[As part of this
summer’s
beach reading, I had the chance to revisit and engage more deeply with Dennis
Lehane’s The Given Day (2008),
one of the most compelling and effective recent historical novels. In this series,
I’ll share a handful of histories that this fiction helps us better remember;
share your nominees for great historical fictions, new or old, for a
boundary-blurring crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On what Lehane’s
novel gets right about a controversial history, and what feels wrong.
If the first
third or so of The Given Day is
structured around the influenza epidemic, the novel’s culminating section is
thoroughly dominated by a far more local but just as significant historical
event: the Boston
Police Strike of 1919. While Boston’s wasn’t the first police force to
employ this extreme negotiation tactic (Lehane’s characters, both pro- and
anti-police, refer frequently to earlier
events in the U.K, for example), it was the first in the United States, and
comprised a hugely controversial watershed moment to be sure. Underpaid,
overworked, and generally treated as poorly as it’s possible for a labor
community to be treated, the Boston police had a long list of genuine
grievances, along with the support of prominent Bostonians from Mayor
Andrew Peters to James
Storrow. But the strikers also faced powerful adversaries, not only in leaders
like Commissioner
Edwin Curtis and Governor
Calvin Coolidge, but also in the fearful communal narratives of “Bolsheviks”
and “anarchists” so prevalent in this era of the Palmer
Raids and the Red
Scare.
Lehane’s portrayal
of the strike is a masterpiece of balancing these different historical
realities, narratives, and contexts. Because cop protagonist Danny Coughlin is
our main perspective character, and because Danny becomes the VP of the
officers’ “Social Club” that would morph
into the union and briefly affiliate with the AFL, we are necessarily
understanding of and sympathetic to the policemen’s side to these histories. But
as in so many classic historical fictions, Lehane also takes the liberty of
imagining the perspectives of actual historical figures, including in this section
those of Peters, Storrow, Curtis, and Coolidge. In so doing, he rounds out his
portrayal of this historical moment and its different moments and meanings
quite successfully—and at the same time primes readers for the genuine,
multi-faceted chaos that results when the police choose to strike and, for a
few nights, the
city descends into a series of demonstrations, confrontations, riots, and
crimes. We’re never far from Danny (or his co-protagonist Luther Laurence, who
by the novel’s midpoint is also living in Boston) in this section, but neither
are we limited to his individual take; the strike and the city become vibrant characters
in their own right in this climactic set-piece.
There’s one
element of that set-piece that doesn’t ring nearly as true, however, and it’s
one that features another of the novel’s fictional protagonists: Thomas
Coughlin, Danny’s father and a longtime Boston police captain. Disgusted by the
crimes taking place during the strike, and learning of a group of scab
policemen who have been pinned down by a group of such criminals, Thomas
assembles a small force of his own and heads out into the chaotic night to bust
heads, an action he performs with relish across multiple action scenes. I don’t
doubt that some of Boston’s worst criminals took advantage of the strike and
deserved the kind of beating Thomas and company deliver, but this whole thread
contradicts one of the novel’s overarching themes: both Danny and Luther come,
in their own way, to see violence as something that, even when seemingly
justified or directed at deserving targets, becomes its own vicious cycle and
self-fulfilling prophecy, one that takes good men and women and whole
communities down with it. That’s a particularly potent theme for the post-World
War I era, with its Palmer Raids and massacres of African American
communities alongside the war’s lingering effects. Yet in this Thomas
thread, historical novelist Lehane seems to give way to crime novelist Lehane,
and the section and novel are the worse for the shift.
Next Given Day connection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Historical fictions
you’d highlight? Share for the weekend post, please!
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