How a Boston police strike made Calvin Coolidge presidential material, and still teaches us today

"Kids have been through enough." That was the response of Governor Maura Healey to the demand by the Massachusetts Teachers Association for legalization of teacher strikes in the Bay State. After COVID idled them for so long, grade schoolers and high schoolers need to learn in the school building.

But there is a stronger case against public-sector strikes than pandemic disruption. None made that case more clearly than one of Governor Healey’s predecessors as Bay State governor, Calvin Coolidge. A century ago Governor Coolidge’s handling of a public-sector strike put Coolidge on the path to the U.S. Presidency and, more importantly, showed how a governor can shift political culture nationwide.

The year was 1919, and rebellion was in the air. In Russia, revolutionaries were winning the civil war against the White Army. In America, strikes plagued cities everywhere. In Seattle that February, workers from 101 unions had idled every industry–public or private – in a general strike so thorough that across the city "nothing but the tide moved," as someone commented.

In Boston, the mutiny came in the form of a plan to strike by the Boston police. The policemen suffered from genuine grievances. Inflation so shrank their pay packets that they struggled to cover family expenses: "Can a man, single or married, even live on such a wage? He manages to exist, that is all," concluded the Boston Labor World. Rats prowled the shelves of police station houses, chewing through the leather of their helmets. Policemen or their families had given their all in the recent war.

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The police reasoned therefore that they might prevail if they went on strike. After all, they were not proposing revolution; only to walk out for better conditions. The patrolmen affiliated not with radical unions but with the milder American Federation of Labor, led by an ally of President Woodrow Wilson, Sam Gompers. The police contracts did not permit strikes, but this fact seemed a mere technicality in the heat of the moment.

Another reason the police counted on conciliation was the governor himself, a first-termer. As a state lawmaker, Coolidge had led negotiations with textile workers before the war; surely he would negotiate with police now. The next gubernatorial contest was just two months away. Surely too Coolidge would prefer a peaceful outcome to losing control of the state capital.

When the majority of the Boston force did walk out in September, riots indeed erupted in Boston. Crowds rampaged down streets, breaking shop windows and hurling bricks at volunteers who had offered to man intersections — Boston did not have a full stoplight system yet. Shop owners queued at police stations to apply for pistol licenses so that they might defend their wares. Injuries and deaths mounted, but the police commissioner did not cave. Gompers, the labor leader, made an indirect threat by allowing publicly that worse could come if the police commissioner did not negotiate: "I suppose he is willing to assume the responsibility for the consequences of his action," Gompers muttered.

What would Coolidge do? The governor’s first move was predictable: he called out the state guard, and asked other New England governors to send their state guards to reestablish order in Boston. A few days into the riots, even the police themselves were finding themselves appalled by the violence. Gompers modulated his tone: the police strike was, he said, merely "a ‘natural reflex’ of the futile attempts by the policemen to improving their working conditions." "Cops Want to Work Again," read the headlines. The moment had come for conciliation.

But Coolidge did not conciliate. "The action of the police in leaving their posts of duty is not a strike. It is a desertion." A contract that prohibited strikes like the policemen’s was no technicality. The striking policemen were fired and would stay fired. There was a difference between an industrial worker and a public-sector worker; a public-sector worker had a duty to the public. Service was an honor. Earlier that year Coolidge had expressed the same philosophy in a terse veto of raises for legislators: "service in the General Court is not obligatory but optional."

Now Coolidge sent a wire to Gompers, more missile than missive. The telegraph punctuation even had the effect of artillery fire. "YOUR ASSERTION THAT THE COMMISSIONER WAS WRONG CANNOT JUSTIFY THE WRONG OF LEAVING THE CITY UNGUARDED STOP." Coolidge concluded with a line of telegraphese that has rung down the decades: "THERE IS NO RIGHT TO STRIKE AGAINST THE PUBLIC SAFETY COMMA BY ANYBODY COMMA ANYWHERE COMMA ANY TIME STOP."

This stand was a tough one. Though many praised his move he was not sure of his own political fate post-strike. His opponent in the November gubernatorial election, Richard Long, chided Coolidge: "a broad minded governor would have been able to satisfy them" – the police – "and at the same time protect the dignity and honor of Boston and Massachusetts."  

"People applaud me a great deal but I am not sure they will vote for me," Coolidge wrote his father following the strike. Still, the governor noted, "this was a service that had to be done. The result won’t matter to me but it will matter a great deal to the rest of America."

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It did. Coolidge’s categoric action inspired other governors, and many mayors, all of whom were confronting their own labor unrest. When they learned of Boston they felt relief. Finally, someone had drawn the necessary line in the sand. Coolidge did win his gubernatorial election, and even Wilson spoke up, via his own telegram: "I CONGRATULATE YOU UPON YOUR ELECTION AS A VICTORY FOR LAW AND ORDER. WHEN THAT IS THE ISSUE WE MUST ALL STAND TOGETHER." The freshman governor from Massachusetts suddenly became national material, and was nominated for the vice presidential slot on what proved successful "law and order" ticket.

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In 1923, at President Warren Harding’s passing, Coolidge himself became president. But his 1919 strike message inspired statesmen long past Coolidge’s retirement. Even Franklin Roosevelt, that most progressive of presidents, balked at strikes by public employees: "such action, looking toward the paralysis of government" was "unthinkable and intolerable." Public sector unions and even strikes became more common later. But today the majority of states ban strikes by public employees.

This year marks the centennial of the Coolidge presidency; Fox will be airing a documentary about Coolidge. The Coolidge story reminds us that America does not take its cues from Washington alone. When America veers off course, it matters only that someone speaks up and points the country back in the right direction. And often enough, that person is a governor.

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