“Silent” Calvin Coolidge and the existential battles of our time

“We are facing an issue that knows no party.  It is not new.  That issue is supremacy of the Law.  On this issue America has never made but one decision,” the future President declared while facing down an unprecedented police strike in 1919.

Before Calvin Coolidge was elected President in 1920, he faced an existential threat to his adopted home state of Massachusetts while he was governor.  The progressive movement, as it was known at the time though it bears little resemblance to the modern counterpart, was ascendant in both the Republican and Democrat parties.  Fellow Republican Teddy Roosevelt had already broken off from the GOP to found the new Progressive Party, colloquially known as the Bull Moose, ushering in a landslide victory for the man considered the first progressive president, Woodrow Wilson in 1912.  Coolidge himself was a middle-of-the road, moderate Republican who generally sought consensus on major issues, believing the pace of change the country was experiencing was simply too fast for the government to keep up.  Laws, in his opinion, were being written at a far more furious pace than they were being enacted.  As he put it, “Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority…Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation.”  Generally speaking, he was receptive to concerns about the poor treatment of workers, low pay, and the other challenges facing the newly industrialized economy, and he was skeptical of massive wealth concentrated in the hands of the few.  A descendant of farmers and small manufacturers, he personally understood the struggles of the common man.  At the same time, he was hugely skeptical that there was an easy fix to the economic and social challenges of the day, understanding that government funds did not simply appear magically out of thin air, and that taxes had to be taken from somewhere.  While Mayor of Northampton and then governor of the entire state, he was closely involved with local and regional railroad issues, believing that connecting small towns to the larger network was critical for their survival and growth, but funding these projects and making them profitable was easier said than done.  The railroads were a top political target because the larger, national companies were operated by the heirs of the Robber Barons of old and there was the impression the industry was awash with cash.  Legislation, however, that enabled the Federal government to set ticket prices radically reduced their profits and prevented them from keeping up with inflation caused by World War I.  This was especially true of smaller, regional providers.  Coolidge recognized, correctly, that there was simply no more money to go around, and while one can sympathize with a struggling worker, destroying the company that employed him or her benefited no one in the long run.

This was not a popular view as 1920 approached.  Public sympathy lied almost entirely with the workers, and politicians seemed to be competing with one another to become even more progressive in their rhetoric and their plans.  The workers themselves believed they were on the right side of history, organizing into national unions and carrying out crippling strikes across the country, a trend that had been building since the 1890s.  Grover Cleveland faced down the Pullman Strike in Chicago which had effectively shut down rail service throughout the Midwest and Northeast, required thousands of federal and state troops to quell the lawlessness that erupts, and ultimately resulted in the deaths of around 30 people.  About a decade later, Teddy Roosevelt negotiated a settlement to a coal strike that threatened to leave almost the entire country without heat in the winter.  If anything, the situation was worse in Europe after the Russian revolution overthrew the Czar and the emerging Spartacus League in Germany insisted on both the right to strike and seize property.  South of the border, Mexico was wracked by civil war over similar issues.  Progressive and the specter of socialism appeared to be sweeping the world, and it seemed only a matter of time before similar tactics were deployed in America on a scale to make the Pullman and coal strikes small by comparison.  In 1918, Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson attempted to break up a so called general strike – where workers regardless of their vocation walked off at the same time, effectively shutting down an entire city if not more – decrying it as “domestic bolshevism.”  He had some public support and managed to force the city back to work, but the trouble didn’t end there and ultimately culminated in an assassination attempt.  Mayor Hanson appeared to give up at that point, declaring “I’m tired and I’m going fishing.”  The lesson was clear to other officials – even if you succeeded in resolving the dispute and getting people back to work, the repercussions would linger, perhaps even more dangerously.  So far, Boston, what residents considered the cradle of American democracy and the shining city on a hill, had been largely spared, but trouble was brewing within the police department, who had become convinced that they needed to unionize and strike or their concerns about low pay and other matters would never be addressed.  This was a new tactic entirely.  The current rules didn’t allow for a police union at all.  As the commissioner in 1918 put it before his untimely death, “A police officer cannot consistently belong to a union and perform his sworn duty.”  At the same time, the officers’ complaints were largely legitimate.  Food prices had doubled in less than six years.  The police officers themselves put in thousands upon thousands of unpaid hours during the war under the assumption they would be compensated after peace was achieved.  They also served as the front line of defense against domestic anarchists and terrorists.  The station houses themselves were fit to be condemned, and had not been maintained in years.  The nominal raise they had received after World War I didn’t even cover the cost of food.

Therefore, it would not have been a surprise if Coolidge chose to tread lightly and avoid provoking the proverbial bear in uniform even though the policemen were openly violating their agreed upon code of conduct.  The 19 officers who initially lead the formation of the union were duly suspended, but even Coolidge himself saw that as a temporary step, saying “I earnestly hope circumstances will arise which will cause the police officers to be reinstated” as talks continued between the various parties.  The overall situation began to change, however, when over 1,000 men walked off the job on September 9, 1919 at 5:45 PM, leaving their posts and a major American city at the mercy of a mob.  That same evening, looting and rioting broke out on a scale that had not been seen in Massachusetts to date, resulting in rampant violence and some odd spectacles like a group of young men robbing a shoe store while trying on the shoes first.  “Here was presented the novel spectacle of thieves sitting on chairs of the establishment, while others of the crowd helped to fit them to the proper sized shoes.  They stayed as long as they liked,” as described by the Hampshire Gazette.  There were immediate reports of beatings, rapes, and fatalities, all without any law enforcement response, prompting The Boston Globe to note, “For the first time in the memory of man, Boston was given over to lawlessness.”  Citizens scrambled to take matters into their own hands, applying for private security and gun permits in the city limits, while the state and local government scrambled to put together a backup force from volunteers, state police, and the state militia.  As Boston plunged into further chaos, the rest of the country looked on, dreading the same happening to them very soon.  “As viewed here the issue goes further than a mere dispute over the recognition or non recognition of a union,” explained The Christian Science Monitor from DC.  A Democrat Senator, Henry Myers, was more dramatic, remarking, “Unionization of the police of every city of more than 5,000 population will follow within 60 days.  We will have a Soviet government within two years unless some branch of the government steps in and stops this tendency.”  Coolidge, however, preferred to move much carefully – some would say far too slowly, accusing him of cowardice and dereliction of duty just like the police  – as violence and fears of an additional strike, this one of telephone operators in support of the police, continued to mount.  Six people were killed on September 11 alone, hundreds more wounded.  The violence became so overwhelming that the replacement police started mounting machine guns and aiming them at the unruly crowds, and local edicts prevented citizens from walking within three feet of a storefront or window.

Many expected Coolidge to seek some sort of compromise, believing the 1,000 striking police could be offered amnesty and permitted to return to work after a settlement was negotiated, but Coolidge surprised everyone, perhaps even himself given his penchant for seeking the middle, by taking a much harder line, viewing the issue in starkly moral terms and saying as much plainly, with conviction.  “The action of the police in leaving their posts of duty is not a strike.  It is a desertion…There is nothing to arbitrate, nothing to compromise.  In my personal opinion, there are no conditions under which the men can return to work.”  The statement certainly didn’t please the unions, but it clarified the issue so succinctly that public sympathy began to change almost immediately across the political spectrum. Even President Woodrow Wilson, who had been dithering as was his wont while focusing on promoting the League of Nations, insisted that he shared Coolidge’s view.  “I want to say this, that a strike of the policemen of a great city, leaving that city at the mercy of an army of thugs, is a crime against civilization.”  Later, he told The Christian Science Monitor, “The obligation of a policeman is as sacred as the obligation of a soldier.  He is a public servant…I hope that lesson will be so burned in that it will never again be forgotten.”  Coolidge was also increasingly buoyed by the facts on the ground.  Boston was effectively under martial law, but by this point tens of thousands of troops had been deployed and the violence was largely quelled.  The policemen, sensing positive opinion was moving away from their position, responded by refocusing on the grievances that most had agreed to.  Samuel Gompers, a national union leader claimed unionization was “a ‘natural reflex’ of the futile attempts by policeman to improve their working conditions,” and concluded that the consequences of the strike were fully the responsibility of the government, “If the authorities give no consideration for the human side of the question which I had the honor to make, then whatever betide us upon the head of the authorities responsible therefor.”  He personally urged Coolidge to remove the new police commissioner and chart a different path in a telegram, but Coolidge shot back in a telegram of his own the following Saturday, further clarifying matters.  This one was ultimately heard around the world, “leaving the city unguarded…furnished the opportunity.  The criminal element furnished the action.  There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”

No one was sure how the public would react to so bold a statement against the progressive trend sweeping the country, but by the next day, a Sunday in September, even Irish Catholic Churches, normally allied with a largely Irish police force, were openly in support of Coolidge.  Father Patterson of St. Vincent’s Church, said the entire episode as a disgrace to Catholics in general.  Other denominations agreed.  At King’s Chapel, the pastor declared, “This attempt by the police should be resisted by the community to the utmost.”  The pastor at Warren Avenue Baptist Church wondered how “all that noble band of patriots who fought America’s first battles for freedom must have stirred in their graves at the sights and sounds of Boston this past week.”  The local and national press agreed, catapulting Coolidge into countrywide notoriety.  The New York Sun described him as “a plain New England gentleman, whose calm determination to uphold law and order in the situation caused by the Boston Police walk out has made him a national figure.”  He was cheered as the “governor with a steel backbone.”  The threats of strikes continued into the future, but here Coolidge provided clear proof that regardless of one’s sympathies with the plight of the working man, basic law and order had to prevail, what was rebranded shortly thereafter as simple normalcy, and was supported more fervently by the public than anything else.  He went on to be reelected in his state by a huge margin of 125,000 votes (compared to a scant 17,000 in his first victory), even coming close to winning Democrat districts, followed by the Vice Presidency a year later.  On Teddy Roosevelt’s birthday in 1919, right before his gubernatorial election victory, Coolidge put the matter before the country plainly, perhaps as only he could.  “We are facing an issue that knows no party.  It is not new.  That issue is supremacy of the Law.  On this issue America has never made but one decision.”

2023, of course, is not 1919, but still there are parallels.  The increasingly international economy and the rise of technology has wreaked havoc on much of the American workforce, resulting in stagnant wages even while inflation continues at historic levels, a dislocation not dissimilar to the emergence of the full industrial economy more than a century ago.  The establishment embraced an unpopular, aging politician for President who had failed at everything in an incredibly undistinguished career, promising a return to normalcy that simply did not come. Unrest, in general, seems everywhere on both sides as violence continues to simmer only slightly beneath the surface of our politics.  The conservative riots at the Capitol building on January 6 receive most of the attention in the mainstream media, but the entire country was wracked by progressive driven riots in the summer of 2020.  Massive rioting accompanied former President Trump’s inauguration in 2016.  Meanwhile, both sides insist that our institutions and even our democracy itself is under attack from the other side.  Progressives believe conservatives are undermining the Department of Justice, the electoral system, and more in a desperate attempt to re elect Donald Trump or at least save him from a lengthy prison sentence.  Likewise, conservatives are convinced progressives have infiltrated those same organizations, and turned against traditional American principles, from free speech to the Supreme Court to the Electoral College.  Culture itself has become an increasingly hot war over even the most fundamental things, such as the definition between a man and a woman, and what right a parent has to be involved in what their children learn and the decisions they make.  Dialogue and debate between the two sides is rare, replaced by talking over one another at best, screaming at worst.  Similar to 1919, the broader establishment in general seems intimidated by the rising tide of culture rather than right or wrong.  The tide itself takes the form of speech controls (usually known as wokeness), and even venerable media companies such as The New York Times and The Washington Post live in fear of the reaction of their own employees.  Confidence in confronting those we disagree with for whatever reason is low, so low even family oriented companies are loath to offend Satanists at times because of their preferred political views.  Regardless, the preferred technique is to boycott, cancel, and shun without mercy or discretion.

The preference of both parties and their accompanying media apparatus is to view these troubling phenomena as largely political, where one side is right, the other wrong, and a vote for the right party is the solution.  Give your vote to me, and I will solve your problems, they say on both sides.  This is a false promise, however.  As in Coolidge’s day, these challenges transcend party.  They are instead fundamental questions about the kind of country and culture we want to live in collectively as a people.  Do we accept the wisdom of our system of government and the rights we enjoy as a result of the values instilled by our founding documents including the right to peaceably disagree or simply be left alone?  Or do we hide behind them in order to advance our political goals?  Free speech, free association, a government limited by authorized powers, the structure of our democracy, the terms of our electoral process, and almost all of the other things we fight about have no party.  They are ideas you either support – fully, without condition – or you do not.  This does not imply that you agree with everything or blindly accept every aspect of American government and American life, but it does mean that you believe positive change comes from within, rooted in the rights and processes enshrined in the system itself, not some radical reinterpretation of it that results in lawlessness.  Coolidge had no question whether or not America would make the right choice.  Today, I’m not so sure myself, but the choice remains.