Boston Police Strike, 1919

On September 9, 1919, approximately 1,117 of the roughly 1,544 officers of the Boston Police Department—nearly 80 percent of the force—walked off the job, leaving the city of Boston, Massachusetts almost entirely without police protection. The stoppage triggered outbreaks of lawlessness across the city, drew the Massachusetts National Guard into the streets, and resulted in nine deaths and dozens of injuries before order was restored. The strike ultimately launched the national political career of then-Governor Calvin Coolidge, who would go on to become the 30th President of the United States. The Boston Police Strike of 1919 remains among the most consequential labor actions in American municipal history, reshaping debates over whether public safety workers had the right to unionize and collectively bargain, and directly prompting Massachusetts to prohibit public employee strikes by law.

Background and Context

The strike did not emerge without warning. In the years following World War I, American workers across industries faced economic pressures driven by rapid inflation and stagnant wages. Police officers in Boston were no exception. By 1919, a Boston patrolman earned roughly $1,100 per year—a figure that had not been adjusted meaningfully since 1913, even as the cost of living had climbed by more than 70 percent during the intervening years. Officers were required to work shifts of up to 87 hours per week on rotation, with only one day off in fifteen, and were expected to provide their own uniforms out of pocket. Station houses were decrepit, equipment was outdated, and there was no formal grievance mechanism through which officers could seek redress. Police work at the time was widely regarded as a low-status occupation comparable in social standing to sanitation work, and the department's ranks were dominated by Irish immigrant families for whom city employment represented one of the few reliable paths to economic stability.

The broader post-World War I period was marked by widespread labor unrest across the United States. Workers in steel, coal, and other industries were pressing for better wages and the right to organize. The year 1919 alone saw more than 3,600 strikes involving over four million workers nationwide. Boston's police officers looked to join this movement by affiliating with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In August 1919, officers formed the Boston Social Club into a formal union and applied for and received AFL Charter No. 16807, making them the first urban police force in the country to achieve AFL affiliation. The decision to seek an AFL charter proved to be the flashpoint that triggered the confrontation with city and state officials.

Commissioner Edwin Curtis opposed the unionization effort outright. Curtis took the position that police officers were public servants whose first obligation was to the citizens of Boston, and that affiliation with an outside labor organization was incompatible with that duty. He issued a formal order forbidding department members from joining any union affiliated with an outside organization, framing union membership as a direct violation of an officer's oath of public service. When officers proceeded to form a union and obtain AFL affiliation despite his prohibition, Curtis suspended nineteen union leaders on August 26, 1919. That act of suspension served as the immediate catalyst for the strike vote that followed, in which 1,134 officers voted to strike and only two opposed the measure.

The strike also unfolded during the first Red Scare, a period of intense national anxiety about the spread of Bolshevism following the Russian Revolution of 1917. AFL president Samuel Gompers appealed to both Commissioner Curtis and Governor Coolidge to accept arbitration and avoid a confrontation, arguing that the officers' grievances were legitimate economic concerns with no connection to radical politics. His appeals were rejected. When the strike began, much of the national press immediately framed the walkout in ideological terms, with editorial writers and public officials characterizing the striking officers as "agents of Bolshevism" and warning that surrendering to their demands would open the door to Soviet-style disorder in American cities. This framing, however dishonest as a description of the officers' actual motives, proved politically powerful and shaped public opinion decisively against the strikers.

The Strike Begins

When the strike commenced at 5:45 p.m. on September 9, 1919, the city found itself almost entirely without police coverage. The handful of officers who remained on duty—supervisory personnel and a small number of volunteers drawn from the ranks of Harvard students, businessmen, and veterans—numbered fewer than 200 and could not begin to fill the gap left by the mass walkout of more than 1,100 sworn officers. The volunteer replacements were largely untrained and in some cases became targets of harassment and assault by hostile crowds within hours of taking up their posts.

The effects were felt almost immediately. Within the first evening of the strike, gambling rings operated openly on street corners and in the middle of busy thoroughfares, dice games and card tables appearing with little attempt at concealment. Stores were looted in several neighborhoods, particularly in the South End and in areas near the waterfront. Violence broke out in various parts of the city as the absence of law enforcement emboldened criminal elements and opportunists. The striking officers did not return to their posts during this period, and the city's residents experienced a level of public disorder that shocked observers across the country.

The situation in downtown Boston grew particularly tense. According to contemporaneous accounts, sword-waving cavalry charged into a jeering, stone-throwing crowd of 15,000 people in the city center as authorities attempted to restore order. These dramatic scenes illustrated just how severely the absence of the police force had destabilized public life in the city. Before order was fully restored, nine people had been killed—several by National Guard gunfire—and more than 50 had sustained injuries serious enough to require medical attention.

Deployment of the National Guard

As conditions deteriorated through September 9 and 10, Governor Calvin Coolidge activated the Massachusetts National Guard to restore order in Boston. The Guard established a headquarters at Faneuil Hall, a location that carried deep historical resonance as a gathering place for civic debate and democratic action. From this base, Guard units fanned out across the city to suppress disorder and provide the public safety presence that had evaporated with the police walkout. Mounted troops patrolled major thoroughfares, infantry detachments guarded commercial districts, and machine gun positions were established at several intersections during the most intense period of unrest.

The deployment of the National Guard represented a significant escalation and signaled that neither the city nor the state government was prepared to negotiate a return to work under terms favorable to the striking officers. Confrontations between Guardsmen and crowds resulted in the use of lethal force on multiple occasions, contributing to the nine fatalities recorded during the strike period. The city returned to a semblance of order once the Guard was fully deployed, but the period between the start of the strike and the restoration of stability had already left a lasting mark on the city's collective memory and on the national perception of labor militancy in essential services.

Calvin Coolidge and the Political Response

Governor Calvin Coolidge's handling of the Boston Police Strike proved to be the event that brought him to national attention. Throughout the initial days of the crisis, Coolidge was cautious and somewhat passive, allowing Mayor Andrew Peters and Commissioner Curtis to manage the immediate response. It was only after the situation had significantly deteriorated that Coolidge fully mobilized the Guard. His decisive turn came in a telegram he sent on September 14, 1919, to AFL president Samuel Gompers, who had appealed for reinstatement of the striking officers and arbitration of their grievances. Coolidge's reply contained a sentence that circulated immediately across the country: "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time."

That single declaration transformed Coolidge's political standing overnight. Coolidge refused to reinstate the striking officers and publicly backed Commissioner Curtis's position that police officers who abandoned their posts had forfeited their right to return to them. His firm stance resonated strongly with a national public that was alarmed by labor unrest and worried about the erosion of public safety. His response to the strike—uncompromising and framed in terms of public duty versus union interest—made him a prominent figure in conservative political circles and helped propel him onto the national Republican ticket. He was selected as Warren G. Harding's running mate in 1920 and subsequently became the 30th President of the United States following Harding's death in office in August 1923.

The strike thus had consequences that extended far beyond Boston's neighborhoods and well beyond the immediate question of police wages and working conditions. It became a defining moment in the broader national debate over public employee unions, a debate that would recur at intervals throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

The Strikers' Fate

The striking officers did not prevail. Commissioner Curtis refused to reinstate any officer who had participated in the walkout, and this position held firm. The entire striking force—more than 1,100 men—was effectively dismissed, and the Boston Police Department was rebuilt with newly hired officers. The union that had precipitated the crisis was decertified, and police unionization in Boston was set back by decades.

For the individual officers involved, the outcome was a personal and financial catastrophe. These were men who had served on the force for varying lengths of time, in many cases making careers out of public service. Losing their positions meant losing their livelihoods, their pensions, and their professional identities. Efforts by some of the dismissed officers and their supporters to seek reinstatement in subsequent years did not succeed. Samuel Gompers publicly condemned the mass dismissals and pressed for a negotiated settlement, but his appeals to both Coolidge and Curtis were rebuffed. The strike's defeat sent a powerful message to public safety workers across the country: the right to strike, even when recognized in private industry, did not necessarily extend to those charged with maintaining public order.

Ironically, the newly hired replacement officers received many of the wage increases and improved working conditions that the striking officers had sought. Starting pay was raised, shift lengths were reduced, and investments were made in station house facilities. The officers who had actually walked out received none of these benefits, having permanently forfeited their positions in pursuit of them.

Labor Context and Historical Significance

The Boston Police Strike of 1919 did not occur in isolation. It was part of a broader wave of labor unrest that swept the United States in the immediate aftermath of World War I. The year 1919 saw strikes in steel, coal, and shipping, as workers sought to convert wartime sacrifices into peacetime economic gains. The Boston strike stood apart, however, because of its subject matter: the men responsible for public safety had themselves withdrawn that safety from the city they were sworn to protect.

The strike raised fundamental questions about the nature of public employment. Were police officers workers in the same sense as factory hands or miners, with all the same rights to organize and collectively withdraw their labor? Or did the specific character of their duties—the monopoly on legitimate force, the responsibility for civic order—place them in a different category, one where the strike weapon was not available? These questions did not have simple answers in 1919, and they have continued to generate debate in subsequent decades.<ref>{{cite web |title=200 Years of