Boston Tea Party

In 1930, the American Legion convention shook Boston to the marrow of its Brahmin bones. The car-tipping and bonfires, the water-bombs zooming from windows had moved the Harvard Crimson to shudder, "worse than a drunken football crowd." Local rowdies helped tear up the town in the boozy wake of World War I Legionnaires.

Last week Boston winced again. This time the Veterans of Foreign Wars, zipped up by young bloods of World War II, turned Tremont Street into a topsy-turvy midway. As before, bonfires blazed and city-bred hoodlums filtered through the chaos to multiply the veterans' pranks.

Soon the situation was well out of hand. Mobs fought with firemen and police (ten cops were injured), hurled bottles and bricks through windows, smashed the ticket booth of Scollay Square's Old Howard burlesque house, turned on a fire hose in a downtown movie theater. Women of all ages fled from the streets. Said Police Superintendent Edward W. Fallon: "The worst night in my experience."

By daylight V.F.W. funmaking provoked fewer hooligans. Proudly the veterans of four wars, 30,000 strong, paraded for five hours through a confetti-tossing mass of cheering New Englanders. Bostonians managed a grin at the placard behind a strutting Lone Star bugle corps: "The horse Paul Revere rode came from Texas."

In serious moments, V.F.W. members crammed into Boston Arena to cast votes for: 1) old-age pensions for World War I veterans, 2) keeping the atomic bomb secret; against: 1) increased immigration, 2) Communists on the ballot, 3) taking a stand on merger of the armed services. As their next national commander the veterans chose Oregon's Louis E. Starr, 48, World War I infantryman, Portland lawyer. World War II veterans failed to win a major national office.

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