A City in Terror Read online

  In 1917 Mayor Curley was finishing out his first four-year term, determined to succeed himself. Equally determined to drive him from City Hall were the ward bosses he had alienated, headed by Lomasney and his old enemy Honey Fitz. Boston’s Good Government Association—founded by the chamber of commerce and derisively labeled the Goo-Goos by Curley—persuaded Peters to come out as a reform candidate. Peters had the backing of the minority Republicans, the proper Bostonians, the Goo-Goos, and various real-estate and business interests alarmed over the increase in taxes resulting from the free-spending Curley. More vitally, Peters had the indirect support of the Ward Eight mahatma and Honey Fitz. In a straight contest the ebullient Curley would have overwhelmed the lackluster Peters. To make sure that this did not happen, Lomasney inserted two Irish-American congressmen in the contest to split the Democratic vote, James A. Gallivan of South Boston and Peter Tague of Charlestown. The division was too much of a handicap even for a dynamic freebooter like Curley. Peters won the election with 42 per cent of the vote. The final figures were: Peters 37,923; Curley 28,848; Gallivan 20,255; Tague 1700.

  As a minority mayor, unfamiliar with City Hall, Peters soon found himself beyond his depth and turned to the ward bosses who had elected him for help, filling his staff with the men they suggested, allowing them to assume the bothersome details of administrative work while leaving him serenely carefree. Subtly, almost without his knowledge, the underlings took over. While he sat in the mayor’s office, bagmen did business in the anterooms, and greenbacks were passed routinely in the corridors. Under the rule of Honey Fitz contractors had had a habit of charging the city for each side of a granite paving block. Under Peters they sold the foundations of City Hall. His administration became the most graft-ridden in Boston’s graft-ridden history.

  By his late forties Peters had grown almost bald, resembling more an aberrant Scot than a Yankee. He had a domed forehead fringed with rufous hair that gave him the spurious look of a thinker, petulant too-full lips, and curiously tufted, almost Mephistophelian eyebrows. His tenor voice had a precise Harvard-Boston accent, the exaggerated broad “a” that is not quite English and not quite anything else. Preferring long summers at his Maine estate on the island of North Haven and other-season interludes at his clubs to hours at his City Hall desk, he was somehow able to shut both his mind and his eyes to the corruption of his administration. He gave the impression of an easygoing, superficial man, inclined to bore. Yet beneath his brownstone exterior lurked a perverse personality, recognized by a select few at the time and only to come to larger light long afterward. For, in spite of his affection for his wife and small sons, Peters had an uncontrolled and apparently uncontrollable passion for pubescent girls, those whom the lepidopterous Nabokov would come to classify as nymphets. Whenever he could create an excuse he would entice the local nymphets into his sedate Jamaica Plain house. In 1917, just before he declared his candidacy for mayor and when he was forty-five years old, he became involved with the eleven-year-old Starr Wyman, a distant relative living nearby whom he encouraged to visit as a playmate for his boys. After much maneuvering he finally managed to seduce her when they were alone by giving her ether. From then on she accepted and he continued his anesthetic advances, until in time she became something of an ether addict. As she grew older she would sometimes slip away for rendezvous with him in out-of-town hotels. She remained attached to him with a mixture of both affection and fear, if one can judge by her diaries that came to light after her death.

  Neither the mayor nor the governor nor the police commissioner in that postwar August sensed the weight of the trouble that was advancing directly down the road toward them. But Curtis, increasingly disturbed by the buzzing talk of a police union, shook up the department, discharging eleven men he considered troublemakers and dispersing a number of others within the department, an effort that was only to result in spreading the discontent. On July 29 he issued an order that he hoped and believed would meet the issue head-on. Once he had made himself uncompromisingly clear, he was convinced that the men, his men, would fall into line.

  I note [the order read] that a movement among the members of the Boston Police force to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor is actively on foot. I had hoped that the older men in the service who have served under my predecessor, Stephen O’Meara, who understood his attitude on such matters would have speedily and effectually terminated such a movement. Mr. O’Meara issued a General Order to the police force on June 18, 1918. I repeat to the members of the force what he said in that General Order, and trust that every member of the force will weigh every word carefully….

  I desire to say to the members of the force that I am firmly of the opinion that a police officer cannot consistently belong to a union and perform his sworn duty. I am not an opponent of labor unions, and neither was Mr. O’Meara. He pointed out in well-chosen language that there is no question in the police department as to how much of an employer’s profits should be shared with the workers. Policemen are public officers. They have taken an oath of office. That oath requires them to carry out the law with strict impartiality, no matter what their personal feeling may be. The laws they carry out are laws made by the representatives of the people assembled in the Legislature. Therefore it should be apparent that the men to whom the carrying out of these laws is entrusted should not be subject to the orders or the dictation of part of the general public. A man who enters the police force, as I have stated, takes an oath of office, and he should realize that his work is sharply differentiated from that of the worker in private employ. It is difficult to see, under these circumstances, what a policeman can hope to gain by proposed affiliation, although it is easy to see how the other affiliated bodies may gain a great deal.

  As Police Commissioner for the City of Boston, I feel it is my duty to say to the police force that I disapprove of the movement on foot; that in my opinion it is not for the best interests of the men themselves; and that beyond question it is not for the best interests of the general public, which this department is required to serve.

  On August 1 the Boston Social Club scheduled an emergency meeting at Intercolonial Hall to consider Commissioner Curtis’s adamant stand.

  SUMMER’S END IN BOSTON

  Intercolonial Hall, rancid from decades of floor oil, sweat, and cigar smoke, was full to overflowing as more than fifteen hundred members of the Social Club met to deal with the commissioner’s new general order. In spite of the recent salary raise the hall churned with discontent. Again the familiar complaints were aired, though in more strident tones: the old talk of hours and wages and conditions, of peanut graft and petty tyrannies. Even before the balloting it was clear that the policemen had committed themselves emotionally to the union. Of those present 940 voted to join the AFL. The rest abstained. Not one man voted No. Yet it was also clear that, though a minority group was ready to challenge the commissioner head-on, the majority were still anxious to avoid any such confrontation. They chose rather to ignore the last general order, as if it might somehow evaporate. President Lynch was so intent on smoothing matters over that he had even invited Curtis to address the meeting. The commissioner declined, ostensibly because of his health, but each speaker that evening went out of his way to compliment him for his efforts in winning the police a salary increase and in trying to improve their working conditions. If, however, they thought such soft words might make the commissioner more conciliatory, they obviously knew him as little as he knew them.

  After that meeting the police were expected to announce the formation of a union in the next few days. A police sergeant told a Globe reporter that 891 patrolmen had already signed up. Yet the days slipped by and nothing happened. If quiescent Boston grew more conscious of the imminence of a police crisis, it was due more to police disturbances elsewhere in the nation and the world. Dwarfing all other such news that August were the reports of the strike of English police in Liverpool and London over the same matter of union recognition. The London s
trike resulted in few disturbances, but the one in Liverpool developed into one of the bloodiest in British labor history. For two nights the dockside city was given over to riot and pillage. Troops were called out, and pitched battles developed between the soldiers and the mob. The Admiralty finally sent three warships to guard the port and prevent destruction of the docks and shipping facilities.

  In this country Jersey City police, attempting to form a union, were threatened with suspension by Mayor Frank Hague. Police in Washington, D.C., were negotiating with the AFL. The Massachusetts Police Association (consisting of the Metropolitan Park Police and those of other Massachusetts cities and towns except Boston) was asking in peremptory tones for a wage increase. In Brockton, a small shoe city forty-one miles from Boston, the police were organizing, while in Springfield, New Bedford, and Lawrence they were demanding substantial pay raises. The Lawrence City Council met hurriedly to consider police claims there, while in suburban Wellesley the selectmen hastened to forestall trouble by granting their minuscule force a raise. Worcester police halted their plans for a union to await the Boston outcome. The only news from Boston was that a new order now allowed the police to leave the city on their day off without permission. On August 9 this static calm was broken by a rumor that the AFL’s New England organizer, Frank McCarthy, already had a charter in hand for a Boston police union. Unlike most rumors, this happened to be true, for the officers of the Social Club had sent a telegram to AFL headquarters requesting such a charter. Within twenty-four hours the document was on its way, making Boston the thirteenth city to be enrolled. Not for two days was the news made public. On learning of the charter Curtis at once issued an official addition to the rules and regulations of his department. Rule 35, Section 19, said:

  No member of the force shall belong to any organization, club or body composed of present and past members of the force which is affiliated with or part of any organization, club or body outside of the department, except that a post of the Grand Army of the Republic, the United Spanish War Veterans, and the American Legion of World War Veterans may be formed within the department.

  Curtis defined a policeman as not “an employee but a state officer” bound to the impartial enforcement of the law. Police affiliation with any outside organization representing the interests of a segment of the population, rather than the population as a whole, would compromise his duty to carry out impartial law enforcement. But, he concluded, this new rule in no way interfered with a policeman’s interests as a man and a citizen.

  The police felt otherwise. Their commissioner’s tight-lipped intransigence stirred them to stubborn opposition. Each move of Curtis’s brought a hardening of spirit to both sides that lessened the chance of conciliation and compromise. As the strike-ridden months of August moved along in a succession of cool and rainy days, Bostonians began to realize that a crisis in their city was imminent. News of conflict between the police and the commissioner advanced from the back of the Boston papers to emerge at last in splashing headlines on the front page. The AFL’s McCarthy called Curtis’s order “amazing, unfair, coercive, unsound in law as it is un-American in principle.” He denied that joining the AFL would create any conflict between the men and their duties, and went on to accuse Curtis of attacking their rights to obtain a standard of living more in keeping “with American ideals, and their honorable positions.” James Vahey, the silver-haired grandiloquent labor lawyer and general counsel for the Street and Electric Railway Employees of America, protested that Curtis had “no right to take away from the men the liberty which entitled them to organize.” Vahey, twice Democratic candidate for governor, had recently guided the Bay State Carmen’s Union through its successful strike, and he was now prepared to guide the police. He threatened the commissioner with an injunction that would restrain him from coercing his men. Rule 35, he insisted, was unconstitutional under Massachusetts law. City Councilor James Moriarty, an officer of the sheet metal workers’ union, asked Acting Mayor Francis Ford—Mayor Peters being on his yacht somewhere off the coast of Maine—to call a special meeting of the city council in order to select a committee of councilors to meet with the governor and the commissioner. Labor leaders planted reports in the press that if Curtis continued to remain adamant, organized labor would force him from office.

  Curtis’s supporters were quick to come to his defense. The Boston Herald, which had long since replaced the Journal at New England’s Republican breakfast tables, cautioned the policemen “to regard themselves as officers of the law, representing all the people,” and to trust the public for a “satisfactory share of the product of the community.” The tea-table institution, the Boston Evening Transcript, was pleased to note—what Curtis himself had not yet noted—that the governor fully supported the commissioner. In the Transcript’s editorial opinion the police were not employees but officers of the state who exercised a sacred trust of enormous responsibility, a responsibility that ought not to be abused “but must be protected.”

  After two years of debates the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention was still in the process of concluding its deliberations. But echoes of the police crisis penetrated even that languid atmosphere. On August 13 one of the delegates, former state Attorney General Albert Pillsbury, proposed legislation making it illegal for public-service employees to affiliate with labor unions. Carried away by the thought, he then moved to a general attack on all labor unions:

  The American people [he informed his receptive Republican colleagues] are living today under a tyranny to which the rule of George III and his parliament was benevolence itself. The organized working man, euphemistically so called, has taken us by the throat and has us at his mercy. He will not allow us, except on his own terms, our common rights—not even our right to live. For we cannot live without food, and we cannot have food without railroad transportation, and this and every other public service is now being conducted at the sufferance of organized labor in the face of an impotent government and helpless people.

  Then, almost as an afterthought, he added: “I turn aside for a moment to congratulate the Police Commissioner of Boston that he does not propose to allow the police service in Boston to be held up so long as he is at the head of it.”

  The labor representatives present, Dennis Driscoll and Councilor Moriarty, sprang from their seats to labor’s defense. Driscoll called Pillsbury’s speech “a threat and challenge to organized wage workers.” Moriarty, to the accompaniment of some applause but more boos, condemned the police commissioner’s actions and accused the Republican-dominated convention of being pro-capital and anti-labor. At this point Curtis, who was also present as a delegate, endeavored to cut off the discussion: “I do not think this is the time or the place,” he told the delegates, “to discuss matters relating to the Boston Police Department, but I want it distinctly understood that because I refrain from discussing them I do not fear to discuss them at the proper time and place. Neither am I afraid that I have not taken the right stand, and I propose to stand right where I am on this issue.”

  Moriarty, while agreeing that the discussion should end, challenged Curtis to debate the police issue publicly elsewhere at any time and at any place, a challenge that Curtis chose to ignore. A number of the delegates hissed Moriarty; then the convention gave Curtis a standing ovation.

  By now the commissioner had decided to meet the challenge head-on, placing a rush order with the City Hall printing plant for a thousand discharge and suspension blanks. He received these on August 14. Under the letterhead “City of Boston Police Department, Office of the Commissioner,” the text read:

  To _________________________________________________________________________________________

  Boston Police Officer

  By authority conferred on me by the Police Commissioner, you are hereby suspended until further order of said Commissioner. The cause and reasons for such suspension are as follows:

  Specifications _____________________________________________________________<
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  This form was to be signed by Michael H. Crowley, superintendent of police. The discharge blank under the same letterhead read:

  To _________________________________________________________________________________________

  Boston Police Officer

  By authority conferred on me by the Police Commissioner, I hereby discharge you from the Police Department. The cause and reasons for such discharge are as follows:

  Specifications _____________________________________________________________

  This last was to be signed by Curtis himself.