The Parallel Lives

At 5:45 p.m., on Tuesday, September 9, 1919, in Boston, Massachusetts, close to 80% of the city’s policemen, some 1142 men, walked off their jobs, and went on strike, demanding more money, less working hours, better working conditions, and recognition of their union.

Historians agree that Boston’s policemen were underpaid, overworked, with little benefits.

Veteran policemen received some $1400 per year (equal to $30,000 in 2025), but rookies received even less. While the cost of living had increased 79% between 1913 and 1919, their wages had stagnated, causing the men to receive less pay than most blue collar workers.

The policemen worked ten-hour shifts, at night or days, seven days per week, with only a single day off every fifteen days, with little or no vacation days.

One policemen said, “That was the way it was day after day, round after round. We had no freedom, no home life at all. We could not go to the beach, without the captain’s permission.”

City officials expected recent hires to pay for their own uniforms, side-arms, and equipment.

Reaction to the strike was swift.

On the streets, hooligans looted stores, threw rocks into windows, pushed over vendors’ carts.

The city’s police commissioner, Edwin Upton Curtis, refused to negotiate or to re-hire the strikers. Instead, he fired each of the 1142 men.

Curtis appealed to Massachusetts’s Governor, Calvin Coolidge, who dispatched onto the city’s streets some 5000 of the Commonwealth’s Guard. The men of the guard brought out their weapons to reduce the violence and civil unrest. Nine hooligans were shot, causing eight to die.

Curtis asked for volunteers to help the guardsmen police the city’s streets. Among the volunteers, were students from Harvard, who showed up to act as strike-breakers.

Due to the Red Scare, a rampant fear of a communist take-over, public sentiment drifted against the strikers. They were labeled, “Bolsheviks, deserters, and agents of Lenin.”

On September 12, Samuel Gompers, chief of the AFL, sensed that the mood of the city had turned against the policemen. He urged the strikers to return to work, but they could not.

On September 13, Curtis began to take applications, and over several weeks, he hired 1574 men, to replace the strikers. Curtis gave the new-hires better wages, more time off, and paid for their uniforms and equipment, the same benefits that the former policemen had requested.

Governor Calvin Coolidge was adamant. On September 14, he sent a telegram to Samuel Gompers and said, “There is no right to strike against the public safety anywhere, anytime.”

On September 24, Coolidge issued a “Proclamation on the Police Strike.”

His second sentence reads, “In the deliberate intention to intimidate and coerce the Government of this Commonwealth, a large body of policemen, urging all other to join them, deserted their posts of duty, letting in the enemy.”

In 1920, the Republican nominee for President, Warren G. Harding, of Ohio, selected Calvin Coolidge as his Vice-Presidential running mate. Harding and Coolidge won the election on November 2, and upon Harding’s passing on August 2, 1923, Coolidge became President.

The failure of the strike in Boston set back for decades labor advances among policemen. No police force dared to strike again until in July of 1974, and then in Baltimore for a few days.

In 2012, researchers at the Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts created a Project, built a website, identified each of the policemen, and found a stack of 3 x 5 index cards.

On each were typed the record of a certain policemen’s employment, but then at the bottom of each card, an official had rubber-stamped in red the words, “Abandoned His Duty, Sept.9, 1919.”