Nineteen Nineteen

The Boston Police Strike in the Context of American Labor

Introduction | The A.F. of L. | "Bolshevism" | The General Strike | Conclusions | Bibliography

Chapter 1: Introduction

At 5:45 p.m. on Tuesday, September 9, 1919, at the beginning of the evening shift, 1,117 Boston policemen stopped work. The proximate cause of this walkout was a labor dispute that had been brewing for a little over a month, concerning the policemen's attempt to form a union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The immediate consequence was about 48 hours of looting and rioting in downtown Boston and South Boston plus sporadic violence over the next few days. The strike occupies a place of medium to high obscurity in American history. If the average American has heard of it, he probably learned about the strike either as the event which launched Calvin Coolidge into national prominence and eventually made him President, or as a milestone in public-sector unionism, an issue which recently gained attention during the 1983 strike of air-traffic controllers. Beyond these two claims to fame, the strike fascinates many because of its suggestion that the difference between what we call "civilization" and a reversion to a Hobbesian brutality is indeed a thin blue line.

This essay is about none of these issues. Of course, if one is interested in the history of public-sector unionism or the career of Calvin Coolidge, it helps to have as deep an understanding of the strike as possible, and this essay seeks to enlarge that understanding beyond the level of current scholarship on the subject. Although I will discuss the effects of the strike, and the long-term history of the Boston police, I am primarily interested in the strike itself, and the reasons it developed as it did. I will begin with the discontented policemen and ask why they chose the tactics they did in their attempt to better their lives. I will look at the actions of the government officials whose task it was to respond to the challenges of the police force and ask why these officials made the decisions they did, before and during the strike. And I will examine the behavior of organized labor on the local and national levels, again attempting to explain the crucial decisions that shaped the outcome of the strike. And to explain requires context.

A Very Short History of the Boston Police Strike

This essay is not intended to be a complete, chronological history of the strike. That task has been more or less accomplished by Frederick Manuel Koss's thorough, if limited in scope, dissertation on the subject and by Francis Russell's book, A City in Terror, a lively, if not always entirely credible, narrative. Nevertheless, it will be necessary to provide a brief chronological account of the events of August and September 1919--the two months during which all the key events of the strike took place--because the reader is not expected to be familiar with them. 1

There was in 1919 and is today a general consensus that the Boston policemen of 1919 had a great deal about which to complain.2 Their substantive grievances fell into three categories: hours, and working conditions, and most importantly pay. After getting a raise in 1913, the policemen had asked for another raise in 1917 to compensate for the high wartime inflation. In the summer of 1918, they asked for a $200 increase in the patrolmen's annual salary, which was then $1,200. By the time that raise was finally granted in May 1919, steady inflation had eroded buying power so that even with the raise, the policemen were still having difficulty making ends meet. Another point of contention was the long hours the men were forced to work, including special details and a night in the station house each week. Finally, the men objected to the conditions under which they worked, particularly the crowded decrepitude of the station houses. Men had to sleep in beds infested with bedbugs and cockroaches and on the soiled sheets left over from the previous occupant.3 The men's chosen means to voice their complaints was the Boston Social Club, a fraternal organization founded by Police Commissioner Stephen O'Meara in 1906.

On the opposite side of the negotiating table was Police Commissioner Edwin U. Curtis. Curtis had been commissioner since December 1918, when O'Meara, his predecessor, had died. (Prior to O'Meara's appointment in 1906, the police department had been administered by a three-member commission.) Since 1885, police commissioners had been appointed and removed not by the mayor, but by the governor of the Commonwealth, who in 1919 was a laconic Republican named Calvin Coolidge. Though the mayor of Boston helped determine the police department's annual budget, he could not override a decision by the commissioner. Curtis believed himself to be sympathetic to the policemen's demands, 4 but he refused to deal with the Social Club and instead established a Grievance Committee comprised of men from each station.

On August 9, the policemen, through the Social Club, applied for a charter from the American Federation of Labor. Their application was accepted and on the fifteenth they formed Local 16, 807 of the A.F. of L.: the Boston Policemen's Union. On July 29, Curtis had responded to the rumor that the police were seeking a union, by issuing a statement detailing O'Meara's objection to a police union and proclaiming his own. On August 11, he followed this up with an amendment to Rule 35 of the department's Rules and Regulations, barring the policemen from forming any organization within the department with ties to an outside group, except for veterans' groups. This order initiated the showdown that led to the strike: the policemen's insistence on a union clashed with Curtis's demand for obedience.

As the weeks passed, the situation grew tenser. On August 26 and 29, Curtis tried 19 policemen, including the president and other officers of the union, for violation of his amendment to Rule 35. Meanwhile, former police superintendent William Pierce began recruiting a volunteer police force as insurance against a strike. As discussed in Chapter 2, Boston Mayor Andrew J. Peters attempted to effect a settlement between the two sides by forming a Citizens's Committee composed of prominent residents of Boston and its suburbs. This committee drafted a compromise, which Curtis rejected. Saying that the compromise had nothing to do with his legal obligation to punish violators of the anti-union clause of Rule 35, Curtis announced the suspension of the 19 officers he had tried, on Monday, September 8. That evening, the Policemen's Union voted to protest the suspensions by striking at evening roll call the next day: Tuesday, September 9.

The strike took place as scheduled, and nearly three-fourths of the force walked out. As Boston residents absorbed the reality of the policemen's absence, some of the more mischievous among them took the opportunity to engage in petty crimes, such as gambling in public. These crimes grew more serious as the evening advanced, and crowds coalesced in downtown Boston. At about 8 p.m., the crowd broke a cigar-store window and removed the merchandise. This started a frenzy of looting, which swarmed back and forth over Hanover and Washington Streets. Similar violence erupted in South Boston. Checked only by a small coalition of non-striking Boston police, Metropolitan police, and a few private watchmen, the riots continued until about 1:30 a.m.

On Wednesday, Peters and Coolidge together mobilized the entire Massachusetts State Guard, while Pierce readied his volunteers That day, the volunteers had difficulty maintaining order, but by evening the Guard was deployed. Nevertheless, there were several more instances of violence, some fatal, especially in South Boston. By Thursday, the State Guard had pretty much restored order, although there were a few more deaths, and shooting continued on Friday and Saturday. In the process of pacifying the city, the Guard forces killed five residents and wounded several others. Three more were killed by civilians, and dozens were injured and wounded. The riots also destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of property.5

As described in Chapter 3, the nation responded to the events in Boston with shock and horror. In addition to feeling repulsion at the violence that had swept the city, many Americans--particularly newspaper editorial writers--saw the strike as a manifestation of what they called "Bolshevism." In Boston, the immediate concern was not so much whether a red flag would be raised over the State House but whether the city's unions would go on strike in support of the police, touching off an even greater crisis than the one the city had endured. This threat essentially dissolved by September 21. Meanwhile, in the face of public disapproval of their actions and the uncompromising stance of Curtis and Coolidge, the police began considering cutting their losses and returning to work. But when American Federation of Labor President Samuel Gompers sent a telegram to Governor Coolidge asking that the men be reinstated and their grievances negotiated later, he was rebuffed on September 14 by Coolidge's immediately famous reply that "there is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time."

The policemen's defeat came when Curtis succeeded in hiring a new force from the ranks of young World War veterans. By December 13, the commissioner had gotten the new force up to its desired strength. Eight days later, the last State Guard unit was dismissed, bringing Boston back to some semblance of "normalcy." Beyond that December, there were ripples of consequences: the rise of Coolidge to the Vice Presidency and Presidency, the futile attempts of the policemen to get re-hired, and decades in which police unions were unthinkable in this country.

The Historiography of the Boston Police Strike

Although the Boston Police Strike has not inspired major historians to vie with each other to re-interpret it, the small set of works about the strike vary significantly among themselves. The essential differences among these accounts are not ideological, in the sense of Marxist versus non-Marxist interpretations, though the level of sympathy for the policemen varies considerably. Nor do the primary sources used by the authors vary widely, though there is some variance. 6 Rather, the essential distinction between one account and another is the orientation, the angle of approach to the strike. Some accounts are written from the perspective of Calvin Coolidge, others from that of the policemen. This essay does not stick close to any one participant or group of participants in the strike. Instead, it seeks to add another perspective by fitting the strike into the history of organized labor in North America and the position of organized labor--moderate, radical, or somewhere in the middle--in August 1919.

Historians of the Boston Police Strike emphasize various themes as they write about this complex event. The first theme is Calvin Coolidge, who as one of 41 American presidents attracts a fair amount of attention simply for having held the nation's highest office. Because Coolidge's rise to the White House was indisputably a direct result of the Boston Police Strike, those writing articles and full-length biographies of Coolidge must confront the issue of the strike. In many cases, this comes down to a thumbs-up, thumbs-down verdict on Coolidge's conduct, a verdict which may be appealed. In 1938 and 1940, Mark Allen White and Claude M. Fuess published adulatory biographies confirming Coolidge's heroism during the strike. 7 Later writers, notably Francis Russell, have questioned the extent to which Coolidge deserved the sparkling evaluation that won him the presidency. 8 Most recently, Thomas B. Silver has attempted to restore the gleam of Coolidge's armor in the face of such detractors as the skeptical Donald R. McCoy. 9

Early in this century a group of historians blamed the Civil War on a "blundering generation." Similarly, some investigators of the Boston Police Strike have tended to emphasize the combination of mistakes, by Coolidge, Peters, Curtis, labor leaders, and policemen, that was necessary for the disaster to occur. The best example of this perspective comes from Randolph Bartlett, who comes right out and says, "the strike was an American tragedy of blunders." 10 Richard Lyons, writing twelve years later, echoes this view, though less explicitly. He sprinkles praise and blame around, suggesting that each major figure in the strike could have behaved better or worse.11

Robert K. Murray's Red Scare, published in 1955 during the height of the McCarthy era, provides a broader view. 12 Although he only devotes one chapter to the strike, Murray is perhaps the most influential interpreter of the event, for his emphasis on the fear of radicalism has been repeated by most subsequent commentators. In his argument, the strike was just one in a series of events and fears that contributed to the Red Scare, what Murray calls the "national hysteria" of 1919. Other events he includes are the founding of communist parties in the United States, the letter bomb campaign against prominent politicians, and the Seattle General Strike. Murray did a great service by putting the Boston Police Strike in the context of the fear of radicalism, and almost every subsequent author--myself included--has acknowledged the tremendous value of his work by quoting from it extensively. Red Scare is so well-written and persuasive that it is very easy to accept it uncritically, but there are two serious pitfalls in doing so.

First, Murray's goal in his chapter on the strike is not so much to explain the origins of the strike as to explain how it contributed to the national feeling--as expressed in newspapers, statements by public officials, and voter preferences. He is more interested in the effects of the strike than in its causes, which is not true for this essay, or most of the other accounts of the strike. Other authors, having read Murray, have tended to take for granted that the national mood affected the strike, whereas Murray only argues that the strike affected the national mood. Of course, there were certainly some instances in the strike (such as Gompers's waffling) when public opinion did affect events, but too many accounts of the strike assume that "public opinion" (often an historian's unacceptable shorthand for newspaper editorials) had some effect, without explaining the mechanism by which it could have. Second, once a solid context for an event is offered, it is too easy to think that it is the context. But no one coherent set of previous events can explain the strike, as will be elaborated below.

Perhaps the most thorough work on the events of the strike is Frederick Manuel Koss's Ph.D. dissertation, "The Boston Police Strike of 1919." 13 The heart of Koss's work is the Boston Herald, which he cites extensively, but he brings in many primary sources, including many government documents and interviews he conducted with participants in the strike and children of deceased participants. From these documents he creates a massive collection of facts in chronological order. He has no stated ideological or interpretive position, and presents only a two-page introduction about the significance of the strike before plunging in to the policemen's grievances. Koss sees his role as less of an interpreter than a judge; in fact, he calls his concluding chapter "Judgments," resembling the Coolidge biographers who try to grade the performance of everyone involved. This chapter is in many ways an odd appendage to the rest of the text, for only here does he hint at a context outside of Boston. At the very end of this final chapter, he discusses the general labor unrest of 1919, the Seattle General Strike, and other events of the time. But his goal in doing so is limited to explaining why the public (both newspapers and voters) lauded Coolidge and reviled the police; he does not attempt to suggest that the "climate" 14 of the times had any greater effect than that. Essentially Koss's work remains the best source on events in Boston in August and September 1919, but he fails to put those events in a larger context.

Francis Russell's City in Terror, the only book written exclusively about the Boston Police Strike, is often the the only account read by researchers interested in the strike. 15 Russell takes a broader view of the strike than Koss. He traces the history of the Boston police department back to the seventeenth century, and provides excellent background information on local politics of the time. Russell's primary context is Boston, though even in this light he fails to delve into the history of organized labor in that city, either of individual unions or the Boston Central Labor Union (B.C.L.U.). He does mention the presence of radical labor in the United States in 1919, but, as is noted in Chapter 3, he does not do a very good job gauging the impact of American radicalism on the strike.16

Jonathan Randall White's Triumph of Bureaucracy: The Boston Police Strike and the Ideological Origins of the American Police Structure explains the strike largely in terms of Progressivism and the restructuring of police departments that took place as part of that movement. White's argument is that the policemen's grievances were the result of reforms which were in turn part of a nationwide movement toward more centralized, bureaucratized police administration structures. He compares the Boston Police Department with the New York City police and the Pennsylvania state police to show that power was being centralized in many police departments during the Progressive Era, and that Curtis's position as an essentially autocratic administrator who could not tolerate a police union was part of a larger trend. He also hints about the long-term effects of the Boston strike on police administration. This argument is fine as far as it goes, and it certainly adds an important angle to our understanding of the strike. But White is on shakier ground when he tries to evaluate the importance of events outside of the police history about which he is expert. For example, he does not go into depth about the effects of the "national hysteria" which he describes (amazingly, he does not seem to have read Murray), but his argument that this hysteria seriously affected decisions during the strike appears to be post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. White's essential contribution, placing the police crisis in the context of Progressivism, is obscured by his attempts to fit the strike into less appropriate contexts as well.

Thus, we have four main contexts in which the Boston Police Strike has been studied. Some accounts, including Frederick Manuel Koss's impressive narrative, diminish the role of context and stick to the events of August and September without much in the way of background. Coolidge's biographers see it as an important event in Calvin Coolidge's career. Robert Murray sees the strike as one of the causes of the Red Scare; it is well to remember that he does not claim that it was an effect of the Red Scare. Francis Russell explains the strike primarily as an event in Boston history, though he skillfully alludes to other views. Jonathan Randall White depicts the strike as an event in the history of police administration in the United States. Each of these contexts is valid, and a full understanding of the strike would have to include all of them.

But all of these accounts, from the contemporary newspapers to Jonathan Randall White's recent dissertation, fail to locate the strike in what must be considered one of the most important--perhaps the most important--context of all: the position of American labor, both radical and moderate, in 1919, and the tactics for controlling labor that had been developed by governments in response. When all else is stripped away, the Boston Police Strike was first and foremost not an event in Massachusetts politics, nor a milestone in the development of American police administration. In its very essence, the strike and the events preceding it were a labor dispute, and a labor dispute that took place in that unique year: 1919. To understand why that dispute took the course it did, it is necessary to understand what a labor dispute meant to Americans in 1919. One cannot create a model of a typical conflict or a typical strike; even if such a task were possible for another period, 1919 was so volatile a year that its events defy generalization. Instead, I will suggest some of the events of the preceding decades that the actors in the Boston police crisis recalled as they planned their strategies. In some cases, different actors, such as the policemen and their commissioner, may have recalled different events as they watched the Boston situation unfold. In other cases, two sets of actors may have been thinking of the same events, but drew opposite lessons from them, since the "lesson" of an event is always subjective. To see how the decision of a person or group can be informed by previous events or customs--as happened repeatedly during the Boston strike--it will be helpful to examine the work of two social theorists: Max Weber and Clifford Geertz.

Thick Description

Good historical writing is not necessarily explanatory. The initial task in the study of any historical phenomenon is simple description, a task which in the case of the Boston Police Strike has been ably accomplished by Frederick Manuel Koss. Once the event has been described, the historian must ask why it worked itself out the way it did, and attempt to deduce the causes of the event in question. The goal of this essay is to explain events and decisions. To do so, it will seek to put those events and decisions in their proper context or contexts.

This end and means correspond closely to the guidelines for social scientists set forth by Max Weber in his book, Economy and Society, and his essay, "'Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy." 17 Weber's ideal of history is explanatory history. He writes, "History. . . is oriented to the causal analysis and explanation of individual actions, structures, and personalities possessing cultural significance." 18 He cautions against accepting a materialist interpretation of history for its own sake, arguing that such an interpretation's "specific significance consists only in the fact that we not only observe human conduct but can and desire to understand it." 19 For Weber, observation is not enough; understanding is the goal.

It is, however, impossible to explain directly human behavior. Even in cases where people left statements or memoirs stating their reasons for making the choices they made, such statements may either deliberately or unintentionally distort the real motivations of the time. And in most cases, people fail to leave specific explanations for each action. Weber suggests a very sound method for overcoming the impossibility of reading the mind of an historical figure.

For purposes of a typological scientific analysis it is convenient to treat all irrational, affectually determined elements of behavior as factors of deviation from a conceptually pure type of rational action. . . .

. . . . It is naturally not legitimate to interpret this procedure as involving a rationalistic bias of sociology, but only as a methodological device. It certainly does not involve a belief in the actual predominance of rational elements in human life, for on the question of how far this predominance does or does not exist, nothing whatever has been said.20

By calculating what the rational course of action would be in a given circumstance, one can often account for a good majority of decisions. I have not ignored the importance of emotion in this essay; certainly there were many instances during the strike when emotional momentum overrode rational calculation and caused people to act in a manner contrary to their own self-interest. But in general I try to show that the context surrounding the Boston police crisis made logical many decisions that might be labelled irrational were they examined without background information.

Having accepted a model that postulates reason as the primary, but not sole, force behind social action, it is still necessary to appreciate that even rational thought takes into account subjective evaluations. Each social actor assigns to his actions what Weber calls "meaning," the personal significance of the action. Weber cautions that in "the empirical sciences of action, such as sociology and history" there is no objectively 'correct' meaning or one which is 'true' in some metaphysical sense." 21 The Boston policemen and the conservative press could attribute very different meanings to the same action without either meaning being false; rather, both meanings would be subjectively correct. The meaning a person assigns to his action is dependent on the context of the action. As Weber puts it, "rational understanding of motivation. . . consists in placing the act in an intelligible and more inclusive context of meaning." 22 He provides examples, such as the different contexts that can give meaning to the act of aiming a gun: a firing squad, a battle, a desire for revenge. Thus, to explain human behavior, we must understand the meaning assigned to the behavior by the actors, and to understand meaning, we must understand context.

Generally, this context will not be arbitrary and individual--a union member deciding to support a general strike because it would serve as a convenient excuse to cancel a dreaded family vacation--but will apply to many people. In this sense, explanatory history edges close to anthropology. Clifford Geertz distinguishes the two fields by saying historians examine grander events. "The anthropologist characteristically approaches. . . broader interpretations and more abstract analyses from the direction of exceedingly extended acquaintances with extremely small matters," whereas historians and other social scientists tend to work "in more fateful settings." 23 This distinction is quite arbitrary when one considers how subjective is the determination of what is "fateful." Given its relatively minor role in world history, the Boston Police Strike seems to hover between the extremely small matter of the anthropologist and the earthshaking Event of the epic historian. Although an historical event, it remains the story of a relatively small number of people, confined to a small geographic area and taking place in a short segment of time; thus, it is much like the type of event an anthropologist would study.

Geertz appreciates the influence of context on human action: it forms a large part of his notion of "culture." In his essay outlining a theory of culture, he relates a short series of events that took place in central Morocco in 1912 and points out the incredible complexity contained in an anecdote that takes only one-and-a-half pages to relate. 24 Borrowing a term from Gilbert Ryle, he argues that to understand what was going in on in the Moroccan sheep-raid he describes the anthropologist must create a "thick description." As opposed to a "thin description" which merely records observable phenomena, a thick description would include all the social conventions, subjective impressions, and background information necessary to reveal, in Weber's words, "the causes of [individual events'] being so and not otherwise.'" 25 In Geertz's example, this description entails the customs, positions, and aspirations of Berbers, Jews, and Frenchmen at a particular moment in Moroccan history. In the case of the Boston Police Strike, a thick description would include, among other elements, the recent history of the American Federation of Labor, the fear of radicalism, and the results of earlier general strikes. By including these factors in this essay and analyzing their effects on the strike, I am hoping to thicken the available description.

The problem with this approach is that it leads to infinite analysis; each component of an event's context has its own context to be elucidated, and so on ad infinitum. Geertz recognizes this problem, complaining that "I have [never] gotten anywhere near the bottom of anything I have ever written about, either in the essays below or elsewhere. Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete." 26 Weber concurs, writing "the number and type of causes which have influenced any given event are always infinite and there is nothing in the things themselves to set some of them apart as alone meriting attention." 27 It is theoretically impossible to write a history of the Boston Police Strike that takes into account every cause, the complete context, of the situation. I am forced to limit myself to the context that, in Weber's terms, is "interesting and significant" to me as a student. 28 And for no objective reason, though for reasons that I hope will appeal to others who wish to understand the strike, that context happens to be the history of organized labor in North America in the decades prior to 1919.

My Argument

This essay is neither about the police strike as a whole, nor about its consequences. It is an attempt to clarify three moments in the sequence of events, by examining the meanings that three concepts had for various participants in the dispute. The first concept is "the American Federation of Labor." What was the A.F. of L., what did it mean to the Boston police, and what did it mean to the leaders of Boston's government and business? Second, "Bolshevism," and all its close cousins, such as "anarchism," "communism," and "radicalism." Again, what was the meaning of these terms and ideas for the police, and for their opponents? And finally, the nature and meaning of the "general strike."

The policemen's application for an A.F. of L. charter, the hyperbolic cries of "Bolshevism," and the Boston Central Labor Union's consideration of a general strike are all actions whose "meaning" can only be understood through deep investigation. To say that these events took place is to describe them thinly. To attempt to understand the significance of the events to the actors is to try to achieve a "thick description." Such an understanding demands that we trace these concepts--A.F. of L., Bolshevism, general strike, back to their roots and forward to September 1919. It is a process that requires traveling chronologically back several decades, and geographically at least as far as Seattle, if not Petrograd.

The three body chapters of this essay are not organized by chronological sequence, as would be the case in a conventional historical account, nor, for the most part, by groups of actors. Rather, each chapter deals with a group of actions and decisions which were informed by a particular aspect of the American labor movement as it stood in 1919.

Chapter 2 discusses those decisions which were made in light of the reputation of the American Federation of Labor, the great representative of moderate, non-revolutionary organized labor. On the one hand, I will ask why the dissatisfied Boston police turned to the A.F. of L. as a means to increase their power to negotiate with their employer, the government. I will also ask why the A.F. of L. was willing to join the cause of the police. On the other hand, I will demonstrate that to some leaders of the Boston establishment, notably Mayor Andrew Peters and his negotiator James Storrow, the A.F. of L. represented an approachable, non-threatening negotiating partner. Though both men were reluctant to allow the police to join the A.F. of L., they hoped that the past history of negotiations with the Federation augured an amicable solution to the police crisis. Chapter 3 covers the fear of "Bolshevism" and the Red Scare, whose impact on the Boston Police Strike has been overstated. Nevertheless, some decisions were very clearly affected by the knowledge that many Americans did believe that there was a widespread danger that a social revolution would unseat the American system of government. To understand how this belief affected the strike, I will examine the meaning that "Bolshevism" had for the national press, for Curtis and Coolidge, and for the policemen. Chapter 4 examines decisions made in reference to the series of four general strikes by moderate North American labor organizations in the decades prior to 1919. Many laborers in Boston interpreted these general strikes as victories or at least positive steps for organized labor. Labor leaders and government officials looking at the same events drew very different lessons from them, an example of how subjective interpretations of history can cause divergent actions based on the same event. In each chapter, various actors are discussed, and the chronological frame of the chapters occasionally overlaps. Although this situation is not ideal, by organizing the material by historical context, rather than by chronology or by group of people, I have given context the emphasis it deserves.

These three themes--the A.F. of L., "Bolshevism," and the general strike are inextricably connected. People in 1919 often either lumped two or three of them together (e.g., calling the Seattle General Strike an example of Bolshevism) or contrasted them (e.g., the A.F. of L.'s insistence that the Federation wanted nothing to do with Bolshevism). Moreover, an in-depth examination of these themes in American labor history will point out the reasons behind some of the key decisions during the strike, especially the policemen's decision to affiliate with the A.F. of L. and then their decision to strike, as well as the Boston Central Labor Union's decision not to call a general strike. By doing so, it will explain aspects of an event that has up to now been only described.

Next: Chapter 2, The American Federation of Labor

Notes

1 Of course, the choice of those two months as significant enough to serve as an introduction while events before and after are relegated to the analytical chapters or ignored altogether is a subjective decision by the author and in an ideal world would be analyzed itself. For example, one might argue that any account of the strike must begin with Police Commissioner Curtis's appointment in December 1918, or even earlier. But for my purposes these months include all the events which I most want to explain. The facts in this summary can be found in many secondary accounts of the strike or by examining the original newspaper record. In preparing this summary I have relied on Francis Russell, A City in Terror (New York: The Viking Press, 1975), which, for all its deficiencies, is both the best-written history of the strike and the most convenient source for reference.
2 Even the policemen's chief enemy, Police Commissioner Edwin Curtis, was to argue on the grounds of affiliation, ceding the point that the police had legitimate grievances about pay and conditions. The obvious quotation from W. S. Gilbert has been made by an earlier author, so I will not repeat it.
3 A detailed list of the men's grievances was made public by Police Union President John McInnes shortly after the beginning of the strike. His statement may be found in the Boston Labor World, September 13, 1919, 2.
4 Fourteenth Annual Report of the Police Commissioner for the City of Boston, Year Ending November 30, 1919 (Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Co., 1920)
5 Russell, City in Terror, 170.
6 Boston's newspapers are the greatest source of primary material on the strike. In 1919, Boston had seven dailies, if one includes the Christian Science Monitor, which had a more national focus. While the tendency of these papers to include much information without attribution and their failure to give any background information or to run feature stories with longer focuses can frustrate a reader used to today's dailies, at least they had the habit of quoting proclamations by politicians and labor leaders at length, if not in full. In addition to the dailies, the Boston Central Labor Union published the Boston Labor World, which was distributed to members of unions which chose to subscribe. Government documents are also important, especially the report of the Storrow Committee, which includes several communications and proclamations as appendices. Besides these fundamental sources, numerous memoirs, letters, manuscript collections, and, for previous researchers, interviews provide a wealth of information about the strike. This essay relies heavily on secondary sources, hoping to contribute to the analytical rather than documentary understanding of events. Almost by accident it has ended up using sources not used before, but it rests on the incomplete foundation of previous scholarship. As far as I know, this essay is the first account of the Boston Police Strike to make use of the Boston Labor World, which can be found in a microfilm edition at the Boston Public Library. The number of citations to the Labor World may exaggerate its value, since in many cases it merely reported in a more convenient and slightly more trustworthy fashion information that could otherwise have been obtained from the conservative dailies. On the other hand, there are instances--especially in Chapters 2 and 4--when the Labor World's articles and editorials provided invaluable insight into the perspective of organized labor on the police situation. Beyond the Labor World, I relied on the Boston Herald and the Boston Evening Transcript for primary material, largely on the advice of the writings of Frederick Koss (who likes the Herald) and Richard Marchick (who relies on the Transcript). Given the similarity of information provided by these two papers, I doubt very strongly that I would have had a very different impression of the strike had I chosen instead to read the Post (the favorite of Howard Zibel).
7 Mark Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge (1938. Reprint. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973). Claude M. Fuess, Calvin Coolidge: Man from Vermont (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1940).
8 Francis Russell, "The Strike That Made a President," American Heritage 14, no. 6 (October 1963):44-47, 90-94, and City in Terror (New York: Viking, 1975).
9 Thomas B. Silver, Coolidge and the Historians (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1982). Donald R. McCoy, Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President (1967. Reprint. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1968).
10 "Anarchy in Boston," American Mercury 36, no. 144 (December, 1935), 456.
11 "The Boston Police Strike of 1919," New England Quarterly 20, no. 2 (June 1947), 147.
12 Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (1955. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980)
13 Frederick Manuel Koss, "The Boston Police Strike" (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1960)
14 "Climate" is an unfortunate term to describe the nation's mood in 1919, which fluctuated as rapidly as the weather.
15 City in Terror, (New York: Viking, 1975). Jonathan Randall White notes that studies of police administration and unionism tend to refer to Russell for information on the strike, and this confirms my own experience in glancing at books on police unionism. White, A Triumph of Bureaucracy: The Boston Police Strike and the Ideological Origins of the American Police Structure (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1982),48.
16 Russell's failure to use footnotes is appalling. Such an omission may be acceptable in a book that is intended to be just a popular account of a subject that has been thoroughly examined by scholars, but when the only book on a subject lacks footnotes it is a serious obstacle to subsequent scholarship.
17 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Vol. I, eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), and "'Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy" in Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and eds. Edward A Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: The Free Press, 1949).
18 Economy and Society, 19.
19 "Objectivity," 83.
20 Economy and Society, 6.
21 Ibid., 4.
22 Ibid., 8.
23 "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 21.
24 Ibid., 9.
25 "Objectivity," 72.
26 Geertz, "Thick Description," 29.
27 "Objectivity," 78.
28 Ibid.