The Boston Police Strike was a memorable and dark stretch during September 1919, but few might know that an Eastham resident found himself in the middle of this historic event.
When 72 percent of the Boston Police force went on strike on the night of Sept. 9, rioting broke out in the streets, resulting in Governor Calvin Coolidge summoning nearly 5,000 National Guardsmen to help restore order.
One of those soldiers was 17-year-old Clayton Horton of Eastham, who had just joined the Guard.
“I happened to be on the Number One Squad, and the Number One Squad was Coolidge’s escort, and each morning we had to go in and get our orders, you might say,” Horton recalled in a 1981 interview with the Eastham Historical Society. “And I don’t think I ever heard him speak more than half a dozen times.”
Nine people died in the violence that followed, including two shootings in South Boston and another who died in rioting in Scollay Square.
“We went out two by twos,” Horton recalled. “Nobody went out alone. We saw some violence — looting and, well, we saw some people killed and so forth.”
When it came to the employment status of the striking officers, Coolidge was hoping to reinstate them, but two days later, Boston was hiring a replacement force. Despite the efforts of Boston Mayor Andrew Peters, Police Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis maintained that the officers had no right to form a union.
“Somebody — not anybody in the National Guard, but somebody on the floor — asked him what he was going to do and how was going to handle the strike,” Horton recalled. “He says, ‘No problem.’ That’s about all he said. As far as I can remember, he never enlarged on it. And those policemen, well, none of them got their jobs back. Every one of them was fired.”
Coolidge, who became the 30th President of the U.S. in 1923, later admitted that “no doubt it was the police strike in Boston that brought me into national prominence."
Horton, who died in 1996 at the age of 94, attended school in the old Eastham Schoolhouse and graduated from Orleans High School in 1918.
“Influenza was everywhere, and schools were closed,” he said. “I had one year to finish and we didn’t really finish the school year. We went back and they had sessions for a while and they gave pupils tests to see if they would pass. If they lengthened it out, the full school year, it would run into the next school year, and they didn’t want to do that, so they gave us tests and I got my diploma.”
In his early adult years, he owned a grocery store and roadside stand in North Eastham, and operated Crest Hills Cottages in Eastham for 25 years. Horton, who grew up in what he called “a farming and fishing community” prior to the tourism boom of the 1940s, operated Flat Acre Farms in North Eastham and was a building contractor for 45 years. He also served on many town committees.
However, his stint as a National Guardsman didn’t last nearly as long.
“I was up there a month, maybe two months,” he said. “After the trouble was all over, they started going through the names, you know. You see, this was the Home Guard then. This was the start of the National Guard. And when they started going over the names, when the trouble was all over, I got my discharge, honorable discharge, because I was underage.”
Don Wilding, a writer and public speaker on Cape Cod lore, can be reached via email at email@example.com. Follow him on Twitter at @WildingsCapeCod. Shore Lore appears weekly during the summer season.