February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
For years they’d labored under dreadful conditions for low pay, but all their pleas for reform fell on deaf ears. Matters reached the breaking point when 19 officers were suspended from the force for their role in establishing a policemen’s union. As an act of solidarity, nearly three of four policemen took part in the strike. It was a bold maneuver for such men in a city dominated by a Protestant elite quite hostile to and fearful of the Irish-Catholic community. Unfortunately for them, the strike would end in their crushing defeat.
The Boston Irish had come a long way by 1919. While the Irish had it tough nearly everywhere they settled in America, Boston was perhaps the nation’s most bitterly anti-Irish city. Boston was not only a far more homogeneous city compared to Philadelphia or New York, it also had a Protestant elite that was unrivaled in power and unity. They loathed the Irish masses who began arriving in great numbers in the 1840s and did their utmost to keep them down. Nonetheless, Irish political power, along with a fledgling Irish middle class, grew appreciably by the turn of the century. By 1919 the Boston Irish could point with confidence to the growing numbers of Irish elected officials, not to mention doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, and entrepreneurs. Thousands of Boston Irish, however, drew their paychecks from the public payroll, working as clerks, inspectors, firemen and policemen.
The Boston Police Department in particular was an Irish stronghold. But for years they had been forced to endure harsh working conditions and abysmal pay. In 1906 Police Commissioner Stephen O’Meara founded the Boston Social Club, a fraternal organization dedicated to improving this situation. Unfortunately, all their calls for reform fell on deaf ears. By the summer of 1919 the club’s leaders concluded that their only hope lay in forming a union and joining the American Federation of Labor. The Boston Policemen’s Union was born in mid-August 1919.
Their decision made sense on one level. The AFL was the nation’s largest labor organization with a proven record of successful organizing workers and winning strikes. Yet there was one problem: 1919 was a year of unprecedented labor strife. The end of World War I in late 1918 signaled the end to a period of robust economic growth. It also meant that many employers who had been pressured by the federal government eager for labor peace during the war to recognize unions, reduce hours, and increase pay now withdrew these concessions. Outraged and determined not to let their wartime gains slip away, some four million of workers went on strike. Wealthy and middle-class Americans were alarmed by the scale of working-class discontent and many believed it was a sign that anarchism, socialism, and communism were on the march in America. Labor leaders were castigated as dangerous radicals and arrested by the thousands. By mid-1919 the nation was convulsed not only in worker strife, but also a counter-reaction that came to be known as the Red Scare. In short, forming the Boston Policemen’s Union in August 1919 was an extraordinarily risky decision.
That fact quickly became evident. Police Commissioner Edwin Curtis, a member of the Yankee elite, announced that he would not recognize any policemen’s union. Indeed, in anticipation of the union’s formation, he changed the Police Department’s regulations to forbid policemen from being members in any outside organization. On Aug. 26, Curtis notified 19 policemen that they would face disciplinary hearings regarding their membership in the new union. Two weeks later, on Sept. 8, he announced that the men were suspended. The Policemen’s Union called a meeting where the men overwhelmingly voted to go on strike.
The strike began the next day at 5:45 p.m. at the nightly shift change and roll call. Things began to go awry for the strike almost immediately. As word of the strike spread across the city, crowds gathered downtown. Shortly after 8 p.m. a group of young men kicked in the door of a tobacco store and looted it. Immediately hundreds more followed suit, smashing windows, looting stores, and attacking passersby. With only slightly more than one-fourth of the police force on duty, the rioting spread in all directions.
The governor of Massachusetts, a little-known man named Calvin Coolidge, mobilized the state regiments of the national guard and sent them to restore order in Boston. The president of the AFL, Samuel Gompers, telegraphed Coolidge and suggested a compromise: the striking policemen would return to work if the city agreed to address their grievances. Coolidge answered with a terse statement that would soon make him famous: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”
The fighting lasted for three days and left eight dead. Proper Bostonians seethed with anger at the striking policemen, anger that was fueled to a significant degree by the longstanding animosity that existed between the city’s Protestant Yankee establishment and the immigrant Irish. The former cheered when Boston officials announced that all the striking policemen were fired and their places taken by “husky Yankee boys,” many of them World War I veterans. “Good American Yankees,” asserted one official, “do not strike!”
The Boston Police Strike lasted only a few weeks, but its effects reverberated throughout Boston’s Irish population for decades. As Thomas O’Connor wrote in his book “The Boston Irish”: “One can still find Irish families in Boston who recall father, sons, brothers, and uncles on the force losing their jobs forever, and who continue to harbor bitter resentment against the Harvard students who offered their services as scabs and strikebreakers. In their eyes, the outcome of the strike was a realistic indication of the wide gap that still existed between the workers and owners, between the people and the princes.”
The strike also played a key role in national politics. Few Americans had ever heard of Calvin Coolidge before the strike, but his iron-fisted handling of the dispute made him a national celebrity among those fearful of the rising tide of labor radicalism. Eager to recapture the White House after eight years of Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s administration, the Republican party put Coolidge on the national ticket in 1920 as the vice presidential candidate with Warren G. Harding. The conservative duo won the election and when Harding died 18 months later, “Silent Cal” Coolidge was sworn in as President of the United States.