Nineteen Nineteen

The Boston Police Strike in the Context of American Labor

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

3. "Bolshevism"

On September 11, 1919, as Boston still reeled from the shock of the riots that had followed the policemen's walkout, the Boston Evening Transcript reported the following:

Senator Henry L. Myers of Montana declared on the floor of the Senate this afternoon that a Soviet government will be established in the Unites States before the next presidential elections unless firm action is taken. He called upon Congress to defeat all attempts to unionize the police force of the national capital, declaring that if such unionization is permitted, the police forces in every city and town of more than 2000 population will be unionized within sixty days, that such unionization will be followed by the unionization of the Army and Navy, and that immediately thereafter the Soviet government will be established. . . .

. . . [He continued:] The police strike in Boston will be followed by other strikes. . . . He intimated that some powerful force was behind the attempts of police in fifty cities to affiliate with labor unions.1

Had Senator Myers been deliberately distorting facts and employing hyperbole for sordid political gain, it would not be anything new for the United States Senate. But although it is difficult to believe that the Boston policemen were attempting to replace the American system of constitutional government with a dictatorship of the proletariat, the fact remains that along with Senator Myers, many prominent figures and the majority of the nation's newspapers did accuse the policemen of participating in or at least aiding Bolshevism. By doing so, they put the police strike in a context distinct from the growth of moderate labor organizations that was discussed in Chapter 2. This chapter will discuss this second context, the definition of the Boston Police Strike as one of a series of events that created a fear of revolution in the United States in 1919.

In any city in any year, a police strike that exposed the city to 48 hours of rioting and looting, causing several deaths, numerous rapes, and thousands of dollars in damaged and stolen property would be regarded with anger and indignation, much of it directed at the striking police. The Boston Police Strike aroused such emotions among Bostonians and Americans nationwide. But in addition to seeing the strike as an unfortunate collapse of civil peace, some observers, frightened by other events in 1919, described the strike as a deliberate attack on the basic institutions of American government. It was this additional charge, not just of disregard for public safety but also of disloyalty to the nation's political institutions, that doomed the strikers to lose public support. It also allowed the mistakes of Police Commissioner Edwin U. Curtis and Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge to go unnoticed, and which propelled the latter to the vice-presidency.

No one familiar with the police and their complaints could believe them to be Bolsheviks. The basic, substantial issues over which the policemen struck--a pay raise, better working conditions, and an improved channel for registering discontent--were not in themselves terribly threatening. Nor was the A.F. of L. considered a subversive organization by those who knew it well. But the cry of radicalism was made slightly credible by the labor situation in 1919. There were Bolshevistic labor organizers in the United States, and the vocal denunciations of the current political order that had been issued by various anarchist and socialist groups that year gave the violence in Boston--horrifying enough in its own right--a political hue that it otherwise would not have had, at least in the minds of the many editorialists who launched scathing denunciations of the "Bolshevistic" Boston police. Reading those newspaper attacks today, it is easy to imagine that Americans, both those directly involved in the strike and those watching from the sidelines, honestly believed that the policemen were subversive and planned their actions bases on that belief.

But significance is subjective, and the chief actors in the strike did not put the police crisis in the same context of radicalism that the press and blowhard politicians did. Important figures, such as Commissioner Curtis and Governor Coolidge, certainly included the public fear of revolution in their calculus and took full advantage of it. But this was only a minor factor; they did not themselves believe the police to be radicals, nor did they rely heavily on the public perception of Bolshevism in Boston. Curtis and Coolidge formed their agendas based on their desire to maintain a strict, rule-based control of the police force, to preserve the police commissioner's power over the men within the department, and to avoid the interference by outsiders represented by the Storrow Committee. This strategy could have existed in 1916, before the world had learned the word "Bolshevism." That the strike took place at a time of hysteria over radicalism, leaving the policemen vulnerable to charges of treason, was merely a coincidental factor that strengthened the hand of Curtis and Coolidge and weakened the credibility of the police force.

Commissioner Curtis and Governor Coolidge may not have themselves believed the policemen to be associated with radical unionism as advocated by the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W., also known as "Wobblies") or with subversive Bolshevism. But the existence of these movements and the uncompromising stances assumed by other leaders in similar circumstances may have led them to adopt a policy of no compromise, and to paint the strike as a challenge to American democracy and capitalism. And the fact that radicalism had seriously damaged the image of the A.F. of L. put Federation President Samuel Gompers and other union leaders in the difficult position of trying to support the striking policemen while attempting to disassociate the A.F. of L. from any taint of radicalism.

Neither the formation of a union nor the threat of the strike provoked the strong reaction that the walkout and violence of September 9 did. Although a walkout was frequently mentioned as a possibility prior to the actual strike, the opponents of a police union did not deploy their full rhetorical weaponry, charges of "desertion" and "anti-Americanism," until after the policemen had walked out and the city had suffered riots and looting. Conversely, the tough-talking Boston Central Labor Union planned for a police walkout, but not for violence. Labor leaders immediately tried to blame the violence on the government authorities, and it appears today that Curtis and Coolidge bear the responsibility for failing to provide the promised protection despite warning that the police would strike. But at the time, the city, the nation, and particularly the press viewed the violence as a result of the policemen's action, not the politicians' inaction. It was the riots, and not the walkout, that opened the police up to charges of radicalism. And it was the nation's experiences with radicalism in 1919 that made those charges so devastating.

Previous accounts of the Boston Police Strike place the strike in the context of a collective terror of revolution without critically examining the ways in which that terror did and did not influence the outcome of the strike. Francis Russell sets the stage for his narrative of the strike with a chapter about the American fear of radicalism in 1919,2. . but does not show precisely how that fear affected the police strike. Jonathan Randall White argues that the alliances formed to defeat the policemen's attempts to unionize were "coalitions of fear--fear spawned by 1919."3. He claims that Boston's business interests were "motivated by the fear of Bolshevism in a year of fear."4. But White provides no evidence for this claim.5. Indeed, the facts he does provide in his text tend to suggest that the business community was inclined to support the efforts at compromise being made by Peters and Storrow, an inappropriate response had they believed they were facing determined revolutionaries.6. Both of these authors fail to appreciate the subjectivity of context. That some people, particularly newspaper editorialists, linked the strike to the radical events of 1919 does not mean that others, particularly those whose decisions were important, put the strike in the same context.

Mayor Peters and his allies clearly did not think the policemen were Bolsheviks, or else they would never have worked so hard to negotiate with them. But what of Curtis and Coolidge, who refused to compromise with the police? This chapter will examine what significance the radicalism of 1919 had to those men. And, since the policemen were accused of being motivated by Bolshevism, I will examine the validity of that charge. First, I will present a brief account of the events in 1919 which led many Americans to fear an imminent social revolution. Next, I will discuss the actions of Curtis and Coolidge before the walkout of September 9, to show that they did not believe the men to be radicals. After that, I will show that Coolidge in particular took advantage of the accusations of radicalism to boost his own popularity. And finally, I will raise the question of the significance that Bolshevism had for the policemen themselves.

Radicalism in 1919

The Bolshevik overthrow of Russia's provisional government in November of 1917 was, both to its supporters and detractors, a harbinger of things to come. Within Russia, the Bolshevik regime was able to repel the counterrevolutionary forces supported by the West. More ominously, from the anti-Communists' viewpoint, other Marxist revolutions erupted in Germany and Hungary in 1918 and 1919, suggesting that Bolshevism, like the great flu of 1918, was transmissible across international borders. By 1919, many Americans were seriously concerned about the possibility of a radical attempt to overthrow the American government. How widespread or genuine this fear was cannot be neatly quantified. But Red Scare, Robert K. Murray's authoritative study of the phenomenon demonstrates that warnings of an imminent communist revolution were not limited to rightist extremists, but were perpetuated by many of the nation's leading politicians, patriotic groups, and newspapers.7. According to Murray, "through misreporting, exaggeration, misinterpretation of fact, and excessive claims and charges, what was a mere theoretical possibility of radical revolution gradually became in the minds of many a horrible reality."8. While the Red Scare is a fascinating subject in its own right, certain elements of the postwar hysteria were particularly influential in shaping responses during the Boston police crisis. The existence of a radical, industry-based labor movement--in opposition to the moderate, craft-based A.F. of L.--and a complementary socialist political movement made many conservative leaders suspicious of the police union.

The radical labor movement in North America during and immediately after World War I was embodied for most Americans by the International Workers of the World. By mixing revolutionary ideology with a functioning, national organization of unions, the I.W.W. bridged the gap between Gompers and Lenin, and gave a seed of truth to the conservatives' charge that organized labor was subversive. While the A.F. of L. was seeking to establish a solid record of moderate patriotism, the I.W.W. was less compromising and therefore more threatening to established business and political interests. Founded in 1905, the I.W.W. was based on "industrial unionism," the belief that all the workers in a single industry, such as railways, textiles, or mining, should be organized into a single union, and that unskilled laborers should be included so that they could not be used as strikebreakers.9. During its fourteen years of significant activity, it organized workers throughout the United States and Canada, but its strongest base of support was always in the West, particularly among miners and lumber workers.10. Like the A.F. of L., it relied on the strike as an essential weapon against employers, and like the A.F. of L., it had a mixed record of success.11. The I.W.W., however, represented a very different style of labor unionism.

One basic difference was the ideological vision guiding the I.W.W. Whereas the A.F. of L. did not challenge the existing political order, the Wobblies were "syndicalistic," aiming for a society that would be run by laborers, rather than a formal government.12. Until a 1907 split, there were close links and shared membership between the I.W.W. and the Socialist Party.13. Even before the Bolshevik Revolution, the I.W.W. had links to international Marxism. And when news of the November Revolution arrived, the I.W.W. greeted it with enthusiasm.14.

Compared with the A.F. of L., the I.W.W. always had a much more antagonistic relationship with the government and established interests, and the animosity was felt on both sides. The I.W.W. danced around the issue of patriotism, at times denouncing the American flag as symbol of the oppression of the workers,15. at times insisting that its concern with the common good was the essence of patriotism.16. Charges that the I.W.W. was subversive were particularly damaging during World War I, when public opinion was solidly behind the war effort and many citizens saw opposition to the war not as an alternative political opinion but as sedition and treason. While the A.F. of L.'s cooperation with the government reassured the public that the Federation would help maximize war production, the I.W.W. was accused of both encouraging draft resistance and slowing production, especially in the mining and lumber industries, which were both crucial to weapons production and were I.W.W. strongholds. In 1916, the Workers had resolved: "We condemn all wars, and for the prevention of such, we proclaim the anti-militaristic propaganda in time of peace, thus promoting class solidarity among the workers of the entire world, and, in time of war, the general strike, in all industries."17.

When faced with American entry into the war in early 1917, a minority of I.W.W. members wanted the organization to oppose actively the war and the draft, though a more pragmatic majority steered the direction into deferring its ultimate confrontation with bourgeois government until after more workers had been organized.18. I.W.W. workers in Eastern ports loaded war transports without hesitation,19. and sabotage was no longer a sanctioned tactic after May, 1917.20. Yet although the I.W.W.'s stated intention was not to disrupt war production but merely to improve the lot of workers, it was vilified as a threat to the nation, and was attacked physically by both company-sponsored vigilantes and federal troops. In July and August 1917 gangs attacked I.W.W. strikers in the mining areas of Arizona, killing several. And in 1918, the federal government prosecuted I.W.W. leaders for sedition, sabotage, interfering with production, and opposing the draft, crippling the organization.21.

In addition to being opposed to the government, the I.W.W. was often in conflict with the A.F. of L. The Wobblies often defined their organization in terms of opposition to the A.F. of L.'s high dues, moderate politics, and craft unionism. Among the founders of the I.W.W. were leaders of unions that had left or been expelled from the A.F. of L., mostly over the issue of industry unionism vs. craft unionism.22. At the founding convention of the I.W.W., William D. Haywood specifically criticized the A.F. of L. , saying that "it is not a working-class movement. It does not represent the working class."23. On occasion the two national organizations cooperated, as they did during the lumber strike of 1917. But during the World War I era, the I.W.W. did not cease publicly distinguishing itself from the A.F. of L..24.

New England residents got a firsthand look at the I.W.W. in action during the 1912 strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts. Despite the atrocious employment and living conditions of the 30,000 textile workers in the city, the A.F. of L. had not tried to organize any but a handful of the most skilled workers, on the grounds that the mostly foreign-born workers were too heterogeneous to be organized.25. But the I.W.W. was undaunted by the diversity of the mill workers, and on January 10, 1912, it held a mass meeting of Italian workers, who voted to strike in protest over a pay cut. On January 12, the strike began, and soon involved not only the Italians, but also the mill workers of many other nationalities. The strike was particularly well run, with the I.W.W. leaders employing techniques they had developed in the West.26. Despite violence at the hands of the Massachusetts militia and the opposition of the A.F. of L., which sent its skilled members back to the mills before the unskilled majority had gained their demands, the strike was successful. After Governor Eugene Foss threatened to pull the rug from under the mill owners by withdrawing the militia, the owners and the I.W.W. were able to reach a settlement that was largely in favor of the workers.27. Massachusetts had learned that the I.W.W. was a power in the East.28.

In sum, the I.W.W. was to most Americans the embodiment of scary organized labor. As one observer expressed it at the time, "the average man condemns the I.W.W. because he thinks that the organization is unlawful in its activity, un-American in its sabotage, unpatriotic in its relation to the flag, the government and the war."29. A large cross section of American society regarded the Wobblies with horror, and often expressed this horror with attacks--legal, verbal, and physical.30. Americans saw two sides to unionism, one a moderate movement for better conditions, the other a radical movement for the overthrow of the existing order. When the Boston police announced their intention to unionize, the prospect of such a union had frightening implications to those who were not familiar with the different natures and goals of the two movements.

In addition to the long-term trend of radical unionism, several specific events occurred in 1919 that suggested to some Americans that an attempted socialist or anarchist revolution in this country was a real possibility. Two of these events, the general strikes in Seattle and Winnipeg, have great bearing on the Boston strike, and are addressed in the following chapter. In addition, there were several other shows of force by American radicals in 1919. A series of letter bombs were sent to leading anti-communist figures in late April, and were followed by more bombs in June. On May Day, violence erupted between parading socialists and returned veterans. Reported by a sensationalistic press and discussed in public by powerful government officials, these events became, to some, the heralds of revolution.31. Certainly editorial pages became fond of condemning Bolshevism. Certainly Americans with radical political beliefs were little tolerated. But the tense atmosphere of 1919 did not affect the main actors in the strike, as other authors have suggested.

Before September 9

The ultimate outcome of the police strike--the replacement of the striking policemen with returned veterans--was primarily the work of two men: Police Commissioner Edwin U. Curtis and Governor Calvin Coolidge. Each of these men had his own background, attitudes, official duties, and personal agenda. But during the strike they functioned as a unit. Curtis made decisions and carried out actions, but could not have done so without Coolidge's constant support. Coolidge possessed the power necessary to defeat the compromise plan of Peters and Storrow, but generally he only acted through Curtis. The two men, both of whom were lawyers before they became politicians, made their case in formal, legal language, which can be seen as either a deceptive masking of their true aims or a noble defense of principle.32. Together they championed the cause of inflexibility. The image of the policemen as threats to the social order was less a motivation for their uncompromising stance than a weapon in their arsenal against the policemen, once they had adopted their policy.

Police Commissioner Curtis was the individual chiefly responsible for determining the overall shape of the Boston Police Strike. He made the key decisions. First, he ignored the Social Club and replaced it with ineffective grievance committees, sparking much of the dissatisfaction among the patrolmen. Next, he was first to oppose the creation of an affiliated police union. Perhaps most importantly, he rejected the Storrow compromise, which could probably have averted the strike and made the Boston Police crisis into an obscure event in the history of the department.33. And finally, by taking responsibility for protecting the city in case of a strike and then failing to do so, Curtis was largely responsible for the violence that shook the city and put the strike on the front pages of the nation's newspapers and, decades later, in its history books. To understand his behavior is largely to understand why the crisis developed the way it did.

Given the extremely distasteful depiction of Curtis that has come down through the years, it is tempting to ascribe his rigidity and anti-unionism entirely to his personality. William Allen White scathingly called him "incarnate conservatism, a nineteenth century Republican," suggesting that Curtis was an anachronism.34. Many of Curtis's actions and statements support a view of him as a petty dictator who torpedoed the Storrow compromise out of spite as much as anything else. Samuel Gompers was particularly critical, calling Curtis "his majesty, the autocrat of the people of Boston."35. Gompers's harsh words seem appropriate in the light of Curtis's rejection of the Storrow compromise on the grounds that it was irrelevant to the legalistic task of determining the guilt of the nineteen officers. "The commissioner cannot consider [the Storrow proposal] as having relation to the present duty of the commissioner to act upon the complaints now pending before him,"36. Curtis writes, despite the fact that a key provision of the proposal was "that no member of the Boston Policemen's Union should be discriminated against because of any previous affiliation with the American Federation of Labor."37. Curtis rejected the proposed settlement, an act which cost the jobs of over a thousand policemen, while hiding behind the excuse of "duty." It is indeed hard not to condemn him personally.

Jonathan Randall White offers an intriguing alternative explanation of Curtis's obstinacy. White argues that rather then being the arbitrary whim of a sour personality, Curtis's autocratic rule of the Boston Police Department was part of a nationwide trend of bureaucratization of police departments, which entailed strict, even autocratic management practices. He traces the strictures under which the policemen chafed back to the department's reorganization in 1906, when "the [police] commissioner was given virtually unlimited power."38. The first commissioner to enjoy this power, Stephen O'Meara, was benevolent enough to exercise near-absolute power without abusing it.39. His successor, Edwin Curtis, "simply did not possess the personal attributes necessary to control the problems" in the department.40. Even as he contributes an institutional perspective to Curtis's behavior, White does not stray too far from the consensus view that Curtis's rigid, unforgiving character was a primary cause of the police strike.

Either an institutional or a personal view is far sounder than a suggestion that Curtis regarded the policemen as anarchists or socialists. By the time the policemen received their A.F. of L. charter, Curtis had worked with the police for eight months and could be expected to know better than to see ideology where there was merely discontent. Furthermore, his condemnation of the police was always in terms of law, not ideology. He accused the police of violating one clause of a single rule of the department, not of conspiring against the United States.

Like Curtis, Governor Coolidge tended toward a policy of no compromise. This policy manifested itself as a vote of confidence in Curtis. By law, the governor alone had the power to replace Boston's police commissioner, so Curtis could could not go too far without Coolidge's support.41. Coolidge's first official statement on the police situation, delivered on August 19, was that "Mr. Curtis is the police commissioner, entrusted by law with the duty of conducting the office. I have no intention of removing him and, as long as he is commissioner, I am going to support him."42. Coolidge's support allowed Curtis to carry through the no-compromise policy. "By his open refusal to interfere [Coolidge] really helped Curtis. A single word from his would probably have led to a compromise, but that word he would not utter."43. Coolidge himself judged that his main contribution was restoring Curtis to power, thus preempting any attempt by Peters to allow the policemen back.44.

Throughout the police crisis, Coolidge accepted Curtis's emphasis on the political and legal challenges of the police, rather than the issues of pay and working conditions. Thus, even while admitting that the policemen had worked under unacceptable conditions, he could argue that they were wrong to strike.45. For Coolidge, obedience was an absolute: "I did not see how it was possible to arbitrate the question of the authority of the law, or of the necessity of obedience to the rules of the Department and the orders of the Commissioner."46. Coolidge rejected repeated pleas to support the Storrow compromise.47.

Coolidge's inflexibility may have been motivated in part by suspicion of radical labor. He had dealt with the I.W.W. firsthand in 1912 as a state senator. William Allen White, a journalist who knew Coolidge when he was president, suggests that Coolidge had learned to fear the I.W.W. "As chairman of the committee which investigated the strike of the Lawrence Textile Mills workers, Senator Coolidge had first-hand knowledge of an incipient proletarian revolt led by Big Bill Haywood, I.W.W. Communist, an experiment in class consciousness."48. In 1919, at which point Coolidge had become governor, a second strike at the Lawrence mills may have confirmed Coolidge's fears of the I.W.W.; on the other hand he does not appear to have been particularly alarmed by the second strike.49. At the time of the first Lawrence strike, Coolidge wrote to his father that "the leaders there are socialists and anarchists, and they do not want anybody to work for wages. The trouble is not about the amount of wages; it is a small attempt to destroy all authority whether of any church or government."50. Seven years later, when confronted with the police union, Coolidge was to frame that issue in much the same terms, saying the strike was political, not economic. White suggests that Coolidge also suspected radical political aims among the Boston telephone operators who struck in the spring of 1919, since, according to White, "revolution strikes first at sources of communication."51. But this is White's viewpoint; Coolidge himself may not have believed a revolution to be near.

Another explanation of Coolidge's inflexibility and his emphasis on the political dimension of the strike is that he, like Curtis, simply had a legalistic outlook and a strong sense of duty, and he abhorred the police not because he thought they wanted to overthrow the government, not because they wanted more money, but because they were traitors to their duty. Such an attitude is not entirely distinct from a claim that the police were anarchists, but neither is it a position unique to 1919. Coolidge might well have held exactly the same point of view in 1918, when the mayor of Cincinnati deplored the police of that city, saying "policemen are soldiers and they should obey orders as they have sworn to do."52. Indeed, the analogy between policemen and soldiers would become one of the chief arguments of the policemen's opponents. Again, mutiny and anarchy are related concepts, but they are distinct. Anarchism--or Bolshevism--implies a concerted plan, an ideological vision, and links to a national or international movement. Mutiny can be committed by any group of untrustworthy men. The charge of treason could have been made in 1918 or 1909 just as effectively as in 1919. To show that Coolidge's attitude was a response to the events of 1919--the bombs, the strikes, and the socialist parades--one would have to produce evidence that those men believed the policemen to be engaged in a conspiracy to overthrow the government, and such evidence is not apparent. Except for the two general strikes, which will be discussed in the next chapter, the radicalism of 1919 was not a significant cause of the antagonism between Coolidge and the policemen.

After the Riots

To say that Curtis and Coolidge did not believe that the policemen were radicals is not to say that these two lawyer-politicians were unwilling to make use of that charge when presented with the opportunity. Although they do not seem to have regarded the policemen as subversive before the strike, they exploited the common perception of the policemen's radicalism once that perception emerged. This tactic served Curtis and Coolidge well. For Curtis, and to some extent for Coolidge, it deflected any criticism of the delay in mobilizing the State Guard. If the police could be labelled Bolsheviks, they would take the heat for the riots, eclipsing Curtis's role in leaving the city undefended. And for Coolidge, the charge of radicalism gave national significance to his actions, ultimately leading him to the White House. Curtis and Coolidge described the police as subversive only after the violence of September 9 had led newspapers and others to do so. That during the weeks leading to the strike they did not cry treason suggests that such a description was more expedient than sincere.

Many historians of the strike share an opinion that by not calling out the State Guard promptly, Curtis and, to a lesser extent, Coolidge share a responsibility with the striking police for the violence that hit the city. Claude Fuess, for example, writes that "a less obstinate man [than Curtis] might have saved money and bloodshed" by calling out the Guard earlier.53. Mark Allen White adds, "Commissioner Curtis still was sure an hour before the walkout that the strike would not occur."54. On September 8, Coolidge refused Peters's request to call out the State Guard. "Apparently he was determined to wait until actual trouble started before calling out the troops."55. On the ninth, Coolidge expressed his faith in Curtis's assurance and, overriding Peters, personally dismissed two units of the State Guard.56. Peters, too, relied on Curtis's estimate of the situation, though not entirely voluntarily. In his inaugural address of 1920, he recalled that at noon on September 9,

I consulted with the Police Commissioner. Mr. Curtis said that he had the situation well in hand, had made adequate provisions for any emergency and assured me that there was no occasion for alarm. I asked him whether it would not be wise to have the State Guard mobilized in order that sufficient forces might be on hand in case of an emergency. Police Commissioner Curtis stated in no uncertain terms that he did not wish their aid at that time.
The Governor also pointed out to me plainly that no one had any authority to interfere with the Police Commissioner.57.

Of course, it was in the interest of Coolidge and Peters to pass the buck, but it does seem that Curtis was primarily responsible for leaving the city without protection.

In his official annual report released a few after the strike, Curtis gives three reasons for not having the State Guard and volunteer policemen ready when the policemen struck.58. First, the volunteer policemen could not be put in place before the policemen struck. Second, the police department's captains had predicted that 800 officers would remain on duty, rather than the 400 who actually did. And third, the Police Commissioner lacks the statutory authority to call out the State Guard unless "a tumult, riot or mob" exists or is threatened, and the "secrecy of the proceedings" by the policemen prevented him from knowing when to mobilize the Guard.59. As Koss points out in his "Judgments" chapter, none of these reasons can excuse Curtis for having voluntarily taken on the responsibility of protecting Boston and then failing to do so, but does not hazard a guess about which of the reasons actually explains Curtis's behavior.60. The first and third reasons are absurd. Curtis had specifically ordered the policemen to hand in their nightsticks so that a volunteer force could be equipped before the policemen walked out, and the "secrecy" of the policemen did not prevent the Boston Herald from running a banner headline on the morning of September 9 reading, "Police Vote to Strike Today: To Quit at 5:45 P.M. Rollcall."61. Thus it seems probable that Curtis relied too much on the estimates of his captains and overestimated his own popularity.62. The result was that the State Guard was not mobilized until the morning of the tenth, by which time the city had been subjected to a night of rioting and the mob violence, always easier to prevent than to extinguish, had begun. Had the Guard been called out more promptly, perhaps the violence could have been avoided altogether, as was the case in Cincinnati.

Although in retrospect it seems fair to blame Curtis and Coolidge for the rioting, at the time the city and the nation blamed the violence on the striking policemen, sealing their fate more than anything else. In other words, the inaction--even negligence--of these two officials made them into heroes and destroyed their enemies. According to Coolidge, calling out the State Guard on Tuesday to prevent violence

probably would have saved some property, but would have decided no issue. In fact it would have made it more difficult to maintain the position Mr. Curtis had taken, and which I was supporting, because the issue was not understood, and the disorder focused public attention on it, and showed just what it meant to have a police force that did not obey orders.63.

This statement is slippery because Coolidge does not come out and say "just what it meant to have a police force that did not obey orders." Does it mean that a unionized police force may occasionally fail to guard the city against violence? Or is the statement stronger, implying that a unionized police force was a direct threat to government? Before the actual strike, Coolidge did not suggest that a unionized police was a serious challenge to the political order. But once the riots had broken out and the police had been condemned by the national press and national office-holders, Coolidge stepped up his rhetoric and began to use the language of radicalism against the strikers. And long after the strike, Coolidge's opposition continued to intensify, so that he could write in his 1929 Autobiography that his famous telegram to Gompers made it

clear that if voluntary associations were to be permitted to substitute their will for the authority of public officials the end of our government was at hand. The issue was nothing less than whether the law which the people had made through their duly authorized agencies should be supreme.64.

Actually, Coolidge's telegram did not go so far as to predict "the end of our government," but we can allow a retiring president some embellishment.

Violence changes things. The violence of September 9 and the subsequent days redefined the issue at hand; the first looting marked the victory of Curtis's definition of the dispute as being about obedience, and not about low wages, long hours, and unsanitary living conditions.65. Newspapers in Boston and around the country went berserk, falling over each other in their condemnation of the police and charging that the police had Communist intentions. The Los Angeles Times warned that "no man's house, no man's wife, no man's children, will be safe if the police force is unionized and made subject to the orders of the Red Unionite bosses."66. The Philadelphia Public-Ledger added, "Bolshevism in the United States is no longer a specter. Boston in chaos reveals its sinister substance."67. These papers were soon joined by Republican politicians. U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts wrote,

Policemen are like soldiers and sailors. . . and they must not have the liberty of striking. They do not differ essentially from the army and navy. It is a tremendous issue, and if the American Federation of Labor succeeds in getting hold of the police in Boston it will go all over the country, and we shall be in a measurable distance of Soviet government by labor unions.68.

Perhaps the most damning statement came from President Woodrow Wilson, the friend of the A.F. of L. Asked to comment on the police strike on September 11, he called it a "crime against civilization."69.

Only after such statements had been made did Coolidge accuse the policemen of opposing democratic government, in increasingly dramatic terms. On September 12, Coolidge referred to the walkout as "desertion of duty."70. In his famous September 14 telegram to Samuel Gompers, Coolidge referred to Wilson's statement and vowed to "defend the sovereignty of Massachusetts."71. Ten days later, after the nation's press had made him a hero and he had been flooded with laudatory correspondence,72. Coolidge took the opportunity to go further, proclaiming,

In the deliberate intention to intimidate and coerce the Government of this Commonwealth a large body of policemen, urging all others to join them, deserted their posts of duty, letting in the enemy. This act of theirs was. . . long discussed and premeditated, and with the purpose of obstructing the power of the Government to protect its citizens or even to maintain its own existence. Its success meant anarchy. . . .

. . . To place the maintenance of the public security in the hands of a body of men who have attempted to destroy it would be to flout the sovereignty of the laws the people have made. . . . Those who would counsel it join hands with those whose acts have attempted to destroy the government. There is no middle ground. Every attempt to prevent the formation of a new police force is a blow at the Government. That way treason lies.73.

The charges of "anarchy" and "treason," much stronger stuff than had been brandished at the police before the walkout, delighted the conservative press and cemented Coolidge's popularity.74.

In hindsight, it is clear that the outbreak of violence was a great help to Curtis and Coolidge. Like the outbreak of war, it silenced dissent among a majority of citizens. Once men had been shot, women raped, and stores looted, the policemen's inadequate wages and shoddy station houses were forgotten. Curtis and Coolidge realized the effect of the violence quickly, and were able to ride the wave of popular outrage to make the strikers into demons. The lawlessness of that week played so nicely into the hands of Curtis and Coolidge that it raises the question of premeditation: did the two men intentionally delay the mobilization of the State Guard to bolster their own support? Gompers implied as much, several months after the strike,75. but such coldheartedness is unlikely.76. Both men had spent their careers as public servants, and were not likely to have deliberately sacrificed human lives in their struggle with a recalcitrant police force. A simple miscalculation by Curtis is a more plausible explanation.

The Policemen and Radicalism

The Boston policemen walked off their jobs at 5:45 p.m. on September 9, 1919. For a few hours, the city remained peaceful, though it was patrolled by only the few non-striking police--about one-fifth of the force--plus a handful of Metropolitan District Commission officers. Had the State Guard been mobilized in these golden hours, the police might have been able to retain their jobs. Perhaps the strike would have turned out like the one in Cincinnati, where the police had walked out but been immediately replaced by troops, allowing the police to make a dramatic gesture of frustration without the city erupting into violence. With such prompt replacement, the Cincinnati police had been able to negotiate a return to their jobs after three days, not gaining their demands, but keeping their jobs.77. Like the Cincinnati police, the Boston police tried to return to their jobs a few days after striking. But there were three crucial differences between Boston and Cincinnati. First, Curtis's optimism had delayed the mobilization of the State Guard, exposing the city to rioting. Second, when the Boston police left their jobs, the demobilization of millions of American troops had made it much easier to find replacements for the strikers; there was quite literally a "reserve army of the unemployed." And finally, the Boston police had struck in 1919, a year when a police strike was, to some, even more alarming than the wartime strike of the Cincinnati police. Of these three factors, the last was perhaps the least significant; there is little evidence that the shrill cries of Bolshevism actually affected the outcome of the strike, though they may well have been important in determining the effect of the strike over the next several decades, a subject not addressed in this essay.78. None of these factors was directly under the control of the Boston police. But they were decisive in determining their fate.

Most historians agree that the policemen themselves had no particular sympathy for Bolshevism, socialism, anarchism, or any ideology; all they wanted was an improvement in their pay and working conditions.79. If the policemen had become at all acquainted with radical political beliefs, it was most likely during street battles in which the police and the radicals were on opposite sides.80. Yet two authors do claim that there were real links between the police and serious revolutionaries. According to Benjamin Gitlow, a leading American Communist writing 29 years after the strike, "an outstanding figure in the policemen's union of Boston, a policeman of Irish extraction, was a close sympathizer of the Communist party and collaborated with the communists in the conduct of the strike."81. Gitlow also claims that once the strike began, "communist organizers were rushed to Boston. Rank-and-file members who were foot-loose were directed to go to Boston to help the local comrades intensify the strike violence, to work for the calling of a general strike, and to politicize the strike by directing it against the government."82. Francis Russell quotes Gitlow and elaborates on Communist involvement in the strike, alleging that the Soviet government sent $85,000 via the American Communist party "to pay for halls, printing, propaganda, and in some cases subsidies for the families of the striking police. Most of this money derived from the sale of Russian crown jewels smuggled into the United States."83. Russell provides no documentary evidence for this claim, nor does he consider it a major factor in determining police strategy.84. Other accounts of the strike do not mention any Soviet involvement.

Were these charges true, they would raise numerous questions. Why did the Soviet government think the Boston police situation was so important that it was willing to contribute a fair amount of what must have been a limited supply of hard currency? Did the communist financing, coupled with the B.C.L.U.'s failure to strike in support of the police, cause the policemen to reevaluate the relative merits of radical and moderate labor movements? And was Gitlow's "outstanding figure" influential enough to lure the policemen into a strike he wanted because of his communist ideology? Given the haziness of these charges and lack of supporting evidence, it is necessary to forego a full investigation here and accept the more probable hypothesis that Gitlow's "communist organizers" were ineffectual ideologues who, if they did in fact travel to Boston, did little more than stand on the sidelines and cheer the looting mob, convincing themselves that the pillage was evidence of a rising class consciousness, not petty commodity fetishism.85.

Putting aside for the moment the possibility that the police may have been led by a communist sympathizer and financed by the Kremlin, the policemen do not seem to have been much aware of the possibility that observers of the strike might associate them with the communists whom they had so often fought. Prior to September 9, no one had called them Bolsheviks, and this lack of warning may have led them to miscalculate the effect that a strike would have on their support among the public. As Fuess puts it,

The chief agitators had apparently no conception of the hostile feeling which a strike would arouse. Unconsciously they had chosen to give battle at a moment when their chances of victory were as slight as those of Burnside at Marye's Heights or Pickett at Gettysburg. But it is easier to be a prophet after the event than before it.86.

While the policemen certainly had but a slight chance of victory as soon as the violence began, it might be better to compare them with a different Civil War general: John Pope. Unlike Burnside and Pickett, who had a good idea of what they were getting into when they began their frontal assaults, Pope was unaware that he was facing both Jackson and Longstreet when he attacked at Second Bull Run. Similarly, the policemen were ambushed by rioting that was primarily the fault of Curtis and by charges of Bolshevism that appeared out of nowhere.

It is undeniable that the police were accused of anarchism and Bolshevism, and the accusations were more passionate the farther from Boston they were. But the fact that some newspapers and politicians sensationalized the strike for all its worth does not show that many Americans seriously believed that the police were attempting to begin a revolution, or, in Russell's words, that "Boston . . . now in the eyes of nervous Americans had come to seem [America's] Petrograd."87. And even if the screaming newspapers did alarm some readers in Los Angeles and Topeka, it is hard to find evidence that these charges significantly affected the outcome of the strike. They may have magnified the perceived heroism of Calvin Coolidge, helping him get his nomination for the vice presidency. Or perhaps they intensified the public distrust of unionized police, and thus helped retard police unionization until the 1960s. But it is hard to find evidence that the atmosphere of hostility to communism and anarchism greatly altered the course of the strike.

Next: Chapter 4, The General Strike

Notes

1. Boston Evening Transcript, 11 September 1919.
2. Francis Russell, A City in Terror: 1919, the Boston Police Strike (New York: The Viking Press, 1975), 7-25.
3. Jonathan Randall White, A Triumph of Bureaucracy: The Boston Police Strike and the Ideological Origins of the American Police State (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1982), 135.
4. Ibid., 157.
5. White writes on page 143 that "The Boston Police did not perceive themselves to be revolutionaries striking out at the progressive industrial order. Unfortunately for them, the country did." He footnotes this claim to Jonathan Daniels, The Time Between the Wars: Armistice to Pearl Harbor (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), 24. Having carefully examined the Daniels book, I can find no statement on that page or any other that supports White's claim. The Daniels book is a broad history of over twenty years of American history with only brief mentions of the strike and is not a reliable source for information either on the policemen's intentions or the country's perceptions. In fact, it is probable that Daniels relied entirely on Mark Allen White's Puritan in Babylon, which he lists in his bibliography, for information on the strike.
6. White, Triumph of Bureaucracy, 158. Here White concedes that the members of the Storrow Committee, including several prominent businessmen, were considerably more sympathetic to the police than was Curtis. But he repeats that 1919 "was a time of fear" without showing this alleged fear influenced any behavior.
7. Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920, (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980, originally published 1955), 83.
8. Ibid., 83.
9. Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States. Volume IV: The International Workers of the World, 1905-1917 (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 14.
10. Murray, Red Scare, 28.
11. Ibid., 28-9.
12. Roy T. Wortman, From Syndicalism to Trade Unionism: The IWW in Ohio, 1905-1950 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), 6.
13. Foner, Labor Movement, 104.
14. Murray, Red Scare, 39.
15. Foner, Labor Movement, 131.
16. Why and What is the I.W.W.? and What the I.W.W. is Not (Los Angeles: International Workers of the World, n.d.),
17. The I.W.W.: Its First Seventy Years (1905-1975) (Chicago: Industrial Workers of the World, 1976, 110.
18. Ibid., 115.
19. The Truth about the I.W.W. Prisoners (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 1922), 8.
20. Foner, Labor Movement, 553.
21. The I.W.W.: Its First Seventy Years, 124.
22. Ibid., 9-10.
23. Foner, Labor Movement, 29.
24. Ibid., 553.
25. Ibid., 314.
26. Ibid., 318.
27. Ibid., 342.
28. Ibid., 347.
29. I.W.W. Prisoners, 9.
30. John Clendenin Townsend, Running the Gauntlet: Cultural Sources of Violence Against the I.W.W. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986), 3-6.
31. Murray, Red Scare, 83.
32. I tend to believe the "deceptive masking" interpretion myself.
33. Who today has heard of the Boston Fire Non-Strike of 1918?
34. William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge (1938. Reprint. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973), 153.
35. Samuel Gompers, "Samuel Gompers Before Boston Chamber of Commerce," American Federationist 27, no. 2 (February 1920), 135.
36. Report of Committee Appointed by Mayor Peters to Consider the Police Situation [Storrow Report] (City of Boston, 1919), 21.
37. Ibid.,20.
38. White, Triumph of Bureaucracy, 127.
39. Ibid., 130.
40. Ibid., 131.
41. Howard J. Zibel, "The Role of Calvin Coolidge in the Boston Police Strike of 1919," Industrial and Labor Relations Forum 6, no. 3 (November 1969), 305.
42. Evening Transcript, Aug. 19, 1.
43. Fuess, Calvin Coolidge, 211.
44. Calvin Coolidge, The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge (New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, 1929), 132.
45. Zibel, "Role of Calvin Coolidge," 307.
46. Coolidge, Autobiography, 128.
47. Fuess, Calvin Coolidge, 212.
48. White, A Puritan in Babylon, 137.
49. Claude M. Fuess, Calvin Coolidge: The Man from Vermont (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1940), 203.
50. Ibid., 111.
51. White, A Puritan in Babylon, 150.
52. David Ziskind, One Thousand Strikes of Government Employees (1940. Reprint. New York: Arno & the New York Times, 1971), 37.
53. Fuess, Calvin Coolidge, 218.
54. White,Puritan in Babylon, 158. See also Frederick Manuel Koss, "The Boston Police Strike" (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1960), 315 and 338.
55. White, Puritan in Babylon, 158.
56. Fuess, Calvin Coolidge, 217.
57. "Address of Mayor Andrew J. Peters to the City Council, February 2, 1920," Documents of the City of Boston for the Year 1920, Vol I (City of Boston Printing Department, 1921), 17.
58. Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Fourteenth Annual Report of the Police Commissioner for the City of Boston, Year Ending November 30, 1919. Public Document No. 49. (Boston: Wright and Potter Printing Co., 1920), 15-20.
59. Ibid., 19.
60. Koss, "Boston Police Strike," 315-318.
61. Herald, September 9, 1919, 1.
62. Compare Julius Caesar, gasping out with his last breath his astonishment at Brutus' treachery, or Joseph Stalin, suffering a nervous breakdown out of shock upon learning that he had been betrayed by his ally, Hitler.
63. Coolidge, Autobiography, 131.
64. Ibid., 134.
65. An exception is the Boston Evening Transcript, which as early as August 16 concentrated on the political aspects of the policemen's attempt to unionize, editorializing that an affiliated police union would lead to Russian-style "Bolshevism." Aug. 16, 12.
66. Russell, City in Terror, 169.
67. Murray, Red Scare, 129. On page 307, in note 16 to Chapter 8, Murray gives other examples of American newspapers which claimed that the Boston Police intended to establish a Soviet government.
68. Fuess, Calvin Coolidge, 224.
69. Evening Transcript, September 12, 1919, 4.
70. Ibid.,, 5.
71. Zibel, "Role of Calvin Coolidge," 317.
72. Koss, "Boston Police Strike," 246.
73. Fuess, Calvin Coolidge, 228.
74. Koss, "The Boston Police Strike," 246-49, 265.
75. Gompers, "Before Boston Chamber of Commerce," 136.
76. Fuess, Calvin Coolidge, 231, and Koss, "Boston Police Strike," 336.
77. Ziskind, One Thousand Strikes of Government Employees, 37.
78. The association of a police union with treason, as well as rioting, may have increased the degree to which the memory of the Boston Police Strike served as an unassailable argument against police unions for many years.
79. Good examples are Murray, Red Scare, 134, and White, Triumph of Bureaucracy, 136.
80. Russell, City in Terror, 21.
81. Benjamin Gitlow, The Whole of Their Lives: Communism in America--A Personal History and Intimate Portrayal of its Leaders (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948), 55.
82. Ibid., 56.
83. City in Terror, 115.
84. This is but one example of Russell's maddening practice of making provocative statements without any obvious evidence. His book, the only widely available book-length account of the strike, lacks footnotes.
85. In my own experience I have photographed many student demonstrations and anti-war marches at which communists, without having organized the event and though a tiny minority of the demonstrators, have been equipped with the loudest bullhorns and the best made signs. These communists act as hermit crabs, living in shells that they did not create. Perhaps Gitlow's "organizers" of 1919 did the same by attaching themselves to the Boston strike, already in progress.
On September 22, 1919, Police Superintendent Crowley sent out a memo to "All Divisions" reading,
Paper slips, printed in red, which read as follows:
INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY
THE MASTERS FEAR IT
THE WORKERS NEED IT
THE I.W.W. WILL GET IT!
are being posted throughout the city.
You will instruct officers to have a sharp lookout for persons pasting these slips on buildings, poles, and windows. If any person is found pasting said slips, arrrest and prosecute in court. (Samuel D. Parker, Police Strike Papers, Houghton Library.)
Such postering does not indicate any serious radical involvement in the strike; it could have been the work of a single individual who had no contact with the striking police. But had the itinerant posterer been apprehended, one wonders what crime he would be charged with. The tone of Crowley's memo suggests that the prosecution would have been based entirely on the content of the speech, a further illustration of the intolerance for radical political views that Murray has so well documented.
86. Fuess, Calvin Coolidge, 216.
87. Russell, City in Terror, 170.