Boston police strike

[1] Samuel Gompers of the AFL recognized that the strike was damaging the cause of labor in the public mind and advised the strikers to return to work.

[3] Discontent and restiveness among the Boston police force grew as they compared their wages and found they were earning less than an unskilled steelworker, half as much as a carpenter or mechanic and 50 cents a day less than a streetcar conductor.

[3] They also objected to being required to perform such tasks as "delivering unpaid tax bills, surveying rooming houses, taking the census, or watching the polls at election" and checking the backgrounds of prospective jurors as well as serving as "errand boys" for their officers.

[6] They complained about having to share beds and the lack of sanitation, baths, and toilets[3] at many of the 19 station houses where they were required to live, most of which dated to before the Civil War.

They pressed the issue in the summer of 1918 and, near the end of the year, Mayor Andrew Peters offered salary increases that would affect about one-fourth of the officers.

[14] The Boston police organized under an AFL charter in order to gain support from other unions in their negotiations and any strike that might ensue.

Late in August, the New Hampshire Association of Manufacturers called him "the Ole Hanson of the east", equating the events they anticipated in Boston with the earlier Seattle General Strike.

[18] Mayor Peters sought to play an intermediary role by appointing a Citizen's Committee to review the dispute about union representation.

[1] Coolidge assigned 100 members of the state's Metropolitan Park Police Department to replace the striking officers, but 58 of them refused to participate and were suspended from their jobs.

Some was rowdy behavior that scared respectable citizens, such as youths throwing rocks at streetcars and overturning the carts of street vendors.

More overtly criminal activity included the smashing of store windows and looting their displays or setting off false fire alarms.

"[24] In the morning the mayor asked the governor to furnish a force of State Guards; Coolidge promptly agreed and eventually provided almost 5,000 men under the command of Brig.

"[26] The morning papers following the first night's violence were full of loud complaints and derogatory terms for the police: "deserters", "agents of Lenin".

[25] In the "cavalry charge" of State Guard troops in Scollay Square on the 10th, Robert Lallie was shot and killed;[28] Miss Margaret Walsh was wounded and died the next day.

[30] On the 11th a striking policeman, a nine-year veteran named Richard D. Reemts, disarmed two strikebreaking policemen at Columbus Avenue and Buckingham Street.

[34] When Governor Coolidge called the strikers "deserters", a mass meeting of the Boston Police Union responded:[35] When we were honorably discharged from the United States army, we were hailed as heroes and saviors of our country.

On September 12, he urged the strikers to return to work, asking the city to agree to suspend judgment on whether to recognize the police union.

In a telegram to Mayor Peters he cited the model of Washington, D.C., which had, at the suggestion of President Wilson, suspended its regulation forbidding police officers to join a union affiliated with the AFL until a conference scheduled for October 6.

[47] Newspaper accounts exaggerated the level of crime and violence that accompanied the strike, resulting in a national furor that shaped the political response.

A Philadelphia paper viewed the Boston violence in the same light as other labor unrest and numerous race riots in 1919: "Bolshevism in the United States is no longer a specter.

"[1][48] President Woodrow Wilson, speaking from Montana, branded the walkout "a crime against civilization" that left the city "at the mercy of an army of thugs.

"[52] The Ohio State Journal opposed any sympathetic treatment of the strikers: "When a policeman strikes, he should be debarred not only from resuming his office, but from citizenship as well.

He argued that he had not needed the requested State Guards for the strike's first night because the city remained quiet and he trusted reports that many policemen would not join.

[42] The strike gave momentum to Coolidge's political career,[54] and a nationwide reputation for decisive action that was not in keeping with his tendency toward deliberation.

[44] The Boston Transcript reported:[55] Massachusetts is hailed today from Maine to California as the winner of a shining triumph for straight Americanism.

[56] When he succeeded to the presidency in 1923 upon the death of Warren Harding, the New York Times headlined its biography: "Coolidge Firmness Won Recognition; His Suppression of the Boston Police Strike Made Him a National Figure".

Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin said that Coolidge's failure to intervene in that year's coal strike mirrored his 1919 actions when he "persistently refused to act upon the requests of the Mayor of Boston for assistance until riot and bloodshed had aroused the entire State.

The American Federation of Labor responded to political pressure experienced during the strike and revoked the charters it had granted to police unions.

It described large crowds, including a number of sailors from docked naval ships, that took to the streets, smashing windows, committing robbery and stoning bystanders and cars.

In 1937, Massachusetts Governor Charles F. Hurley, after meeting with some of the 1919 strikers, backed the decision of Police Commissioner Joseph Timilty not to reinstate them.