Boston a novel
American and Hungarian history.
“I hope you won’t mind if I find some way to earn my own keep;
there is a hard time in the relation between parents and children,
when the parents have to realize that their little ones are grown
up. I will continue to let Father send me money if he wants to;
I will not refuse a dollar that will keep some child alive for
a month. The suffering in all Eastern Europe is atrocious--I
have seen sights that would make any darling of luxury grow up
in a hurry. Be patient with Grannie and me, and realize that we
love you all, in spite of not doing what you want; we are acting
according to the dictates of our consciences, and where would New
England be in history if some people had not done that?
“Affectionately your daughter,
“Elizabeth.”
CHAPTER VII
DEPORTATION DAYS
I
Rupert Alvin would have worried more about his runaway daughter, if he
had not had so many troubles at home to keep him occupied. It seemed
as if all the devils in Puritan New England broke loose that summer
of 1919. There were a couple of million soldier boys turned out of
the training camps, and flotilla loads returning from France, and no
jobs to go round. They took to crime, to bootlegging, to striking, to
demanding bonuses, to all kinds of behavior which kept bankers lying
awake at night. The war-orders, the great prop of prosperity, had been
pulled from underneath, and business was like a man waking up on the
morning after a celebration.
The cost of living had been going up all through the war, but now it
went faster than ever; there was a shortage of everything, and nobody
could live on his salary. Out in Seattle there was a general strike,
almost a revolution; while close at home, in Lawrence, a strike of the
mill-workers had to be put down by kidnaping the leaders and beating
them insensible with brass “knucks” and blackjacks. And then, in
Boston, the most incredible event of all--a strike of policemen! Of the
safest “cops” in the whole of civilization, Irish-Catholics trained in
humility and obedience in parochial schools especially established for
the purpose! Truly, it seemed the end of Rupert Alvin’s world.
The policemen had been grumbling about their wages all through the
year. Some were getting as low as ninety-two dollars a month, and how
could a man keep a family on that? They grumbled about the way they
were housed--many of them in that old Joy Street station, which had
been built before the Civil War, and was dirty and verminous. They went
on grumbling, and the authorities went on putting them off--for if you
paid living wages to policemen, what would be left for politicians? In
August the grumblers formed a union, and joined the American Federation
of Labor. Treason and red rebellion under the very shadow of Bunker
Hill monument, on the very steps of “Funnel” Hall!
There were at this time two great banking groups competing for the
mastery of Boston’s affairs; like the wars of the Guelphs and the
Ghibellines in ancient Florence. Parker, Jones and Company, one of
these concerns, stood in with the city administration, and their
Democratic mayor appointed them as a committee to sit down with the
leaders of the union and work out a settlement. The policemen were to
get their “raise,” and everything would be polite. But they had omitted
to consult Rupert Alvin and the Pilgrim National crowd; and Rupert
was incensed that his dignity should thus be flouted. Also, he had
religious convictions on the subject of labor unions. For policemen to
organize and wring concessions by threats was a challenge to the very
being of the state. If a Democratic mayor were allowed to bargain with
Democratic Irish-Catholic labor leaders, and pay out the city’s money
under duress, the Republican Rupert might as well retire from his job
of running Massachusetts and Europe.
He consulted first with Henry Cabot Winters, as was his custom; then
he got his associates together and told them his plan. Never would
there be another such opportunity to teach a lesson to the forces of
disorder. The policemen’s union must be broken, its leaders driven
from the force, and not a man who went on strike should ever again
be employed by the city. Rupert carried his point, and the heads of
the Chamber of Commerce were called in and won over, and the police
commissioner was summoned and told of the decision. Fortunate indeed
that this official was appointed by the governor and not by the mayor,
and so was a “blue-blood” and not a demagogue!
The business men of the city had rallied to defend their property.
The president of Harvard had offered a thousand students, and all
these volunteers were ready to go on patrol-duty the moment they were
called. The policemen had given ample notice; they would strike at five
forty-five o’clock on the afternoon of September ninth; and moreover
they left four hundred of the old men to protect property. But it was
Rupert’s plan to teach the city, and indeed the whole country, a lesson
by a demonstration of what it meant for policemen to form a labor
union. To that end the old policemen were kept shut up in headquarters,
and the volunteers were not summoned until nine o’clock the next
morning. For one whole night Boston was to be without any police
protection whatever; and to make assurance doubly sure, one of the
big detective agencies supplied a few men to throw bricks through the
windows of department-stores and start things moving. That the plotters
had actually done this was never proved, but you would meet many
“blue-bloods,” familiar with the gossip of the clubs, who were certain
that it had been done; and several years later, when Boston saw its
leading bankers on the witness-stand in the case of Jerry Walker, and
heard them lying about how they had got possession of the felt-industry
of New England--then Boston was ready to believe anything about bankers!
II
Whoever started it, the windows were smashed, and men and boys jumped
through the holes and helped themselves to what they wanted; you saw
women sitting on the curb-stones, fitting themselves with expensive
shoes. There were many hold-ups that night, and some rape; more
horrifying yet, there were crap-games going on the Common--on the very
steps of the State House with its golden dome. It is characteristic
of Boston that this breach of decorum was the thing which stamped
itself upon the public mind, and stands out in unwritten history. Three
hundred crap-games in broad daylight--that shows you what the mob is
like, and what would happen if there were no hickory clubs to hold it
down!
The merchants of the city were in a panic, putting up barricades in
front of their shops, arming their clerks and spending the night in
a state of siege. The picture of Boston in the hands of its criminal
element had gone all over the country; Boston papers had made a fearful
panic, and the faithful press agencies had spread it; so Rupert’s
lesson had been taught, and it was time for the city to be saved. The
mayor called out some of the state militia--under an old law he had
the right to call the part which belonged to Boston. He wanted to call
the rest, but for this an order from the governor was needed; and here
came an unexpected hitch in the program of “law and order.”
The representative of Anglo-Saxon superiority in the State House
happened to be a gentleman by the name of Calvin Coolidge, whose
story is one of the oddest ever invented by that Great Novelist who
makes up history. A thin-lipped, tight little man, a petty lawyer
and bill-collector from the western part of the state, “Cal” had
got elected to the legislature, and attracted the attention of the
Republican boss because he always did exactly what he was told, and
never said a word that could be left unsaid. If a politician has an
opinion he is bound to offend somebody; so, obviously, the wise course
is to have no opinion on any subject. Strange, that no one ever thought
of it before “Cautious Cal”!
The man who ran the Republican state machine through this period
was a multimillionaire senator by the name of Murray Crane. He
had established for his good political boys what was known as the
“escalator system,” or the “Massachusetts ladder.” So long as they
took orders, and kept themselves presentable to the voters, he would
promote them regularly, step by step. It was a slow process, and you
were old when you got to the top, but Massachusetts liked that, it is
old itself. In this case, however, there developed a phenomenon known
as “Coolidge luck”; as if the fates were amusing themselves by boosting
this feeblest man in the state machine. Among the legislators aspiring
to the state senate there existed a “rotation agreement”; there was
never any competition at the primaries, each town took its turn. But
the man ahead of Coolidge died, and he jumped into the place. Then, as
a state senator who had never made a speech, he learned that the man
in line for president of the senate had attacked woman suffrage. When
the suffragists asked the views of Calvin, he shut the tightest and
thinnest pair of lips in Massachusetts. The women attacked the other
man and beat him at the polls, and Calvin presented his claims to the
boss, and became president of the senate. Clear the way!
Next it happened that the man who was scheduled to become
lieutenant-governor made the mistake of speaking in favor of
prohibition. Again Calvin kept his masterly silence, and the liquor
interests switched to him, and he was nominated. He served two terms as
lieutenant-governor, at a time when everybody was sick of politics,
and was pleased with a man who said nothing and did nothing. As a
reward they made him governor; and now here was a crisis, and two big
groups of bankers pulling him this way and that! There was nothing for
him but physical flight, and for twenty-four hours no one connected
with the government knew where the governor was to be found.
At last Rupert dug him out, on the farm of Murray Crane, who had pushed
him up the escalator. They had a night session, and Calvin heard such
things as never will be printed in any history-book. When the time came
to call out the state guard, he did what he was told; the machine-guns
went into action on Boston Common, and fired a whole volley of shots
heard round the world.
As for Calvin, he waited several days, until it was evident that
Rupert’s strategy had been successful; public sentiment had turned
against the strikers. Then Calvin rushed forward, waving in his hand
a telegram to Samuel Gompers, proclaiming in clarion tones: “There is
no right to strike against the public safety, by anybody, anywhere, at
any time!” That was, of course, what the capitalist press wanted at
the moment; the governor’s proclamation took the front page all the
way from Boston to Seattle--where there had been a rival strike and
a rival hero. One of these two masterful men was destined to become
vice-president and then president of the United States on the basis of
his heroism; while the other was destined to become a super salesman
of real estate, unloading ten thousand subdivision lots upon admiring
“come-ons.” Which hero was to be which was a matter of a toss-up in a
hotel-room, at the tail end of a long-drawnout political convention.
It may have been “Coolidge luck”--and again, it may have been the fact
that the Massachusetts leaders were able to certify that here was a
man who had never once expressed an opinion in twenty years of public
life, and had never once questioned an order from Murray Crane, who had
pushed him up the escalator.
III
This police strike cost the community three million dollars; nor did