CHAPTER II.
Our President—Friend of the Open Shop Bosses
ONE of our leading financial papers recently labelled "Cal" Coolidge "the Sphinx of the White House." In this there is not a bit of truth. To the financiers and industrialists of the country Coolidge is anything but a Sphinx as far as Labor goes; and that after all is the most decisive gauge of a man in public office today. See where a man stands on the Labor problem, the class struggle, and you know where he is fundamentally lined up on the various issues confronting the country at any particular moment.
The whole record of President Coolidge betrays an unmitigated hostility to the working class and its struggle for the improvement of working and living conditions. It is in this light that the following estimate of our President by Mr. C. W. Barron, owner of the Boston News Bureau and Wall Street Journal and publisher of Barron's Weekly is of import:
"No man is better fitted or equipped to lead the United States in its present commanding position before the whole world. … The business interests of the country will go behind him as they went up behind Harding."
The Textile Strike of 1919
In February, 1919, a committee of textile strikers from Lawrence protested to Coolidge, then Governor, against the savage brutality of the mounted police in the strike. On Feb. 18th this Committee sought an audience with Governor Coolidge to lay before him the highhanded conduct of the Lawrence city authorities in refusing the workers the right to hold parades and meetings; the outrages committed by the Cossacks; and to request his appointmerrt of an impartial committee of investigation.
The Governor, Coolidge, refused even to see this committee of workers. His answer was merely an act of heaping insult upon injury in so far as the striking workers were concerned. Coolidge said that the matter of granting permission to parade was entirely in the hands of local authorities. His letter went on in the familiar strain of the capitalist sanctifiers of the law and order of profits:
"If the police have assaulted any persons without warrant of law the matter should be brought to the attention of the criminal court. The results which you will secure from the great war and from your residence in America will be exactly what you desire to make them. It is my desire that each citizen of Massachusetts should have the equal
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