The climax came with the Boston police strike in the fall of 1919. This was a very curious illustration of the part which the Harvard plutocracy plays in the public life of Boston, so pardon me if I tell the story in some detail. You know how the cost of living doubled all over the country, while the wages of public servants increased very little. The policemen of Boston were not able to live on their wages; they begged for an increase, and the police commissioner promised them the increase if they would wait until after the war. They waited; and then the police commissioner tried to keep his promise, and the mayor and the Democratic administration worked out a settlement. But the Harvard plutocracy, which runs the government of the state, decided not to permit that settlement, but to force a strike of the policemen, so that they could smash the policemen’s union. The late Murray Crane, senator and millionaire, holder of a Harvard LL. D., planned the job in the Union Club of Boston, together with Kidder, Peabody & Co., the bankers. Governor Coolidge, the tool of Crane, upset the arrangements made by the mayor of Boston, and the mayor was so furious that he “pasted the governor one in the eye”—the inside reason why Coolidge disappeared so mysteriously during the strike. But the newspapers of the interlocking directorate celebrated him as the hero of the affair, and he became vice-president of the United States on a wave of glory! The strike came, and according to the standard American technique of strike-breaking, hoodlums were turned loose at the right moment, to throw stones and terrify the public. The whole affair was obviously stage-managed; nothing was stolen, and no real harm was done. Insiders assured me that all the time the “riots” were going on, there was a safe reserve of police locked up in the police-station, waiting in case things should go too far. The Boston policemen were represented as traitors to society, and a wave of fury swept the country—including Harvard, which holds hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of Boston city bonds, also securities of Boston public service corporations. These properties must be protected; so a “Harvard Emergency Committee” was formed, headed by the professor who had first reported to the overseers Professor Laski’s too great zeal in outside activities. Needless to say, no one complained about the “outside activities” of this anti-strike professor; on the contrary, President Lowell issued a resounding call to Harvard men to help smash the policemen’s strike.