CHAPTER FOUR
IN NATIONAL POLITICS
NO doubt it was the police strike of Boston that brought me into national prominence. That furnished the occasion and I took advantage of the opportunity. I was ready to meet the emergency. Just what lay behind that event I was never able to learn. Sometimes I have mistrusted that it was a design to injure me politically; if so it was only to recoil upon the perpetrators, for it increased my political power many fold. Still there was a day or two when the event hung in the balance, when the Police Commissioner of Boston, Edwin U. Curtis, was apparently cast aside discredited, and my efforts to give him any support indicated my own undoing. But I soon had him reinstated, and there was a strong expression of public opinion in our favor.
The year 1919 had not produced much on the
