Calvin Coolidge was not amused.
It was 1919, and the Republican governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge by name, had had it with a lawless “police strike” in Boston.
Almost 100 years later, in 2018, The Washington Post would note:
The phrase ‘law and order’ was used as the title of a 1919 speech given by Calvin Coolidge in response to a police strike in Boston. Coolidge, then governor of Massachusetts, had called in the National Guard to quell a weekend of lawlessness when the department attempted to unionize. The Boston papers characterized the cops as Bolsheviks who set out to destroy civil society.
“There are strident voices, urging resistance to law in the name of freedom,” Coolidge said. “They are not seeking freedom for themselves; they have it. They are seeking to enslave others. Their works are evil. They know it. They must be resisted.”
The future president added harshly, “Laws are not manufactured. They are not imposed. They are rules of action existing from everlasting to everlasting. He who resists them, resists himself. He commits suicide. … To obey is life. To disobey is death.”
By 1968, GOP presidential nominee Richard Nixon had revived the Coolidge phrase and campaigned across the country for a return to law and order.
Nixon’s campaign slogan resonated — with reason. In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King and Democratic presidential candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy (father of HHS Secretary RFK Jr.) had both been assassinated. During the last four years of Democrat President Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, riots had broken out in major American cities.
The riots had begun in New York’s Harlem in 1964, moving on to the Los Angeles Watts section in 1965 and, in massive fashion, to Detroit and Newark in 1967. History records that following the assassination of Dr. King, there were disturbances in over 100 urban areas around the country.
In Chicago specifically, the riot there — per Wikipedia — “left 11 Chicago citizens dead, 48 wounded by police gunfire, 90 policemen injured, and 2,150 people arrested.”
Chicago has a history of facing crime on its streets. And right this minute, Chicago’s crime problems are making headlines again. Take this headline from the Chicago Sun-Times: “9 killed, 52 wounded over Labor Day weekend, most violent holiday weekend of summer,” with the subtitle, “As President Donald Trump threatens to send the National Guard into Chicago to quell violence, violence surged, with 16 people wounded over the weekend in three mass shootings. Other attacks left 9 dead.”
In other words, Chicago’s citizens have a crime problem on their hands, with their physical safety and that of their families in active danger. (RELATED: The Eisenhower Precedent: Is Trump Justified in Deploying the National Guard to Chicago?)
President Trump sent in the National Guard to help get control of Washington, D.C.’s similar problem — bringing it under control and returning safety (i.e., law and order) to the streets of the nation’s capital. To the appreciative thanks from Washington Democrat Mayor Muriel Bowser. The HuffPost headlined: “DC Mayor Muriel Bowser Praises Donald Trump’s Police Takeover,” with the subtitle, “The city’s Democratic mayor has maintained an unusual working relationship with the Republican president.”
But faced with the decidedly similar crime problem in Chicago? Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson went out of their way to reject help from troops sent by the federal government. Not to mention, with the safety of their citizens at stake, the two chose to assail President Trump for offering to send in troops if the two simply picked up the phone and asked for them.
Which is to say, the good citizens of Illinois and Chicago have learned the hard way that their governor and mayor find it more important to play politics than to protect the safety of the citizens of their state and its largest city, respectively. No law and order for them.
And oh yes. The governor is telling his citizens not only to live with crime, but if they are going to monitor anything, it should not be criminals, but ICE agents. Really.
Will the two Illinois law-and-order scofflaws pay a political price for their blatant willingness to endanger the lives and safety of their citizens?
Stay tuned.
But until then? If you have to go to Chicago — don’t. Your life may depend on it. Law and order are not to be found.
Somewhere, Calvin Coolidge is not smiling.
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