Coppers Copped

There has been no police strike in a major U.S. city since 1919, when Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts rode to national prominence by calling out the troops to break one in Boston. But last week Missouri's square-chinned Governor Phil M. Donnelly got his dander up over the very thought of a police strike.

Democrat Donnelly came out fighting against unionization of St. Louis' cops by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employes (A.F.L.), which has quietly but steadily organized police unions in more than 50 U.S. cities.*

Last October Richard Miller, a St. Louis motorcycle cop, returned from 30 months in the Navy and began to organize his colleagues. Within a few weeks he claimed 900 of the city's force of 1,900 as Federation members. Then St. Louis' Board of Police Commissioners (appointed by the Governor) ordered Miller fired--for violation of a rule against a policeman joining an outside organization. It also ordered those cops who had joined the union to resign from it or be fired, required them to make written reports of their withdrawal.

The union's countermove was a plea to its members to "go underground" until the Missouri supreme court rules on the right of police to join a labor union.

That really ignited Phil Donnelly. He flayed the union leaders for urging police officers to "break the laws," derided their "brazen scheme to go underground." The mere existence of the union, he cried, would "breed divided loyalty, suspicion, distrust and confusion." A strike by a police department, he said, "would be a rebellion against government itself."

The Governor's hot words brought only a feeble reply from the unionists that they would stick by the court decision. They might also have remembered Cal Coolidge's famed, succinct dictum: "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, at any time."

*Among them: Los Angeles, Chicago, Omaha, Tacoma, Duluth, Atlanta, Chattanooga, New Haven. Notably not among them: Boston.

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