As in the Boston Massacre a century and a half earlier, when the British troops had been baited into firing into a menacing mob on State Street, no one could say later who gave the order to fire. Captain Hadley denied that he had given it. Possibly—even as in that earlier confrontation—someone in the mob had called out the command in derision. Possibly a green young guardsman, fearful of the onrushing mass, had opened fire on his own and his fellows had copied him. But however fatal the result, it ended all disturbances in South Boston. The guardsmen, continuing their advance with rifles at the shoulder, encountered only fleeing individuals, whose belligerency had collapsed like a pricked baloon. “The firing,” Adjutant General Stevens wrote smugly in his report, “had a salutory effect; it cowed the mob.”
Beyond Scollay Square and South Boston there were only sporadic incidents in the city. Volunteers coming to report at Brighton’s Station 14 during the afternoon were pelted with rotten eggs, yet there was no further trouble when they went on duty. Here and there a random holdup took place. John Kennedy of Roxbury was relieved by a gunman of twenty dollars and his watch near his home. A determined gang, after threatening to shoot the janitor of Maurice Keezer’s suit-rental store on Columbus Avenue, made off with several thousand dollars’ worth of dress suits. Several other small Roxbury shops were looted in quick sorties. Nevertheless the locale of the revolutionary Letts remained relatively quiescent. In the afternoon some 125 Roxbury merchants and businessmen met at the People’s National Bank to organize a vigilante committee. Sworn in by Captain Skillings, given revolvers and badges, they encountered little opposition or disorder as they set out to patrol the streets near the Dudley Street el terminal. At Fields Corner a drunk, being taken by two subs to Station 11, was followed by a threatening gang who then began to stone the station, scattering only after a guard detachment had fired over their heads. Patrolman Francis McNabb—the solitary member of the policemen’s union who did not go out on strike—assigned to guard the Park Square Theatre, had to be sent away when the Actors’ Equity cast of Buddies informed the management that he must leave or there would be no show. Over thirty fire alarms were rung up in Boston, twenty-one of which turned out to be false. In Jamaica Plain, Captain Harriman, inspecting the rifles of his recruits, was shot in the thigh by a guardsman awkwardly presenting his weapon for inspection. Crap games continued across the Common, and lurking hangers-on obstructed the subway entrances. Guardsmen of Company L, Gloucester, broke up half a dozen such games but arrested only a sailor from the Hingham Naval Base, Harris Raymond, who had defied their order to move on. On Washington Street, a trooper sabered Cornelius Lynch of Charlestown in the back after Lynch had failed to get out of the way fast enough.
Long after the rest of the city had quieted down, a striking policeman, Richard Reemts, was fatally shot at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Buckingham Street in the South End. Reemts, from the Roxbury Crossing station and nine years on the force, along with Arthur Shea, another striking policeman, had led a party in two cars that pulled up beside volunteers John Reid of Belmont and Thomas Gannock, a Harvard student. Shea stepped out of the first car and asked the volunteers the way to Auburndale. As they attempted to explain, Reemts—one of the biggest men on the force—and several unidentified companions pinned them against the wall, slugged them, and seized their revolvers and badges. Sergeant John McDonald of Station 5, who happened to be close by, rushed to the rescue. He jumped on the running board of the first car and arrested Shea at pistol point. Reemts bolted down Columbus Avenue on foot, ducking as he ran. Abraham Karp, standing in front of his auto supply store with a revolver in his pocket, saw the bulky form hurtling toward him and feared he was about to be attacked. Drawing his revolver, he fired one shot. Reemts crashed down on the sidewalk, a bullet in his chest. By afternoon he would be dead. Shea, less than a year on the force, was held on a charge of robbery. Ironically enough he had been wounded in the right hand during the May Day disturbances and had returned to duty only two weeks before the strike.
By Thursday morning the state guard was in unchallenged control of the city. Olive-drab and khaki figures in felt campaign hats, with loaded rifles, bayonets, machine and riot guns, patrolled the streets, reiterating their one order: “Keep moving!” Later in the day many of the guardsmen would exchange their wide-brimmed hats for steel helmets, on loan from the army. Though Superintendent Pierce was still accepting volunteers, Crowley ordered them not to wear their by now provocative badges or flaunt their night sticks and revolvers. Some of the sub casualties had already dropped out. H. M. Chamberlain of Beacon Hill, hit on the head with a stone, returned to his Mount Vernon Street town house “to sleep off the dazed effect caused by the blow.” Bill Hoffman and his friends were back in Cambridge, bruised, aching, and shaken, he with a split lip and a swollen nose but with no bones broken. Tack Hardwick had by his own proud admission “the biggest, ugliest and blackest bruised eye of the lot during valiant action in Scollay Square.” The City Hospital, the Haymarket Relief, and the Carney Hospital were occupied by rioters, looters, guardsmen, and police in adjoining beds, suffering from glass cuts, bayonet jabs, bullet wounds, and bruises.
Banks, offices, and stores opened with revived confidence, some of the stores turning their losses into wry jests. Posner’s advertised that any looted hats, shirts, or underwear that didn’t fit would be gladly exchanged for the right size. The adjoining Coes & Young shoe store posted a sign on its boarded-up entrance: “We Are Open But Our Shoes Are Too Valuable To Put In The Window.” Merchants used their losses for informal advertising. Other signs read: “Our Merchandise Is Very Taking”; “Robbed But Opened For Business”; “They Took About 100 of our Umbrellas—We Hope It Clears Up.”
Scollay Square, almost empty in the bleak morning aftermath, was heavily patrolled by both troopers and guardsmen. Pedestrians could cross only at designated points. Any three or more congregating individuals were instantly dispersed at bayonet point. No one could loiter. Sailors, usually so obvious in the square, were absent, the navy having suspended all shore leaves as of the night before. Regular army soldiers protected government property. On the waterfront, watchmen behind barricades guarded the wharves. At the State House the guards were doubled and strangers barred. Now that authority had reasserted itself, the indignation of established Boston over the two riotous nights had become virulently vocal. Business leaders, members of the chamber of commerce, and peaceable commuters, their fears abating, referred to the striking policemen as “deserters,” “Bolsheviks,” and “agents of Leninism.” The Transcript underlined its photographs of looted stores with the remark that the situation in Scollay Square and on Washington Street had been as bad as on the Nevski Prospect during the October Revolution. Other Boston papers in their varying degrees emphasized the “lawlessness, disorder, looting … such as we have never known in this city.”
Only on the Common at Brimstone Corner near the Neptune fountain did the diehards persist in their dice-rolling. Some forty crapshooters had formed a circle there, goggled at by about a hundred spectators, a number of whom were street urchins. Bills and coins dotted the center of the circle. The term “diehard” would take on a more literal meaning before the morning was over, for the order had come down from General Parker to clear the Common. Peripherally, the crapshooters had again started up on Avery Street, and the marathon game near the Dover el station was going into its third day, but the Common remained the center of defiance. Just before eleven o’clock Guard Lieutenant James Dooley of Cambridge marched his platoon of the Twelfth Regiment’s Company F up the Long Walk from Boylston Street across the Common. Halting his men briefly behind the Park Street subway entrance, he stepped out to reconnoiter. The ardent crapshooters by the fountain paid no attention either to him or his uniform. Quietly he advanced his men in extended order and surrounded the gamblers, then ordered them peremptorily to hold up their hands. When they hesitated, the guardsmen fired a volley over their heads, and the hands went up in a flash. One m
an, still hesitant, was struck down by a guardsman’s rifle butt. Another, as he raised his hands, surreptitiously tossed away a revolver that skittered under a park bench and was retrieved by a small boy who scampered off with it. Dooley’s men marched their prisoners away at brisk bayonet point, hands still in the air, toward Boylston Street en route to the LaGrange Street station. Urchins scrambled and scuffled for the coins and bills—the stakes of the game—abandoned on the pavement. A surly crowd followed the prisoners, growing so hostile that Dooley ordered another warning round fired. At the sound the crowd scattered, only to regroup again, hooting and jeering. Foremost in the crowd, Raymond Barnes, an eighteen-year-old merchant seaman in uniform, urged the others to spring the prisoners. The rear-rank guardsmen turned to face the oncoming threat, pulling back their rifle bolts and snapping them with ominous precision. “They’re only shooting in the air!” Barnes shouted, making a dash at the line of guardsmen and waving his arms as if he were prepared to brush the rifle barrels aside. The nearest guardsman dropped to his knee, his rifle pointed upward, and as the sailor rushed at him, pulled the trigger. Barnes was only a few feet from the rifle barrel when the bullet went through him. The shot tore most of his throat away, and he sank to the ground. Appalled at what he had done, the young guardsman reached out to take the sailor’s arm and steady him in his fall. Barnes collapsed and was carried into a Liggett’s drug store across the street. He was dead by the time the ambulance took him to the relief hospital.
The killing marked an end of crowds and crapshooting on the Common. Other players in smaller circles quickly pocketed their dice and hurried away. Morbidly curious spectators gathered round the blood spot on the concrete, muttering to each other but no longer forming a crowd. Early in the afternoon the marathon crap game at Dover and Washington Streets was broken up by a naval provost guard, bringing Boston’s open-air dice-rolling to an end. In the course of the day the provost guard also picked up several dozen AWOL sailors. Meanwhile Captain Thomas Goode of the Back Bay station had received a tip that New York gunmen were on their way to hold up the Fenway Park box office where, despite the strike, the till was bulging with receipts from the double-header baseball game scheduled that afternoon between the Red Sox and the St. Louis Browns. Captain Goode marched two state guard companies, a hundred volunteers, and a detail of loyal policemen to the park. No gunmen showed up, but the guardsmen and volunteers at least were able to see the home team beat the Browns 4–0, 6–0.
All day guardsmen lined Scollay Square at four-foot intervals, while a full company stood drawn up in riot formation in the square’s center beside patrol wagons and military police vans. Pedestrians were hustled along the street with scarcely time to turn their heads, though if they did they were likely to see a bayonet pointed at them. There was no sign of resistance. In South Boston some twelve hundred guardsmen, a detachment of cavalry, three machine guns, and sixty riot guns made that turbulent area as tranquil as on Easter Sunday. Those on the sidewalks were kept on the move, householders not even being allowed to stand in their own doorways. The only incident to break the calm occurred when someone on a rooftop dropped a brick on the head of guardsman Lee Emery as he was patrolling his Broadway beat near D Street. Emery was taken to the hospital with a fractured skull.
Arrests in Boston, a mere dozen or so, were mostly for drunkenness. There was a slight flurry on the Common at midafternoon, when four Harvard volunteers, taunted by spectators, brandished their revolvers. Almost at once a state guard sergeant with his platoon surrounded them. The sergeant, after warning off the spectators, told the four to put away their guns, or he would haul them in for inciting to riot. Meekly they obeyed him. Nothing else happened except for a few small thefts in Roxbury—and a brief fracas involving a guardsman. The occupation and pacification of Boston seemed complete. Meeting in the city, the Grand Lodge of Masons in a unanimous rising vote pledged the support of Massachusetts’s eighty thousand Masons to the governor and the mayor “in their efforts to maintain law and order.”
Yet there was to be one final act of violence, one more death, before the day’s end, this time in the well-to-do Jamaica Plain. Except for the wounding of Captain Harriman, the only other Jamaica Plain incident had occurred on Wednesday night when a Chinese laundryman on Green Street had been beaten and robbed. Tuesday’s demonstration in front of Station 13 had been trivial, and on Wednesday the sedate residential district had kept its usual quiet. But on Thursday evening two guardsmen on patrol came across a handful of young men and boys hunched in the middle of Water Street around a manhole cover that they were attempting to pry open. As the men in uniform approached, the others scattered. The guardsmen shouted several times for them to halt, but they kept on running. Then, instead of letting them go, the guardsmen fired. The two shots brought down four men. Henry Grote, twenty, was killed outright. Carton McWilliams, eighteen, lay in the gutter dying. Two others, one of them only sixteen, were slightly wounded.
As spread across the press of the land, Boston’s riot and disorder were magnified to insurrection, the realization of Fraina’s reddest hopes. Headlines rang out like tocsins: “TROOPS TURN MACHINE GUNS ON BOSTON MOBS”; “TERROR REIGNS IN CITY.” The San Francisco Examiner shuddered at the “RIOTS IN BOSTON,” where “Gangs Range Streets, Women Are Attacked, Stores Are Robbed, Shots Are Fired.” For the Los Angeles Times, “no man’s house, no man’s wife, no man’s children, will be safe if the police force is unionized and made subject to the orders of Red Unionite bosses.” “Civic treason!” was the New York World’s opinion. The Wall Street Journal saw “Lenin and Trotsky on their way.” Other papers predicted “Sovietism” in Boston, while several United States senators felt that “the effort to Sovietize the Government has started.” Senator Henry Myers of Montana declared on the floor of the Senate that if the Boston strike succeeded, other police strikes would follow until within sixty days every town of more than three thousand inhabitants would have unionized police. Then “unionization” of the army and navy would follow, and “a Soviet government will be established in the United States before the next presidential election.” He called the strike “one of the most dastardly acts of infamy that has ever occurred in this country since the act of Benedict Arnold.”
President Wilson, touring the country in a desperate attempt to defend the peace treaty and his League of Nations, interpolated a reference to the police strike in a prepared speech after his secretary, Joseph Tumulty, had called his attention to the Boston crisis.
I want to say this [the president told a Helena, Montana, audience] that a strike of the policemen of a great city, leaving that city at the mercy of an army of thugs, is a crime against civilization.
In my judgment the obligation of a policeman is as sacred and direct as the obligation of a soldier. He is a public servant, not a private employee, and the whole honor of the community is in his hands. He has no right to prefer any private advantage to the public safety.
I hope that that lesson will be burned in so that it will never again be forgotten, because the pride of America is that it can exercise self-control.
Eight persons died in the strike, twenty-one were wounded, and at least fifty injured. An estimated third of a million dollars’ worth of property was stolen or destroyed, most of which, according to some obscure statute, had to be paid for by the city. So the riots came to an end in beleaguered Boston, the town that in its provincial pride had once called itself the Athens of North America and that now in the eyes of nervous Americans had come to seem its Petrograd.
A City in Terror Page 20
