Coolidge (26 page)

Both employers and workers looked to Washington for a sign, but Wilson was busy fighting for his League of Nations, and he clearly deemed the wage question secondary. The workers waited while Wilson feuded with senators such as Massachusetts’s own Henry Cabot Lodge over what seemed petty details. The acting head of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, moved more belligerently than Gompers. Lewis was calling for a nationwide strike of coal men beginning November 1. The industry experts were already warning families to buy coal early.

It was difficult in turn for any official to deny the workers on the wage question because of yet another problem: prices. The cost of food at the store was double what it had been in 1913. Such increases were nothing like what any adult could remember; you had to have worked in the 1860s or 1870s to recall such a rise. The Housewives League had recently tried to explain to President Wilson that his strike problem was caused by the nationwide price problem. The women had asked the president to seek legislation to “reduce the cost of living which thru present prices of bread, meat and corn has become unbearable. This situation more than anything else is the cause of the discontent of labor.” In the war the farms had fared better by selling their grain to Europe. Now, because they had their own basics, they were more protected than the city households from the price rises. That did not mean, however, that the farmers’ lives were easy either. John Coolidge’s cheese factory wasn’t doing much better than it had been when he’d opened it during Coolidge’s college years. Grace and her neighbors were now selling the Plymouth cheese from 69 Massasoit Street, the home of Therese Hills, but that was the extent of Colonel Coolidge’s success in the agricultural sector.

In Boston, the would-be strikers, the police, made an especially strong case. The city and state had worked the police hard in the war; the men had spent thousands of extra hours serving by the side of the governor or other officials at events like the parades for returning soldiers. It was the police who had taken the blows when the anarchists blew up public structures; they viewed themselves as the first line of defense against chaos. The men had received a raise that year, but the raise had not covered the price rise. Some of the police were returning veterans; many had disabled relatives to care for. So many in Boston were disabled that a former congressman, Frederick Deitrick, had even formed a Boston Blind and Cripples’ Union, which met every Friday at Tremont Temple, where Coolidge often spoke. The policemen’s other complaint, about conditions, was also legitimate; the Boston station houses were in rotten condition. Vermin were so prevalent that they chewed through the leather on the policemen’s helmets. James Storrow, a great Boston eminence, led a committee to talk to the police and was already close to an agreement with them. Most newspapers in Boston had signaled that they were ready to follow whatever Storrow recommended.

The policemen had selected as union president a leader it would be hard for Coolidge to tangle with: a veteran policeman named John McInnes. In a city where cars moved wildly and unpredictably, and where there were not yet stoplights, McInnes stood every day reliably at Devonshire and Water streets, managing traffic. McInnes was also a military veteran. He had fought in the Indian wars and had gone to Cuba with the 9th Massachusetts Infantry. Just recently McInnes had trained troops in Texas and performed intelligence work for the army.

The police were also confident because they knew that Coolidge had given in to unions before. In April, the telephone workers across New England had struck, their opponent being the U.S. Post Office, which had seized control of the phone company for the duration of the war. The telephone ladies had affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Gompers, careful about picking his battles, had advised against the strike, but the women had proceeded anyhow, and Postmaster General Albert Burleson’s efforts to replace them with soldiers had backfired. The soldiers found it unchivalrous to face off with the telephone ladies. In the telephone strike, the governor had again tried to find the old middle ground: if a government had to step in, he said, why not let it be the state of Massachusetts? Massachusetts could manage the phone company for the duration of the strike. The postmaster general had given the phone operators a wage increase. In the same days, Coolidge had signed a labor bill limiting the workweek for women workers to forty-eight hours, a concession to organized labor generally.

Finally, the Boston patrolmen knew that Coolidge could scarcely spare time for a drawn-out conflict with them. That summer and fall Coolidge needed every hour he could get for a difficult task mandated by the new state constitution. The governor must cut the number of departments in the state government. This meant laying off friends and political supporters. In a state where a governor’s term ran only twelve months, this was treacherous work.

Even before the police conflict, Coolidge had already been flagging, his secretary, Henry Follansbee Long, had noted. To look over the appointments in Long’s diary of the past months was to find a contrast with the relaxed time of Governor McCall, who had taken whole months at a time away from office. “Governor in about 9:30 and busy all day,” his secretary’s book had read on July 3. There was another entry for July 7: “Governor in early with young Calvin. He busy all day seeing people and writing veto.” July 8 brought the inevitable: senators paid a call to protest the veto. The veto rejected funding for roads, including some sought by the town of Amherst.

There had been breaks now and then, of course. Sometime that summer, the visit of an old friend had provided a moment’s respite: Henry Field had come from Northampton to see Coolidge and inquire how he was holding up under the pressure. Coolidge then did something unexpected: he took his first boss in the state car to Watertown. Their destination was the old burial ground where the graves of John and Mary Coolidge lay. Coolidge seemed to think he could draw strength from his ancestors. Grace and his sons, especially Calvin, sustained him in difficult moments.

“I think you might find him some comfort to you while you are alone,” Coolidge had written once about the boy to his father.

“Governor getting tired of seeing people. He is planning to visit institutions,” Long was writing by August 26. On August 27, the reason for the retreat to institutions had become clear: Coolidge finally handed out one of the lists of names he had pulled together, mostly by himself, in isolation, for the new, reorganized state government. What mattered was not so much the names that did make the list as those that didn’t. With each cutback, Coolidge made a new enemy.

On that September Monday of the AFL meeting, Coolidge arrived back in Boston to learn that Curtis had moved forward, suspending the nineteen policemen who had taken the lead in joining the union. The governor’s response was just as predicted: he conferred with his attorney general. At some point in the afternoon or evening Coolidge sent a message to the AFL Convention in Greenfield. It too contained the expected content, placating: “I earnestly hope circumstances will arise which will cause the police officers to be reinstated.”

By Tuesday the strike plan was gathering momentum. Once Curtis had suspended their peers, many police were ready to move. Coolidge conferred with Curtis and Mayor Andrew Peters. The three men would have to decide on the right thing to do. The matter of jurisdiction was complicated; the police reported to the commissioner, who reported to the governor; but both the mayor and the governor might call out the state guard. All of them were now turning to the rule books and statutes. Boston employed more than a thousand policemen. Over the course of that Tuesday afternoon, the officials told themselves that a few might strike, but a majority would stay on the job. Curtis assured Coolidge he could handle any trouble.

At 5:45
P.M.
on Tuesday, September 9, the event that they all had discussed so often finally occurred. More than a thousand police, the majority of the force, more than Curtis had imagined, walked out of the station houses. The men carried their big, old-fashioned helmets under their arms, like props for an era on which the curtain was now closing. Crime and violence were already a problem in Boston that year, and now the policemen had left the streets unguarded. It would be quite easy for this to expand to a general strike including telephone workers and power workers, the sort that had roiled Seattle. Curtis again told Coolidge that he could handle the strike, and Coolidge held back. The adjutant general of the Massachusetts State Guard, Jesse F. Stevens, however, would stay with him that night at the Adams House; his state troops had already been instructed to be ready for a call. Coolidge also instructed a separate force, the Metropolitan Police, to go on duty, but it was just a small group of one hundred officers. Then he headed to La Touraine on Tremont Street to dine with Stearns. The president of the R. H. Stearns department store, Robert Maynard, had already applied for licenses for private guards to protect it. Henry Wyman, the attorney general, also attended the meal. Stearns and a publisher, Houghton Mifflin, were preparing a volume of Coolidge’s speeches, tentatively titled “Bay State Orations.” Now, however, such publicity efforts seemed frivolous; Coolidge’s future would be decided by the strike.

At Harvard, President Lowell issued a call for volunteers to protect the city. The president carefully advised young men that they were not “strikebreakers” because police could not strike and promised the students that the university would schedule makeup tests for students who missed exams because of police duty. Mayor Peters, for his part, retreated to his home in Brookline, taking reports over the course of the evening.

The policemen themselves gathered at their strike headquarters at Fay Hall. McInnes walked about in plain clothes, encouraging the striking policemen, who seemed dazed at their own action. The telephone girls who had received the patrolmen’s support now moved to respond; Mae Matthew, the secretary of the union, spoke up for a crowd around McInnes, saying, “The girls will back up the police and will go out, if necessary, to help them win.” The girls’ antic presence lightened it all. For a few hours, the city was quiet. Coolidge and the adjutant general retired to sleep.

Later that night small, rough crowds began to build around the city. In Roxbury, a streetcar conductor was shot in the leg. Ruffians went up and down Washington Street, breaking windows. At Washington and Friend streets, a cigar store, United Cigar, was looted and its windows demolished. The Adams House, where Coolidge slept, stood between West and Avery streets on Washington; Posner’s, a furniture store at the corner of Avery, was sacked that night. Crowds thronged in Roxbury and at Scollay Square. On Tremont Street, the looters targeted the smaller shops, like Studio Jewelry, just down the street from R. H. Stearns. All over, small tussles broke out. “Men fought each other, not knowing why they fought,” one reporter wrote.

The next day, the papers delivered more details. At one downtown shoe store, a group had entered, taking down hundreds of boxes of shoes. The young men and their friends proceeded to try them on. “Here was presented the novel spectacle of thieves sitting in the chairs of the establishment, while others of the crowd helped to fit them with the proper size shoes. They stayed as long as they liked,” wrote the
Hampshire Gazette
. At Scollay Square, a seventy-year-old worker at a fruit stand, James Burns, had held off a large crowd seeking to gain entrance, with a .38-caliber revolver. In the North End, small groups terrorized girls and women; there were reports of rapes, serious injuries and even fatalities. This was not a massacre. But for the City on a Hill, the events were unusual. Riots had hit the city before, but not riots in which authorities were not there to mount a countering force, nor riots which the police had actually facilitated. As the
Globe
wrote breathlessly in a 2-cent extra published that morning, “For the first time in the memory of man, Boston was given over to lawlessness.”

Coolidge’s and Mayor Peters’s first action that Wednesday morning was to call out units of the state guard. At the police headquarters, Curtis sat deluged with applications by security firms and other private groups to carry guns. When they were all counted, 1,052 individuals had applied for gun permits in Boston and 390 people for licenses to serve as special policemen. Police Superintendent James Crowley spoke to reporters, telling them he could not have imagined the extent of the disruption. The period of negotiation was over. As James Storrow’s commission would note in a report published later, by Wednesday morning, “it was clear to the members of your committee that the situation had become a military one.”

At around 2:00
P.M.
Wednesday, at the State Armory in West Newton, an alarm rang; men gathered and were told to eat but had no idea what their assignment would be. At 4:00
P.M.
the bugles called the men to assembly; the men’s commander told them that, as one wrote, things were “nawsty” in Boston. Marched to West Newton Station, the men rode to Huntington Street in Boston, where, after various assemblies, they patrolled Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain, as well as policing a large electric light plant.

Curtis was already looking past the striking police, hunting for replacements. Page one of the
Globe
carried his advertisement:

Volunteer Police: Able Bodied Men willing to give their service in case of necessity for part of day or night for protection of persons or property in City of Boston. Apply to me at Room B, Third Floor, Chamber of Commerce Building, except Sundays. William H Pierce Supt of Police, Retired.

Beside this ran a spate of insurance ads, all aiming to capitalize on the emergency. “Protect Yourself,” read one. “Strike-Riot-Civil Commotion and Burglary R. S. Hoffman & Co.” Yet another notice informed citizens of their rights and obligations: “Bystanders must assist officers.” On the major streets, department stores were covering their windows, hammering up timber to cover the glass, and making barricades; men with bayonets guarded the big shops. In Ireland citizens were waging what many in Boston considered a parallel mutiny against the some 200,000 British troops then garrisoned there. To some of the Irish-American police, Curtis was the equivalent of a British general.