Coolidge (13 page)

Getting to know Coolidge as they walked up and down the streets, Dennis began to notice that Coolidge spoke well, omitting powerful curse words and even “the feebler New England diaconal oaths such as ‘by heck’ and ‘by cracky’ from his speech.” He also decided, after a while, that Coolidge’s silence was a form of affection. “It made him easy and comfortable to get along with. . . . But with him quietness was never assumed: it was as natural as breathing. And the queer part of it was that he was always seeking out companionship even though he did not want to talk.” In the end, Dennis said, Coolidge’s silence “had rather a charm for me.” One might “sit with him on a three hour train from Northampton to Boston and really enjoy his companionship though he never said a word.” Others, including his old law bosses, were beginning to feel the same way. Coolidge grew on them. And his aptitude for brevity continued to win notice. Now, in addition to being an advantage for private clients, the Coolidge style was an advantage for the general public. Whereas another city solicitor summed up a year’s work of eleven cases in four printed pages, Coolidge used two pages to cover fifteen cases. Readers knew that shorter was harder and appreciated his work.

The year 1900 was a good one for companies and the nation generally. In the fall, around the time of the election, two brothers with a bicycle business were making improbable advances in flight with man-carrying gliders in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. That fall of 1900, Calvin was not the only Coolidge who was seeking public office. His father’s old friend William Stickney, a Black River Academy man, won the Vermont race for governor. John was to get a new post. Coolidge was by now enough of a political hand to want to advise his father, whether on dress for the inauguration or posts he might seek. He sent his father a picture of a Prince Albert coat as a sartorial suggestion; John bought the clothes and also received the honorary title of “Colonel” from his old friend.

The Vermont outcome was clear in September because Vermont held its elections early. But afterward, Coolidge waged his own more difficult campaign in the city council as city solicitor general. He prevailed, winning a second term. He followed the Republicans in the wider races in the area, especially Winthrop Murray Crane, the candidate for governor of Massachusetts. Crane was related to Stephen Crane, who had sold currency paper to Paul Revere himself. Zenas Crane, Murray Crane’s father, had established the current business, printing stock certificates and notepaper, in an era of poets and books, which had made him wealthy. But the son had made his mark as well. Years before, when he had been a young man like Coolidge, Crane had won for his company an enormous coup, the contract to print the U.S. dollar. Now Crane’s presses at his “government mill” printed dollars for the rest of the country.

Crane differed from many of the other politicians. Perhaps because his own company employed many new immigrants, he understood the value they brought to the state. The new money would not be so easy to print without the skilled workers and Italians and Irish who worked at Crane. Crane was different from the Boston crowd that had created the Immigration Restriction League, which consisted of both Democrats and Republicans. Crane, whose paper company depended on a government contract, was a strong tariff man.

Crane’s style was also unusual. The sandy-haired manufacturer’s son read but was not bookish. He had a twinkle in his eye, and built a tight circle, and within that circle he and his advisers enjoyed themselves. When William M. Butler, an attorney in his entourage, moved into a Boston house next to another Crane ally, George Lyman, Crane suggested opening a door between the two houses, so that the two might meet without Boston formality and in privacy. In public though, Crane turned taciturn and became famous for skipping speeches. Other politicians talked. Crane gave few speeches. He was an operator, a power behind the scenes. It was said that he never wrote when speaking could do and never talked when a nod would suffice. The letters he did write often ended, “But I’ll talk to you about it when I see you.” Without speeches, Crane still proved a stellar vote getter: that year he beat Robert T. Paine, the father of a man who had cofounded the anti-immigration league, to win the governor’s job by more than 20 percentage points. Governor Crane was a model of what Coolidge might become.

Despite such inspiration, Coolidge sometimes flagged. Money was still too tight, and he felt too close to the bankruptcy cases he was now representing. “I was duly reelected City Solicitor General,” he wrote to his father in early 1901. “There were a couple of Irishmen after the job. They made me some trouble but they did not secure votes enough. I have business enough to get a fair living but there is no money in the practice of law.” He was even, again, a little sour: “You are fortunate that you are not still having me to support.” Sometimes his victories were mere accidents. The Democratic candidates had quarreled, leaving Coolidge with a plurality and victory. That confirmed what Garman had told him: if one avoided being sidelined, sometimes one moved forward. Representing the city of Northampton put him on the other side of the property debate, just as being tax collector had shown his father the other side of the revenue equation. He was often in court, despite his inclinations, and did not always win. The city claimed some land along a highway as its own; a private party claimed that the land belonged to him. Coolidge, representing the city, felt “I should have won these cases on the claim that the land in question already belonged to the highway.” The jurymen, his fellow Yankees, sided with the private party.

And for all the progress he had made in the law, there was at first not much progress to show with women. Percy Deering’s sister, Rose Deering, had caught his eye; she attended Smith. But early hope of something there had fizzled; by May 1901, he was letting her know that he forgave her rejection: “My dear Miss Deering:—There is nothing to pardon, you always do all I could wish. . . . It is very dear of you to let me come, I shall not forget. I am so tired.”

He may have been tired of romance, but he resolved not to tire in his work: elections. After all, the solicitor general races were an example of Garman’s theory of staying in the mainstream. Sometimes he won only because Democrats quarreled, but he did win. He also studied how politicians comported themselves and in all kinds of situations. How did the ship of state move? How did you turn it when a storm hit? Vice President Roosevelt provided a compelling answer when President McKinley was shot by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, a worker who had been laid off at his factory around the time of the Pullman strikes. Roosevelt was on Isle La Motte on Lake Champlain, as McKinley declined. But then the news turned dark, and Roosevelt traveled to Buffalo. By the time he arrived by the New York Central, McKinley was dead.

Stability was the dominant concern of the New Yorker. The number of hours between an old president’s death and a new one’s swearing in had to be short. Roosevelt himself chose the venue for the swearing in, the Delaware Avenue home of his friend and adviser Ansley Wilcox; its pillars evoked the White House and Monticello. Before the swearing in, he attended church, but at the swearing in there was no Bible, probably because everyone had moved with such dispatch. Observers could see that Roosevelt stepped with great care in these crucial hours: the Rough Rider was not rough now but rather decorous. In the name of continuity, he reappointed the key figures of McKinley’s cabinet. In a very small way, Coolidge was pulled into the politics of the transition; he was assigned to give a eulogy for the president in Northampton. Coolidge spoke of McKinley’s service and his devotion to his work. The young attorney could see that the sad events were an example of Garman’s theory of chance: something had happened. Fate had intervened. Because Roosevelt had been in the water, now he was president.

But Roosevelt did not stay decorous long. By temperament Roosevelt was neither judge nor solicitor but prosecutor. In fact, he treated the White House as a prosecutor’s office. In McKinley’s time the Sherman Antitrust Act had not been used aggressively; Roosevelt, however, found it a useful tool. Roosevelt moved against the Northern Securities Company and J. P. Morgan aggressively, asking for the great company’s dissolution. Astonished, J. P. Morgan asked TR if his other companies would be assailed. “Not unless we find out,” said Roosevelt, “that they have done something we regard as wrong.”

In an area where voters had an obvious stake, coal for heating, Roosevelt moved especially aggressively. All of New England lived with one preoccupation: how to heat in winter. Coal workers had organized a new kind of union, not like the Carpenters’ Union, whose Northampton chapter, number 351, met at 38 Main Street on the first and third Wednesdays of every month. This new union, the United Mine Workers, struck in May and at first received little notice. But it stayed on strike, and with each day that passed a heatless winter became more probable. Normally companies and workers settled these things with each other, but President Roosevelt was in a mind to intervene. In September, he visited Massachusetts, where he happened to endure an accident while riding with Murray Crane. Their landau was struck by a trolley car while en route to Lenox from Pittsfield. A Secret Service man was killed, but Crane escaped unhurt and Roosevelt merely injured a leg. That underscored Roosevelt’s authority: once again, as on San Juan Hill, he had laughed at death.

By October, some schools could not open owing to lack of heat. The price of coal had risen from $20 to $30 a ton. There was a fear of what Roosevelt himself termed “coal famine.” Grover Cleveland, the stalwart noninterventionist, wrote to propose a solution to Roosevelt: that coal production somehow be started again for a short period to allay the emergency, “leaving the parties to quarrel.” George Baer, the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, on the other side, warned that mining was “not a religious sentiment or academic proposition,” and noted that “God in his Infinite Wisdom had given control of the property interests of the country” into the right hands.

But President Roosevelt reacted differently from Cleveland or McKinley before him. First, he threatened a military solution: to send 10,000 troops to run the mines, operators and miners be damned. From his wheelchair—the wound he had suffered in Pittsfield was now infected—he put himself forward as arbiter, inviting the United Mine Workers and the companies in to try to persuade them to find a settlement. His leg injury had emerged as a serious matter; infected, the leg refused to heal. The accident had sealed a bond between Roosevelt and Crane, to whom he now turned for support in this approach. The president also warned the country of the price if he did not succeed: “untold misery,” Roosevelt wrote Crane in Boston, “with the certainty of riots which might develop into social war.”

In the end, Crane, who had earlier negotiated a rough conflict between the Teamsters and employers in his state, did help President Roosevelt find a settlement with the coal men. Many of the companies were not pleased with the way Washington had forced them down to equal footing with the miners. But the part of the story that interested a man like Coolidge was that Crane had participated in negotiating a national settlement. His own prospects for rising to Crane’s level were now beginning to seem real. Coolidge’s career was bumping upward; he was even able to turn down a well-paying and well-respected job, that of county clerk, because he saw greater opportunities at the bar; it felt good to say no to $2,300 a year.

Still, the wife he hoped for was missing. He might have taken an interest in the administration of Cable’s Home Culture Clubs, but he remained a boarder himself. Men from Amherst had found spouses—Dwight Morrow had married Elizabeth Cutter, the Smith graduate, in 1903, and Harlan Stone had been married since 1899. The truth was that Coolidge was already settling into the easy life of the political bachelor: party meetings, working, and resting in his rooms. There were women in Northampton, at Smith College, which was itself a sort of showcase for educated women. There were the female teachers of the Clarke School for the Deaf, some of whom lived in Baker Hall, a redbrick dormitory. Each time a hole wore in his sock, he put the sock aside to be darned. But he did not darn them, and the pile grew. It was as though he were living behind glass; the girls were on the other side, and he could see but not reach them. Perhaps the right girl would know to break through herself and get to him, first.

Finally, she did. One morning Calvin planted his hat on his head and began shaving. A peal of laughter coming through his Round Hill window startled his ear. The laughter, Coolidge’s housemate, Weir, told him later, was from a teacher at the Clarke School, one of Miss Caroline Yale’s recruits. The teacher lived just across the way and had spied him while watering the flowers on the lawn outside her dormitory. Soon she sent him a pot of flowers, and he sent her his calling card. Their first date was at a political rally at Northampton City Hall.

The name of the laughing teacher was Grace Anna Goodhue. She had come to Northampton from Burlington, where she had graduated from the University of Vermont. Six and a half years younger than Calvin, Grace was graceful, like her name, dark-haired, and enthusiastic. At Vermont she had sung in the glee club. She was one of the young women who had helped to found the University of Vermont chapter of Pi Beta Phi and participated avidly in the alumnae activities. She made friends everywhere. The breezes that crossed the green at the University of Vermont were more meritocratic and freer than the sometimes stuffy air that overhung Amherst.

Dennis, Coolidge’s partner on the trolley ride, called her a “creature of spirit, fire and dew.” Other men also found Grace stunning, and were stunned to find that she favored the quiet lawyer. Coolidge’s acquaintances noted that the Coolidge and the teacher listed on page 267 of the 1904 Northampton Directory were opposites, so stark as to make the relationship unlikely. Grace’s father, Andrew, was a Grover Cleveland Democrat, whereas the John Coolidges were Republicans. Grace’s house on Maple Street in Burlington had steam and electricity, whereas the Colonel still scratched out his notes by kerosene light. Calvin hung away from the church, unaffiliated and uncertain, while as a girl Grace had already known her mind, dropping the Methodist Church and determinedly leading her parents to the Congregationalists. He retreated into law books; she loved theater. He disliked sports and lacked skill in them. She could dance—not perfectly but adequately—skate, and play baseball. Whereas Coolidge was fair, she was dark; later, other women would comment on her lustrous complexion, a shade of olive that suited both pastels and strong colors, even the deep red or plum velvets that were popular in the era. He appreciated handiwork but didn’t do much of it: Grace knitted, sewed, and crocheted all the time—indeed, she was so handy it was said that she had learned to sew before she learned to walk.