Coolidge (29 page)

REPLYING TO YOUR TELEGRAM STOP I HAVE ALREADY REFUSED TO REMOVE THE POLICE COMMISSIONER OF BOSTON STOP I DID NOT APPOINT HIM STOP HE CAN ASSUME NO POSITION WHICH THE COURTS WOULD UPHOLD EXCEPT WHAT THE PEOPLE HAVE BY THE AUTHORITY OF THE LAW VESTED IN HIM STOP HE SPEAKS ONLY WITH THEIR VOICE STOP THE RIGHT OF THE POLICE OF BOSTON TO AFFILIATE HAS ALWAYS BEEN QUESTIONED COMMA NEVER GRANTED COMMA IS NOW PROHIBITED STOP THE SUGGESTION OF PRESIDENT WILSON TO WASHINGTON DOES NOT APPLY TO BOSTON STOP THERE THE POLICE HAVE REMAINED ON DUTY HERE THE POLICEMENS UNION LEFT THEIR DUTY COMMA AN ACTION WHICH PRESIDENT WILSON CHARACTERIZED AS A CRIME AGAINST CIVILIZATION STOP YOUR ASSERTION THAT THE COMMISSIONER WAS WRONG CANNOT JUSTIFY THE WRONG OF LEAVING THE CITY UNGUARDED STOP THAT FURNISHED THE OPPORTUNITY COMMA THE CRIMINAL ELEMENT FURNISHED THE ACTION STOP THERE IS NO RIGHT TO STRIKE AGAINST THE PUBLIC SAFETY BY ANYBODY COMMA ANYWHERE COMMA ANY TIME STOP

Coolidge was not sure what the effect of such a burst would be. But he realized he had known what he would do all along, even before the meeting at Greenfield. On September 1 Coolidge had gone to Westfield to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the town. The event was also a welcome home for soldiers; there was a lobster for each man. The question in the room had been the same as at Greenfield: when men ought to rebel against authorities, and when they ought to stop. To find an answer, Coolidge had gone back to Shays’s Rebellion. Many of the men who had lived through the rebellion were suspicious of government; they resisted the idea of the new law from above. Their hostility had focused on the new U.S. Constitution. Such a law restricted too much, the men said—better to have no law. Then at a meeting a farmer, Jonathan Smith, had risen to make another case. Smith had started by recalling the turmoil: “Last winter people took up arms, and then, if you went to speak to them, you had the musket of death presented to your breast.” Coolidge quoted that line.

Sometimes a new law, however imperfect, was better than no law. “Shall we throw the Constitution overboard because it does not please us all alike?” the farmer Smith had asked. “Suppose two or three of you,” Smith had gone on, “had been at pains to break up a piece of rough land and sow it with wheat. Would you let it lie waste because you could not agree what sort of a fence to make?” In some ways the year 1919 was like 1787. The time for disruption was over; in order for the next day, the next decade, to proceed well, for there to be wheat, freedom, and lobster, law must be allowed to reign now. “We come here to honor the past, and in doing so render more secure the present,” Coolidge had said.

Sunday arrived and no one was sure what came next. The terrible price of the state’s action against the policemen was all too visible, as visible as the men from the Blind and Cripples’ Union who filed in and on Friday nights at Tremont Temple. Against the cost to the policemen one had to balance the benefit of breaking the strike, a benefit that remained as yet only theoretical. Still, Coolidge felt certain of one thing. The progressives could not be met. Conciliation would not work. As he made his rounds in the now quiet city, he went over the police strike and kept coming to the same conclusion. This time, there was no middle ground.

Seven
: The Reign of Law

ON SUNDAY THE BELLS
of the churches broke the silence, and they were tolling in his honor. All morning, men of the cloth praised Coolidge’s handling of the strike. At Boston’s Trinity Church, the Episcopalian minister, Alexander Mann, cited the Acts of the Apostles and spoke of how Paul had obeyed even the Roman tyrants in the name of order. “The present great peril in American society is lawlessness, which has its source in godlessness,” intoned Reverend Cortland Myers at the Baptist Tremont Temple. Unitarians at Arlington Street Church heard from their minister, Edward Cummings, that a policemen’s strike was as rational as a jailers’ strike that let all prisoners free or a strike of the army and navy.

“This attempt by the police should be resisted by the community to the utmost,” exhorted Sydney Snow, the junior pastor at King’s Chapel. At the Warren Avenue Baptist Church, Reverend Frank Haggard cited Paul Revere, as well as Samuel Adams. Haggard said that “all that noble band of patriots who fought America’s first battles for freedom must have stirred in their graves at the sights and sounds of Boston this past week.” Boston, Haggard told his flock, had sunk low, to the level of Petrograd and the sailors’ mutiny. Even the Catholic priests, whose parishioners were the families of the Irish-American policemen, chimed in with disapproval of the rioting. At St. Vincent’s Church Father Patterson called the uprising a disgrace to Catholics and told of an instance on West Broadway when he had sought to help a volunteer policeman and had seen a crowd insult the volunteer. At the Gate of Heaven church, Father Burns reminded his parishioners that the Catholic Church stood for law and order. Outside Boston, in Quincy, William Jennings Bryan spoke out, taking time off from a Prohibition campaign to deliver a sermon called “Enforcement of the Law.” “I wonder what would have happened in Boston during the rioting last week if prohibition had not been in force,” he said.

The next morning the newspapers picked up where the churches had left off. The line in the telegram to Gompers was becoming a refrain: “No right to strike against the public safety by anyone, anywhere, anytime.” Commentators likened Coolidge to Ole Hanson of Seattle, the mayor who had stared down the strikers earlier that year. The
New York Sun
framed Coolidge as a regional type: “a plain New England gentleman, whose calm determination to uphold the law and maintain order in the situation caused by the Boston police walkout has made him a national figure.” Coolidge was suddenly a person to be followed. Northampton, Amherst, and Vermont rewarded him richly for it. At a banquet at the Draper Hotel in Northampton at midmonth, diners feted their own, the “governor with the steel backbone.” A chemistry teacher who had been one of Dwight Morrow’s brothers at Beta Theta Pi wrote Coolidge to say he admired the tough actions Coolidge had taken. Coolidge wrote back, “I knew you would.” Frank Stearns and Houghton Mifflin executives were moving into a publishing frenzy, adding Coolidge’s strike statement to the galleys for
Bay State Orations
and racing it all to press: as soon as October 10, voters would be able to buy Coolidge’s speeches, now titled
Have Faith in Massachusetts
, for $1.50. The book also included Coolidge’s statement after he vetoed a pay raise for lawmakers: “Service in the General Court is not obligatory, but optional.” The papers were picking up Coolidge ideas everywhere. The
Los Angeles Times
published a cartoon showing Washington throwing down his sword at Valley Forge over the caption “What if George Washington had struck?”

Boston seemed to approve too. R. H. Stearns was returning to business. Indeed, that very Monday, the
Globe
carried an advertisement that signaled confidence. At its entrance on Tremont Street, the avenue of barbed wire, Stearns was opening a new men’s section, whose wares included “hosiery, gloves, handkerchiefs and scarves for men.” That, Stearns hoped, “would prove convenient for men.” Across the nation, other vendors were betting that veterans would finally get back to work. The military seemed at that point to inspire business. “We’d done so well in the canteen we didn’t see why we couldn’t do just as well in civilian life,” a young man in Missouri named Harry Truman later recalled. Truman was opening a men’s clothing shop in Kansas City that fall. Enough jobs would ensure industrial peace.

In Boston the men who had been policemen a week before wandered around the city, disoriented without their uniforms. To each other they repeated versions of the statement of Edward Keller, a fellow striker who had been wounded three times while serving overseas: “I want to say that I joined the union because we could not get our grievances redressed or listened to any other way.” Now that the danger of disorder was receding, all sides could indulge in reflection about the terrible waste caused by the past week’s events.

On Tuesday on Tremont Street, very near where the clergymen had damned the strikers at King’s Chapel over the weekend, a police horse ridden by a replacement officer from the 369th Regiment whinnied a glad greeting at a civilian. The horse, whose name was Duffy, had recognized his policeman, Frank Leddy, a striker from Station House 15, and, nearly unseating his rider, went wild with joy. His old friend offered him a bit of sugar as a crowd gathered to watch. Leddy pronounced Duffy “a damn good policeman” as the crowd listened. Afterward, the reporter observed, Duffy checked over Leddy “as a mother would her babe.” The sight of the horse and the man touched the whole street. “Duffy will be Leddy’s horse no matter what happens,” concluded
The Boston Globe
, which wrote up the story. Coolidge himself now also tried to find jobs for the displaced men: but not as police.

Some papers were taken aback by Coolidge’s sudden fame.
The New York Times
resented the fact that a policy it admired had been promulgated by a figure unfamiliar to its editors. Channeling the snide Senator Lodge, the editors delivered backhanded praise:

With all due respect to all local partisan ambitions, and with no special predilection for his Excellency, CALVIN COOLIDGE, who, after all comes from the savage western part of the Bay State and is an alien to the Boston Pale, it remains the truth inescapable, probably unpleasant, like most truths which always look like parvenus, that Governor COOLIDGE, having sustained without shadow of concession or failing the power and reign of law, attacked perilously by the Boston Police strike, will be, and has to be, re-elected.

But the fact itself could not be denied: he had upstaged a sitting president. The governor had stood firm on strikers where Wilson had vacillated, indeed was still vacillating. And if Coolidge could upstage a president, he could be a president. In the minds of Stearns and a number of other Massachusetts Republicans, the image of the Coolidges at the White House, the first lady clad in R. H. Stearns finery, was already forming. In college Coolidge had observed that men succeeded in politics when they got out in front of a movement that other politicians had not yet identified. He had realized that the country was ready for an end to the strikes before Wilson. And that was not surprising, since Wilson was now pushing his League campaign the way a locomotive pushes a train up a steep gradient. Wilson had begun his tour only a few weeks before, had already spoken well over a hundred thousand words, and had appeared before some 350,000 members of the public.

Still, it was not clear that Coolidge’s new national fame would endure, or that it would even translate into reelection as governor. Fame alone, especially national fame, did not guarantee votes in Lawrence, Holyoke, or, certainly, Boston. “Law and order” was well and good, but might lose him the election in the end. It did not necessarily constitute an entire campaign platform. This was still only September, and warm, in the 60s. Who knew how his positions might look when the weather turned cold and heat depended on the coal strikers? Along with the good news there was some bad. In other cities across the nation, such as Macon, Georgia, the police merely hooted in derision when their plan to unionize and strike was deplored by authorities. On Monday, the Board of Aldermen in Holyoke announced plans to raise the wages of their own patrolmen, as well as to invite Irish President de Valera to the town. On Tuesday, one week after the strike had started, Mayor Peters undercut Coolidge by placating the firemen with the raise they had demanded when threatening to march with police. The firefighters promptly announced loudly and clearly that they would not strike, that they had never intended to strike, that they were “now, as always, opposed to lawlessness,” that any other claim regarding their position on strikes was “irresponsible.” From Washington, D.C., came the report that 2,400 sleeping and parlor car conductors would receive a slight raise, retroactive to May, a gesture of concession clearly designed to calm the national fevers. This method of paying groups not to strike could not be sustained by either government or private companies.

Many Republicans believed that for a politician to survive he must remain progressive. That first Monday after the strike, a reporter put his finger on another uncertainty when he asked what Coolidge’s record was in regard to helping the workingman. The governor, defensive, replied that he’d signed every bill for the workingman that had crossed his desk, “except the bill to raise the pay of members of the Legislature,” a reference to the veto of earlier in the year. He asked his assistant, Henry Long, to compile a list of progressive legislation he had signed. The laws ranged from a plan regulating weekly pay for injured employees in case of partial incapacity to minimum wages for scrubwomen. To Coolidge’s south, Dwight Morrow was coming to the same conclusion; Morrow saw “complete intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican Party of New Jersey.”

The next challenge for all was the big steel strike. Elbert Gary, the chairman of the board of U.S. Steel, was refusing to meet with the unions, despite Wilson’s urgings. All across the nation, governors and senators, in part emboldened by Coolidge’s willingness to resist pressure from labor, were lining up behind Gary. In Ohio, Senator Warren Harding, along with two other senators, was warning that unless Wilson stopped pandering to labor, America would be “Russianized.”

On September 22, the strike commenced. From Wyoming to Colorado to Pennsylvania, workers walked off the job. In Wheeling, West Virginia, eight thousand did so. Two thousand coal miners in the Johnstown area quit. Wilson announced from his train tour that he could not interfere if Gary would not meet with the unions. For the labor movement, this was a high point, and the movement seemed to be on the brink of gaining a wider membership than ever. Even Wall Street clerks were thinking of taking up arms;
The Wall Street Journal
reported that week a meeting of the clerks at Washington Irving High School where the clerks had planned to demand a six-hour day. What was clear was that there would be more violence across the country.