Freepost: Forgotten Counterrevolution, the Boston Police Strike of 1919

Try that in a large town

This article is part of my series covering the unremembered leftist violence that preceded and defined the First Red Scare (1919-1920). The previous article covered the Bolshevik-supported 1919 Seattle General Strike, which was ended without violence due to the courageous actions of Mayor Ole Hanson. Although this article was initially paywalled, I’ve decided to make it available for free to everyone in light of ongoing discussions. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work.

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The year of 1919 was supposed to be a happy one. The First World War, which saw tens of millions dead, was finally over. America was the only superpowers not to be directly touched by this global catastrophe. America’s already massive advantage in industry and natural resources was poised to grow even further.

And yet, 1919 was a year of destruction on the homefront. The normally placid American labor scene exploded. The communist-backed International Workers of the World (IWW) and more moderate American Federation of Labor (AFL) gained hundreds of thousands of members. There were hundreds of strikes per month, including massive General Strikes that shut down whole cities, along with dozens of race- and labor-related riots. The body count went into the hundreds. The height of the violence became known as the “Red Summer” of 1919 both due to the threat of communism and the massive amounts of blood spilled.

At the time, many respectable people thought (and loudly proclaimed) that the country was heading towards a communist revolution. It can seem tough to understand their perspective with the benefit of hindsight, but they were more right than most today are willing to admit.

Many scholars refer to this period as one of unfounded paranoia and reaction, driven by ignorance and business interests. This view discounts the reality of Russian Revolution: The Bolsheviks were always a minority, even among the revolutionaries. The Revolution is perhaps best understood as a seemingly permanent state of crisis created by huge organized mobs. The government was not able or willing to contain these mobs and, gradually, violence and disorder creeped into every part of Russian life. By the end, society’s collapse and the creation of a new order was inevitable.

Most of the early violence was committed by criminals, or people whose political ideas were so poorly-formed that their behavior was indistinguishable from that of criminals. Even at Bolshevik-led riots, most of the participants had only a faint idea of what Marx or Lenin or any of the figures who supposedly drove the Revolution even stood for. The Bolsheviks were merely the most ruthless and organized group to emerge from this horrible stew, and they took the whole country down with them.

Let’s talk about Boston. Boston was relatively prosperous during WWI, but after the war ended it had a serious problem reintegrating returning veterans into the labor force. Furthermore, it hadn’t been spared from the labor organizing that had spread across much of the country. There was also a major flood of immigrants and the persistent threat of mature organized crime networks.

Boston was one of the first cities in the country to maintain a professional police force. Although for most of its history the Boston PD enjoyed a very good reputation, in 1919 it was beset by real problems. They were overworked and did dangerous duties with limited support. Most importantly, the officers simply were not paid enough. Although before WWI their salary could have afforded them a respectable middle class lifestyle, as other wages increased dramatically police salaries remained stagnant.

The police, officially forbidden from joining a union, tried to form a social club to better advocate for themselves. However, the combination of a new inexperienced mayor and a new anti-union police commissioner who was out of touch with the needs of the department left the problem unresolved. Good-faiths attempts at compromise, backed by the local Chamber of Commerce and several prominent local figures, were rejected in favor of a hard line against all collective bargaining.

As a last resort, the police applied for a union charter with the AFL. Although the record of the AFL was somewhat checkered around that period, they were certainly preferable to the communist-controlled IWW. Knowing that department policy had been violated, the ringleaders were called before police leadership and placed on suspension. The new police union prepared to strike.

Ironically, here the actual strikers were one of the least culpable parties for the chaos that ensued, although they would bear most of the blame for it. As the police prepared to strike, only limited steps were taken to find volunteer replacements. A general call went out for special officers.

Hundreds responded: ex-soldiers, students, former athletes, curious people who just wanted a few days of adventure. The volunteers represented a broad range of the respectable elements of Boston society, but they had no training in police work. One of the senior police officers had the foresight to ask all the striking officers to turn in their billy-clubs for “accounting” before the strike, fearing that they would not be able to equip all the volunteers once the strike began.

Governor (and future President) Calvin Coolidge ordered the Massachusetts State Guard on alert and offered Mayor Andrew Peters the use of 100 out of the 183 Metropolitan Park State Police units that were already in the city. Although there was a provision in the state code that allowed the Mayor of Boston to deploy State Guard units, Mayor Peters thought that it would be too politically embarrassing to call out the State Guard before any disorder had occurred. As the strike approached, Mayor Peters spent the evening frantically calling police chiefs of neighboring towns to ask for extra support. His requests were politely rejected each time.

The strike began on the morning of September 9, 1919. Large crowds formed outside many police stations and the striking officers were jeered and physically attacked by mobs of vengeful criminals as they left the building. According to the book “A City in Terror” by Francis Russell, of the mobs were apparently led by “Lettish” (Latvian) agitators. The striking policemen fled to their homes in a rush.

The situation worsened. More than half of the Metropolitan Park State Police units offered to Mayor Peters refused to do Boston street duty, either out solidarity with the striking officers or because street duty was much more dangerous than their normal responsibilities. Governor Coolidge suspended the insubordinate state policemen immediately. The volunteer officers, greatly outnumbered and without any training or experience in police work, could not control the growing crowds. Huge open air dice games, which had previously been banned, formed in many public spaces. An eerie silence settled over the city as people wondered what to do next.

The mob soon found its answer. The dice games became dangerous. Winners would sometimes be beaten and robbed by men who quickly slipped back into the crowd. Children climbed fire alarm poles and rang false alarms all over the city. A spree of tire thefts began.

Large aimless mobs of street kids, criminals, and other lower elements began to roam the city. Attempts by the few remaining professional police officers to control them were a total failure. They were outnumbered by 500-to-1. The mobs then began an organized robbery campaign. Any store they came across was completely looted. Open air markets sprung up for the stolen goods in public spaces. No one was afraid of legal consequences anymore. A few fights broke out but the violence that occurred was mostly between the looters themselves over control of the loot.

Some of the rioters were uniformed soldiers and sailors. Gunshots began to ring out across the city, celebratory at first. As the mobs grew more confrontational with police, the only solution available to the greatly outnumbered officers became their revolvers. The mob confronted a small group of officers interrupting a robbery, chanting “Kill the cops!” The police fired over the heads of the crowd, causing most to run off. Those that remained had to be beaten back with billy clubs.

The criminal element in Boston had a field day. Two commandeered taxis full of armed men drove around the city, stopping at jewelry stores to rob them. The rioters began to mug spectators in full view of the crowd, stealing watches and wallets after brutal beatings. The police superintendent roamed the streets with a small crowd of plainclothes officers to make arrests himself, but it was just a drop in the bucket. Out of the thousands of crimes being committed in full view of the public, only 129 arrests were made that day. A total of 5 rioters were shot, none fatally.

The crowds started ignoring warning shots. They were no longer intimidated when policemen drew their revolvers. They didn’t think the police would shoot and were for the most part right. Several groups of men roamed the streets of the North End gang raping lone women.

The violence took on a nihilistic character in Boston’s South End. Most of the destruction was just for the sake of destruction. Gangs began blocking streetcar tracks with mattresses and wreckage and then destroying the streetcars when they were forced to stop. A motorman who objected was shot in the head.

It was a night of complete chaos. Mayor Peters began to release statements absolving himself of blame and then disappeared for hours. Newspapers across the country condemned the striking police officers for bringing Bolshevism to the United States. The next morning, Mayor Peters formally requested that the State Guard enter the city to restore order. Governor Coolidge assigned 5,000 State Guardsmen to law enforcement duty, and then added another 3,000 men shortly thereafter.

Large numbers of volunteers began to pour in as well. Many of them were organized by Harvard University and its alumni association. The head football coach dismissed his 125 man team and said “To hell with football, if men are needed to protect Boston.” The city of Boston issued several thousand pistol permits to concerned citizens over the following days.

The violence that had spilled onto the streets the day before was largely gone by the morning. However, signs of disorder remained. Large dice games still formed all over the city and had to be broken up. There was broken glass and wreckage everywhere. It was quiet, but too quiet given what happened the night before.

Governor Coolidge personally inspected the streets and met with reporters. His calm demeanor and no-nonsense attitude made him very popular with the press and the public.

The striking policemen were initially overjoyed by this outcome. They held a meeting where they celebrated that, at last, the city was able to understand what it was like to live without police. Other unions began to talk openly about a large General Strike to get a better deal from the city. Their celebrations would not last for very long.

Slowly but surely, the violence of the previous day began to return. Purses were snatched from women on the street in full view of the public. Stores were robbed. A volunteer directing traffic was ambushed by a group of teamsters, shoved to the ground, and kicked repeatedly. A huge hostile mob formed outside of one South Boston police station, preventing the volunteers from leaving.

After a day of complete anarchy without repercussions, the masses were in no mood to return to reality. Francis Russell wrote in “A City in Terror”:

From early morning a restless mass roamed back and forth across the square between Sudbury and Court Streets with an insistent aimlessness, blocking traffic, hooting and pelting the dozen or so volunteers and the few loyal sergeants and patrolmen with stones and potatoes, while individuals occasionally darted closer to fling mod across their faces. One small boy snatched a night stick from a volunteer, then darted away, the crowd opening up to let him through but closing in again so that the enraged volunteer could not follow. A passing coal wagon had its contents dumped and soon coal lumps were arching through the air. Arthur Morse, a suburban lawyer-volunteer, was struck in the eye with a piece of coal. Another volunteer had his cheek laid open. From time to time a sergeant or a sub would brandish his pistol and threaten to shoot, and the crowd would scatter, laughing and jeering, only to surge back as soon as he put his weapon away. Some of the brawnier and more pugnacious volunteers would occasionally wade into the crowd with their night sticks, where they managed to knock several of their tormenters unconscious. With each hour the crowd grew more and more uncontrollable.

By the evening a crowd of 5,000 rioters had gathered in Scollay Square, a major traffic artery, forming a huge roadblock.

Police command had tried to filter in reinforcements to the greatly outnumbered local volunteer detail but the crowd descended on them too quickly. They were seized by the mob, had their guns taken from them, and then brutally beaten. The volunteers became separated from each other and the mob began to stomp them out. The huge crowd formed a massive wall blocking the police rescuers from reaching them. Only the arrival a State Guard cavalry unit interrupted the violence.

There was a tense standoff for a few seconds as the large crowd turned to face the cavalry, which spread out in a line across the entire square. Then, the order to charge was given. Seeing the charging cavalrymen with their sabres out activated the blood memories of the mob. The wall broke and the rioters began to flee in terror. The volunteers, although seriously injured, were rescued before it was too late.

Although they only had two weeks of training a year, the Massachusetts State Guardsmen made a decisive impact on the crisis. These were professional state militia. They had clear chains of command. They had a quartermaster corps that could make plans in advance to transport, supply, and house the Guardsmen when the time finally came. Everyone knew what their job was before the crisis actually occurred.

State Guard units began to fan out across the city. They were aided by nearby WWI veterans, who would show up wearing their old uniforms to join these detachments. Units from all over the state began flood the city. The huge manpower deficiency facing the local police and volunteers was no longer a problem.

Later that evening, another mob began to form in Boston. Although smaller than the previous night, it was much better armed. On top of local criminals, anarchists and communist radicals arrived from New York City to join the melee. There were even some of the striking policemen in the crowd. Over time, a crowd of 10,000 filtered back into Scollay Square. The robberies resumed. Groups of drunk sailors roamed the plaza destroying the windows that hadn’t already been taken out the night before. Policemen were beaten and disarmed.

It was a show of defiance. Slowly but surely the State Guard consolidated to meet them. The Guardsmen were at first pelted with bricks and other debris. The first casualties of the night occurred: a man was shot to death and a woman was wounded near a police patrol box. The shooter is still unknown. The Guardsmen stormed the houses that the rioters were occupying with bayonets fixed. Cavalry returned to the scene and had a decisive psychological impact on the crowd. As rioters began to flee, they encountered more approaching lines of Guardsmen coming in from side streets.

The local State Guard commander implemented a plan to cut Boston into segments and clear each segment one by one. As the rioters dispersed throughout the city in disarray, rolling battles between criminals and volunteer police broke out. The largest grouping of rioters was down to just 2,000.

Around 11PM, the critical moment arrived. A large group of rioters confronted an isolated squad of Guardsmen. One of the Guardsmen managed to get away and call for reinforcements, which soon arrived. A company of State Guard spread out across the street with their rifles and shotguns facing the mob. They mob didn’t think they’d shoot. The Guardsmen fired a warning volley over their heads, but the mob didn’t back off. Then, the local commander ordered his men to aim at the crowd. Without his giving the order to fire, the shooting began soon afterwards.

The exchange left three fatally wounded, including one innocent bystander. More than a dozen other rioters would suffer from nonfatal wounds, mostly from buckshot pellets. All disturbances in South Boston ended after this shooting.

Violence continued sporadically throughout the city. One of the striking policemen was shot after ambushing and beating a volunteer in an attempt to disarm him. The next day, after Guardsmen arrested a large group of craps players on Boston Common who refused to disperse, a sailor was shot and killed as part of a mob that tried to free the prisoners. Disturbances in the area ended after this shooting.

By the end of the third day, violence had mostly subsided in the city. Two more teenagers would be killed by Guardsmen, shot fleeing after being interrupted while prying open a manhole cover. However bloody the process may have been, normal life had returned to Boston. The streets were cleared. Brazen crimes no longer occurred.

The public across the country had turned decisively against the striking policemen. Rumblings of a General Strike by other unions in the city fell totally silent. Union leadership knew they had stepped in it. The strikers were widely condemned as agents of Bolshevism by newspapers and branded traitors by President Woodrow Wilson.

Rather than reaching a deal with the strikers, the police commissioner vowed to hire an entirely new police force (that would receive the pay increases and other benefits that the strikers demanded). The strikers would be rehired when Hell froze over. One of the only figures who tried to help the now-unemployed policemen was Governor Coolidge, who quietly reached out to them in an effort to find them new jobs while publicly condemning their dereliction of duty.

The aftermath of the incident seems hard to understand. Although a few policemen were actually communists, the overwhelming majority were extremely hostile to communism. Many of them had likely been injured responding to the recent communist-led May Day rioting.

The public’s reaction has to be understood in context of what people associated Bolshevism with after watching the Russian Revolution unfold from a distance: extended periods of rioting and mass theft, culminating in a new political order; legitimate authority cowed into submission by the lowest elements of society.

Although this definition has nothing to do Marx or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat or whatever, this is what the implementation of communism looks like in practice. It’s unlikely that anyone could have told you that the Bolsheviks would eventually be running the show when the first mass rioting broke out in St. Petersburg over food or military service or any number of other issues that had very little to do with communism. And yet, that’s exactly what happened.

The threat of a General Strike, floated as the rioting was ongoing, further alarmed the public. Life had become totally unlivable in Boston. Innocent people were being robbed and seriously injured at an unprecedented scale. The response of the newly-organized workers was not to come together to fight against this antisocial force, but rather to see if they could organize an even greater disruption of normal life in order to extract concessions at (sometimes literal) gunpoint.

AFL President Samuel Gompers understood immediately that the incident was a disaster for organized labor and begin advocating for the strikers to return to work as soon as possible. The AFL halted efforts to unionize police forces for several decades.

People were scared. And they had good reason to be as later events would reveal. Above all else, the events of the strike revealed to Americans that beneath the streets they walk every day was an enormous amount of violence, increasingly organized and sometimes brought in from overseas, that was just waiting for the right moment to reveal itself. These were massive crowds. It wasn’t a small group of bomb-throwers causing problems. It seemed like there was a secret enemy army in every city. In 1919, after winning a massive war, that’s not a revelation most people expected to have.

There are several good takeaways from the incident. The first is that you can and should prevent problems before they even occur. The police actually had very reasonable demands. Business leaders and other mediators had proposed a compromise that could have worked for everyone. It was pigheadedness on the part of local politicians and hysteria on the part of the media that led to two days of disaster.

Exacerbating the problem was that Mayor Peters refused to call out the State Guard before the violence actually began. It is not hard to figure out that the absence of police will lead to some kind of disorder in a very large city like Boston. Many riots are actually very easy to predict, especially now that there is an entire professional media and activist apparatus that has sprung up around creating these riots. If you know something bad is going to happen, you should not wait for the bad guys to give you “permission” to respond by harming the public.

This can sometimes put you in a precarious position: Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer publicly proclaimed that the 1920 May Day would be accompanied by large labor disruptions and violence, as the May Days of the last two years had been. He launched preemptive raids on leftists organizations across the country, arresting more than 10,000 activists on somewhat dubious charges. When May Day passed uneventfully that year, he was portrayed as hysterical rather than forward-thinking. His reputation did not survive the controversy, but who knows what positive effect his actions had?

Having preexisting structures that can respond to these crises is also very important. The impromptu volunteer policemen did good work, they were great to have, but their effect on the large crowds was nothing compared to the organized State Guard units. They came from all over Massachusetts, they weren’t dependent on a local population that might even be sympathetic to the rioters. Those groups trained together, they had equipment already ready for them when the crisis emerged, they could work together at a large scale, they had professional staff to handle logistics and other problems that inevitably emerge from moving large numbers of people around. They were also legally authorized to use force and not afraid to do so.

This is probably the most important aspect. The violence escalated to a fever pitch when the mob was no longer afraid of physical consequences. Police would draw revolvers and the mob knew that it was very unlikely that the cops would actually shoot. People who committed “low level” violence, including assaults that could easily kill someone, were able to quickly slip back the massive crowd, shielding them from arrest. As a result, police were pelted with rocks and sometimes even swarmed and disarmed. It was impossible to control the mob. If they got enough people together, they could do whatever they wanted. All Leftist movements rely on the power of mobs.

The State Guard was unfazed by this. When confronted by a large mob that had cornered and attacked their men, the Guardsmen were willing to fire into the crowd rather than back down. When another mob formed to try to free prisoners, the soldiers were willing to shoot to carry out their duty to arrest and detain people for brazenly breaking the law. Illegal force from the mob has to be met with legal force. Criminals can’t be allowed to get away or their behavior will only escalate.

Some of the soldiers’ actions, like shooting the fleeing teenagers who had tried to remove a manhole cover, were unreasonable. However, this willingness to shoot sent the clear message that if the choice was between using force and letting mobs of criminals decide what life is going to be like, they (and the millions of Americans backing them) chose using force. You have to place these actions in context.

As with many historical incidents, the reason the Boston Police Strike and the surrounding First Red Scare are derided by leftists today as moments of national hysteria is that the conservatives won. What they did worked. Leftists hate and lie about what happened because it worked. The accelerating cycle of organized violence and general disorder, culminating in political revolution, was stopped prematurely. Writer H.P. Lovecraft, who was living in Boston at the time, wrote of the incident:

Last fall it was grimly impressive to see Boston without bluecoats, and to watch the musket-bearing State Guardsmen patrolling the streets as though military occupation were in force. They went in pairs, determined-looking and khaki-clad, as if symbols of the strife that lies ahead in civilisation's struggle with the monster of unrest and bolshevism.

That sums it up very nicely.

For further reading on this topic, I strongly recommend A City in Terror: Calvin Coolidge and the 1919 Boston Police Strike by Frank Russell.

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