Boston Police Strike, 1919
On September 9, 1919, approximately 1,100 Boston Police Department officers walked off the job, leaving the city of Boston, Massachusetts almost entirely without police protection for five days. The stoppage triggered outbreaks of lawlessness across the city, drew the Massachusetts National Guard into the streets, and ultimately launched the national political career of then-Governor Calvin Coolidge, who would go on to become 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.
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. Many officers had not seen meaningful wage increases in years, even as the cost of living climbed sharply in the postwar period. Conditions within the department—long hours, inadequate facilities, and aging equipment—had eroded morale over a sustained period.[1]
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. Boston's police officers looked to join this movement by affiliating with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The decision to seek an AFL charter proved to be the flashpoint that triggered the confrontation with city and state officials.[2]
Police 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. When officers proceeded to form a union and obtain AFL affiliation despite his objections, Curtis suspended the union leaders. That act of suspension served as the immediate catalyst for the strike vote that followed.
The Strike Begins
When the strike commenced on September 9, 1919, the city found itself almost entirely without police coverage. The handful of officers who remained on duty—volunteers and supervisors—could not begin to fill the gap left by the mass walkout. The effects were felt almost immediately.[3]
The five-day strike produced numerous outbreaks of lawlessness throughout the city. Gambling rings operated openly on street corners. Stores were looted in several neighborhoods. Violence broke out in various parts of Boston as the absence of law enforcement emboldened criminal elements and opportunists alike. The striking policemen did not return to their posts during this period, and the city's residents experienced a level of public disorder that shocked many observers.[4]
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.[5] These dramatic scenes illustrated just how severely the absence of the police force had destabilized public life in the city.
Deployment of the National Guard
As conditions deteriorated, 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.[6] 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.
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. The city returned to a semblance of order once the Guard was in place, but the period between the start of the strike and the Guard's full deployment had already left a lasting mark on the city's collective memory.[7]
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. 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.[8]
Coolidge's 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 and subsequently became the 30th President of the United States following Harding's death in office.
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 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.[9]
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. 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.
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.[10]
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.[11]
The strike also illustrated the fragility of urban order. Boston in 1919 was a major American city with well-established institutions, yet the removal of its police force for five days was sufficient to produce significant disorder and public fear. The episode underscored how dependent modern urban life had become on professional law enforcement, and how quickly that dependence could be exposed when officers left their posts.
Photographs and Documentation
The visual record of the Boston Police Strike survives in photographs that capture both the disorder of the strike period and the military response that followed. Images of National Guard soldiers at Faneuil Hall and mounted cavalry in downtown streets provide a documentary record of an event that many contemporaries found almost unimaginable.[12][13]
These photographs have been preserved and revisited by historians and journalists, particularly around the centennial of the strike in 2019, when Boston media organizations and historical groups marked the anniversary with exhibits and retrospectives. The centennial coverage helped introduce the story to a new generation of Bostonians who had not previously encountered it in depth.
Legacy
The Boston Police Strike of 1919 left a durable imprint on American labor law, municipal governance, and political culture. The episode established a precedent—reinforced many times in subsequent decades—that governments could and would refuse to negotiate with striking public safety employees and could dismiss them rather than yield to strike pressure. This precedent would be invoked explicitly more than sixty years later when President Ronald Reagan dismissed striking air traffic controllers during the PATCO strike of 1981.
Within Boston, the strike accelerated reforms to the police department. New officers were recruited, wages were eventually raised to address the underlying grievances that had fueled the walkout, and steps were taken to improve working conditions. The department that emerged from the crisis was in some respects better compensated than the one that had gone on strike, though the officers who had actually walked out received none of these benefits.
The strike also anchored Calvin Coolidge's reputation as a man of decisive action in a crisis, a reputation that shaped his subsequent political career and his presidency. For Boston, the strike became a reference point in discussions of labor relations, public safety, and the limits of employee rights in essential services—a reference point that remained relevant across the decades that followed.[14]