Coolidge (16 page)

The mixture of the heavy old ornate writing with straightforward modern prose betrayed a mixture within Coolidge. In politics, he had to be clear, like Ade, understand the region, entertain it, reward it, but not lecture to it. That he could translate Italian meant little to the people he encountered in the shops or at Rahar’s, which he patronized. But in his own time, he appreciated the old authors, especially Dante: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood.” Dante captured the questing of his own first decades and his own “dark woods,” the moments when the familiar landscape suddenly turned strange.

In early 1906, so very soon after the wedding, the old pattern of sorrow accompanying joy repeated. Coolidge’s beloved grandmother, Sarah Almeda Brewer Coolidge, died. From Northampton, Calvin and Grace traveled up into the deep snows to attend her funeral, taking the train to Ludlow and then hiring a horse and sleigh for the ride to Plymouth. Grace, looking around, thought of Sarah Coolidge’s great magnanimity, of all the years she had gone out as a midwife.

Soon Grace would be expecting her own child, and the need to earn a living pushed out thoughts of his grandmother. He busied himself both helping and getting to know clients and new voters and showing that he could deliver for the town even without holding office. The Home Culture Club received a grant of a stupendous amount, $8,500, from Andrew Carnegie, to construct a greenhouse and maintain a model garden for city workers; Coolidge was on the committee that publicly and gratefully accepted the money. He represented not only estates but also people in trouble, among them the workers of Northampton who served Smith College. Among these clients was a twelve-year-old, Mary Whalen, the daughter of a washerwoman, who was accused of stealing gold jewelry from the girls’ rooms in the dormitories.

Such cases were welcome reminders of the needs of voters. Coolidge thought a good deal about campaign style in this period. It was important not only to be clear but also to let people know he valued them, to greet them on the street, to help out when he could. There was nothing wrong with doing an individual voter a service when possible; that was what politics was for. Via his wife and Miss Yale, Coolidge heard that Kennedy was doing a good job. Why not praise him? Coolidge had ladled out his share of mockery, especially in college, but could see now that attack politics yielded poor results. The best way to win was to stick to the issues and forgo any personal attacks or name-calling. Civility would be his rule from now on. He would try it out in his next campaign, for the office of state representative in Boston.

But for now, the couple enjoyed themselves. Their baby was due at the end of summer. It was a magical time for both of them. When the time of the birth grew near, the Coolidges rented, for the longer term, half of a two-family house on Massasoit Street, six houses down from Elm Street. The rent was $27 a month; Coolidge furnished the 2,100 square feet with his savings. There was electricity and a sewer line; trolleys were coming. About two weeks later, their son John was born, on the evening of September 7. The scent of clematis came through the window; to Coolidge and Grace it seemed like a benediction.

To report the news, Calvin sent his father a letter with a typically deadpan opening: “We seem to be getting along well at our house. Grace had an easy time of it and seems well and strong. She had no fever and the baby came after she was in bed about an hour—though she had little pains all day.” As the letter went on, the new father betrayed more of his enthusiasm: “Little John is as strong and smart as can be. He has blue eyes and red eyebrows. Grace calls his hair red. He weighed about eight pounds and measures about 20 inches. They say he looks just like me. His little hands are just like yours. I wish you could see him.” To his stepmother, Carrie, who was traveling back from Michigan, Coolidge was even more enthusiastic: “Can’t you come back here from Albany and see your grandson? He came Sept 7th just as the clocks were striking six. The boy is real white and was born hungry. . . . I told Grace I should call a girl Carrie because you had no little girl.” The baby, the wife, and the stepmother all made his family marvelously whole, whole as it had not been since his own mother’s death.

Within a week, even as the baby’s nurse sat in his kitchen, the
Hampshire Gazette
was chattering on about the possibility that Calvin would accept the Republican nomination as a candidate for his first statewide office, state representative: “Calvin Coolidge has shed the most light on the situation by saying he would consider the nomination,” commented the paper charitably. The salary would be $750 a year, plus mileage; it was only a half-year job, through June. The
Gazette
went on to flatter him by announcing, without accuracy, “Mr. Coolidge has acquired considerable real estate since he was came to Northampton and is now one of the large taxpayers.” In late October, Coolidge introduced a Republican speaker with a set of folksy New England remarks. “The frost may be on the pumpkin, but it does not seem to be in City Hall.” He spoke out for bipartisanship and electoral freedom: “It is axiomatic that popular government cannot long exist without a free ballot.” After a point, he digressed to take a stab at Henry Cabot Lodge, who had recently told voters that it was a choice between the Republican Party and the “Cossacks,” his way of assailing progressives in the Democratic Party. Coolidge sought to include where Lodge had excluded, to show that the progressive Republicans were men of democracy. In the Republican Party of western Massachusetts, Coolidge told his fellows, “we call in every kind, ‘barbarian, Scythian, bond or free’ you are welcome one and all, we care not at what shrine you worship or how you eat your pie. That includes what Senator Lodge calls Cossacks.” The language was frothy, but it revealed a feature of Coolidge that others would repeatedly note in the future: he was an independent man who shied away from clubs, but he felt no shame in demonstrating loyalty to a political party, the Republicans. Indeed, he suspected vanity in the Republicans who frequently diverged from the party position in the name of demonstrating their own independence. Loyalty was not always weakness. Sometimes it was efficiency, as in the case when men rowed together on the Connecticut River.

Like all parents, Coolidge was finding that his family life gave him new insight into his work. The Republican Party in that period was obsessed with hygiene and clean food. In 1906, a young writer, Upton Sinclair, had published
The Jungle
, an exposé of the brutality and filth of the meatpacking industry. The story of dead rats shoveled into sausage machines and guts sold as “potted ham” had stirred so much outrage that Congress had pushed through a bill to regulate food and drugs. Theodore Roosevelt, reportedly sickened by reading an advance copy of
The Jungle
, had sent agents to study the stockyard of Chicago; they found substance in Sinclair’s allegations. That year, he signed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which established federal food and drug regulations.

But Coolidge, whatever his party was doing, retained his conviction that much was up to the customer. When it came to medicines, the old rule of “Let the buyer beware” seemed good enough to him. In fact, he teased his new wife about that. One day he returned home to discover that Grace had bought a book titled
Our Family Physician
for the then-high price of $8.00. Grace and he did not discuss the purchase. But here his boardinghouse side came out; he couldn’t resist a prank with an edge. A few weeks later she opened the book to see a note: “Don’t see any recipe here for curing suckers! Calvin Coolidge.” But their home was a pleasant one. Soon they would add a tiger kitten, shipped especially from Vermont; they named him Bounder.

There were other issues beyond food in the campaign. Railroad and trolley companies were dueling to dominate Northampton; in the Berkshires and the Connecticut Valley, the rails had triggered a construction boom. In Washington, Congress had obeyed the president and passed a new law, the Hepburn Act, that gave the Interstate Commerce Commission more authority to set railway freight prices. A number of railmen signaled that they could live with the new law, which they thought the ICC would enforce liberally. In November, Coolidge won his election to the lower house of the General Court, the state legislature in Boston. That meant a long separation from Grace: half a year away, at least on weekdays. Thinking it over, Coolidge realized that his father too had gone to the legislature soon after his own birth. He was finally going to Boston, all these years after his father had warned him that the calf would get there first. Just after New Year’s, he took the train, arriving at North Station.

The capital still could intimidate. The State House on Beacon Hill was a glorious structure, its cornerstone having been laid by Samuel Adams, the governor, who had arrived to deliver it with fifteen white horses. Its thirty-five-foot dome shone gold, having been freshly gilded in twenty-three-carat paint the autumn before at a price of $4,758.79, a sign that in autumn 1906, Massachusetts was feeling extravagant. Oliver Wendell Holmes had originally called not Boston but specifically the State House “the hub of the solar system.” The dome had been gold since the 1870s, when the commonwealth, perhaps out of respect for President Ulysses S. Grant and Congress’s new commitment to the gold standard, had ordered the gilding. Everyone knew that whatever the quality of the top paint, underneath lay the honest copper of Revere Copper Company, which had covered the dome with that metal back at the turn of the century. Inside, the state’s glorious history did the blazing. Framed by Ionic columns in Nurses Hall were new mural paintings of the Boston Tea Party and Revere’s ride. Busts of John Adams, Daniel Webster, and John Hancock were everywhere, all asking silently, as another visitor noted, “What have you done?”

There were also Coolidges everywhere, themselves also eminences. Louis Arthur Coolidge, who belonged to Roosevelt’s “kitchen cabinet,” was a renowned journalist and adviser to Lodge. William Coolidge was a railroad lawyer. The clerk of the Senate was Henry D. Coolidge, who had served in that job while Coolidge had been a schoolboy in Ludlow.

But by now Coolidge was harder to frighten. Starting slowly was his routine, almost a theatrical act. Hammond, Field, Irwin, and the other western Massachusetts Republicans collaborated in that act. After all, they had seen it succeed before in the person of the quirky, silent New Englander who had made it to the governor’s spot, Murray Crane. Richard Irwin, Coolidge’s Amherst friend Hardy’s partner, wrote an introduction to the speaker of the House, John N. Cole. In the Civil War, General Grant had always been underestimated. One colleague had commented, upon meeting Grant, that he looked like a singed cat. Now Irwin suggested that Coolidge fell into the same category.

Dear John,

This will introduce the new member-elect from my town, Calvin Coolidge. Like the singed cat, he is better than he looks. He wishes to talk with you about committees. Anything you can do for him will be appreciated.

The singed cat dwelled at the Adams House on Washington Street, a dumpy structure favored by members of the Western Massachusetts Club, the crowd of lawmakers who crossed the Connecticut to come to Boston. Coolidge’s room, number 60, at the center of the building and without bathroom or water, looked out on a narrow inner courtyard. He rented the room for a dollar a day, a bed and three-quarters wooden couch where he perused the
Manual for the Use of the General Court
in the evenings. In the front it contained the U.S. Constitution with all its grandeur and peculiarities. Article I, Section 3 of that document reminded readers of the important role of a state legislature: to pick U.S. senators. Here the job of the U.S. vice president was described: “the vice president of the United States shall be president of the senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.” Interestingly, in Massachusetts, however, a president of the Senate was chosen differently, for Chapter I, Section II, Article VII read, “The senate shall choose its own president.” The president of the Senate in Massachusetts had more power than a U.S. vice president, for the state constitution stipulated: “the president may vote on all questions.”

As the legislating began, Coolidge started to feel his way forward. State spending was growing, he learned with interest, in part because the executive, the governor, had trouble stopping it; the Ways and Means Committee of his chamber was in revolt, calling for more formal budgeting. Cole assigned Coolidge to two committees: the Committee on Constitutional Amendments and the Committee on Mercantile Affairs.

Soon enough, he fell into a routine. He smoked cigars, drank rarely, and traveled home to his new baby and Grace on the weekends. Mondays at 7:50
A.M.
he was back on the train, arriving at North Station by 10:50. That meant he could spend Sundays at home. Northampton gave him direction. Until he mastered the big issues, he could concentrate on legislating to help the town and his friends there. His first bills reflected more loyalty than quality. Hammond’s fury at joyriders had not abated: Coolidge introduced House Bill 41, a plan to ban licenses for vehicles with “a speed capacity of more than twenty miles an hour when running over a level macadam roadway.” Coolidge worked on his delivery, pointing out that automobiles appeared dangerous; one in nine drivers in the state had landed in court in the past year. That did not stop the
Springfield Republican
from pointing out the essential absurdity of his plan, noting that the freshman lawmaker was “at a loss to explain just how he would have the cars arranged mechanically so as to comply with the bill.”

More logical was his defense of “wet” cities’ rights to keep the revenues from their liquor taxes; Coolidge went before the Committee on the Liquor Law to speak against a brazen effort by the state to keep half the revenues from local liquor licenses for itself. The legislature, like nearly every legislature in the land, was preoccupied with health regulations; Coolidge stuck to commerce. The same week that the Joint Committee on Public Health debated labeling of patent medicines, he pushed through a bill that would make easier the sale of property of agricultural societies, the kind that John operated with the cheese factory. The point was to be sure that co-ops could compete in commerce and be bought and sold by private companies.