* They would eventually find their way into most dictionaries of quotations.
AFTER THE STRIKE
As if Coolidge’s proclamation had not been sufficiently mortal, Gompers in Washington that same day gave the strikers what seemed to them the ultimate stab in the back. Speaking to the Senate Committee of the District of Columbia against a bill to withhold the salaries of policemen who affiliated with any labor organization, he defended the Boston police as sacrificial victims. Their strike had benefited the police all over the country, he told the senators, by calling attention to such matters as pay and working conditions, but he ended lamely by saying that he did not recognize the right of a police force anywhere to strike.
The governor’s proclamation had stunned the Boston labor leaders. O’Donnell replied tentatively that the labor movement would answer it after the Storrow committee had made its report to the public. Feeney said he could not reply until he had read it more carefully. Vahey and McInnis were not accessible. McCarthy refused to discuss it. Finally Vahey and Feeney sent an open letter to Peters, Storrow, Curtis, and Parker calling for the truth about the strike and denying the still-current story that the union had been hostile to the compromise plan. Since their letter remained unanswered, they followed it up with a second letter to Peters and Storrow asking why they had not responded to the request for “a truth-telling party,” complaining that the “police officers of Boston … have been assailed with a ferocity, injustice and lack of Christianity unparalleled in our life time” and asserting that the governor’s “slandering and villifying [sic]” of them as “traitors and deserters” was “as false as hell.” The police were being made “the football of political greed and ambition.” The letters and a long covering statement published at length in all the Boston papers drew only a feeble response within the city and scarcely any at all outside. Except for the police themselves the strike was over, done with, settled. Other things engrossed the public. President Wilson’s collapse in the West took over the headlines. The steel strike with its growing violence commandeered the labor news.
After the first rush of candidates for the new police force there was a certain falling off in recruits at Kingsley Hall. Some held back out of fear that the old police might, as was rumored, soon get their jobs back. Strikers did their best to discourage and intimidate prospective patrolmen, threatening them as they stood in line before the Ford Building or harassing them at their homes. The governor’s proclamation reassured the candidates and swelled their ranks. To increase the total still further Curtis requested the Civil Service Commission to expand the age limits from twenty-two to thirty-five years, lower the height minimum to five feet seven inches, and the weight to one hundred thirty-five pounds. Any such change required the approval of the governor’s council and the governor, and usually took several bureaucratic months. But since the state guard was costing the Commonwealth twenty thousand dollars a day, everyone from the governor to the commissioner was anxious to set up a new police force as quickly as possible, and approval for Curtis’s proposed modification came within a week. On September 24 the commissioner released the last of his civilian volunteers. Although his search for applicants outside of Boston was not very successful, by November he had in all five hundred recruits enrolled. Ten days later he discontinued his newspaper advertising. By the month’s end his new force was almost complete, and by December 13 the last group of men sworn in brought the total patrolman strength to 1574—more than had been on the force when the strike began. Since the United Garment Workers in their solidarity with the old police refused to make uniforms for the new, many recruits had to go on duty in civilian clothes. Curtis shipped three thousand yards of blue cloth from headquarters to an unknown destination outside the state where, it was hinted, new uniforms would be made by convict labor. Wherever they might be made, Curtis expected to have all his men properly outfitted by New Year’s.
As the police in impotent anger watched their cause collapse, they came to feel increasingly, beyond any question of grievances or union affiliation, that what they wanted most was once again to wear a policeman’s uniform. Labor they now accused of betraying them. Two weeks after the BCLU vote against a general strike, the delegates met again at Wells Memorial Hall to discuss the police situation. Three striking patrolmen who were not delegates—Boston Social Club President Michael Lynch, Charles McGowan, and John Mahoney—made their way into the hall and, after listening impatiently to a timeserving report by the committee of seventeen, stood up and furiously attacked the central union for its failure to make good on its promise. Lynch shouted from the floor that he wanted to know “where the organized labor movement stood in relation to its pledge of full moral and financial support.” Mahoney asked what the BCLU had done to stop the opponents of the policemen’s union from poisoning the public mind. McGowan reminded them that on the second day of the strike McCarthy had told the police that “we would have to extend our lines and further extend those lines if necessary to win the fight.” Bitterly he concluded, “I am now satisfied that someone failed him.”
The three impassioned patrolmen so stirred the delegates that even on that belated date they were ready to vote a general strike. President O’Donnell did his best to calm them down, assuring his dubious audience that friends in high places were still working hard for the police and were making real progress. McCarthy told them that the situation was “unusually bright for the policemen” and hinted that “something is about to drop that may result in somebody, now seemingly all powerful, walking the plank.” Jennings explained soothingly that “the question now is one of adjustment. The people who talk general strike are in my opinion not safe, sound or sure.” O’Donnell kept the matter from coming to a vote, but he could not keep the rank-and-file resentment from spreading. The next day the police union members meeting in Fay Hall voted their confidence in the BCLU, but it was confidence in the Pickwickian sense.
After Coolidge’s proclamation few expected the Storrow committee to issue any further statement, and in fact the committee, meeting a day later, voted not to make a public report. However, at Peters’s request, on October 4 the committee members finally did issue their report, explaining that it would have been inopportune to release one earlier, “while the state was still engaged with the immediate tasks of asserting its sovereignty, defeating the strike and re-establishing law and order.” The committee resolved “that the policemen of Boston were unjustified in leaving their post,” and that they should not have been permitted to join an outside organization whose interests might interfere with their duty. Furthermore the committee “fully support the acts of the authorities in preserving law and order and toward defeating finally and conclusively the efforts to enforce by strike the right of the policemen to join the A. F. of L.” Nevertheless the committee did admit that Curtis, and not the police union, had rejected the compromise and that Coolidge had stepped in only after order “had been generally restored.” Placatingly if not wholly accurately the report concluded that
in justice to the commissioner it should be stated that at no time during the progress of the affair did counsel for the union or officers of the union or men upon trial take any position with the commissioner other than to insist upon continuing and retaining their membership in the union.
And in further justice to all parties it should be stated that the Governor, the Mayor, and the Commissioner, in the opinion of the committee, acted at all times from the highest motives and with but a single thought, namely the welfare of the Commonwealth and its people.
Vahey and Feeney were enraged by the report. Not only did they question the “highest motives” of the commissioner and the governor, but they denied that the union had insisted on retaining membership in the AFL. Several weeks later they challenged Coolidge, Curtis, Parker, and former United States Senator John W. Weeks—who publicly asserted that the police department had done much for the benefit of the patrolmen—to debate the following six topics with anybody the
others might select before a bipartisan group of citizens interested in getting at the facts:
Who is responsible for the strike of the Boston policemen?
What was done to prevent it?
What was done to protect the lives and property of Boston citizens?
Did Commissioner Curtis grant relief to the policemen of Boston as stated by the Hon. John W. Weeks and if so what did that relief really amount to?
Should the striking policemen be restored to their jobs?
Are the striking Boston policemen deserters or traitors?
To this challenge there was no reply either from Pemberton Square or the State House.
Interest in the police strike would have subsided much sooner if it had not been for the November election, but with Coolidge inevitably cast as the law-and-order candidate, the strike became the central, in fact the sole, issue of the campaign. By pre-empting the conservatives and the moderates, the governor forced his opponent into an increasingly radical position. That acute Democratic journalist Michael Hennessy considered Coolidge “easily the most popular public figure in the State,” whereas Long “was quite generally supported by the leaders of the police strike and their friends.” The New York Times correspondent went even further, holding that among Long’s adherents were “all the Bolsheviki, the Soviets, the I.W.W…. the striking policemen and all their disorderly followers.” Charles Baxter of the Republican State Committee predicted that Coolidge would win by as much as fifty thousand votes.
Suffering from the after-effects of influenza, Coolidge made only a few speeches during the campaign. In the clipped generalities that came so readily to him, he defended his strike stand as if he were more concerned with the principles of free government than with party politics. “The forces of law and order may be dissipated,” he told an applauding Republican State Convention; “they may be defeated; but as long as I am their commander-in-chief, they will not be surrendered.” To an audience gathered to honor Theodore Roosevelt’s sixty-first birthday, he grew even more emphatic. “We are facing an issue which knows no party,” he said. “It is not new. That issue is the supremacy of the law. On this issue America has never made but one decision.” He did not attack Long. He did not so much as mention his name. Only at the end of the campaign did he refer to “a rash man … seeking to gain the honor of office by trafficking in disorder.” To his fellow Republicans he explained that “the issue is perfectly plain. The government is seeking to prevent a condition which would at once destroy all labor unions and all else that is the foundation of civilization, by maintaining the authority and sanctity of the law. When that goes, all goes. It costs something, but it is the cheapest thing that can be bought.” His earlier hesitancies forgotten, he insisted that once the policemen had struck he could give no “aid and comfort … to support their evil doing.” Yet, he continued, he was no foe of labor; in fact his administration had more than any other in the state’s history “passed laws for the protection and encouragement of trade unions.”
The rare speeches that Coolidge did make were received with tremendous enthusiasm. A decade later he wrote in his Autobiography: “Though I was hampered by an attack of influenza and spoke but three or four times, I was able to make the issue plain even beyond the confines of Massachusetts…. I felt at the time the speeches I made and the statements I issued had a clearness of thought and revealed a power I had not been able to express, which confirmed my belief that when duty comes to us, with it a power comes to enable us to perform it.”
The Democratic platform had neither condemned nor condoned the strike, but the Democrats found it a touchy issue, one they preferred to keep at arm’s length. They went so far as to admit that the police were wrong in leaving their post but balanced that by condemning Coolidge for his failure to protect the lives and property of the city of Boston. Long himself was more intemperate, stumping the state, and in increasingly violent language accusing Coolidge and Curtis of deliberately goading the police into striking. “Governor Coolidge,” he told one audience, “has shown himself to be the most helpless and incompetent governor that our state has ever had.” Nearly a hundred members of the policemen’s union campaigned for Long with desperate fervor, traveling about the state to interrupt Coolidge rallies and heckle the speakers and visiting factories to urge the workers to “get Coolidge” on election day. Their wives and relatives formed a Women’s Committee for Public Safety to stir public opinion in favor of the discharged men and to drum up votes for Long. Nevertheless, Long for some time avoided saying whether or not he favored reinstating the police. Finally Chairman Herman Hormel of Boston’s Republican City Committee pinned him down. Hormel demanded flatly to know whether he as governor would restore the policemen to their old posts. Long at last came out and said that he would.
In the last weeks of the campaign Long, stung by Coolidge’s steady disregard of his challenges, played the rabble-rouser. He promised if elected to reinstate the struck policemen and remove Curtis, to give all veterans of the World War a year’s pay, and to abolish the poll tax and force the rich to make up the difference in revenue. Coolidge, he charged, was the governor for Standard Oil and the beef trust, a coward who had hidden away during the crucial stages of the strike, then afterward used “Prussian methods” to deal with it. As Long ranted, many of the Democrats who heard him deserted their party. The supporters of Colonel Gaston had in any case never forgiven Long for usurping the nomination in 1918 and were only waiting for a chance to even the score. Democratic papers such as the New York Times, the New York World, the Boston Post, and the Springfield Republican crossed party lines to endorse Coolidge. From all over the country attention again focused on Massachusetts, where, it seemed, the final act of Law versus Anarchy was about to be played out. Even the New Republic—besides the Nation the only journal that had any use for the striking police or doubts about Coolidge—felt that Massachusetts held the chief interest of the nation on election day. In the last hours of the campaign ex-President Taft came on to speak for Coolidge as did Governor Bartlett of New Hampshire and Allen of Kansas and Senator Poindexter of Washington. Republican elders Elihu Root and Nicholas Murray Butler telegraphed their support. Mayor Ole Hanson called from Seattle to tell the Republican State Committee that “the people of Massachusetts must stand by Coolidge.” Senator Lodge, masking his personal distaste for Coolidge, struck a Verdun stance at the election eve rally in Tremont Temple, declaring dramatically that “they shall not pass!” Republican leaders were now predicting that Coolidge would carry the state by a hundred thousand votes.
On Sunday, November 2, two days before the election, sermons on the virtues of Coolidge resounded from Boston pulpits. The local papers each carried a full-page admonition that “THE NATION WATCHES,” under which were printed the names of a dozen governors from Maine to California who were endorsing the Massachusetts governor. Next day an advertisement appeared in the form of a collage of the headlines of the Herald, Post, Globe and American, as they appeared during the strike. Above it windswept letters proclaimed, “REMEMBER SEPTEMBER THE 9TH,” while at the bottom there loomed the warning, “DON’T LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN! FOR LA W AND ORDER VOTE FOR CALVIN COOLIDGE.”
On election day itself the Herald ran a cartoon of a steamer, “The Pilot Who Weathered the Storm” in which the frail slack-muscled governor was transformed into a sturdy figure in oilskins standing rather oddly in the bow rather than on the bridge of the steamer Law and Order. Not to be outdone, the Los Angeles Times ran an eight-column headline, “REDS RUN ELECTION ISSUES—BATTLE IN BAY STATE,” and asked “Shall the state of Massachusetts be governed by law or mob rule?”
From the earliest returns on election night, it was clear that Coolidge was winning, but even the Republican optimists were astonished at the size of his victory. Carrying the entire Republican ticket with him, he defeated Long with 317,774 votes to the latter’s 192,673, a majority of 125,101 and one of the most sweeping electoral triumphs in the history of the Commonwea
lth. That evening, when sufficient returns had come in to make his victory certain, he looked up for a moment at his associates with the thinnest of smiles. “Three words tell the result,” he said in his most aphoristic manner. “Massachusetts is American!”
With the result finally tabulated, congratulations again poured in from all over the country. “A shining triumph for straight Americanism,” the Transcript called the election. On the other side of the United States, the Los Angeles Times hailed it as “a defeat of the Soviets.” Charles Evans Hughes, ex-President Taft, Will Hays, and other Republican luminaries added their good wishes. The Herald quoted from fifteen leading newspapers, all of them hailing Coolidge’s victory as the triumph of law and order and the vindication of conservative principles against “violence and wild innovations.” Republicans and Democrats in both houses of Congress applauded the Massachusetts outcome. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., wired that “the American people have vindicated themselves by their support of you.” Governor William Sproul of Pennsylvania found the result “a body blow to radicalism and irresponsible democracy.” Nicholas Murray Butler thought it “a truly impressive victory of American principles.” From his sick bed in the White House the stricken Wilson telegraphed: “I congratulate you upon your election as a victory for law and order. When that is the issue, all Americans stand together.”
A City in Terror Page 25
