A City in Terror Read online

  Following the Seattle strike, Mayor Hanson toured the country crying up the Red menace. But Seattle was a continent away, and Bostonians and the Boston press were more concerned with the strike in the mills of Lawrence, the drab and polyglot company town thirty-seven miles to the north. That strike of foreign-born workers was seen by both sides as a sequel to the great Lawrence strike of 1912, when the founder of the IWW, the one-eyed giant Big Bill Haywood, had come to the city in person to rally the workers. With him in that turbulent struggle, in which one girl worker was shot dead, were the anarchist leader Carlo Tresca, the anarchist poet Arturo Giovannitti, and Tresca’s mistress, the (then) slim young firebrand Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

  The second Lawrence strike began three days before the one in Seattle, following a demand by the textile workers for a reduction of their six-day nine-hour week to one of eight hours at the same rate of pay. The companies were willing to compromise by granting a forty-eight-hour week at the same rate plus time-and-a-half for overtime. Although United Textile Workers of America officials were ready to accept the offer, the more radical local leaders were not. The strike took on political overtones when a general strike committee repudiated the Central Labor Union and the AFL, and called on the IWW for help. Ime Kaplan, a Russian alien, took over the leadership of the strike. To Kaplan the six hours in dispute were irrelevant. He saw the strike as part of a larger pattern of capitalist disintegration preliminary to the seizure of power by the proletariat. Tresca and Giovannitti again traveled to Lawrence to spur the workers on, and Larkin put in a firebrand appearance. The strike committee sent out an appeal in twenty languages calling for a general strike of all textile workers. Factory owners refused to negotiate further. Lawrence police forbade all meetings on city land. A house was bombed, a striker killed by a shot in the dark. Some of the mills defiantly reopened. But the strike dragged on for months.

  The narrow streets of Boston had a grim aspect when President Wilson landed there on February 23 on his return from the Paris Peace Conference. Secret Service men armed with rifles lined the roofs, and all windows were ordered closed as he drove past. The day before, two Spanish anarchists of the Groupa Pro Prensa had been arrested for plotting Wilson’s assassination. Nothing untoward occurred during the President’s Boston visit, but the fear remained, a fear that Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson gave voice to when he warned an apprehensive middle-class audience that “recent strikes at Lawrence, Seattle … and other places were not industrial, economic disputes in their origin but were results of a deliberate, organized attempt at a social and political movement to establish Soviet Governments in the United States.” News from overseas reinforced such fear: the earlier Spartacist revolt in Berlin, a Soviet Bavaria under the Left Socialist Kurt Eisner, in March Béla Kun’s Communist dictatorship in Hungary, the wounding of Premier Clemenceau in France by a “Bolshevik agent.” Could it happen in America? men increasingly asked themselves.

  Telephone service in New England went dead on April 15 as twenty thousand telephone operators, headed by the Boston local of the telephone workers’ union, pulled the switches and walked off their jobs. The girls, earning sixteen dollars a week, demanded twenty-two dollars, finally settled for nineteen dollars. That strike lasted only a week, but it disrupted and alarmed the business community. It seemed one more ominous sign.

  Something of the mood of Armistice Day in the grey seaport city was recaptured when on April 25 the returned Yankee Division held its final parade in Boston. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts appropriated thirty thousand dollars for the victory reception. Stands had been run up in front of the State House and on both sides of the Commonwealth Avenue mall. For hours on that cold spring day, the men of the Yankee Division marched by the gilt-domed State House to the applause of the assembled politicians, down Beacon Street and up and down Commonwealth Avenue, company after company in their high-collared tunics, spiral puttees, and steel helmets, led by their new commander Major General Harry Hale. But all eyes were on the former commander, General Edwards, mounted on a skittish bay and conspicuously wearing an overseas cap instead of a steel helmet.

  Three days later the country received its first bomb scare. Already in February, when there was talk of deporting every radical, anarchist posters had appeared in New England defiantly proclaiming:

  GO AHEAD

  The senile fossils ruling the United States see red!

  …………………………………………………

  The storm is within and very soon will leap and Crash and annihilate you in blood and fire. You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise.

  …………………………………………………

  We will dynamite you!

  Then on April a package containing a home-made bomb was sent to Mayor Hanson in Seattle. Acid from the detonator leaking through the package revealed the bomb before it could explode. Another bomb, sent to Georgia’s ex-Senator Thomas Hardwick, was more disastrous, exploding as a maid opened the package and blowing off both her hands. On April 30 thirty-four “May Day” bomb packages were discovered in the mail before delivery, addressed to such people as Ellis Island’s Commissioner of Immigration Frederick C. Howe, the commissioner general of immigration, the chairman of the Senate Bolshevik Investigating Committee, Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, who had earlier barred radical literature from the mails, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who had sentenced Big Bill Haywood and the other Wobbly leaders, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Secretary of Labor William Wilson, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan. Headlines announced to an alarmed public that “REDS PLAN MAY DAY MURDERS.” Until 1919, except among the foreign-born of the large cities, May Day had never taken on the political significance that it had developed in Europe. But radicals were determined to dedicate this May Day to their cause, to make the day a real Red Letter one. In cities across the country they held mass assemblies and staged Red Flag parades. Riots followed as indignant opponents, often ex-soldiers and sailors still in uniform, attacked the Red militants. Major disturbances took place in New York, Cleveland, and Boston.

  In New York ex-servicemen invaded a Tom Mooney protest meeting that overflowed Carnegie Hall while other men in uniform stormed the Russian People’s House on East Fifteenth Street and forced a Socialist gathering to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Seventeen Socialists were injured. Some four hundred soldiers and sailors then broke up a reception at the new offices of the Socialist Call, smashed furniture, and forced the guests into the street.

  In Cleveland, Victory Loan workers led by an army lieutenant stopped a mammoth Red Flag parade, and the lieutenant tore a red banner from the hands of a soldier leading the column. Paraders and their opponents at once flung themselves on each other with fists and clubs. In Public Square another uniformed lieutenant confronted several soldiers wearing red flags pinned to their uniforms. As he snatched at the flags the soldiers struck back, and the parade turned into a riot so violent that it required army trucks and a Victory Loan tank to break up the fighting. One man was killed and over forty were injured. Police arrested 106 Socialists, most of them aliens.

  In Boston the Roxbury Letts were denied a permit to parade by the City Board of Street Commissioners. Nevertheless, on May Day morning they formed up in front of the Dudley Street Opera House and unfurled their red flags and revolutionary banners to shouts of “To hell with the permit!” Led by Fraina, marching arm-in-arm with a huge gorilla-like Lett by the name of Jurgis and the frail Willy Sidis, the mathematics prodigy who had graduated from Harvard five years earlier at the age of fifteen, the Letts trudged off toward Boston. Near the Dudley Street el terminal they came up against a squad of police, who ordered them to halt. Instead they rushed the police, who gave way, vainly swinging their billies. Some bystanders dashed in to aid the police and to snatch at the red flags. When police reinforcements arrived, the Letts went at them with fists, knuckle-dusters, short lengths of pipe, b
lackjacks, and even revolvers. One policeman, Arthur Shea, was shot in the hand; another policeman in the foot. Several men were stabbed, while still others were clubbed, stoned, and attacked with ice picks. In the swirling brawl a police captain died of a heart attack. Not until mounted police appeared did the Letts finally disperse. Confronted by such a Red menace, Boston reacted savagely. Patriotic vigilantes spread through Roxbury beating up anyone looking too suspiciously foreign or wearing a scrap of red. District Attorney Joseph Pelletier (shortly to be disbarred) called on every citizen to “be on guard and active against the malignant enemy of democracy.” Before the melee ended, 116 paraders had been arrested. Taken before Judge A. F. Hayden at the Roxbury Municipal Court, fourteen of them were found guilty of disturbing the peace and sentenced to several months in prison.

  Two weeks after the May Day outbreaks, the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council in Manitoba, Canada, called a general strike. With its onset the Winnipeg city government, the police and fire departments, the post office, and other municipal offices fell completely into the hands of a strike committee. Although the strike collapsed after two weeks, many Canadians and Americans believed it another Bolshevik forerunner. Samuel Gompers of the AFL, fearing the spreading reaction against all organized labor, labeled it an “evil.” Secretary of War Newton Baker told the Ohio Federation of Women’s Clubs that “in our country, since the armistice, there has been a growing agitation and unrest manifesting itself sometimes in race riots and mob disorder, but for the most part evidenced by widespread industrial controversies. Our newspapers are daily filled with accounts of violent agitation by so-called Bolshevists and radicals courting violence and urging action in behalf of what they call revolution.”

  As if to bear out his warning, on June 2 bombs exploded in eight American cities. The chief target was the Red-hunting attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer. Just as he was going to bed in his Washington town house on R Street, a tremendous explosion blew off the front of the building and shattered the windows of neighboring houses, including that of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt across the way. Copies of a pamphlet entitled Plain Words were found near the site of each explosion. It read, in part:

  There will have to be bloodshed … we will destroy and rid the world of your tyrannical institutions….

  Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny!

  The Anarchist Fighters

  The bomb destined for Palmer went off prematurely, blowing its carrier to bits. Only his head was found, on a rooftop several blocks away. Not until some time afterward did the police finally identify him as Carlo Valdinoce, a New Jersey anarchist.* Judge Hayden’s house on Wayne Street, Roxbury, was almost demolished by a bomb made of an iron pipe stuffed with shrapnel and dynamite, although the judge himself was unhurt. Copies of Plain Words were found in the debris. In suburban Newtonville a similar bomb blew off the side of a house belonging to State Representative Leland Powers, who had sponsored an anti-anarchy bill in the Massachusetts legislature. Attorney General Palmer declared that the latest bombings were another attempt on the part of radical elements to rule the country.

  Spring gave way to the Red Summer, so named by James Weldon Johnson, the black poet, who was thinking more of the color of blood than of politics. It ushered in the most savage racial strife in a generation as four hundred thousand Negro soldiers returned to civilian life. Race riots broke out in twenty-five American cities. With the wartime shortage of labor, rural Negroes from the South had migrated to the Northern industrial centers. After the war such migration continued, even though falling employment brought blacks and whites into increasing confrontation both in jobs and housing. One sign of conflict was the spectacular growth of the revived Ku Klux Klan. In Chicago the conflict erupted into a race war after the death of a young Negro at a Lake Michigan beach. He had swum into water customarily reserved for whites, who threw stones at him. Although they failed to hit him, they so terrified him that he drowned from exhaustion. Negroes felt he had been murdered and began to attack whites on the streets. The whites turned on the Negroes, and rioting raged for thirteen days. Even when after four days the militia was called out, the guardsmen were unable to contain the riot that soon expanded into a miniature civil war. Before it was over fifteen whites and thirty-eight blacks were dead, with over five hundred injured on both sides. More than a thousand houses were burnt down, mostly in the Negro district. Other race riots followed in the District of Columbia, Tennessee, Nebraska, Omaha, Arkansas, and Texas. During the year some seventy Negroes were lynched, a figure that included ten returned soldiers.

  As the 1919 Fourth of July neared, it seemed in prospect as ominous a day as the first of May. Radicals took the lead in demanding a general strike in protest against the conviction of Thomas Mooney, who with Warren Billings had been arrested in July 1916 and sentenced to death for his supposed part in setting off a bomb during a San Francisco Preparedness Parade in which nine people were killed and forty injured. Doubts as to their guilt, carefully fanned by propaganda, made them into a symbol of the working class’s fight for justice. Liberals and radicals of all the shades from pink to red embraced their cause. Again apprehension spread among the more naïve patriotic Americans. “REIGN OF TERROR PLANNED,” newspaper headlines announced as the Fourth neared; “PLANS FOR WIDESPREAD VIOLENCE AND MURDER.” Mayors and governors grew increasingly nervous. In New York City, eleven thousand police and detectives were placed on a twenty-four-hour alert guarding all public buildings. Two companies of infantry were rushed to Chicago. In Boston several platoons of soldiers with rifles stood guard at the Federal Building.

  July Fourth itself turned out to be an anticlimax. The muchvaunted strike never took place, and there were no signs of other radical activity. Nevertheless, the very anticipation of more labor violence heightened antiradical emotions and increased public suspicion of unions in general.

  The annual convention of the American Federation of Labor, meeting at Atlantic City in June, had gone out of its way to demonstrate its hostility to radicalism. Delegates voted against recognizing the Soviet Union, declined to take any part in a proposed general strike for Mooney and Billings, opposed “one big union,” and demanded more stringent immigration laws. The AFL did, however, reverse an old policy by announcing that it was now prepared to grant charters to police unions. Over the large protests of Gompers the convention rank and file endorsed the Plumb Plan providing for the federal government’s permanent ownership of all the United States railroads, already taken over as a wartime measure by Wilson in December 1917. The four Railroad Brotherhoods supported the plan, which called for the purchase of the railroads and a division of the profits between the government, the managers, and the other employees. Many Americans, including many members of Congress, saw the Plumb Plan as “a bold, bald, naked attempt to sovietize the railroads.”

  The summer grew increasingly turbulent. President Wilson, already repudiated in the 1918 midterm elections, was fighting a desperate rear-guard action for his League of Nations. Attorney General Palmer, still unnerved by the bombing of his house, made preparations to purge the country of Reds once and for all. Strikes, riots, and terror spurred on the fanatic conviction of men like Fraina, Reed, and Gitlow that this turbulence would usher in a revolutionary wave to sweep away the old. Middle Americans yearned for the assurance of stability. Patriotic zealots saw their fears embodied in the unruly radicals. Strikes rose from 248 in April and 303 in June to 360 in July. On July 4, five thousand New England fishermen began a thirty-eight-day walkout, to be followed by the maritime workers. On July 13 Boston streetcars and elevated trains stopped for four days after the elevated railway workers left their jobs, refusing to return until their demands were met. The Boston Herald observed angrily that “every self-respecting person must have a feeling of disgust over the thought that an army of public service employees can get their wages raised by so despicable a performance as quitting their jobs while an adjustment is pending, to which they
had agreed to adhere, the terms of which would have been retroactive.”

  Some of the crustier Republican elders blamed Governor Coolidge for being too conciliatory to the Boston elevated strikers. Undoubtedly the el strike made a preceptive impression on the Boston policemen, whose static pay scale had long been a growing source of discontent to them. At a December meeting of the representative police organization, the Boston Social Club, a member suggested calling in an American Federation of Labor agent. The matter was dropped without a vote. But by February 19, 1919, more than a thousand Boston policemen attending a meeting of the Social Club in Intercolonial Hall, Roxbury, “to discuss the advisability of affiliating with some other organization” declared themselves in favor of joining the American Federation of Labor. A large majority of those present voted to grant their executive board full power to act in the matter.

  An announcement, following the American Federation of Labor June convention, that the federation was now prepared to grant charters to police unions resulted in a surge of union activity among police all over the country. By August the police forces of thirty-seven large cities had already been accepted into the AFL. On July 23 the Herald noted that “Boston Police wish to join the A. F. of L.” According to the Herald, petitions were already circulating in each of the nineteen police districts requesting the formation of a union with an AFL charter.

  * Valdinoce’s sister Susie went to live with the Sacco family in Boston after the arrest of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

  THE BOSTON POLICE DEPARTMENT

  Like the city itself, the Boston Police Department traced its roots to the earliest Colonial period. In 1631, a year after the settlers arrived on the Trimontaine peninsula and renamed it Boston, the “Court”—that is Governor John Winthrop, Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley, and their assistants—ordered “that Watches be set at sunset, and if any person fire off a piece after the watch is set, he shall be fined forty shillings, or be whipped.” Two days later, as set down in the spidery handwriting of the record, “we began a Court of Guard upon the Neck, between Roxburie and Boston, whereupon shall always be resident an officer and six men.” Those seven, on night watch against knaves, thieves, straggling Indians, wolves and bears, runaway servants and slaves, were Boston’s first police force. Five years later at Town Meeting the watch’s position was made more regular when “upon private warning, it was agreed yt there shalbe a watch taken up and gone around with from the first of the second month next for ye summertime from sunne sett an houre after ye beating of ye drumbe, upon penaltie for every one wanting therin twelve pence every night.”