A City in Terror Read online

  ALSO BY FRANCIS RUSSELL

  THREE STUDIES IN TWENTIETH CENTURY OBSCURITY

  THE AMERICAN HERITAGE BOOK OF THE PIONEER SPIRIT

  THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WARS

  TRAGEDY IN DEDHAM

  LEXINGTON, CONCORD, AND BUNKER HILL

  THE GREAT INTERLUDE

  THE WORLD OF DÜRER

  THE SHADOW OF BLOOMING GROVE

  THE MAKING OF THE NATION

  THE CONFIDENT YEARS

  FORTY YEARS ON

  THE CONCISE HISTORY OF GERMANY

  SACCO AND VANZETTI: THE CASE RESOLVED

  ADAMS: AN AMERICAN DYNASTY

  THE SHADOW OF BLOOMING GROVE

  THE KNAVE OF BOSTON AND OTHER AMBIGUOUS

  MASSACHUSETTS CHARACTERS

  Beacon Press

  25 Beacon Street

  Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892

  www.beacon.org

  Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregatons.

  Copyright © 1975 by Francis Russell

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  First published in 1975 by The Viking Press, Inc.

  First Beacon Press edition published in 2005.

  09 08 07 06 05 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.

  Map of Boston orignally by Graphic 70 Redrawn in 2005 by Bruce Jones Design

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Russell, Francis, 1910–1989

  A city in terror: Calvin Coolidge and the 1919 Boston police strike.

  Bibliography: p.

  Includes index.

  1. Boston—Police Strike, 1919. I. Title.

  HV8148.B72R56 331.895281536320974461 74-31306

  ISBN 0-8070-5033-4

  eISBN 978-0-8070-9666-6

  CONTENTS

  A Personal Recollection

  The Year of Disillusion

  The Boston Police Department

  Overture to a Strike

  Summer’s End in Boston

  On a Tuesday in September

  The Riots

  Law and Order

  After the Strike

  The Ghost of Scollay Square

  Postscript in Baltimore

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  A PERSONAL RECOLLECTION

  The Boston Police Strike of 1919 was an event that reached far beyond itself, even into our own day. Its set of curious chances took an inconspicuous governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, and placed him in the White House. It also made any future strike by the police force of a large American city all but impossible. Most police in that immediate postwar period were being carried along on the rising tide of unionization. The failure of the Boston strike saw the tide ebb for the police, leaving the strikers high and dry. Since then America’s various police forces have formed their own associations, but after the Boston debacle few have chosen to affiliate with any national labor group. Boston’s strike was unique in that when the police quit their posts there was no counterforce to replace them. To the public in that Red-haunted year the unchecked rising of the Boston mob came as an ominous shock. For many middle Americans—and for a few spellbound radicals—it seemed the germinal event, the harbinger of an American October Revolution. Respectable Bostonians, viewing the rogues’ carnival in their staid streets, thought back to A Tale of Two Cities read long ago in school. For a few hours the lid had been off their stratified social structure, and the glimpse of what lay underneath was cruel, bestial, something they did not like to think about.

  That strike is one of my more coherent childhood memories. We lived then on Wellington Hill in the Mattapan section of Dorchester, four and a half miles distant from Beacon Hill, though considerably farther socially. Our Hill was a small lower-middle- to middle-class community where life during the hectic days of the strike ran on with a placid neighborliness that neither war nor civic commotion could disturb. Proletarian Blue Hill Avenue and the Dorchester streets below us remained equally calm. The second day of the strike my father came home from the office in a singularly buoyant mood. From the baize bag he had acquired in the Harvard Law School, he took out a service revolver and a shield-shaped nickel badge stamped BOSTON POLICE. He was now, he told my mother, a special policeman for the duration of the emergency. That evening he spent several hours going through trunks and boxes hunting for a pair of white kid gloves that he had worn at a Masonic installation eight years before.

  “Nobody can ever find anything in this house,” he muttered, a perennial complaint of his.

  “Don’t be an Uncle Podger,”* my mother told him, her timeworn retort. She finally found the gloves in the old steamer trunk under his tennis-racket press.

  One of my father’s fixed beliefs was that he had a natural talent for things military, a talent under which he now subsumed police work. The police strike became a kind of compensation to him for not having served in two wars. Twenty-one years before, as a seventeen-year-old Dorchester High School senior, he had stood in line with my Uncle Charlie to join the Roxbury Horse Guards for service in Cuba. However, somebody tipped off my grandfather at his South Boston paper factory, and he whipped down in his buggy to intercept his two boys before they reached the recruiting officer’s desk.

  In August 1914 my father had taken the German side, either out of contrariness to the general feeling on the Hill, or from recollections of an elementary psychology course under that staunch Harvard Teuton, Professor Hugo Muensterberg, or because he had had a German grandfather in the Franco-Prussian War, or perhaps to bait my English mother. I expect all four motives were inextricably combined in him. But the sinking of the Lusitania, in which my mother had returned to this country in 1913, muted his pro-German opinions, and with the United States War Declaration of April 1917, he did a complete about-face. From then on no one on the Hill was more uncritically and ardently patriotic. As head of the local Red Cross drive he saw to it that his Mattapan section had the highest percentage of contributions in the city. He served on the Mattapan Legal Advisory Board, which entitled him to wear a bronze pin in his buttonhole showing a hand holding a pair of scales over which was inscribed LEGAL ADVISOR and underneath, U S SELECTIVE SERVICE SYSTEM. The long field behind our house was ploughed and divided up into war gardens, and along with most of our neighbors my father took an allotment. His agricultural zeal was brief, however. Our garden was by autumn easily the weediest, the least hoed, the most neglected on the Hill. Beetles devoured our potato plants, rabbits from the Hollow chewed off our emergent peas and beans, cutworms leveled our tomatoes. Only the summer squash, planted at random in the rubbish pile, grew lushly. I do not think our family efforts helped the starving Belgians much. Still, my father was very proud whenever he came up the back stairs with those elongated and overripe yellow squashes.

  At that time he was serving the first of several terms in the legislature. As a state representative, as a married man with two children, he was not subject to the draft. I am still rather puzzled that he did not volunteer. Instead he became a home-front zealot, in the legislature, in the Red Cross and Liberty Bond drives, at the Legal Advisory Board (whose functions I have never been able to determine). His wartime views, once adopted, remained fixed. During the pacifist drift of the twenties he would continue to argue that America’s entry into the war had been necessary to keep the victorious Germans “from coming over here.” He once told me that if he had joined in 1917 he could have been a major. Over half a century later I still find it a shuddering thought, unless he had been kept penned up in the
judge advocate’s office. His martial spirit later found a part outlet in the legislature when he sponsored a bill to create a Massachusetts State Police. After the bill was passed Governor Coolidge presented him with the pen he had used in signing it. It was a white goose quill, the nib stained with ink. Though the pen has long since been lost, I still have the governor’s letter following my father’s election to the legislature, with the somewhat questionable observation that “our House of Representatives is an ancient and honorable body and worthy of the highest type of service that our Massachusetts citizenship can bestow upon it.”

  The calm of our district was probably quite a disappointment to my father. His single adventure was in commandeering a private automobile to chase a suspicious character who had been noticed boarding a streetcar at Mattapan Square. The character was suspicious because he was foreign-looking and had tried to change a ten-dollar bill at McHugh’s drugstore. However, he turned out to be merely an Italian laborer, and the bill was what was left of his week’s pay.

  For several days my father in his white kid gloves directed traffic at the corner of Morton Street and Blue Hill Avenue, the busiest intersection between Franklin Park and Mattapan Square. In those days there were only about a twentieth as many cars on the road as today, but somehow each morning he managed to create a traffic jam of dimensions previously unknown in Dorchester and not to be seen again until the introduction of traffic lights. He maintained that the tie-up was caused by all the drivers coming in town after the strike, and that no regular policeman could have managed better. Whatever the jam, he enjoyed himself thoroughly. Badge, revolver, whistle, and white gloves were authoritative symbols that made his law office seem tame when he went back to it a week later.

  Before the strike, the police of Boston still wore dome-shaped helmets like those of the English police. They also wore high-necked frock coats above which protruded the ends of a wing collar. With their leather outer belts they resembled the old Keystone Kops. The only policeman I knew by sight was Mr. Fitzgibbons. “Iron Mike” they called him at Mattapan’s Station 19. His daughter Susy was in our fourth-grade room. Susy was a bright, aggressive little girl who wore paper hair-ribbons, could write in Palmer Method without making blots, and got double promotions. As I look back now at our old fourth-grade picture, I can see that she was the most attractive one of our group, but I did not think so then. She was the oldest of seven children.

  The Fitzgibbonses lived in a square little two-and-a-half-story house down the street from the Martha Baker School. They were neat, well-behaved children, all seven of them, and they went to St. Angela’s, not like those tough shanty Irish who lived on Mulvey Street. Mrs. Fitzgibbons belonged to the Mothers’ Club. There were such a lot of Fitzgibbonses that they used to have benches along the dining-room table instead of chairs. People like my mother were dubious about so many children, but they thought Mrs. Fitzgibbons was a wonderful manager.

  I can remember Mr. Fitzgibbons coming up over the Hill on the way home from Station 19, a tall, striding figure in his grey helmet and blue coat with the shining badge and buttons. Even the Mulvey Streeters who used to yell “Cheese it, the cop!” when they saw other policemen were quiet when he went by. No one would have dared to challenge his presence. Mr. Fitzgibbons, that proud and handsome man, walking up the street with the sun shining on his helmet, saluting Miss Sykes, the head teacher, as he passed with courtly reserve, was the Law. But on that Tuesday afternoon he went on strike with the others. “If I hadn’t been in my last month, I’d have seen that Mike never walked out,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons told my mother afterward.

  For several months after the strike the policemen of Station 19, almost all of whom had struck, were replaced by the state guard. The aspect of these overage and underage guardsmen was ludicrously unmilitary. They scarcely knew the manual of arms, and they still wore the laced gaiters and felt campaign hats of the Mexican Border Campaign of 1916, which had been replaced in the American Expeditionary Force by spiral puttees and overseas caps.

  To us in the fourth grade, though, they were impressive indeed, soldiers in the flesh, objects of military might. It was like having Memorial Day every day in the week to see so many uniforms. The guardsmen carried rifles with fixed bayonets rather than revolvers, just like the pictures of soldiers in the war. That Halloween I was chased by a guardsman who caught me shinnying up a lamppost to put out the gas light in front of the Sandses. As soon as I saw him I jumped and tried to get away by ducking through the backyards, but he ran after me and the fear went down into my legs. I still recall my side glimpse of that looming khaki figure in his wide-brimmed felt hat, his rifle at port, and the light sparkling on the bayonet as he chased me across lots and under clotheslines. At each step he took I could hear the slap of the leather sling against his rifle stock. I was so frightened I wet myself.

  By the end of the year a new police force had been recruited and the drab uniforms of the state guard disappeared. The new policemen had different uniforms. The long coats and wing collars had been discarded. Caps replaced the helmets. It was the close of an era: the end of the patrolman in his high helmet walking his beat under the gas lamps past the corner saloon, the beginning of prowl cars and bootleggers.

  Even in the fourth grade I could sense the change. I remember one sunny October afternoon passing the Fitzgibbons house on the way home from school. The Fitzgibbonses had a tree in their yard that Susy called an umbrella tree. It had wide leaves almost two feet long and a pink fruit that ripened in the autumn and looked like a magnolia bud. Most of the leaves had fallen, and the yard behind the clipped privet hedge was buried under them. One of the Fitzgibbons children who was too young to go to school yet was gathering the leaves in his express wagon. Another, still younger, sat on the edge of the curb in front of the house playing with an old spoon and a grey policeman’s helmet.

  * See Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. My father did indeed have much in common with Uncle Podger.

  THE YEAR OF DISILLUSION

  November 11, 1918. By the time the first cloth-capped workers with their tin lunch boxes stood waiting for the Boston streetcars in the long-shadowed morning, the newspapers were already shouting in jubilant headlines that the armistice had been signed. Church bells and fire bells rang out in the suburbs, small boys built fires in the streets, and the downtown air quivered from the shrillness of tugboat whistles and foghorns in the harbor. For Boston, as for all the other thronged and delirious cities, that morning was the beginning of the new, the bright promise of a future that combined the ineradicable American belief in progress with the memory of a prewar golden past that never existed but was now to be recaptured.

  In that first World War the patriotic slogans had rung as true as newly minted silver coins. Keep the World Safe for Democracy! The war had been the struggle of light against darkness, against the sinister forces led by the Kaiser, the very essence of militarism with his spiked helmet and insolently upturned moustache. Beat the Hun! Those barbarians had started it all by attacking brave little Belgium and marching through that green and peaceable land, butchering women and children and even worse, as one could read in the nightmare pages of the Bryce Report. Only barbarians would have bombarded an open city, as the Boches did when from seventy-five miles away they shelled the French capital with their Paris Guns. Only Boches would have sunk the unarmed Lusitania carrying innocent American women and children.

  Through the little streets of the Boston suburbs, of Roxbury, Dorchester, Everett, Somerville, South Boston, Liberty Loan posters, flaunting a high-breasted Columbia draped in the Stars and Stripes, filled the front window. Often there was a serviceman’s flag beside the posters—the blue star on the red-bordered white background—and a Red Cross transparency behind which it was suggested one light a candle on Christmas Eve—until the fire commissioner objected.

  Our boys would not come back until it was over Over There, the Old World redeemed by the New. For this Americans cheerfully had accepted mea
tless days and lightless nights, substituted rice and cornmeal for wheat flour, used Karo corn syrup instead of sugar, huddled without grumbling before a portable Simplex oil heater when coal grew scarce. In the public parks through the summer evenings, men who had never touched hand to hoe before trenched and weeded in war gardens among rows of potatoes and corn and beans and tomatoes. Can Vegetables and Fruit and the Kaiser Too! Families ate more peaches for the sake of the stones that in some mysterious way had become vital to the manufacture of gas masks. Peach-stone collection barrels dotted Boston Common. All the large cities held Wake Up America parades. Such celebrities as Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and the opera singer Geraldine Farrar gave four-minute pep talks to persuade even the most hesitant to buy Liberty Bonds. Arthur Guy Empey, the heroic American author of Over the Top, who had rushed to join the British Army after the sinking of the Lusitania and who had fought and been wounded in the trenches, announced that he was now giving away an autographed copy of his book to everyone who purchased a $100 bond. Buy a Bond! Feed a Fighter! Those who could not afford a Liberty Bond could at least buy War Savings Certificates, and even schoolchildren could save their nickels and dimes for the green twenty-five-cent Thrift Stamps sold by the postman, sixteen of which could be exchanged for a War Savings Certificate. Lick the Stamps and Lick the Kaiser!

  America in those nineteen war months had been overwhelmed by a euphoria such as the nations and cities of Europe had experienced in the summer of 1914. War, unknown for fifty years in the United States except for the three-month Spanish-American incident, became a heart-moving experience that cut through class and ethnic barriers to knit Americans together in a mindless unity. As one contemporary versifier, caught up in the patriotic fervor, explained:

  There’s a certain sort of glory

  That is throbbing in the street;