Danver Steven L. (Edited). Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History: An Encyclopedia (ENG)

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without written permission. Accordingly, the overworked ofﬁce rs were o ften

required to sleep between their 10-hour shifts in pol ice stations that lacked sani-

tary facilities for baths and toilets. In addition to these grievances regarding wages

and working conditions, the ethnic divisions of Boston were evident in a Protestant

Yankee political establishment that sought to control the rank-and-ﬁle policemen

who were predominantly of Irish Catholic ancestry.

Political authority over the Boston police department was divided. In 1885, city

police were placed under the control of a police commissioner appointed by the

governor, although the police budget was assigned to the city’s mayor. When nei-

ther Police Commissioner Edwin Curtis nor Mayor Andrew Jones Peters responded

to their grievances, Boston police attempted to afﬁliate w ith the American

Federation of Labor (AFL), which had bestowed charters to over 30 police

unions. After an AFL charter was granted to Boston police on August 15,

1919, Commissioner Curtis responded that the police could not unionize as they

were not employees, but ofﬁcers of the state. Later that month, Curtis sus-

pended 19 police ofﬁcers for serving as union organizers. Mayor Peters, who

was in Maine on vacation when the ofﬁcers were suspended, took a more con-

ciliatory approach, forming a c ommission led by prominent Boston banker

James Jackson Storrow to examine police labor complaints. The commission

concluded that while the Boston police, indeed, had legitimate labor grievances,

it would violate the public interest for the city to negotiate with a police union.

Issues of public safety ostensibly trumped collective bargaining rights.

When city ofﬁcials remained unresponsive, the Boston police voted over-

whelmingly, by a margin of 1,134 to 2, for a strike. On the evening of September 9,

approximately three-quarters of the force walked off the job at 5:45 p.m. followed

by unrest in the city streets. By 8:00 that evening, a crowd of over 10,000 gathered

in Scollay Square. The restive crowd, fueled by unruly sailors, engaged in public

looting, gambling, and ﬁghting throughout the night. Mayor Peters called for vol-

unteers to be deputized and restore order. Harvard president Lawrence Lowell

urged students to heed the mayor’s request. M any of the Harvard student volun-

teers, however, were attacked by working people supporting the police strike.

With ﬁghting in the streets and the police walkout termed by President Wilson

as “a crime against civilization,” Mayor Peters also called for the deployment of

the state guard, but Governor Coolidge made it clear that he would retain com-

mand of the troops. The soldiers quickly restored order, although ﬁve Boston res-

idents were killed in clashes with the military along with another three fatalities

suffered at the hand of civilian violence. National public opinion also turned

against the strike, with the New York Times on September 10 asserting, “A police-

man has no more right to belong to a union than a soldier or a sailor. He must be

ready to obey orders, the orders of h is superiors, not those of any outside body.”

758 Boston Police Strike (1919)

In a similar vein, the Los Angeles Times embraced the Red Scare and proclaimed,

“No man’s house, no man’s wife, no man’s children will be safe if the police force

is unionized and made subject to the orders of Red Unionite bosses.”

Faced with military intervention and widespread denunciation of the strike,

which was associated in the public mind with communist agitation, the AFL

attempted to negotiate an end to the w ork stoppage by insisting that the striking

police be reinstated to restore order while a new contract was negotiated. Governor

Coolidge took a hard stand against the union, informing AFL president Samuel

Gompers, “There is no right to strike against the public safety anywhere, anytime.”

Rather than being reinstated, approximately 1,100 ofﬁcers were ﬁred and replaced

with a new police force drawn from a pool of unemployed World War I veterans.

The new recruits, however, were provided with higher salaries, additional vacation

days, and uniforms purchased by the city. The demands of the strikers were essen-

tially met with the conditions offered to the newly constituted police force, but

there was to be no unionization of the Boston police department.

In wake of the negative public reaction to the Boston police strike, the AFL cur-

tailed their organization of police unions, while union membership declined in the

1920s following the labor unrest of 1919 and postwar Red Scare. As for Coolidge,

he was reelected as governor by over 124,000 votes before joining Harding on the

Republican ticket in the fall of 1920. After ascending to the presidency following

the death of Harding, Coolidge remarked, “No doubt it was the police strike in

Boston that brought me into national prominence.”

—Ron Briley

See also all entries under Molly Maguires (1870s); Great Railroa d S trikes (1877);

Haymarket Riot (1886); Seattle Riot (1886); Homestead Strike (1892–1893); Pullman

Strike (1894); Lattimer Massacre (1897); Black Patch War (1909); Ludlow Massacre

(1914); Battle of Blair Mountain (1921); Bonus Army (19 32); Toledo Auto-Lite S trike

(1934); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading

Fogelman, Robert M. Big-City Police. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977.

Foner, Philip S. History of the Labor Movement in th e United States: Postwar Struggles,

1918–1920. New York: International Publishers, 1988.

Lives ay, Harold C. Samuel Gompers and Organized Labor in America. Boston: Little,

Brown, 1978.

Robertson, David Brian. Capital, Labor, and State: The Battle for American Labor Mar-

kets from the Civil War to the New Deal. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld Publish-

ers, 2000.

Boston Police Strike (1919) 763

Red Summer (1919)

“Red Summer” is a term used to describe a series of race riots that broke out across

the United States in the summer and fall of 1919. Between May and Oct ober of

that year, an es timated 25 race-related disturbances took p lace (Tuttle 1970, 23).

Nearly half of them took place in cities and smaller industrial towns in northern

and border states. They ranged from Charleston, South Carolina, and Longview,

Texas, in May, to Chicago in July, to New York, Omaha, Nebraska, and Elaine,

Arkansas, in October. Overall, more than 120 people died (Tuttle 1970, 14). The

three deadliest, in terms of lives lost were in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and

Elaine, Arkansas.

The riots, along with the accompanying “Red Scare ,” grew out of a climate of

fear and intole rance that was a product of the economic, political, and cultural

mobilization that came along with the United States’ participation in World War I.

Although the period of American belligerency (April 1917–November 1918) had

been a time of national unity, by the spring of 1919, that unity had evaporated amid

growing social tension. What remained was the wartime super patriotism and zeal,

with its need of an external enemy, which was channeled into hatred of dissenters,

political radicals, and racial and ethnic minorities—particularly blacks.

Fueling that suspicion and hate was the reality of 1919 as a year of transition

growing out of rapid demobilization that produced inﬂation, unemployment, and

housing shortages. These dislocations fed racial tensions that found expression in

the r iots and lync hings that plagu ed American socie ty throughout t hat summer

and fall.

Moreover, the United Stat es’ social structure in 1919 was conducive to both

anti-radical and racial violence. American society was predisposed to violenc e

against blacks because of the country’s prevailing social mores. Almost univer-

sally, whites viewed blacks as inherentlyinferiorandalsoasunabletocontrol

their sexual urges, which made them a danger to white women. In addition,

working-class whites feared black competition for low-skilled and low-paying

jobs. These fears w ere heightened by black migration from the rural South. The

potential for racial conﬂict in this mass movement was apparent in the rising num-

ber of race riots that had occurred in cities and industrial towns in all regions of the

United States since the turn of the century.

765

With the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, however, this steady ﬂow of African

Americans into northern industrial cities became a ﬂood. Between 1915 and 1919,

more than 450,000 blacks migrated (Tuttle 1970, 21). They were subject to forces

that both drew them north and forced them from their homes in the South. The

war shut off the ﬂow of cheap immigrant labor from Europe that American business

counted on to keep labor costs down. At the same time, war orders from the Allies

and President Wilson’s 1916 preparedness campaign led to economic expansion

and a tightening of the labor market. These trends induced industrial leaders to open

manufacturing jobs to black workers for the ﬁrst time. Advertisements in northern

black newspapers and labor recruiters who fanned out throughout the rural South

made sure that blacks were aware of these opportunities.

The attractions of moving north were reinforced by events driving southern

blacks from their traditional homes. Many left out of fear and anger over violence

by southern whites against blacks that, combined with disenfranchisement and

segregatio n, kept b lacks in a state of permanent servitude in a white supremacist

society. In addition, the great Mississippi Flood of 1916 forced thousands of share-

cropper s off their lands in the Delta. Southern white landowners, concerned over

the effect of the massive exodus on the security of their labor pool, often resorted

to violence and duplicitous economic measures to keep blacks in their place, with

only mixed results.

Whatever their reasons for leaving, the biggest consideration for leaving was

wages. Migrants moving north could easily make more money, even as unskilled

workers, than they could in any occupatio n in the South. On average, hourly pay

in the South was only three-quarters of that in the North (Marks 1985, 152).

The North was hardly the paradise they envisioned. They found crowded condi-

tions made worse by housing discrimination, inadequate schools, overloaded pub-

lic transportation, and intense competition from whites for jobs and political

inﬂuence. Whites viewed blacks, with their differing appearance and behavior pat-

terns, as alien and threatening. Blacks were scapegoated for everything from rising

crime to breakdowns in city services. Most of all, whites feared that blacks would

undermine their social and economic status.

For their part, black men and women, wherever they lived, entered the postwar

period with aspirations for greater social and political equality as well as wider

economic opportunities. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans had served

in the armed forces and had worked in war industries at home. They expected rec-

ognition for their service. Their ambitions collided with a general white determi-

nation to keep them at the bottom of the nation’s socioeconomic structure.

While wartime patriotism and mobilization kept conﬂict to a minimum, signs of

racial anxiety and the potential for violence were evident throughout the country.

There was a threshold of tension, which, when exceeded, made racial vi olence

766 Red Summer (1919)

almost inevitable. All it took was a precipitating incident and the lack of adequate

law enforcement to restrain the rioters. In 1919, these te nsions repeatedly coa-

lesced in an unprecedented outbreak of racial violence.

The East St. Louis, Illinois, outbreak of July 1917 was a harbinger of the trouble

to come. East St. Louis had all the ingredients—corrupt city politicians, labor vio-

lence, and manufacturers who sought to play black and white workers off against

each other. White labor unions were striking for higher pay in the city’s retail

stores and pu blic transportat ion. Both t he city’s political leaders and manufac-

turers were courtin g black workers, luring them north to replace striking white s.

Blacks were also being blamed for rising crime rates. On July 2, whites, infuriated

by reports that local businesses were bringing in black strikebreakers on special

trains, rampaged through black neighborhoods. Over the ensuing two days, rioters

indiscriminately attacked blacks with either ﬁrearms, clubs, or baseball bats and

burned businesses and homes. A grand jury later estimated that 245 buildings

had b een burned and over 100 people (mostly black) had been killed (Barnes

2008, 193).

Another wartime sign of heightening racial tensions was the upswing in the fre-

quency of lynchings in 1917 and 1918. In 1917, 44 lynchings were reported; i n

1918, 64 more (Hagedorn 2007, 13). Most of these incidents occurred in the South

and were connected with the maintenance of white supremacy and the social and

economic status quo. A smaller number that occurred in the Midwest or the Far

West grew out of wartime anti-German hysteria and fear of labor unrest and

radical union organizers growing out of the reaction to the Russian Revolution.

The Armistice of November 1918 began the process by which these pent-up

resentments repeatedly exploded into racial violence in 1919. Precipitate demobi-

lization, carried out with little thought t o the consequences, added fuel to racial

and class divisions throughout the country. The U.S. Army was broken up, war-

time price and production controls were terminated, and entire industries either

were shut down or drastically curtailed production while converting back to pro-

duction for civilian consumption. By July 1919, the army had discharged

2,600,000 men, thus increasing the labor surplus at a time of rising unemployment.

Conﬂicts between discharged white soldiers seeking jobs and black soldiers

demanding equality for the ir service were to be a common occurrence in the ﬁrst

year of the peace.

Social and economic conditions were thus conducive to the wave of racial vio-

lence that swept the United States in the summer of 1919. The ﬁrst outbreak

occurred in Charleston, S outh Carolina, on May 10, after an al tercation between

an African Americ an male and a white sailor tha t resu lted in the fatal wounding

of the black man by a gunshot. Hundreds of sailors on liberty in Charleston

descended on the city’s black district. Two blacks died in the violence, and 17 more

Red Summer (1919) 767