Book Review: The Given Day

Spoilers!

Cognitive dissonance explains much of bad human behavior, and consequently, American history. Coming off of the first World War and the ravaging of the influenza epidemic, there was the first Red Scare. The Russian Revolution had just occurred, and the fear was that Bolsheviks and anarchists were going to “Russianize” America. And to be fair, there were genuine violent agitators who sent bombs to leaders in the government and business, but as is almost always the case, the reaction is outsized to the threat. However, when I talk about cognitive dissonance, I’m not even talking about the outsized reaction, the Red Scare, as it were. Rather, I’m talking about how people in Boston, for example, could thump their chests and vehemently declare their Americanism — that their country will not be overtaken by this anarchist ideology — while at the same proclaiming with smug satisfaction that the Black people next to them will never be Americans, that this country will never be theirs either. This despite those same Black Americans a.) being here much longer; and b.) having just fought valiantly in the Great War, too. Alas, the dangerous part of cognitive dissonance is one’s lack of awareness about it; indeed, to become aware of it would be to crumble the entire edifice of their worldview. All this to say, Dennis Lehane’s 2008 tome about tumultuous Boston, The Given Day, takes place amid the Red Scare. This is a book about how good people deal with very small men and their outsized issues, of cognitive dissonance and dissidence to the mores of the time. It’s cliche to refer to a big book as a tour-de-force, but Lehane’s well-researched, historical fiction about this time is a tour-de-force of character work, attitudes of the time, action and violence, and truly brings to life the sights, sounds, and feel of the Boston of that time. The Given Day is one of the best historical fiction books I’ve ever read.

As a Bostonian himself, Lehane situated his story in Boston because it was a microcosm of what was going on in America in the post-Great War period, from the influenza outbreak to budding labor union movements and their corresponding breaking by industry and police, to race relations, as well as just the family dynamics of a middle-class Irish family. You know you’re in for a heck of a book when there’s a couple pages of character names at the start. But the three most important characters to the book are Danny Coughlin, the oldest of the Coughlin clan, and a Boston police officer; Luther Laurence, a Black man who initially finds his way to Tulsa, Oklahoma at the height of the Black abundance and freedom there; and Babe Ruth. Yes, Babe Ruth, who at the time was still with the Boston Red Sox. In fact, Ruth bookends Lehane’s book, as sort of a passive, albeit shamed, observer of race and labor relations in America.

Ruth and his teammates, as well as his opponents in the 1918 World Series, the Chicago Cubs, are traveling by train for the next game when they stop in Ohio. Ruth hears what sounds like a baseball game being played nearby, so, naturally, he walks over to it. It’s a group of Black men playing baseball, including Luther, who is the fastest person Ruth has ever seen. Ruth can’t resist asking to play with them. Unfortunately, his white teammates, not nearly as jovial and, well, accommodating, as Ruth is, join the field where it turns into a mashup of the Red Sox and Chicago Cubs against the Black players. For the most part, the latter dominate the game, outclassing in every way the best white players in the country. When a play late in the game goes against the white players, though, one of the white players pretends it didn’t and dares the Black players to say otherwise. Ruth, much to Luther’s disappointment, sides with the white players because he knows in this climate, one sticks with their side. Rather than continue the game, the Black players just leave, baffling Ruth.

Part of me wonders why Lehane included Ruth and these vignettes with him spread sporadically throughout the book. In other words, nothing would necessarily be lost from the book if Ruth was taken out. On the other hand, perhaps Lehane included Ruth’s perspective because Ruth is such a dynamic, damaged character who himself is a microcosm of America at the time. Ruth just wants to play his game, the world falling apart around him be damned. Similarly, there is something to be said for Americans who just want to watch such games, despite the world falling apart around them. Regardless of how you interpret it, I found the Ruth parts fascinating, and it made me want to read the book on Ruth that Lehane cites as a source at the end (Robert Creamer’s Babe: The Legend Comes to Life). I’ll return to Ruth at the end.

Danny is a big man, full of piss and vinegar, who isn’t afraid to throw down. That “piss and vinegar” attitude also means he’s rebellious of his Police Captain father, Thomas Coughlin’s, ways of decorum and comportment in the household and expectation in the precinct. He wants Danny to gain the “gold badge” of detective by informing on the Bolsheviks and other labor unions, including the budding Boston Social Club, i.e., the police union. Thomas is backed up by his friend, and Danny’s de facto “uncle” and godfather, Lieutenant Eddie McKenna, who spoiler alert, is one of the most odious, abhorrent characters I’ve read in fiction. McKenna particularly seems focused on Danny gathering the mailing lists of these organizations. As we later learn, Thomas is selling those lists to corporations for personal profit. For McKenna’s part, he wants power and control.

Meanwhile for Danny, he wants to be with Nora, their domestic help. Their prior dalliance though ended because Danny learned a secret about her past, and now it looks like Nora will marry Connor, Danny’s younger brother who is an assistant district attorney, for the “stability.” In the intervening time before Danny gets over his foolishness with Nora, he has another dalliance with his neighbor, Tessa, an Italian immigrant. He also becomes friendly with her father. One day, he comes back home only to learn that they’re both gone, and that they weren’t father-daughter, but husband-wife, and that far from being innocuous neighbors, they’re anarchists with bombs and nefarious ambitions. A then-23-year-old John Hoover (yes, that Hoover) and Rayme Finch with the Department of Justice and Bureau of Investigation, respectively, inform Danny of all this, and then want him to go undercover with the Lettish Workingman’s Society to get at their head, Louis Fraina. Danny doesn’t have much choice but to oblige. So, Danny is undercover with this group while also attending the BSC meetings. But all of this has the effect of, well, radicalizing him into believing that a.) the Bolsheviks may have a viewpoint he disagrees with, but they aren’t violent; and b.) the BSC has a point: the police are woefully underpaid and face terrible working conditions. When it seems like Danny and the leaders of the BSC might actually make headway on these issues with the current Boston Police Commissioner Stephen O’Meara, he dies of a heart attack and is replaced by Edwin Upton Curtis. Curtis, who previously was Boston Mayor, is considered unfriendly to the policeman’s concerns and someone out for revenge.

Luther and his wife, Lila, move to Tulsa to be closer to Lila’s family, and because of the promise of Greenwood, a district within Tulsa that was prosperous (“Black Wall Street”) and where largely Black people could move about without being accosted by the white residents. Luther, though, only 23, and used to being a speedster on the baseball diamond, is restless in Tulsa, especially under the constrictions of Lila’s religious family and the expectations of marriage and impending fatherhood. Just as importantly, though, he can’t stand the tenor of it all. We get this passage from Lehane: Because what Luther hated most was that behind all this — all this finery, all this newfound nobility, all the wing collars and preaching and handsome furniture and new-mown lawns and fancy cars — lay fear. Terror. If I play ball, they asked, will you let me be? And of course, those familiar with what happens next in the real life Greenwood story, “they” most certainly did not. So, to get out of the house and this hate he feels, Luther starts running numbers with his new friend Jessie for this gangster, Deacon Broscious. Turns out, not only is Jessie doing heroin (I think), but he’s been skimming off the top of Deacon’s take of the money for the numbers. When Deacon learns of this, he threatens Jessie and Luther to come up with many times the amount they stole. They do, initially, but then it turns sideways when everyone starts shooting at each other. Luther, for his part, kills Deacon and nearly kills his heavy, a Black man named Smoke. After that, with the insistence of Lila, Luther absconds from Tulsa, where thanks to his uncle, he eventually arrives in Boston. One of my favorite parts of a book is when you have two disparate characters and you wonder how they’re going to come together. Now, Luther is in Boston where Danny is! In fact, Luther stays at the home of Isaiah and Yvette Giddreaux, heads of the Boston chapter of the NAACP, where they want Luther to help them retrofit the new headquarters building, and he also becomes the new houseman for the Coughlin household. That’s how he directly meets Danny, and Nora, who he quickly befriends. Danny would take more time to become friendly with Luther and vice versa.

Because of Luther’s proximity to the Coughlin family, he soon receives the ire of McKenna, an unabashed, violent racist, the kind of racist who wouldn’t think twice about killing Luther despite being someone entrusted with upholding the law in Boston. McKenna does his digging on Luther and essentially blackmails him over his Tulsa affair into informing on the NAACP. Luther acquiesces in front of McKenna, but doesn’t actually help McKenna undermine the NAACP. But man, any time McKenna interacted with Luther, I hated him so much. He was boorish and smug in his boorishness, knowing he was untouchable. Or at least, ostensibly untouchable. Clayton, Luther’s Black friend helping him on the restoration of the headquarters building, tells Luther that “whatever you did to that man, you got to undo it.” Luther responds that he didn’t do anything, McKenna is “just that way.” When Clayton says, “What way? White?” Luther nods, and adds, “And mean. Kinda mean just keeps eating till the day it dies.” Oof, that’s one of my favorite lines of the book. There are people like that, who for whatever reason, have an insatiable meanness that certainly only ends with their death. Think about that. Even one’s mortality doesn’t abate the meanness.

Nora is eventually kicked out of the family home after Thomas learns she had a husband from Ireland, who claims he had a kid with her (he didn’t). All of this is verboten to Irish Catholic sensibilities and Thomas’ idea of societal comportment. The entire dinner scene at the Coughlin home the night she’s kicked out is one of the wildest of the entire book, though. This dinner scene started with the “happy” news of Connor and Nora’s engagement and then nosedived from there when Nora’s husband abruptly interrupted. After much back-and-forth discussion, the husband drags Nora out by her hair, which prompts Danny to chase him down and beat the snot out of him, including nearly coming to blows with his father who tried to stop him. Again, the family dynamics with the Coughlins is fascinating. Thomas is the domineering patriarch trying to hold everything together, but he knows he can’t tame or mold Danny. In one of my favorite lines of the book, he tells Danny he “loves him in defeat.” Which is to say, he loves him in spite of his inability to mold him. The love he had for Danny was endearing in a way. Then, there’s Connor, who comes to believe Danny is a traitor to the United States because of his sympathies with the labor unions, but it’s actually rooted in emasculation when Danny confessed his love for Nora. With Thomas’ help, Connor is elevated to a position in the Department of Justice with Finch and Hoover. Joe, the youngest brother, dotes upon Danny and admires his rebellious streak, and then when he gets a taste for the criminal underbelly of Boston after a spat with his father, he takes to it (and indeed, that’s the subject of the second book in Lehane’s Coughlin series!). The mother, Ellen, is a hollowed out husk of a woman, who would rather pretend none of this is happening. She’s cold and distant, even to Thomas, who is quite aware the perfunctory nature of their relationship. And of course, one of the biggest rifts in the family is that Danny (and Nora, for that matter) view Luther, and other Black people, as people, not as a necessary evil.

The book builds up to the one of the biggest events in 1919: the Boston police strike. All 1,400 members of the Boston Social Club, which then became affiliated as a charter member, for a time, with the American Federation of Labor, went on strike. The moment they did, Boston erupted into riots, with a roving mob busting out store fronts, setting those stores on fire, assaulting people, and raping women. In this melee, Luther is nearly killed by someone he knew back in Tulsa trying to collect on Smoke’s bounty. Later, during another night of rioting, Joe runs away from home a second time, with Connor in hot pursuit. Just as Connor saves Joe, he’s blinded by a riotous attack. After a few days of this chaos, future president, then-Governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, throws the Mayor of Boston, Andrew Peters, under the bus. Peters wanted to deploy the state’s National Guard, but Coolidge demurred. When that proved disastrous, Coolidge acted like it was Peters’ fault in the press. Coolidge also gets the Boston Central Labor Union and the AFL to sell out the BSC. Coming out of the riots, after the National Guard and the American Calvary restore order, Coolidge, fired-then-rehired-by-Coolidge Curtis, and the volunteers and recruits that would make up the new Boston Police Department, are valorized, while those who went on strike are pilloried. Danny, as the de facto head of the BSC, is especially castigated in the public and press. Danny was initially seen as a heroic figure, though, even despite the labor union affiliation. First, he acted heroically a year prior during an anarchist bombing. Then, he acted heroically later when he caught up with Tessa’s husband and killed him in a shoot-out, preventing a church bombing. Finally, in a climactic scene with Tessa, he killed her, although not before she stabbed him in his femoral artery and a different anarchist shot him three times. He survived. However, the tide turned against Danny when the public “somehow” learned about his tryst with Tessa, and viewed everything in a different light, like killing her husband was the move of a scorned lover rather than public service. All of that, including Danny nearly dying, was rather frustrating, to say the least! At the end of the book, Danny and Nora decide to leave Boston for New York City before eventually moving West (to maybe Tulsa?).

In the most jaw-dropping scene in the book, Luther and Clayton are taking a break from their renovations of the NAACP headquarters building when McKenna and his goons arrive with a toolbox. McKenna wants Luther to put that toolbox in a secret vault of the building, and he also wants that darn NAACP mailing list. The implication is that at some point in the future, McKenna and his goons will return under the auspices of official business, “discover” the tool box of pistols (I thought they were planting a bomb!), and discredit the Boston chapter of the NAACP as a subversive element. When Luther tries to buck McKenna, not even afraid of McKenna shooting him, McKenna shoots Clayton dead to prove his seriousness. Holy hell. Again, I can’t stress enough how much I detested McKenna. Lehane wrote him pitch perfect. But Luther ultimately, thankfully, gets the last laugh against McKenna. He sneaks up on McKenna when he’s enjoying a drink on the roof of his home and pushes him off that roof to his death. When the police find McKenna’s body, they assume he was trying to fix a broken gutter and fell, and the alcohol probably played a role. Luther then absconds with all of McKenna’s (likely corrupt) money he’d squirreled away over the years. Luther uses that money to make it right with Smoke. Instead of killing Smoke, he gives him the money. He said he’s tired of their kind killing each other. He also sends Danny and Nora money to help them since Danny is out of a job and rehabilitating from his injuries. Finally, most beautifully, Luther reconnects with Lila and meets his son for the first time.

Back to the Babe. The other great interaction between Babe and Luther occurs in the middle of the book. Danny and Luther are enjoying a game at Fenway Park (what a sight that is since Luther was the only Black man present in the stadium), and Ruth, who up to that point was set to break the single season homerun record, is completely thrown off his game upon seeing Luther in the crowd. Luther reminds him of his shame! His cowardice! At the end of the book, Ruth has been traded by Harry Frazee, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, to the New York Yankees. Initially, Ruth is worried he’ll be swallowed up by New York City, but he realizes it’s exactly the opposite, that NYC is the big platform a big star like Ruth needs. It just so happens that Ruth, Danny, and Nora interact at the bar on the train into NYC. When Ruth sees how Danny and Nora so unabashedly love each other, he feels such a sense of sadness and longing. Could he ever be loved like that? Then he walks out of the train to a crowd ready to love him — just not like that — which lifts his spirits.

The cognitive dissonance of a McKenna, a virulently racist man, is not realizing that he represents far more danger than the Bolsheviks to America. Worse still, the fear and hate of the Bolsheviks almost inevitability turns to a hatred of the Jews, as it does with McKenna and his ilk. And regular Bostonians rioting after the police strike did far more damage to Boston than the Bolsheviks and anarchists ever did. I forgot to note who said this, but my favorite line of the book I believe occurs around the time of the riots and reflecting on everything: “This terrible smallness of men was bigger than him, bigger than anything.” That’s it, right? The issues we deal with in society do not come from big men, even if those men operate in positions of the highest authority, as high as the presidency itself. No, we’re dealing with very small men and their outsized issues. As it was in 1919 Boston, so it is now in 2026 America.

With tour-de-force books like this, I feel I can never do them justice. So much is happening from the grand to the granular that it’s impossible to recount and reflect on all of it, but suffice it to say, I was thoroughly captivated through all 700 pages of the book. Whether the story was told from the perspective of Danny, Luther, or Ruth, I was enthralled by the historical touchstones and characters of the time, the propulsion of Boston into the 20th century, and the more intimate moments that elucidate history in a way those big beats can’t possibly. Lehane fans have to add The Given Day to their to-be-read list. If you’re not familiar with Lehane’s work, this isn’t necessarily one I would go with since it’s a tome, but you can’t go wrong with it, either. The writing is lively and ferocious, but gentle and cerebral, too. Lehane’s prose is simply incomparable, as he weaves this tale of Boston in the early 1900s. He’s like the Babe in that way: capable of calling his shot from the outset, and you trust him on it because he has the goods to back it up.