A City in Terror

by Rosalind Russell

  Newton’s Company A received its call at two o’clock. Captain Henry Crowell at once notified First Sergeant John Perry to put the alarm list in operation. Special operators, as previously arranged, sent out the call from the West Newton switchboard. The armory doors were opened and within the hour the first guardsmen in their piecemeal uniforms came straggling in. They found sandwiches and coffee ready in the hallway, and the captain urged them to “snack up,” since there was trouble in Boston and it was going to get worse. Ripples of excitement ran through the armory, as through all the small Massachusetts armories, a sense of anticipation that recruits commonly feel before soldiering becomes too boring or too dangerous. The news spread across Newton. Eighteen former members of Company A showed up for the “sport and diversion.” At four o’clock the bugler sounded assembly. The three officers and forty-eight enlisted men—including a machine-gun unit—fell in on the floor of the armory, then marched to the West Newton Station to entrain for Boston. In Boston they detrained across the street from the South Armory, where they went immediately. Inside the armory they found a bustling confusion of units arriving from all points of the Massachusetts compass. No sooner did they set down their baggage in one area than they were ordered to take it to another. Seven minutes after Company A’s arrival, twenty of its guardsmen and a lieutenant were sent off by truck to Station 10 at Roxbury Crossing, with only the chance of grabbing a sandwich as the men left. En route they decided to call themselves the “Flying Twenty.” Within five minutes the rest of the company, consolidated with skeletal companies from Taunton, Fall River, Concord, Clinton, and Lowell, and under command of Captain Crowell, was dispatched to Station 9, Dudley Street. “Jesus,” said Police Captain Skillings as he looked over his raw but eager recruits, “I didn’t expect to see any of you before midnight!”

  The companies of the Twelfth Regiment, from Somerville, Waltham, Stoneham, Cambridge, Medford, Wakefield, and Arlington, assembled at the Cambridge Armory. Among them was the youngest guardsman in the state, sixteen-year-old Private Jack Hesketh of Company G. At six-thirty, eight companies were sent to the Joy Street station on the far side of Beacon Hill. Sergeant Augustus Hermann was out of town when the call came and did not get to the armory until after dark. Two truckloads of the latecomers were then ordered to South Boston. When the drivers heard their destination they at first refused to go there, and it took a considerable amount of soldierly persuasion to make them.

  Most of the Fourteenth Regiment was made up of guardsmen from Quincy and the towns along the South Shore. They mobilized at the Quincy Armory and came to the Commonwealth Armory by train. Two companies from more distant Brockton, West Bridgewater, and Taunton followed by truck.

  From the North Shore, from Everett, Winthrop, Chelsea, Lynn, Salem, Gloucester, Rockport, Beverly, fire alarms and sirens summoned the men of the Fifteenth Regiment. The Guardsmen of Company F rode in from Beverly in their own truck. Companies B and C left Lynn at six o’clock in ten jitney buses for the Charlestown Armory, a crowd cheering them as they left. The Danvers and Salem companies commandeered streetcars.

  In the western part of the state the mobilization went more slowly, the Twentieth Regiment guardsmen from Springfield not being called out until after dark. Harry Cross, a seventeen-year-old journeyman electrician of Company G got his order to report only after he had come home from work. He managed to join the rest of his company at the Howard Street armory before they left by train for Boston. It was midnight before they arrived. They were sent in great haste to the Commonwealth Armory. There the haste stopped. The men were given a supper of frankfurters and beans. No orders followed. There was nothing left for the men to do but to bed down in the earth of the drill shed on their overcoat rolls until morning.

  While the state guard units were converging on Boston and being funneled off to the nineteen police stations according to need, more Yankee Division veterans in search of excitement and wearing their old uniforms flocked to the East Armory. They were mustered into service at once. A number of ex-cavalry and artillery officers reported directly to the police department and were given badges and night sticks and told they were now mounted police. The First Corps Cadet Armory on Columbus Avenue became the headquarters of the Motor Transport Corps, consisting of three trucks, three motorcycles, a dozen touring cars, and some sixty commercial vehicles that Lieutenant Colonel John Decrow was in the process of requisitioning. The Ambulance Corps drivers, also stationed at the Cadet Armory, were warned to exercise patience and tact with the public and to avoid provocation. The several machine-gun companies arriving in Boston were issued with Winchester riot guns, and a machine gun was installed at each police station. Every company commander received a map of the city showing the general defense scheme. By evening the city’s armories were humming like militant beehives, and Boston itself with its various strongpoints had come to resemble a besieged fortress. At six o’clock an urgent call came to the Pemberton Square headquarters for a hundred guardsmen to be sent immediately to South Boston.

  The Boston mob as it developed Wednesday night, though smaller, was harder and more menacing than the night before, since many of its members were armed, and it was reinforced by professional criminals who had been heading toward the city all the afternoon. Striking policemen mingled in the throng, urging on the more violent. At the sight of the guard columns, bayonets fixed, and in the highest spirits, many of the policemen felt their earlier self-assurance evaporate. Now they struck back desperately. The Roxbury Letts were also circulating in the darkness with revolutionary zeal, having been directed to Scollay Square with their transient New York comrades by Fraina and Ballam to intensify the disorder that they hoped would lead to a breakdown of all civil government.

  In the fifteen minutes following their charge over the cobbles of Scollay Square, the First Cavalry had cleared the now-sodden quadrangle of all except those who had business there. For a while it seemed that the troopers were in unchallengeable control. Traffic began to move along unimpeded. Volunteers leaving Station 2 were no longer subject to a barrage of boos punctuated by debris. But, gradually, detached gangs of several hundred surly drifters congregating in the feeder streets leading into the square—Sudbury, Hanover, Howard, Brattle, and Court Streets and Cornhill—began filtering back into Scollay Square itself. The troopers, though aided by guardsmen with bayonets, volunteers with revolvers and billies, and a contingent of hardened 101st Infantry veterans wearing steel helmets and their old YD uniforms, could not keep the cobbled quadrangle open. By seven-thirty a restive, ugly crowd of some ten thousand was wedged into that narrow space. Remaining windows in and near the square were soon smashed—the Market Men’s Shop, Woolworth’s, the Alpha Lunch. No guardsmen were agile enough to stop the small boys who climbed up building fronts, onto wagons, and on the roof of the subway entrance, where they flung down coal, stones, and chunks of wood. Older roisterers were making their way to the tops of buildings to bombard the troopers with bricks and bottles. John McTiernan, a striking patrolman from the Joy Street station with a few drinks under his belt, threatened to beat up a police sergeant who told him to clear out of the square. As soon as the sergeant’s back was turned, McTiernan hit him with a lump of mud, then swaggered down Howard Street with two other strikers, McKinnon from his own station and Conlan from Station 1. All three had stones in their pockets. When a guardsman passed, McTiernan tossed a bottle he had just drained and struck the soldier on the head. The man leaned against a wall, stunned and bleeding. Not far from the three, Patrolman Kuhlman of Station 12 aimed a rock at another sergeant. McTiernan continued on his belligerent way until he came across a volunteer, John McLaughlin, Jr., of Winchester, sitting in a car, and threatened to pull him from his seat. When the nervous young man drew his revolver, McTiernan laughed in his face and dared him to shoot. A crowd surrounded them. Told of this confrontation just round the corner, Captain Sullivan sent out a special detail to bring McTiernan in, and booked him on a drunkenness charge. The other st
rikers continued to stir up trouble unimpeded. Carousing sailors beat up civilians and smashed windows until a contingent of marines subdued them with their fists.

  From the windows of the Crawford House overlooking the square, the patrons of that once elegant but now seedy establishment watched as troopers charged again and again, sometimes collapsing under the rain of stones and brickbats from the rooftops in their vain efforts to break up the swirling crowd. Guardsmen kicked in the doors of houses and charged upstairs. Occasionally pistol shots rang out, often a succession of them. Arthur McGill, thirty-one, of the South End, who was standing near the patrol box on Howard Street, slumped to the ground dead with a bullet in his chest. A young woman, Gertrude Lewis of Townsend Street, Roxbury, was shot at the same time in the right arm. No one knew, no one was ever to know who fired the shots, but McGill’s was the first death in the strike.

  Bill Hoffman and his sub friends had had a rough if exciting afternoon. Several times they had been jostled and knocked to the ground, but each time by flourishing their revolvers they had forced the troublemakers back. A few bruises were in any case no worse than those from a football scrimmage. But in the evening he and two friends found themselves cornered in a doorway near the Old Howard by a gang who had been “laying for the Harvard guys.” Even the menace of drawn revolvers failed to intimidate their adversaries. When the boldest started to climb the steps after him, Hoffman fired in the air. There was a tinkle of glass followed by a woman’s cry, then shouts of “Baby killers!” Hands reached out of the shadows and snatched away his revolver. Then the enraged wolfish faces closed in; fists beat down on the panic-stricken students. Hoffman felt a jarring blow on the head; the street itself seemed to reel toward him.

  Not until after ten was Scollay Square finally cleared through the sporadic but increasingly coordinated efforts of troopers, guardsmen, shaken but undaunted subs, and a provost guard from the Charlestown Navy Yard. The mob showed more fear of the horses than of anything else. With its cohesiveness finally broken, the disordered remnants streamed down Cornhill and State Street to the Old State House, breaking windows routinely in passing. Iver Johnson’s remaining plate glass caved in; more persistent looters smashed their way into Burnham’s Book Store, the Conclave Phonograph Company, American Wallpaper Distributors, and H. Goldthwaite, a dealer in surgical supplies. As the mob members retreated they found a convenient shelter in the subway entrance under the Old State House. Several of them with gleeful malice set the trash baskets on fire. Winkled out by the horsemen and driven further along Washington Street, they came face to face with a line of guardsmen at Summer Street and were diverted down Franklin Street. One recalcitrant was struck over the head with a revolver butt by a guard lieutenant and went sprawling on the cobbles. Troopers then harried the others beyond State Street into Adams Square, where what was left of the mob resolved into footsore and damply dispirited individuals.

  With Scollay Square at last permanently cleared, General Parker now put his master plan into effect, cordoning off downtown Boston by degrees into controllable sections. The feed-in streets to Scollay Square were barred to pedestrians and traffic alike. Patrols and pickets kept the whole length of Washington Street as far as Chinatown a forbidden section into which no outsiders were allowed to make their way. All the little streets running from Tremont Street and the Common to Washington Street were closed. Guardsmen engaged in sharp if brief battles with skulkers on West, Summer, and Bromfield Streets. Avery Street was blocked off at both ends. The several hundred crapshooters and onlookers wedged into that narrow street faced the militia with defiance. “Let’s go!” one of them shouted. At that a squad of guardsmen advanced with bayonets, and the crowd wilted.

  Troopers rode the sidewalks on Newspaper Row, forcing pedestrians away from buildings and windows. The first detachment of cavalry to clear Washington Street was made up of volunteers, gentlemen-riders such as Richard Russell from the North Shore, the young partner of Mayor Peters’s corporation counsel, who only a few months before had been discharged from the army after serving overseas as an artillery officer. With several other former officers, all of them wearing their old uniforms, he had joined up at the Chamber of Commerce Building and enrolled as a mounted policeman. His first assignment came Wednesday night, when he and three others were given police horses, ordered to clear Washington Street, and instructed to back their horses into any rioters who tried to hide in doorways. Starting from the foot of Court Street the amateur policemen edged their horses down Washington Street. From upper windows china and bottles were aimed at them but none hit. Scattered gangs along littered Washington Street showed little or no opposition, taking to their heels as the horses edged toward them. Those in doorways seemed terrified of the horses’ flanks. Guardsmen, following the horsemen, took up positions twenty feet apart, the whole length of the sealed street. Once the bounds were set, downtown Boston grew as quiet as on any ordinary evening.

  In South Boston, as in Scollay Square, the turbulence lurking just below the surface continued to break out in intermittent violence. All Wednesday afternoon the Gustins and lesser street gangs were out in strength, stoning passing cars, smashing windows, waiting only for the darkness to resume the mass pillaging of the night before. By early evening when trucks carrying the first detachment of the Tenth Regiment’s three hundred fifty men pulled up on Broadway near Station 6, the few exhausted police were beginning to lose control. As the guardsmen in their floppy felt hats dismounted, a derisive howl went up from the sullenly bellicose crowd gathered there. Quickly the guardsmen formed a line across Broadway. Showers of stones, sticks, vegetables, and tin cans met them. Twice as many bystanders had gathered as on Tuesday night, sympathetic to the roistering gang but for the most part content to cheer the rioters. Violence was confined to the gangs and to furtive adolescents hurling missiles from the shadows. Nevertheless, the sight of uniformed men with rifles, bayonets, and riot guns posted at intervals along Broadway had a temporarily sobering effect. Occasionally a more pugnacious group would taunt or challenge the patrols but would break away sharply if the guardsmen lunged with their bayonets. Beyond Broadway the rest of Southie remained calm. Station 12 seemed the quietest place in the district. Patrols in the City Point area encountered no incidents at all.

  Trouble broke out just after eight o’clock near Station 6, where the crowd was thickest, when three off-duty volunteers left the station and headed for the car stop on Broadway. With shouts of “Strikebreakers!” a mob of at least a hundred started after them. The volunteers broke into a run but were soon cornered. Just as the mob ringleaders were closing in, Monsignor George Patterson of St. Vincent’s Church thrust himself between them and the unarmed volunteers, begging the mob—a number of whom he recognized as his own parishioners—to stop the senseless violence. But for once a priest’s voice had little effect in that Catholic community. The three were rescued only after a state guard officer forced his way through the crowd, automatic in hand, and with the aid of several guardsmen led the volunteers back to the safety of the station.

  An hour later small bands of young men began racing through the streets, hurling stones and bricks through store windows, though there was nothing like Tuesday’s systematic demolitions. At the renewed sound of shattering glass, the crowd yelled approval. Half a dozen alley boys on Broadway took to throwing stones at the windows of Stephen Burdick’s jewelry store. Burdick rushed out into the street pretending to draw a pistol from his hip pocket, and at this gesture the stone-throwers retreated. He went back to his store, turned off the lights, locked up, and headed for home. But he had not gone a block before the alley boys jumped him, knocking him down, beating him, kicking him with their pointed shoes, taking his wallet, and leaving him unconscious on the sidewalk. Guardsmen arrived too late to catch any of his attackers.

  After Burdick had been carried away in an ambulance, rain began to fall, dissolving the crowd. Scarcely two thousand remained where earlier there had been five times as many, but
those remaining were recalcitrant ones. When Superintendent Crowley drove up Broadway at about half past ten, he found the Tenth Regiment in well-organized control. A few revolver shots rang out in the darkness as his car neared F Street, and several sergeants with him gave chase without finding any trace of whoever had fired them. There were no more shots. Most of the disturbances were now taking place in the streets and alleys off Broadway, small forays that the police and guardsmen easily broke up. Several false alarms were turned in. Small boys seized the opportunity to break a few windows in the Lawrence, Bigelow, and Hart schools. A convivial crew managed to filch two barrels of whiskey from a D Street saloon which they trundled to a vacant playground, broke open, and served out in pitchers stolen from the five-and-ten, an occupation that kept them from further mischief.

  More serious trouble was obviously brewing in the section of West Broadway near E Street, where the gangs had consolidated. It boiled over at about eleven o’clock with the bellicose appearance of a band of toughs, some with pistols, who proceeded to rampage down Broadway away from the patrols. An isolated guard squad in front of adjoining O’Keefe’s, the A & P, and Shea the Hatter proved a tempting target, and the toughs showered stones on the guardsmen, incidentally smashing the as-yet-undamaged windows. Hostile faces pressed in from all sides, and the amateur soldiers faced the throng with bayonets. The crowd yielded briefly to the leveled rifles, then pushed forward again, taunting, pelting the guardsmen with mud and stones, and daring them to “make something of it.” One of the guardsmen by pointing his bayonet finally managed to work his way to Station 6 and call for help. Captain Thomas Hadley at once led out the Tenth Regiment’s Company G in riot formation. At the sight of a company advancing in line, bayonets fixed, reinforced by riot guns, those threatening the isolated guardsmen temporarily retreated, but their blood lust was up and they soon returned more challenging than ever. As Captain Hadley placed his men in skirmish line across the wide street, there were more jeers. Hoarse voices dared him to fire. Even when the guardsmen raised their rifles for a volley in the air, the mob refused to take the gesture seriously. Several pistol shots echoed back in mocking reply, and stones continued to course through the air. Hadley then ordered those confronting him to disperse. As if in answer a stone struck him on the forehead and sent him spinning, even as the throng thrust forward. Staggering to his feet, he gave the command “Make ready!” There was the sharp click of bolts drawn back and cartridges thrust home. “Aim!” Then followed a staccato succession of shots as the guardsmen with rifles and riot guns fired directly into the encroaching mob. A wail went up, a long drawn-out echoing “Oh” of disbelief that ended in women’s screams and was followed by a stampede to get away. Men and women were trampled down in the mad dash for cover. Five figures sprawled like rag dolls on the rapidly emptying boulevard. Anthony Czar, twenty-four, who lived on Broadway and who had been passively looking on from a doorway, lay dying from a bullet through the stomach. Robert Sheehan, sixteen, of L Street, shot in the back as he turned to run, would die a few hours later in the Carney Hospital. Twenty-one-year-old Robert Lallie, mortally wounded, would live until Friday. Thomas Flaherty, shot in the leg, and sixteen-year-old Helen Keeley with buckshot wounds in the head, would recover. Eight more, including two girls, escaped with superficial—mostly buckshot—wounds. Sergeant Hermann, leading his Twelfth Regiment platoon in clearing lower Broadway, was close enough to see the shadowy figures drop as the guardsmen opened fire. He concluded then and there that we were not as civilized as we ought to be.