At 5.45 pm on 9 September 1919, 1,117 of the Boston Police Department's 1,544 officers and men failed to report for duty. The policemen had organised a union under a charter from the American Federation of Labor in August, and Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis, who held that police had no right to such a union, suspended 19 of its officers and on 8 September found them guilty of union activity. The union voted 1,134 to 2 to walk out the next evening. That first night, with the streets almost unpoliced, a crowd estimated at 10,000 filled Scollay Square, then the city's centre of theatres and amusement halls, and the three days of rioting and looting that followed were centred on the square. Governor Calvin Coolidge sent a brigade of the Massachusetts State Guard into the city on 10 September and called out the whole Guard, almost 5,000 men, the next day. That evening Guard cavalry and infantry cleared Scollay Square; Robert Lallie was killed in a cavalry charge in the square, and Arthur McGill was shot dead on Howard Street beside it. Nine people died in all, eight of them shot by Guardsmen, including two in South Boston. On 13 September Curtis announced that the strikers would be replaced, and 1,500 new officers were hired at higher pay. None of the strikers was taken back. Coolidge's telegram of 14 September to Samuel Gompers of the AFL, "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time", made his name across the country.
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