A City in Terror Read online

  Whatever their latent discontent at the war’s end, the Boston policemen had not wavered in their confidence in and affection for their leader. Most of the members of the force visited his body as it lay in state, and afterward marched in the funeral procession. Every station and every branch of the department sent its separate wreath.

  If O’Meara had lived out his third term, the Boston Police Strike of 1919 would probably never have taken place. Under his successor, Edwin Upton Curtis, it became almost inevitable. For if O’Meara had been an autocrat tempered by understanding, the fifty-seven-year-old Curtis was an uncompromising martinet with no previous experience in police administration and no great affection for the Boston Irish. William Allen White characterized him with malicious accuracy in A Puritan in Babylon as

  a large, serious man, addicted to long double breasted coats, with a reserve which passed easily for dignity in the pre-Civil War era; a reserve which men in his own day were moved to call pomp; one of these solemn self-sufficient Bostonian heroes who apparently are waiting in the flesh to walk up the steps to a pedestal and be cast into monumental bronze. Boston parks are peopled with them.

  He … embodied the spirit of traditional inherited wealth, traditional inherited Republicanism, traditional inherited skepticism about the capacity of democracy for self-government and a profound faith in the propertied classes’ ultimate right to rule.

  A quarter of a century earlier at the age of thirty-three, Curtis had taken office as Boston’s youngest mayor. On that chill January day in 1895, his career seemed full of promise, with City Hall merely a way station on the glittering political road upward. The bright prospect never materialized. The road led nowhere. A year after his election he was defeated for a second term. His further career, until he became police commissioner, was a series of negligible interludes. In 1896 Governor Frederick Greenhalge appointed him a member of the Metropolitan Park Commission. A year later he married Margaret Waterman of the well-known family of undertakers. In 1906, as a further reward for Republican virtue, he was made assistant United States treasurer in Boston. In 1908 he became chairman of the Republican State Convention. A year later President Taft appointed him collector of customs for the Port of Boston, and there he remained until the advent of Wilson in 1913.

  The Curtis genealogy was as old and established a one as could be found in New England. In 1632 John Curtis, born in England, had settled in Roxbury across the neck from Boston. Seven generations of Curtises had grown up there, none of them living more than a mile from the family homestead, which was torn down shortly before Edwin Curtis’s birth in 1861. His father, Major George Curtis, had built a new home on Highland Avenue less than a mile from the old, a spacious square house with oval windows and a cupola. The major had been a Roxbury alderman and became a Boston one after annexation. But the Boston of Back Bay and Beacon Hill, the opulent mercantile Boston, passed the Curtises with a cursory nod. Unfashionable Roxbury remained a world apart from the Boston of the so-called Brahmins—the term the kindly Oliver Wendell Holmes had originally coined to mean no more than a bread-and-water intellectual asceticism but that had come to mean a class-conscious membership in the Back Bay–State Street oligarchy.

  If Edwin Curtis had been brought up on Beacon Hill, he would no doubt have gone to Milton Academy or St. Paul’s School and then Harvard. Instead he attended the solidly respectable if unfashionable Roxbury Latin School that a remote ancestor, John Eliot, the translator of the Indian Bible, had founded. After four years of the school’s six-year course, he transferred to the Little Blue School at Farmington, Maine. Then he entered Bowdoin, a sturdy, small college sixty miles south of Farmington. Graduating from Bowdoin in 1882, where he was more remembered as an athlete than a scholar, he returned to Roxbury. He decided to become a lawyer, following the old-fashioned pattern of reading law in a private office—that of former mayor and governor William Gaston—rather than going to law school. After two years he passed his bar examination and in 1885 started a law firm on his own with his Bowdoin friend William G. Reed. But as an ardent Republican, his most engrossing interest was politics. An adequate private income, though modest by Beacon Hill standards, freed him from too much concern about building up a law practice. Within a year of opening his law firm he was made secretary of the Republican City Committee, and the following year, 1889, when Republican Mayor Thomas N. Hart replaced Democrat Hugh O’Brien, he was elected city clerk. Curtis’s tenure was notable chiefly for the introduction of the Australian ballot system.

  A Yankee Democrat, Nathan Matthews, Jr., succeeded Hart as mayor and was twice re-elected. Then, in 1894 the Republicans decided to turn from the party elders to the young city clerk. Henry Parkman, placing Curtis’s name in nomination before the Republican City Convention, spoke of the “need of a young person of vigor and manhood.” The Boston Daily Advertiser commented that it would give the young Republicans the chance they had been asking for to show what they could do. The Democrats put up Francis Peabody, Jr., a pleasant nonentity with a distinguished genealogy and a reputation as a Harvard oarsman, a figurehead candidate nominated by the Irish ward bosses who, in spite of Hugh O’Brien’s earlier success, did not yet feel confident enough to name one of their own. Curtis’s election seemed to Boston Republicans a redemption from Democratic error. So confident were they in the dawn of a new Republican day that they persuaded the firmly Republican legislature to extend the mayor’s term from one to two years. In 1895 Martin Lomasney, the mahatma of Ward Eight, with the other Democratic ward bosses, upset Republican hopes and Republican tenure by importing a mayoralty candidate from neighboring Quincy: Josiah Quincy III of the eponymous family, the direct descendant of the pre-Revolutionary Josiah Quincy, “the Boston Cicero.” Quincy easily defeated Curtis and was the third of his name to become mayor of Boston.

  Curtis’s political career was cut short by his defeat. Never again would he be nominated for public office. His bitterness against the ward bosses remained. His people had governed Boston since the Revolution. Now they were being steamrollered by the second-generation Irish. He despised and feared this emergent group with its alien religion and its eye for political plunder. In his heart he was convinced that Boston would never again be a decent city until the ephemeral Honey Fitzes and Jim Curleys and Dan Coakleys had been replaced by Curtises. That was why at the 1917 Massachusetts Constitutional Convention he sponsored an amendment denying public funds to any private religious institution, school, or hospital, a measure aimed primarily at parochial schools and one that Boston’s Cardinal O’Connell called “an insult to Catholics.” That was why, in the period of Boston’s decline, he accepted the office of police commissioner from Governor McCall.

  When Curtis took over the Boston Police Department in 1918, he was an ailing man, suffering from a malignant heart condition which he attempted to conceal but which gave his face with its pendulous protruding ears a somewhat bloated appearance. It was a face that had grown increasingly set in middle age, with an uncompromising quality intensified by narrow, disillusioned eyes and a pugnacious chin clamped above a wing collar. At fifty-seven, in spite of his precarious health, he welcomed the new police post as a belated opportunity to demonstrate his abilities.

  OVERTURE TO A STRIKE

  In February 1913, the National Police Magazine listed the recently increased salaries of the Boston Police Department as:

  Commissioner $6000

  Superintendent $4525

  Chief of Detectives $2800

  Inspectors $2600

  Captains $2500

  Lieutenants $1600

  Sergeants $1400

  Patrolmen (1227) $1200

  This, the magazine felt, was a very fair pay scale, as indeed it was in the day when a laborer or mill worker often earned less than five hundred dollars a year. The new graduated scale had been set in 1898, but because of a running dispute between the mayor and the city council had not been voted into effect until fifteen years later. Those years marked the
end of the post-Civil War deflationary cycle that had at last reversed itself during the McKinley administration. Already in 1913 living costs had risen 37 per cent above what they had been in 1898. By 1918 they had shot up another 79 per cent. Yet a new policeman, who had to be twenty-five years old, received only two dollars a day, what he would have received in 1854 when the police department was established.

  A recruit, after he had passed his police examination, joined the Boston force as a probationer or “reserve man” at $730 a year. The following year he received $0.25 a day more or $821.25 annually, but usually during that year he became a patrolman at $1000. His salary then increased each year until it reached a six-year maximum of $1400. Out of his pay he had to provide his own uniform and equipment at a cost, by 1919, of over two hundred dollars.

  What had been acceptable before the war grew less so after 1917. Rising expectations induced by the steady expansion of a consumer economy were accelerated by the slogans of the war years. With the High Cost of Living, discontent and restiveness among Boston’s police grew. They were resentfully aware that in the wartime boom they had come to earn less than an unskilled steelworker, half as much as a carpenter or mechanic, fifty cents a day “less than a motorman or conductor on the streetcars.” Boston city laborers were earning a third more on an hourly basis. Even the admittedly small wages of the female spinners in the Lawrence mills had quadrupled since 1914. As William Allen White noted: “The high wages received by comparatively unskilled labor, in the factories and shipyards, was probably the most potent force in stirring up insurrection in the heretofore staid Boston police force. Many of these officers living on less than twenty-three dollars a week were arresting shipyard and factory workers on their Saturday nights in Boston. Their spending was profligate. Wages of seventy-five dollars to one hundred dollars a week were common through the pyramiding of high overtime rates.”

  In 1917 a committee of policemen met O’Meara to ask about a raise. He was sympathetic, but advised them to wait for a more auspicious time. They did not raise the issue until the summer of 1918, when spokesmen for the Boston Social Club again complained about the inadequacy of their pay. The commissioner told them that while he himself favored an immediate increase, his hands were tied. The best he could do was to arrange for them to meet with the mayor. Boston’s “reform” mayor, Andrew J. Peters, in reply to their demand for an across the board $200-a-year increase, explained that the city at present lacked funds, but if they would wait until the new budget was completed he would see what he could do. Not until December 7 were the budget plans announced. To their dismay the police found that a quarter of them were to get no raise at all. Those who had been at a maximum for at least a year would receive a $100 raise. Reserve men would enter into the force at $900 a year and after three months of satisfactory service would be given a $200 increase. No one else would receive anything.

  The disgruntled police felt their patience had done them little good and that Peters had let them down. On December 25 a committee of four patrolmen from the Social Club, headed by Michael Lynch, met again with the mayor and the new commissioner, Edwin Curtis, who in the few days since O’Meara’s death had not yet been officially sworn into office. The committee renewed the police demand for a $200 general increase, and again Peters refused. Lynch enlarged on what had happened in the Montreal police strike and asked Peters how he would like such scenes in Boston. He also warned that many of his fellow patrolmen were threatening to leave for better-paying jobs and that their leaving would disorganize the department. But he denied that “radicalism had entered the department to such a degree as to make the duties of the new commissioner difficult.” Peters, with as much affability as he could muster, told the committee that the city could not afford such a pay hike. Lynch replied that he was “clearly disappointed.” The mayor told the press afterward that “while the word ‘strike’ was not mentioned, the whole situation is far more serious than I realized.”

  Lynch in turn assured reporters that “the matter of a strike has not been considered by any patrolmen I know.” But he added that “for four years we have waited patiently for some action regarding more money.” He complained of the High Cost of Living and pointed out that other cities paid their police better. “Boston should live up to its high ideals,” he concluded. “The situation could be summed up by saying that the men in the department are unable to make both ends meet.” Finally, on New Year’s Eve, seven hundred of the twelve hundred Boston Social Club members met in Longfellow Hall, Roxbury, and voted unanimously to stick to their demand for a $200 increase. The word “strike” still was not mentioned.

  Although pay stood out as the primary grievance of the Boston police, other grievances were there, exacerbated by what seemed the intransigence of the mayor and the commissioner. Beyond the pay scale there was the matter of hours, unaltered in half a century. Patrolmen worked a seven-day week, with one day off in fifteen. Day men put in seventy-three hours a week, night men eighty-three hours, and wagon men ninety-eight hours. Night Patrolman James Long of the LaGrange Street station recalled:

  After my day off, I used to report and had to do what they called a “house day,” that is I was on call at the station from eight in the morning to six at night, sometimes on command for a wagon run—to hop the wagon when it went out—sometimes to sit at the signal desk and record the duty, things like that.

  We got out at six, but we had to report back at the station house at nine. After we checked in, we usually went upstairs to the dormitory where we slept until 12:45 when the bell rang for roll call. Then we went out on the street till eight in the morning. After that we could go home, but had to be back at six for what they called an evening on the floor, the same sort of duties as house-day duties, a trip on the wagon, taking care of prisoners, whatever turned up. At nine we went to bed for three hours. Sometimes during the week we’d get an afternoon detail at a theater like the Wilbur and get two dollars extra. But for parade duty on our days off we got nothing—and Boston always had a lot of parades.

  That was the way it was day after day, round and round. We had no freedom, no home life at all. We couldn’t even go to Revere Beach without the captain’s permission.

  Day men, in addition to their ten-hour day, had to spend one night a week in the station house on reserve. Although the commissioner and the mayor had agreed to give the police a twenty-four-hour holiday for every eight days of work, this day could be taken away at will. Even in their free time the patrolmen could not leave the city limits without express permission.

  Many of the extra duties assigned to the police came to seem arbitrary and even capricious. Men did not see why ten or fifteen patrolmen should be assigned to a Sunday band concert where two would have sufficed. Nor did they feel that they should be delivering unpaid tax bills, surveying rooming houses, taking the census, or watching the polls at elections. Particularly after O’Meara’s death, they objected to having a man’s promotion hang on the judgment of his captain, who if he disliked him could keep him a patrolman indefinitely in spite of his qualifications and assign him to some undesirable beat if he attempted to protest. Then there were the “petty tyrannies” of the captains and higher-ups, who in many cases made errand boys of their men, sending them out to bring in lunches and Sunday dinners or to pick up the daily newspapers (“peanut graft,” never paid for). One superintendent even complained about his free papers arriving late!

  Finally, the police had much to complain about in the sorry condition of most of the nineteen station houses. Only four had been built during O’Meara’s term and these—in South Boston, East Boston, Charlestown, and Mattapan—were far beyond the city core. In spite of all the commissioner’s efforts, the innercity station houses remained overcrowded, decaying, rodent- and vermin-ridden. Much of this state of affairs was brought about by the hostility of Democratic mayors to Republican police commissioners. In all but two of O’Meara’s years, the mayor’s office was occupied either by Honey Fitz or Jame
s Michael “Gentleman Jim” Curley. Neither Fitzgerald nor Curley was interested in improving the conditions of a department over which they had no control and through which they could parcel out neither jobs nor favors. Curley in 1913 was so piqued at the frosty integrity of the Republican commissioner that he attempted to undermine him by disallowing the new wage scale. Until 1912 there had been no new police station in thirty years, and some stations stood relatively unaltered since before the Civil War. In 1912 the city council at last appropriated thirty-seven thousand dollars for plans for new buildings. Those plans were drawn up, scrapped, and drawn up again, but except for the four semisuburban structures, nothing further was done. In May 1917, O’Meara prepared a lengthy report for the city council about the need for new or reconstructed station houses. After two years the council had taken no action.

  As the station houses continued to deteriorate, ordinary patrolmen came to feel that their officers were little concerned about how the men had to live as long as their own private offices were in order. Captains were supposed to inspect the attic dormitories in the station houses once a day but often had never so much as set foot there. Beds were used by two, three, or even four men in succession in a single twenty-four-hour period, the man coming off duty merely pushing the duty man out of bed and taking his place. Bedbugs and roaches swarmed in the sleeping quarters until it became a sardonic joke among the men that they carried visitors home in their clothes. In the Court Square station house, just behind City Hall, the bugs were so voracious that they ate the leather of the police helmets and belts. That same station had four toilets and one bathtub for 135 men. All the stations were overcrowded, so much so that at times two patrolmen had to share not only the same locker but the same bed. At Dudley Street the matron had to occupy a room with the female prisoners. Patrolman Long at LaGrange Street thought the cockroaches there were the largest in Boston and wondered if they were some new breed. His attic dormitory was almost never cleaned, the two city laborers assigned to do it contenting themselves with mopping the floor and perfunctorily making beds. Next to the dormitory was the toilet-washroom, and often at night he would be wakened by the stench of it.