A City in Terror

by Rosalind Russell

  On election day the state guard was still on duty at the polling places, motor corps guardsmen with white hat bands still directed traffic, but elsewhere in the city the brown uniforms were thinning out. From the original 4768 guardsmen called into service the total had increased in two weeks to 7567 officers and men. But by the end of September, as the threat of a general strike passed, the adjutant general had curtailed the enlistment drive.

  “The Pilot Who Weathered the Storm”

  With its uniformed presence the state guard had brought a brief renewal of wartime fervor and excitement, as if the guardsmen were the soldier boys of 1917–1918 all over again. Hospitality huts reopened on the Common. The YMCA, Salvation Army, and other social organizations distributed coffee, doughnuts, candy, gum, cigarettes, magazines, and newspapers, just as they had done during the war. There were state guard entertainments several times a week, as well as passes to the Shubert, Colonial, Boston, and Plymouth theaters. On September 21 a three-hour benefit performance was held at the Colonial Theatre with vaudeville turns, variety acts, and community singing. General Parker and his staff attended. Anything the guardsmen did was newsworthy. For weeks the daily papers were full of the casual details of what it was like to eat and live in an armory, what the men did for recreation, their various Sunday religious services, the small accidents and incidents of barrack life. Minor disturbances were blown up into major human-interest stories. There were special articles on the men’s backgrounds, their families, and the personal hardships brought on by their enlistments.

  Among the men themselves something of the holiday atmosphere of a summer encampment persisted. In their spare time those with a knack for such things wrote jingles and ditties or made up songs. There was usually one versifier to each company. After the messing problems were straightened out, guard life became freer as it became more routine. Many of the older men and those with families grew restive as the weeks passed, but most of the younger unmarried ones, in spite of the confinement and the incidence of “armory bronchitis,” enjoyed their temporary authority. Harry Cross, now quartered at the Naval Service Club at the foot of Beacon Street, was one of them. He had been shifted to traffic duty just outside the South Station, conveniently near the Wentworth Lunch. Whenever four or five men came out of the lunchroom together, he would bring his rifle to the port and order them to “break it up!” He also kept people from loitering in doorways. At first he was on a daily eight-hour shift, but this was changed to four hours on and eight hours off. Every other week he had a forty-eight-hour pass. Sometimes a striking policeman would come up to him and in a quite friendly way give him a few tips on the district. There was no trouble at all.

  The usual mishaps continued. A guardsman at Scollay Square accidentally fired off his rifle through a Painless Dentist sign, an incident his comrades labeled the Battle of the Signs. Ever since autos had first appeared in any number, Boston acquired a well-deserved reputation as the home city of the anarchic pedestrian. This, General Parker now decided to alter. One morning just after midnight the First Motor Corps spent four hours painting white lines at street corners from curb to curb—“Dead Lines” they were called, where motor vehicles must stop to let pedestrians cross. Crossing at any other point, Parker announced at guard headquarters next day, was forbidden. Jaywalking would cease!

  The guardsmen’s most pervasive complaint was that their families were suffering. Then, too, some employers were hinting they might have to discharge their absent guardsmen unless they returned to work. The adjutant general threatened legal action against such unpatriotic taskmasters. As for the families, the Fund for the Defenders of Public Safety had reached $500,514.22 by October 24.* Over a hundred thousand dollars were dispersed to the families of 516 guardsmen. At the same time, the trustees announced that they would give a $200 bonus to each nonstriking policeman. All the guardsmen had a flattering sense of having done their duty. They agreed fully with Governor Coolidge when he addressed a group of them at Faneuil Hall, conveying the people’s gratitude for their service, which “spoke more eloquently than words of the dignity and strength of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” The mayor and other speakers said the same thing in more ornate language. In a more tangible expression of gratitude, the governor called a special session of the legislature, to raise the pay of the state guard from $1.55 to $4. a day and to make this retroactive from the day the guardsmen reported for duty.

  On October 24 the guard received its first reduction in strength. Almost half the men were released. At Newton’s Company A the men drew lots, those left behind calling themselves the Army of Occupation. Thirty-eight men remained in the South Armory of Company A’s original seventy-one. On November 16 came a second cut and this time twenty-seven men marched away, leaving eleven of Company A in the Second Army of Occupation. On November 23 after a third cut, only three men remained, and in a few days they were ordered to their home station and placed in reserve. Finally on December 21, following a mustering-out parade of the First Motor Corps on Boston Common, the last units of the state guard were demobilized after 102 days of consecutive duty.

  The day after his re-election, Coolidge wrote that he was willing to help the unemployed police to jobs “where they can bring forth works meet for repentance.” He and Curtis encouraged the chamber of commerce to find places for the financially pressed patrolmen, few of whom had had any outside skills and many of whom now found themselves unable to support their often large families or keep up their rent or mortgage payments. The chamber set up a special committee to assist them. However, the men in their pride and anger wanted no “charity” from an organization they had found so hostile, and by a unanimous vote their union rejected the chamber’s aid, making this statement: “Now you offer to get us jobs while at the same time you condemn us. If we are not fit for our jobs as policemen, we are not fit for any job and if you think you can put us in the position of accepting charity from you after the hypocrisy and double-crossing you have indulged in with us, all we can say is that you don’t yet know the kind of men we are.”

  Nevertheless, Coolidge continued surreptitiously to do what he could for the stranded policemen, and they with quiet reluctance accepted his assistance. They had not many places to turn. Employers generally were reluctant to hire them. Some of the men even conceived the notion of taking examinations for the new police force, but this notion was at once vetoed by the Civil Service Commission. Except for the six patrolmen who did not join the union and go on strike until after the initial walkout and who managed to retain their jobs on a technicality, none of the strikers were ever taken back. On October 15 at Fay Hall, the Women’s Committee for Public Safety heard the English expatriate, Harvard professor Harold Laski, defend the striking police and denounce Curtis as the real deserter. But Laski’s was a solitary voice. Labor support remained tepid. Not long after Coolidge’s re-election the Boston firemen returned their union charter to the AFL’s International Association of Firefighters. In a desperate reversal Vahey filed a petition with the Massachusetts Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus to compel Curtis to restore the nineteen discharged officers to the force, claiming that the commissioner’s Rule 35 was “invalid and unreasonable, and contrary to the Constitution of the United States.” On November 7 the court denied the petition. There were occasional briefer flurries. The day of Governor Coolidge’s second inauguration, Samuel Gompers spoke at a luncheon of the Boston Chamber of Commerce and caused a sedate uproar when he accused Curtis of being responsible for the strike. A month later, on February 18, 1920, Feeney, testifying before the Legislative Committee on Metropolitan Affairs, gave Peters the credit for quelling the strike troubles and told the legislators that the policemen’s union would have accepted the Storrow compromise plan.

  The police union lingered on in a state of dormancy. At a meeting on February 22, McInnes resigned as president, saying that he was returning to his trade of bricklayer. In December the union became the Association of the Former Police of the C
ity of Boston. Later it was absorbed into the Boston Social Club. Long before this, a majority of the discharged policemen had found other jobs for better or worse, though in the beginning generally for worse. Some became bank guards in the city, the State Street Trust Company alone refusing to employ them. Others joined the police forces in other parts of the state or even outside Massachusetts. For most of them the need of a job was so pressing that they took anything that came to hand. Thanks to another discharged colleague at Station 15 who had been a steam fitter, Frederick Claus became a steam fitter’s assistant at Wellesley College, then a few months later a milkman for the Whiting Dairy Company. James Long, with two children at home, went round knocking on doors asking for work only to be turned down as a “striking cop” until finally he was taken on as a driver for the Bond Bread Bakery. Two children would have been only a prelude for Iron Mike Fitzgibbon’s large brood in Mattapan. To provide for them he managed to get a job as a meatcutter on Blue Hill Avenue while all the time looking for another police post. Many were not even as lucky as Iron Mike. Walter Crocket was broken by his discharge. “He was never the same man again,” his fifteen-year-old daughter Mildred wrote years later. “He was so proud of that uniform.” For months he could find nothing to do, and to keep the family going his oldest daughter, Alice, had to leave high school to work as a messenger girl in a hospital at $7.50 a week. All he could get in the end was a job as an attendant at a Jenney filling station. Hundreds of the discharged men had similar fates. Yet though they had cast off the union, they still kept their cause alive in the Boston Social Club, and they refused to give up the hope of one day being vindicated.

  Of the three principals in the police strike, Commissioner Curtis had the briefest further history, for he died on March 28, 1922. After the strike, in spite of his increasingly grave heart condition, he continued at his Pemberton Square office, seldom missing a day. With the zeal of a younger and healthier man, he reformed and reorganized his department. Every applicant had to be interviewed by him personally, every discharge had to be initiated by him. After his death the Transcript printed under his sternly Roman features: “No soldier in battle ever made a more gallant sacrifice than the head of the Boston Police Department, whose long career in public service was one of splendid achievement.”

  On a chill and glowering March afternoon, Curtis, in his office, had a sudden heart seizure that he must have sensed was fatal. Stoically saying nothing to anyone, he summoned his car and had himself driven home. On their reaching the house the chauffeur tried to help him out, but Curtis brushed him aside. “Don’t take my arm until we get inside!” he ordered. Somehow he managed to walk up the steps unaided. Once the door closed behind him he collapsed, and died a few minutes later.

  In the aftermath of the strike, while the state guard still patrolled the streets of Boston, the Union Club became an unofficial mess for its higher-ranking officers. General Parker and his staff dined there. At mealtimes the coat hooks in the dressing room were weighed down with Sam Browne belts and pistol holsters. Governor Coolidge arrived almost daily for lunch, accompanied by an extra bodyguard for the emergency. While he ate, his two guards would wait in the reception room with their revolvers on the table. A new attendant, George Simpson, one day gave the thin-lipped governor the customary brass check for his overcoat, which he indignantly refused to take. A governor was a governor! Coolidge’s outside popularity did not penetrate within the club walls. Never did he speak to the waiters or any of the other help except to give an order. “Lemon-puss,” they used to call him behind his back.

  The police strike and Coolidge’s stunning election victory left him a figure of national interest and national goodwill. More than once during the winter he was mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. Charles S. Baxter wrote in the November 5 edition of the Transcript that “Governor Coolidge now looms so large before the nation with his wonderful triumph and so impressive a verdict by the Massachusetts electorate behind him that he must be given serious consideration by the Republican Party in the selection of its national leaders for the presidential campaign of next year.”

  Frank Stearns opened his heart and his pocketbook at the prospect. Even before the election he had arranged with Houghton Mifflin to publish a selection of Coolidge’s speeches under the title Have Faith in Massachusetts, and he himself bought over sixty-five thousand copies to distribute to libraries, schools, newspaper editors, and above all politicians. After the election he opened a Coolidge-for-President headquarters in Washington and was preparing to open one in Chicago when Coolidge issued a flat statement that he refused to enter any contest for delegates. He did not, he said, wish the governor’s office to be used “for manipulative purposes.” “I have not been and am not a candidate for president,” he announced, to Stearn’s chagrin. Yet the Massachusetts governor remained an enigma. Did he, after all, have secret presidential ambitions? Did he think by remaining an enigma he might be drafted? In his Autobiography he wrote, “I did not wish to use the office of Governor to prosecute a campaign for nomination to some other office.” The Herald observed shrewdly: “Although Governor Coolidge has withdrawn as a presidential candidate, he remains available for dark horse purposes…. You can never tell what will happen at a convention. The Governor is among the possibilities.”

  As the months of 1920 moved on toward the Republican National Convention, General Leonard Wood was unquestionably the leading Republican candidate. A widely popular independent-conservative, scornful of politicians, the friend of the late Theodore Roosevelt, and the choice of the Roosevelt family, his nomination seemed inevitable. Branches of the Leonard Wood League were springing up all over the country. William Allen White saw him as “the political man of the hour.” The pols, the party wheelhorses, and the old guard of the McKinley era did not. Wood might collect more delegates than any other candidate, but the politicians would do their best to see that he lacked a majority. The general’s closest rival was the reform governor of Illinois, Frank Lowden, who was hampered not only by his independence of the party bosses but by his wealth and his marriage to the daughter of that notably unpopular capitalist George M. Pullman. Astute political observers saw the Wood and Lowden forces fighting each other to a standstill at the convention, and the weary delegates turning to a dark-horse candidate in the ensuing stalemate. Harry Daugherty, that wily Ohio political confidence man, was the first to sense this possibility. Long before the convention Daugherty had traveled round the country buttonholing Republican state leaders and city and county bosses, praising Wood and Lowden and local favorite sons to the skies while at the same time collecting second and third and fourth choices among prospective delegates for his own favored candidate, the amiably insignificant Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio.

  A few days before the convention’s opening the Literary Digest poll placed Wood unassailably at the head of the list of possible nominees. Harding rated sixth, Coolidge seventh. But once the convention met, Daugherty’s long-odds hunch proved uncannily accurate. The delegates, during four days in the smoke-heavy flatulent air of Chicago’s barn-like Coliseum, with the temperature often above a hundred, sweated in frustration as Wood and Lowden canceled each other out in ballot after ballot. Sour and disgusted, short of funds and short of patience, the men on the floor had come to feel it might as well be the innocuous Harding, the second-third-fourth choice, as anyone. It was a feeling shared by a group of senate elders whose inconsequent discussion that night at the Blackstone Hotel would give rise to the “smoke-filled room” myth. But as George Harvey, in whose room the discussions were held, explained afterward, “Harding was nominated because there was nothing against him and because the delegates wanted to go home.”

  The demonstration following Harding’s nomination the next day was more of relief than enthusiasm. Most of the delegates nursed the frustrated image of their own rejected candidate. There was still the minor matter of the vice-presidential candidate to consider. During the roll call on the final
ballot, the senate hierarchs had huddled in a small alcove concealed under the speakers’ stand and decided on the old Bull Mooser Senator Irvine Lenroot of Wisconsin. Besides being a trusted senator, Lenroot would add a progressive balance to Harding’s machine conservatism. It was arranged that Senator Medill McCormick of Illinois would make the nominating speech, to be seconded by H. L. Remmel, an old-line politician from Arkansas. The word was passed along to the delegates, some of whom were already drifting out of the darkening hall.

  Senator McCormick duly mounted the platform and in a perfunctory two-minute speech nominated Lenroot. The florid old-pro Remmel seconded the nomination. With contemptuous indifference the permanent chairman, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, turned over the gavel to Ohio’s hog-calling ex-governor Frank Willis; then he and McCormick left the platform. The vast Coliseum echoed to the tramp and shuffle of feet and the clatter of chairs as more and more of the delegates and onlookers in the galleries made their way toward the exits.

  Scarcely anyone could catch what the speakers were saying, nor did it seem to matter. Suddenly on the far side of the hall a stocky, red-faced man bellowed for recognition. Affably, the substitute chairman recognized Wallace McCamant of Oregon, assuming that his was merely one more seconding voice for Lenroot.

  There is a moment when the whip cracks and the animal, instead of jumping, turns on the ringmaster. Chairman Willis did not recognize that moment until it was too late. The voice from the floor was no casual approval of an accomplished fact. McCamant had angrily talked the matter over with his delegation and decided to have none of Lenroot. In the last year he had been sent three complimentary copies of Have Faith in Massachusetts. Coolidge was the man he thought of now—“Law and Order” Coolidge.