This detailed history of the Boston strike of 1919 is an interesting and intriguing read for not just any Boston police officer, but for anyone interested in the fight for unionization of police officers. Oliver’s depictions and insights of the people involved in this historical moment give us lessons in history and politics that are still relevant and applicable today. A must read for anyone interested in the Police Labor movement.

Larry Calderone, President, Boston Police Patrolmen's Association

Boston is often depicted as a relatively calm city. Although remembered as the site where the American Revolutionary War started, it has rarely been seen as the home of ethnic, racial, and class turmoil, at least until the school busing controversies of the late 1970s and 1980s. Oliver’s treatment of the 1919 police strike complicates and animates Boston’s past by looking deeply at the politics and attitudes surrounding the police force's effort to gain fair wages. Taking place at the end of WW I and the final year of the devastating Spanish influenza, the strike revealed the tensions and the civil unrest that typified Boston’s urban history in that era. Immigration from Europe was peaking, with Irish and Italian immigrants leading the surge, and the Great Migration brought many African Americans north. The Great Molasses Flood of January 1919 ignited a fear of anarchists, spotlighting Italian immigrants. Boston Mayor Andrew Peters, who tried to tip toe around Boston's ethnic enclaving, was clearly fearful of the Irish presence in the police force. In the end, it is the depiction of these contextual conditions, rather than the strike itself, that will keep readers engaged and informed in this fine history. Recommended. General readers, lower-division undergraduates, and professionals.

Choice Reviews

The Boston Police Strike of 1919 is one of the signal events in Boston's history, and in Willard Oliver's vivid and well-research account, one of the most important in the nation's. He has mined the Boston newspapers and a new database compiled for the Strike's centennial in 1919 to tell the story, and to analyze its importance for Boston, for its police force, and for unions. The strike destroyed the nascent Boston police union, set off a wave of violence in the city, and helped make Calvin Coolidge President of the United States. This is a story that has long needed to be told well, and we are fortunate that Willard Oliver, one of the nation's foremost scholars of police work, has completed the task.

Robert J. Allison, Suffolk University, author of A Short History of Boston