Within range of Boston, William Jennings Bryan, under the auspices of the Anti-Saloon League, continued his tour of the state, making his passionate defense of Prohibition, “Work Accomplished and the Task Before Us.” In Greenfield the delegates at the AFL convention turned from the affairs of the Boston police union to the fiery Eamon de Valera, just over from Ireland, whose speech impelled them to vote for recognition of the Irish Republic. Beyond the boundaries of Massachusetts, Belgium’s Cardinal Mercier arriving in New York warned Americans that the Germans were plotting a war of revenge. Even as the cardinal spoke, General Pershing, his four stars a-glitter, led a triumphant parade of the returning First Division down Fifth Avenue. But beyond all the other news, the Boston Police Strike dominated the country’s headlines from the New York Times to the Times of Los Angeles.
While the volunteers, the “subs” as they were now labeled in the press, were patrolling the streets with varying degrees of confidence and efficiency, the striking policemen were holding another meeting at Fay Hall. Their mood was jubilant. The riots of the night before, they were convinced, had taught the public what it meant to be without police protection, a lesson that would hasten a settlement. While waiting for the meeting to be called to order, they bellowed out “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here” in cheerful if monotonous refrain. McInnes exuded confidence as he spoke to them. He said that no settlement proposals had yet been made and added defiantly that any such must come “through the regularly established channels of organized labor.” Almost as an aside he expressed regret for the disorders of the previous night. He added that Vahey was holding a conference with the business agent of the Boston Street Carmen’s Union and hoped for a sympathy strike. Both the firemen’s union and the Metropolitan Park police had pledged their support.
At the close pickets were assigned for duty, twenty to each station, to work in four-hour shifts of five men. Following the meeting the striking policemen gathered together on the playground behind the fire department headquarters to pose for the Pathé newsreel cameras.
Those unlucky enough to have been taken into custody during Tuesday’s melee—some fifty in all—were being brought before the municipal court in Pemberton Square and the South Boston district court, to be charged with breaking and entering, larceny, and so forth. At Pemberton Square there was a flurried attempt by onlookers to rescue the prisoners that was quickly broken up by Sheriff Keliher. In South Boston, Judge Edward Logan, who had commanded the Yankee Division’s 101st Infantry until a few weeks before the Armistice, when he was relieved because of “inertia,” showed no inertia in sentencing the rioters brought before him. Six months in the house of correction, Judge Logan felt, would serve as an example to show that South Boston authority was not to be trifled with. In the municipal court, Charles Hayes, convicted of assaulting Sergeant James Laffey of Station 2, was given a year.
Coolidge in the Adams House woke at his usual hour. Not until then did he learn of the disorders of the night before. Outwardly unperturbed, he took his customary breakfast of prunes and oatmeal and then his walk along Washington Street and up West Street, across Tremont Street and the Common to the State House. The governor’s walk had by this time become a rite of passage. “It was as good as a show to watch him cross Tremont Street,” a Globe reporter recalled. “The traffic was thick, of course, and sometimes Coolidge came to the street before the traffic cop was out in the morning. He always stopped, glanced, bird-like, up and down the street, measured the distance to the nearest car, and if he thought he could make it, he started across. If that car brushed his coattails he would not run. He had calculated the distance and the time. He had faith in his calculation. And evidently he considered it the driver’s fault if he went faster than the Coolidge calculation provided. Having escaped, he did not exult.”
On that hung-over Wednesday morning, accompanied by his bodyguard, state policeman Edward Horrigan, Coolidge passed the debris, the boarded windows and barbed wire, and a hardy band of crapshooters still rolling dice on Brimstone Corner. The wise old owl observed but said nothing, nor did he say any more when he was finally seated behind his vast glass-topped mahogany desk with the picture of his mother on it. Under the shadowed portraits of John Hancock and Samuel Adams, he conferred briefly with Secretary Long before calling in reporters. Peters, in his latest press release, had accused the governor of trying to shift the blame for the rioting from the commissioner to the mayor. “I made no such statement,” Coolidge told the reporters testily. “When Mayor Peters and Commissioner Curtis were in conference with me yesterday, I told the mayor that he had the authority under the law to call out units of the state guard and that I of course could call out those units and other units in the state. I further said to him that if he did not care to exercise his authority in the first instance, I would on his request call out the troops if he should request me to do so. He did not make such a request. I stand ready to continue fully to support the mayor and the commissioner as I already have done.”
There was no sign of emotion in the governor’s face. Yet for all his outward impassivity, he was deeply troubled. After the reporters had left, he sent for his car and had his chauffeur take him as inconspicuously as possible across the Charles River to Watertown. Accompanied by an old Northampton acquaintance he drove to a time-worn, neglected cemetery surrounded by encroaching warehouses and factories on the road to Watertown Square. There, moving surefootedly among the slate stones, he made his way to one marking the grave of John Coolidge of Cambridge, England, who had died in 1691 and was buried with his wife, Mary. Coolidge stood by the grave in enigmatic silence for several minutes, finally remarking, “These are my first ancestors in this country.” Then, as if he had gathered strength from this contact with the dust eight generations removed from him, he turned abruptly away.
The mayor’s precept for the mobilization of the state guard within the Boston area reached Adjutant General Stevens’s office at midmorning. In an accompanying letter to the governor, Peters asked for the three thousand additional troops. Coolidge at once complied, calling up the Eleventh, Twelfth, and Fifteenth regiments plus a machine-gun company and placing this force under Brigadier General Parker’s command. Following General Cole’s advice that it would be more effective to display the troops in force than to have them come straggling in, Peters requested mobilization for five o’clock that afternoon. Later he conferred with General Parker, who had moved with his staff from the South Armory to the third floor of police headquarters, then he formally asked the governor for additional troops. “You are at liberty to call on me,” Coolidge replied, as he ordered up the Fourteenth and Twentieth regiments, the last of the state’s guard units. The mayor’s morning confidence oozed away in the ensuing hours, to be succeeded by a postprandial depression. Would even the full muster of the state guard be enough to protect his city from renewed violence?
Midafternoon found him telephoning Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt begging for a provost guard from the Charlestown Navy Yard to help in preserving order. Then still smarting from Coolidge’s noncommittal aloofness, he prepared another press release defending his seemingly passive role in the disorders of the night before:
I have only now had opportunity to consider the statement issued a few hours ago by Governor Coolidge, in which he tries to place on me the responsibility for the distressing disturbances which occurred last night. I think I am entitled to state the facts.
Until riot, tumult or disturbance actually takes place, the only person who has authority to police the city is the Police Commissioner and he is appointed by the Governor. The Committee of thirty-four appointed by me and myself have made every human effort to avoid the strike of the policemen, but received no cooperation from the Police Commissioner and no help or practical suggestions from the Governor.
Furthermore in a recent communication from the Governor, he states so plainly that no one has any authority to interfere with the Police Comissioner, that I should
have hesitated to take control of a situation which the Commissioner assured me was under control, even had I had the power.
I had no alternative but to give the Police Commissioner a chance to demonstrate that he had adequately provided for the situation. The disorders of last night have demonstrated that he misjudged it….
After this appeared in the early editions of the afternoon papers, rage fissured Coolidge’s granite features, and for once he became voluble to the point of profanity. When a deeply distressed Curtis appeared at his office to say that he would resign rather than continue at police headquarters as a supernumerary under Peters, the governor assured him that he could count on his, Coolidge’s, backing. As Coolidge later wrote in his autobiography: “If he [Curtis] was to be superseded, I thought the men he had discharged might be taken back and the cause lost. Certainly they and the rest of the policemen’s union must have rejoiced at his discomfort.” Both the governor and the commissioner felt that the mayor might be induced to submit the strikers’ grievances to arbitration. Curtis had already determined that, so far as it was in his power, none of the striking policemen would ever wear uniforms again.
While mayor and governor bickered and the state guard units prepared to mobilize, Boston continued to simmer, with always the latent threat that the city might boil over. Women had their handbags snatched on Washington Street. Near the Old South Meeting House, a pedestrian was jumped by two pickpockets but managed to shake them off and escape into a store, from where he was rescued by a sergeant and two patrolmen. One Harvard volunteer directing traffic in front of the Ames Building was forced against a car by a belligerent teamster and then knocked down and kicked by several bystanders. A truck loaded with thirty-nine cases of shoes belonging to the McElwain Shoe Company and valued at over ten thousand dollars was quietly driven away to oblivion. Across the Charles River the Harvard Yard was being patrolled by university police and ROTC students, and only one gate was left open.
In South Boston hordes of boys between five and eighteen roamed the streets, bent on mischief. Law-abiding Southies, under the leadership of former Lieutenant Governor Edward Barry, hastily formed a South Boston Vigilance Committee. A large crowd gathered in front of Station 6, following a rumor that volunteers were going out from there on duty. So threatening was the crowd that Captain Daniel Murphy kept his thirty Harvard subs inside for fear that they would be torn apart. As it was, the station house was bombarded with stones, tin cans, and bottles. Picketing strikers made no effort to stop the disorder.
Scollay Square, not a square at all but an irregular quadrangle below the Pemberton Square Courthouse, where eight streets meet, remained the focus of disorder, and those volunteers—mostly Harvard graduates and undergraduates—who went on duty there had a rough day of it. From early morning a restless mass roamed back and forth across the square between Sudbury and Court Streets with an insistent aimlessness, blocking traffic, hooting and pelting the dozen or so volunteers and the few loyal sergeants and patrolmen with stones and potatoes, while individuals occasionally darted closer to fling mud in their faces. One small boy snatched a night stick from a volunteer, then darted away, the crowd opening up to let him through but closing in again so that the enraged volunteer could not follow. A passing coal wagon had its contents dumped, and soon coal lumps were arching through the air. Arthur Morse, a suburban lawyer-volunteer, was struck in the eye with a piece of coal. Another volunteer had his cheek laid open. From time to time a sergeant or a sub would brandish his pistol and threaten to shoot, and the crowd would then scatter, laughing and jeering, only to surge back as soon as he had put his weapon away. Some of the brawnier and more pugnacious volunteers would occasionally wade into the crowd with their night sticks, where they managed to knock several of their tormentors unconscious. With each hour the crowd grew more and more uncontrollable. A passing United States mail truck was stopped and rocked back and forth, and only the most concerted efforts of Captain Sullivan and his sergeants prevented it from being tipped over.
Even as Sullivan was straining to rescue the mail truck, former Mayor James Michael Curley was making an impromptu speech on Washington Street just the other side of City Hall. Always ready to fish in politically troubled waters, and mindful of the next municipal election two years away in which he had already selected himself as the leading candidate, Curley had had his chauffeur drive him in town from Jamaica Plain. Standing on the running board of his car at the corner of Washington and Bromfield Streets, he denounced Mayor Peters to a hastily collected audience, pointing out to his listeners in his sonorously theatrical voice that during the crucial August days Peters had been sailing in Maine and adding that anyone getting as large a salary as the mayor’s ought to stay on the job and earn it. Then, as if to underline his contempt for Peters, he ordered his chauffeur to drive the wrong way down one-way Washington Street.
By late afternoon at least five thousand malcontents and troublemakers had wedged themselves into Scollay Square, bringing all traffic to a halt. Captain Sullivan fed additional volunteers into the area as the tension grew, until there were twenty of them, the most conspicuous being the tall and rangy Tack Hardwick. In an effort to split the crowd, Hardwick and the one-armed Laurence Davis finally led several Harvard undergraduates in an ostensible retreat down Brattle Street. A segment of toughs immediately started after them, yelping like hounds on the trail of a fox. Every block or so Hardwick’s little group turned on their pursuers with drawn revolvers. Pausing at a safe distance the gang hurled stones and coal, then pressed on as Hardwick’s cohort continued its retreat. Where Cornhill meets Washington Street, the augmented gang closed in on them viciously. Two of the volunteers were downed in a doorway and then stomped; two others were forced against a wall, and pummeled and bludgeoned, their night sticks and revolvers seized. Hardwick, bloody-faced, tried to fight his way out with his fists. Hearing the shrieks and the uproar from Washington Street’s Newspaper Row, sergeants Berry and Flynn of Station 2 dashed to the rescue as did Superintendent Crowley, who was on the point of leading a fresh detail into the square. Even they might not have been able to reach the beleaguered volunteers. But at this moment, as opportunely as at the climax of a Victorian melodrama, the First Troop of Cavalry, led by Captain Frederick Hunneman, cantered down Pemberton Hill from the Court House. After reporting quickly at headquarters, Captain Hunneman wheeled his troop in line facing the expanse of Scollay Square. There was a moment of silence, then a sharp command, and with pennons flying and sabres flashing in the wan afternoon light, the clink of chain bits and the clatter of hooves, the troopers charged. The crowd wavered and broke, then panicked. Oddly enough there were even a few cheers as the cavalry trotted by. Dividing, the troop formed platoon fronts, one platoon forcing a segment of the crowd toward Howard Street, the other driving the rest down Court Street, Cornhill, and Brattle Street. Hardwick’s battered subs on Cornhill were rescued just in time.
The cavalry troop was not the first state guard unit to appear in the city, for shortly before its arrival two squads of infantry had marched across the square, the crowd making way for them, and had disappeared down Tremont Street. By now the guard’s regiments and detachments were beginning to move into Boston from every section of the state. Mobilization had been swift and efficient, carefully planned well in advance, though hardly ready for the five o’clock deadline. Over the weekend the chief quartermaster of Massachusetts, scenting trouble, had ordered up cots, blankets, mess kits, and cooking utensils for the Tenth Regiment, and this equipment had arrived at the Commonwealth Armory Monday night. Tuesday morning Adjutant General Stevens ordered supplies for two more regiments and made arrangements for transporting, quartering, and feeding them. The East Armory on East Newton Street, with its kitchen capable of feeding three thousand men at once, was designated as mess headquarters, and Wednesday morning the commissary provisioned and staffed it. Other city armories were assigned as barracks for the incoming guardsmen.
From three o’clock on
, summoned by fire whistles and alarm signals, the separate guard companies across Massachusetts mustered in the whimsically machicolated mock-medieval fortresses they called armories. Former guardsmen hastened to rejoin and were sworn in at once. The Tenth Regiment, all its units located within Boston’s boundaries, was the first to respond. Companies came from Roxbury, Dorchester, West Roxbury, Charlestown, Jamaica Plain, Roslindale, Brighton, and East Boston. By six-thirty the Tenth was completely mobilized at the East Armory, except for Company L from Allston and Brighton, which was quartered at Brighton’s Commonwealth Armory. Beaming Colonel Sullivan, in full uniform and wearing the ribbons of the Spanish-American War and of the Society of Santiago de Cuba, looked ten years younger than he had as public-works commissioner. He felt prepared for anything as he ordered fifty rounds of ammunition issued to his men for their Springfield rifles.
The Eleventh Regiment—from Marlboro, Southboro, Newton, Clinton, Lowell, Westford, Concord, Haverhill, Lawrence, and Framingham—assembled with dispatch at the South Armory from this wide-ranging arc. Three companies arrived at the North Station from Lowell at five in the afternoon and marched through the business district to the armory with fixed bayonets: an impressive sight, as they themselves thought. The thirty-nine men of Framingham’s Company E were reinforced by eleven sudden recruits that included five AEF veterans. Company M’s thirty-three guardsmen from Clinton marched to the Union Station at four-thirty to find a thousand of their townsmen waiting to give them a send-off.
A City in Terror Page 18
