Monthly Archives: September 2019

The summer of 1919’s terrible climax

10 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Headquarters of the National Guard during the September 1919 police strike. Governor Calvin Coolidge called out the guard in response to lotting and violence.

Summer technically has another week and a half to go, and these waning days mark the anniversary of one of the worst events of that terrible Red Summer of 1919: the Boston Police Strike raged for nearly a week that September. It was anarchy when more than 1000 police officers walked off the job. Hobbes was right. The same thing happened in Montreal half a century later in 1969. The Boston strike was just one of the many violent outbreaks that year, many of which were essentially pogroms against African-Americans. In a broader context in can also be seen as another in one of the thousands of strikes that had taken place across the country dating back decades to the Gilded Age.

Guardsmen rounding up gamblers in Boston Common during the municipal police strike of 1919

The big winner in the 1919 Boston Police Strike was Governor Calvin Coolidge, whose calling out of the National Guard helped staunch the violence and looting. The following year Coolidge was on the national ticket when he and Warren G. Harding defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt and James M. Cox in the 1920 presidential election. I wish my grandparents on both sides were still alive for me to ask if they remembered the incident; all four grew up in Boston and would have been between 5-10 at the time, old enough perhaps to remember something or to have heard older relatives discussing it in later years. Alas I will ever know because the opportunity is just no longer there.

(images/Boston Public Library)

Friday notes

06 Friday Sep 2019

Posted by in Alexander Hamilton, Federal Hall National Memorial, George Washington's Mount Vernon

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It was a good day yesterday when I both downloaded the Hamilton soundtrack and found the Fall 2019 Mount Vernon program booklet in the mailbox. At Federal Hall this summer there were many patrons visiting the site either after or before going to see the Broadway musical. Most of them were not New Yorkers, but individuals and families from across the country who came to the city for the express purpose of attending. They are always fun to talk to, not least because they are so excited. Usually they do Federal Hall, Hamilton’s resting place in the Trinity Church cemetery down Wall Street, and the Grange in Northern Manhattan. A few of the more adventurous even take the trip to Weehawken to see the dueling, though from what I understand there is not much to see. Still, there is that notion of place. I’m listening to it right now as I wrap up my coffee.

Catalogs such as this one from George Washington’s Mount Vernon are coming, in the mail and online, from various places. With summer winding down and people returning from vacation, institutions are rolling out their fall programming.

Sunday morning coffee

01 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Historiography, John C. Calhoun, Libraries

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Volumes 1-7 of the John Calhoun papers were released between 1959 and 1987. The project concluded with volume 28 in 2003.

I hope everyone’s Labor Day Weekend is going well. I am having my coffee and doing a few things. It should be a quiet day, though we plan on going out for lunch later. Here is a picture I snapped in the stacks of the DAR Library yesterday. It is volumes one through seven of The Papers of John C. Calhoun. I find these projects, which often last decades, fascinating. The Calhoun endeavor took almost half a century; volume one was released in 1959 and an internet search informs us that the editors released volume 28, the final volume, in 2003. The first installment was edited by a historian named Robert L. Meriwether, who died in 1958 as that initial volume was in galleys. A cursory JSTOR search of Meriwether’s writings reveals the strong Lost Cause sensibility of his worldview, which should not be surpassing in a white South Carolinian born in the late nineteenth century. Whatever that initial provenance, Meriwether and the editors who came after him did historiography a great service in the editing of Calhoun’s extensive papers.

I don’t claim to be an expert on John C. Calhoun but he is a fascinating figure in American history. The duality is evident: involved in American affairs for decades, he did so much to build the American republic as part of that generation that came immediately after the Founders; conversely, his unapologetic support for slavery, and willingness to secede and tear the union asunder, are also his legacy. How if at all does one square that circle? History is complicated and filled with all kinds of irony.

I remember the case a few years ago when a dining room employee at Yale destroyed a stained-glass window in Calhoun College depicting slaves picking cotton. The school was later renamed. Over a long career Calhoun served as vice president, a U.S. House & Senate member, and Secretary of State & War, among other things. He died in 1850 when that generation of Clay, Webster, and others left the scene just prior to the Civil War.