Coolidge, page 23
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.
Coolidge found that he was becoming a symbol in this wider debate. The more trouble elsewhere, the more the letters of support and charitable donations to help the replacement officers flowed into Boston. Coolidge wrote to his father, noting that the interest in the Boston strike and his response had been indeed “quite remarkable.” In its first few days the public safety defenders’ fund created by Coolidge to help pay the state guardsmen raised more than $200,000. “I feel fairly sure we can protect the government,” Coolidge allowed in a note to his father, but only “fairly.” Boston might be calm now, but the telephone ladies and the trolley men might yet mount a general strike. “There is a possibility of the stopping of transportation,” the governor wrote to one company, Walworth Manufacturing, on September 18; companies like Walworth were being asked to form a committee to prepare for the possibility that Boston might need to supply itself with food. Replacement policemen like the one who rode Duffy were all over the city; the Boston Public Library announced a special campaign to deliver books to them in their barracks. Across the nation, other vendors were betting that men would now go back to work, and business found that September was proving to be a good month. Coolidge began to have some time for family again. Grace came to Boston.
The safest thing to do was focus on the work that remained in his term, especially the state government reorganization he had agonized over with Field. Alone in his office, Coolidge crossed out names and departments; each time he did so, he knew, he was crossing out constituencies and voters. No opponent was challenging Coolidge in the Republican gubernatorial primary, but that did not mean there was no contest: to prove he had a mandate poststrike, Coolidge had to perform better than he had the year before. Murray Crane had often made the 200-mile-plus round-trip home to vote in state elections. Coolidge, though unopposed, also made his own trip of 214 miles to vote at home on September 23. Coolidge therefore missed a call from a national eminence, Bryan, who called at the State House to find the governor departed.
Coolidge beat himself, and by a healthy margin. Even in Boston, Coolidge gained 3,000 votes over the year before. This was the first sign that Coolidge might be something more than a politician who could stare down a union. He might be an electable politician who could do so. Even after the primary, the letters poured in to thank him for the strike management. In total they would number tens of thousands, nothing like what the state government had seen before.
Suddenly, everyone Coolidge knew was rallying in support of him, right down to the neighbors in Northampton or Plymouth Notch. The Vermonters, naturally suspicious of adulation, grudgingly acknowledged Coolidge’s fame: papers now carried reports from those who had known him as a boy, such as Judge Wendell Stafford, who had been at St. Johnsbury with him. Have Faith in Massachusetts, complete with the now-famous telegram, was finally published to respectful reviews; Stearns made sure it was distributed as a campaign document. Newspapers praised Coolidge’s spare style. The Wall Street Journal told the nation in its most direct language that Coolidge was their man. “Governor Coolidge has shown the fibre of which presidents ought to be made,” the paper wrote in an October 29 editorial about the labor situation. Dwight Morrow felt his blood warm as the prospects of an Amherst man on a national stage became more real. Coolidge was almost there, he believed.
To Stearns, Morrow summed up the good in Calvin: “For the last year I have been abroad dealing with all sort of government officials. Some of them have been Socialists like Thomas, the great socialist leader in France. Some of them have been from old conservative families. . . . I have about come to the conclusion that the division of the people in the world is not really between conservative and radical, but people that are real people and people that are not. Calvin is one of the fellows who is real. He really wants to make things better not to pretend to make them better.” Bruce Barton set about writing a puff piece about Coolidge for November, timed, hopefully, to launch Coolidge as not only a governor but also a candidate for president.
Word was that the president’s nonstop exertions had caused Wilson to fall ill; the reports came that he was heading back to Washington. Coolidge too felt himself going under: just after the primary he took to his bed with acute bronchitis. He was not even sure he could make a party convention. On September 26, Coolidge wrote to his father in his typical unpunctuated style, “There is no change in the situation here, my soldiers still on guard a new police force organizing.” With each day that passed it became clearer that his government reorganization would hurt the very people who were crucial to his gubernatorial election. Charles Baxter of Medford, for example, was campaigning hard for Coolidge; he was planning the speaking drive for the GOP in the state that fall. Baxter was expecting to be rewarded with sinecures and places for himself and other men, and Coolidge did not know if his reorganization could accommodate that. “People applaud me a great deal but I am not sure they will vote for me,” he added in his note to his father. “This was a service that had to be done and I have been glad to do it. The result won’t matter to me but it will matter a great deal to the rest of America.” He was warning John that the battles were not all over. More negative press would come.
Oswald Garrison Villard, the owner and editor of The Nation, was now targeting Coolidge’s performance during the strike, making the case that Coolidge had been AWOL for much of it. Coolidge, still defensive, asked his attorney general to prepare an entire brief to prove that he was on alert during the whole course of the strike. Coolidge’s opponent was Richard Long, the businessman who had eaten into the Republican vote in the gubernatorial election of the preceding year. Long’s principal argument was that Coolidge had been unprepared for the disaster of the strike. Long fired off his own telegram assailing Coolidge as Coolidge had assailed Gompers. “You are to blame for failure to consider settlement with them,” Long wrote to Coolidge. “A broad-minded governor,” wrote the Democratic candidate, “would have been able to satisfy them and at the same time protect the dignity and honor of Boston and Massachusetts.”
Later in October, Richard Long grew bolder, traveling to Greenfield, the very town where Coolidge had talked to the AFL before the strike, to allege his incompetence: “Where was Gov. Coolidge on the night of the police strike? He was in seclusion far from the scene of the trouble, safely beyond the reach of those interested in the serious situation, hiding away on the western side of the Connecticut River. If he had been any part of a man he would have stayed in Boston, this great hero, and protected the people of the city.” That hurt, because Coolidge did wonder if he should have acted sooner.
