandise and jewelry. Men waving pistols stood on the running boards. With the appearance of several sergeants from LaGrange Street, the taxis drove off. Directly in front of the pillaged Washington Street entrance to Macullar, Parker’s, Boston’s foremost clothier and tailor, two sailors beat up a pedestrian and took his watch and money in view of some hundred spectators who stood round urging the sailors to “go to it!” “Well, I’m damned!” a Hearst cub reporter muttered to himself. “From now on I’m a conservative!” Judge Frank Deland, passing by, thought the French Revolution had come to his city.
In other parts of Boston, mob action and violence were more sporadic. A menacing group on Court Street melted away when faced on one side by a dozen Metropolitan Park police with drawn clubs and on the other side by Superintendent Crowley with a squad of plain-clothes men. Crowley kept speeding from one part of the city to the other, wherever trouble seemed to be brewing, brandishing a revolver and occasionally making an arrest in person. The skeletal police force managed to make 129 token arrests in all. Five rioters were shot. One of them, twenty-one-year-old John W. Scalizy of Brookline, was shot in the head while running with an armful of clothing from a Huntington Avenue haberdasher’s. He was taken to the City Hospital and his name placed on the danger list. Police opened fire directly on the plunderers in the Studio Jewelry Company at Temple Place. No one was injured, but one man was arrested. Across the street on the Common, a mob defied a police sergeant’s order to disperse, in spite of warning shots. The mob then moved down Tremont Street breaking windows and looting, followed by police in a patrol wagon. Policemen again opened fire but the looting continued—Chamberlain’s Hat Store, the United Cigar Store, scattered clothing and jewelry shops. Looters entering the rear of Kabatznick’s Art Shop on Boylston Street, in a rage at not finding money or valuables, tore oil paintings from their frames, threw pictures and prints on the floor, and then trampled on them. Several dozen roisterers burst into Plakias’s Restaurant near Dover Street, grabbing up the pies and sandwiches and rolls on display and bombarding the countermen with them. When the manager drew a revolver, they rushed out, jeering and hurling coffee mugs through the glass counters. At Mechanic’s Building, where a boxing match was going on, an uptown crowd broke through the side and back doors and several hundred managed to crash the gate.
In the LaGrange Street station Jim Long, after gathering his possessions together, went across the street to a cafeteria for a cup of coffee. He was still there when the rioting started and the window-smashing mob swept past. Cautiously he followed, walking over his old beat—Tremont Street to Avery Street, then through Avery to Washington Street, and from Washington to Stuart. In spite of the rain, clusters of men were rolling dice on every corner. There didn’t seem to be a single window intact. Discarded shoes were scattered everywhere. As he walked he could hear the glass crunch under his feet.
All evening the Haymarket Square Relief Station received a steady stream of the cut and battered. One of the Washington Street ringleaders, a sailor from the U.S.S. Hingham, was treated for a two-inch scalp wound. Several minutes after he was released, three sergeants arrived looking for him. In or with the mob there was relative safety for the individual. But the unwary who were walking alone often found themselves waylaid and robbed. Women venturing out
by themselves did so at their peril. One woman going along Atlantic Avenue near the front of State Street was seized by a group of young men, knocked to the ground, and gang-shagged. Farther down in the North End other women were forced into doorways and violated within sight of hundreds. In Chair Alley off Fulton Street a young woman was beaten and raped but managed afterward to stagger into a bar bruised and bleeding and with several teeth missing. Ironically, she happened to be a prostitute.
Throughout the city tough, restive adolescents itching but not quite daring to challenge authority at last had their chance. In Roxbury a gang stole a buggy, ran it onto the sidewalk in front of the Roxbury Crossing station, and set it afire. In Dorchester at Dorchester Avenue and Eliot Street, another gang piled boxes, barrels, and old mattresses on the car tracks, then smashed all the windows of the streetcars as they came to a halt. The most concentrated violence occurred in South Boston, where roisterers stormed and pillaged and destroyed, not so much for loot as just for the delight in violence.
Disorder was not scattered but general. On Broadway, South Boston’s main artery, all the grocery stores were ransacked and the contents flung in the street, making the road look more like a dump than a spacious boulevard, its surface inches deep in sugar, flour, eggs, squashed oranges and bananas, cans of fruit and vegetables, and even smoked hams. From the waterfront to Andrew Square there was scarcely a whole window. The few remaining police stood by powerless, even when pillagers and window-smashers came within a few feet of them. As soon as a streetcar appeared, urchins yanked the trolley cord and as the car lurched to a stop broke every window and then stoned the passengers struggling to get out. Shots echoed. A motorman was shot through the head. Young boys and girls hauled crates of eggs from the Mohican Market and tossed them at random. At the lower end of West Broadway a gang headed up the wide street, gathering strength as it went and smashing and looting every shop in passing. Superintendent Crowley, pausing in one of his dashes about the city, stood on the corner of Broadway and C Street. Opposite him, beyond the pavement ankle deep in debris, he could see a crap game going on and could hear the howls of the mob as eggs and stones flew through the air and glass crashed on all sides. “If anyone had told me,” he remarked to a police inspector standing next to him, “I never would have believed it.”
A City in Terror Page 16
