Coolidge (28 page)

Coolidge then alerted Washington. “The entire state guard of Massachusetts has been called out,” he repeated to the secretary of war, Newton Baker, and the acting secretary of the navy, Franklin Roosevelt, in a telegram sent at 11:00
A.M.
on September 11, around the time that Barnes was shot. “There are rumors of a very general strike. I wish you to hold yourself in readiness to render assistance from forces under your control immediately on appeal which I may be forced to make to the President. Calvin Coolidge, Governor.”

If Wilson was playing the diplomat, Coolidge was now a dictator in earnest. One of the first announcements was that the guards arriving at the city were to get steel helmets, a threatening upgrade from the policemen’s leather head coverings.

Even as he sent his telegrams from the State House, Coolidge could see the roughhousers and gamblers as they played on Boston Common. Tremont Street was shuttered and barricaded from the Touraine Hotel to Park Street. Through heavy curtains or around shutters and wood, he could see watchmen. The guardsmen now patrolling the city found operating difficult. The electric lights worked, which made the streets brighter, but the telephones sometimes did not; Company A of the 11th Regiment saw no point in using them, “especially since,” as one member of the company later wrote, “we expected a strike of the young ladies on the switchboard, anyway.” Particularly compelling were the small storekeepers who could not afford a guard. A man later recalled that small vendors who could not afford their own private guards implored Company A to spare them a guard or two. “A timid shopkeeper,” one regiment soldier later recalled, “dashed out of his establishment and hailed the Captain: ‘I vant a soger,’ ” a soldier, “ ‘I vant a soger for mine store.’ ” In Jamaica Plain a young man, Henry Grote, age eighteen, was shot and killed by soldiers raiding a dice game. The tension built when word that Richard D. Reemts, a striking policeman, had been shot and killed as well. That night, that of September 11, police required pedestrians to stay three paces away from buildings. By the end of the day a total of six dead were counted. As many as a hundred people were wounded. Others were hurt, less seriously, by the various projectiles of the conflict: bricks, cobblestones, rocks. All day long that Thursday the Central Labor Union, the umbrella group for all the unions, held meetings. All day long the city waited for reports; it was from this office that a general strike order might emanate.

Bostonians were shocked at their own city. There were rumors that the next stage in a general strike was coming, that the strike would now spread to the powerhouse, which provided electricity for the city. At some point Camp Devens sent a wagon train with supplies and ammunition. Early in the year, Vermont’s state legislature had voted to help Coolidge by subsidizing the return of soldiers for the Yankee Division parade. Now Vermont promised to send 20,000 rounds of ammunition and 400 riot guns, a silent tribute to Coolidge. Reporters started calling to interview experts about what might be happening and why. What had happened to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s hub, the Puritans’ City on a Hill?

One reporter spoke with Floyd Allport, a young Harvard professor of psychology. Allport said, as the reporter paraphrased his words, “While the public does not realize it, there is a certain percentage of the population of every large city which will loot, destroy and institute mob rule at the first sign that they may do so uninterrupted by the law.” Late in the day, Coolidge followed up with a note to Police Commissioner Curtis. “Proceed in the performance of your duties,” Coolidge wrote. Franklin Roosevelt wired back that the Navy Department would help if the president ordered it to do so. A naval provost was appointed to keep order at the Navy Yard, in case the sailors mutinied. A naval craft was brought over with electricians who would be ready to jump into the plant and operate it.

Overnight, the new troops showed they were serious, mounting machine guns at the old station houses. The roster of special officers appointed kept growing. That day there were 270 applications for pistol and revolver licenses, nine times more than normal.
The Christian Science Monitor
underscored that the stakes in Boston were far higher than they had seemed even on Monday or Tuesday: “As viewed here the issue in Boston goes farther than a mere dispute over the recognition or non recognition of a union.” Friday felt like a turning point. The lady telephone workers had announced a formal vote on whether to endorse the police; a “yea” from them would signal the possibility of a general strike, which, one paper noted, “would paralyze the life of the city.” That Friday night too, the union of the Fire Department, much beloved of the city, would also vote on whether to strike in sympathy. Storrow, angry that his compromises had not been accepted before the strike, wrote, “There has been a rumor around town, fomented by an erroneous editorial in one of the papers, that after the men struck the Citizens’ Committee was still trying to reach a compromise.” That was not true, he said. Of the men, he added, “of course they were wrong, but most of these men have been serving us faithfully for years.” There might have been a time, he added, that some agreement could be struck, but now “it has gone by.”

Again, Coolidge confronted a choice. The obvious move would be to declare victory and then give ground a bit, finding a way to reinstate the policemen on his own terms. James Timilty, Coolidge’s old friend from the Irish crowd, was sending signals that there would be no general strike. The law made it clear that Coolidge might not only take over but also call the striking policemen to return, and if they failed to do so, fine or imprison them for three months. This first option was highly attractive because it conveyed authority yet spared the policemen’s jobs—some would come back. The reality, that they were losing not only a job but a trade, was sinking in with the men. The second option for Coolidge was to stand firm a few more days, and then give in and negotiate with the striking police.

Coolidge chose neither. Instead he hardened, etching out, finally, a line, for himself and Curtis. The guards would stay and the police could never come back. What’s more, Coolidge put this new idea in the old language, that of Garman and his textbooks, rather than the modern labor-capital lexicon of Wilson and Gompers: “The action of the police in leaving their posts of duty is not a strike. It is a desertion.” “There is nothing to arbitrate,” he said, “nothing to compromise. In my personal opinion there are no conditions under which the men can return to the force.”

No one had expected this. “Cops Want to Work Again, Turned Down,” read the
Wyoming State Tribune
of that evening. Now seven thousand troops were patrolling, and modern electric searchlights were trained on the spaces outside the department stores. There was the new sound of cavalry on Boston’s narrow streets; the Yankee division veterans and the trench helmets that some of the guard wore made Boston suddenly feel like France. Now Coolidge found reinforcement from an unexpected source. The same day that he had advocated conciliation, September 11, Wilson had traveled on his train from Billings to Helena, Montana. There, later in the day, hearing about events in Boston, he had changed his tone abruptly, coming down on the Boston police like a ton of cobblestones: “I want to say this, 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,” Wilson said at the Helena Theater. A policeman had “no right to prefer any private advantage to the public safety.”

Wilson had suddenly turned feisty, though the timing of the news cycle meant that most easterners would not get the news of the shift until Friday night, or even later. Later, Wilson hardened his position further: “In my judgment,”
The Christian Science Monitor
reported the president saying, “the obligation of a policeman is as sacred as the obligation of a soldier. He is a public servant. . . . I hope that that lesson will be burned in so that it will never again be forgotten.”

Such presidential inconsistency earned the scorn of
The Wall Street Journal
’s editors. “The American Federation of Labor is depriving the Law of its right hand,” the editors wrote on Saturday, “and Mr. Wilson, by temporizing with the unionized, while he talks valiantly to Boston is hoisting the flag of surrender.” The weekend was coming, and this might spell good or ill for Coolidge. But it was clear that what he had done would receive careful consideration. At every church, a minister was preparing a sermon. At Amherst, Meiklejohn was drafting the remarks he would deliver to the students in chapel. Amherst was full again, and the fraternities were back. He was going to talk about his summer in Europe. But he would also mention the strike: “Here we are having our police strike, our railway strike, and threatened with a coal strike. They have them all and we have to learn from their experience.”

As the weekend commenced, the entire American labor movement drew its collective breath. The striking Boston police, sensing that they were slipping, sought desperately to bring the debate back to what everyone had conceded were real grievances. The editors at the
Boston Labor World
, supportive of the strikers, penned an editorial making the best case for the patrolmen, and pointing out that their weekly wage of $28 a week was scarcely enough. They published it on Saturday:

Taking the depreciation of the dollar as officially stated a few weeks ago, this is the equivalent roughly of $15 a week in 1914. By any stretch of the imagination, could anyone, no matter how biased, claim such a figure to be fair to a married man engaged in the thankless job of protecting his fellow citizens? Leaving out all pretty theories and grandiloquent phrases about their duty to the State, can a man, single or married, even live on such a wage? No; he manages to exist, that is all.

The paper went on, “In all fairness, Governor Coolidge, Mayor Peters, Police Commissioner Curtis, Citizens of Boston, how would you live on such a wage?” That day, the men finally voted to go back to work. But by the time they made their offer, a door was closing: Curtis collected a ruling from the attorney general that the police had vacated their posts.

On Saturday, Bostonians were still concerned enough to arm themselves; that day there were 337 pistol or revolver licenses granted and thirteen new special officers appointed. The crucial telephone ladies hesitated in the end and would not vote to join the police. In the midst of it all, as Coolidge was evaluating the situation, he received a telegram from Senator Lodge: “If I can be of any service whatever here command me.” Coolidge telegraphed back, “Deeply appreciate your friendly offer of assistance. Had no doubt at any time of your hearty support.”

Next it was Curtis’s turn to move: the commissioner officially discharged every policeman who had walked off the job. Learning, later on Saturday, of Curtis’s action, the striking policemen gathered to meet and voted $1,000 in pension from their meager funds for the widow of Richard Reemts, a policeman who had been killed early on. McInnes proudly warned that he and the other policemen were not going to bow to opposition led by “money interests.” “In the homes and the hearts of the Boston Policeman’s union, we are undaunted.” The men left the building singing “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag.”

The men probably expected backup from Gompers, but now Gompers was elusive, as Wilson had been. His father had just died and the steel strike, his great challenge that autumn, loomed. Perhaps unaware of the blanket discharge of the Boston police, Gompers finally sent a telegram from New York parroting Wilson’s old line: the right thing to do was to await a labor-management conference in October. Why not ask “the authorities who issued the order that its enforcement be deferred until after the Presidential conference”? Gompers spoke out publicly to blame Curtis but did not fully endorse or support the union. He warned Curtis that policemen, hearing that they would not be rehired, might show the city what true violence was like; they might suffer untold miseries without work. “I suppose he is willing to assume the responsibility for the consequences of his action,” he muttered ominously to the press of Curtis.

Next Gompers turned his attentions to Coolidge, whom he had carefully spared from criticism. The unionization of the police was “a ‘natural reflex’ of the futile attempts by the policemen to improve their working conditions,” he said. Curtis was doing damage, he warned, possibly “openly antagonizing the great American labor movement.” In lines scripted as much for Wilson’s ears as for those of Coolidge, Gompers wrote, “If the authorities give no consideration for the human side of the question or to the advice and the suggestion which I had the honor to make, then whatever betide is upon the head of the authorities responsible therefor.” Yet later Saturday, Gompers drafted a telegram for Coolidge, underscoring his own commitment to law and order and blaming Curtis yet again: “While I am not a responsible public official I assure you that I am as much concerned in the maintenance of law and order as anyone possibly could be.” After all, Gompers went on, “the right of the policemen to organize has been denied, a right which has heretofore never been questioned.” Gompers was preparing for his father’s funeral. He shipped his telegram to Coolidge late in the evening, at 11:37
P.M.

Gompers received no reply that Saturday night. The next morning, a bright one, dawned with no reply either. Curtis, unrelenting, was planning raises for junior policemen who were in the force to $1,400 effective September 18. Company A of the 10th Regiment, which had slept on blankets on the floor of the South Armory, was now stationed on the Boston Common, policing an area that included R. H. Stearns. On Sunday morning the shopwindows were still covered with boards and the doorways with barbed wire. But the rest of the city was ready for recovery. The replacements began to conduct traffic as McInnes had.

And now, finally, Coolidge spoke back to Gompers and the country. His medium was the telegram with all its constraints, including a protocol that treated all punctuation the same, with the word “stop” or the word “comma.” The legal constraints of any response from the governor to the union leader were there as well. The result was a three-hundred-word barrage. The stops and commas of the telegram punctuation gave the effect of artillery fire: