Coolidge (17 page)

Another great progressive preoccupation was trust busting, and Coolidge contrived, with some effort, to bust some trusts of his own in an improbable industry: theater. The big-city bookers played hardball with small-town theaters like those of Northampton. If the Academy of Music Theatre was to get Sarah Bernhardt, as it had in 1906 for
Phèdre
, it might have to take or forgo other bookings, according to the big agents’ will. Coolidge tried out a small bill to limit the agents’ and syndicates’ power. His first major piece of legislation was a broader antimonopoly bill for articles of common use, which included gasoline and ice. The leader in the case was a small Springfield company, Hisgen Brothers, which had built up an oil business; Standard Oil had been trying to buy it out or drive it out on and off since 1898. Hisgen sought legislation to control the “disreputable dealings” of big companies. Coolidge supported Hisgen. His classmate Herbert Pratt’s father, a big executive at Standard Oil, was on the other side. The bill died somewhere between House and Senate, but Coolidge resolved to continue the fight against large companies. From the point of view of western Massachusetts lawmakers, after all, such fights were of small towns against big cities.

Of course, as he took his black briefcase and walked down from the State House across Boston Common, Coolidge also began to see that there were some progressive ideas he could not endorse. The town of Cambridge, for instance, wanted to invest public money in a subway system; Coolidge was one of those who objected, as the
Springfield Republican
reported: “Mr. Coolidge of Northampton gave legal and business reasons why it was best to follow the state’s policy of requiring companies to build the underground conduits themselves.”

As disciplined as he was, Coolidge could not force out personal troubles all the time. It was cold that year in Massachusetts; one morning at the end of January, the temperature dropped to −11 degrees. Later winter and early spring were the times of year when people succumbed to illness—his grandmother, and his mother. In mid-February came word that Garman had died of blood poisoning that had started in his throat; the mysterious disease had caught up with him after all. A flurry of correspondence started among the wistful Amherst crowd. They had advanced and were in the stream, just as Garman had instructed, but wondered how they might fare without their navigator. An old student of Garman now taught philosophy at Amherst: William Jesse Newlin, class of 1899. And shortly there came reports that another family member, his stepmother, was faring poorly.

“I am a good deal disturbed about mother,” he wrote home on February 26. “Are you sure you are doing all that can be done to help her? . . . I should think she ought to have a trained nurse. . . . Everything that is possible ought to be done to stop her suffering.” Grace’s self-sufficiency remained Coolidge’s great comfort. She continued to find friends in Northampton; her flutelike voice was recognizable when hymns were sung at the Edwards Church. She kept in touch with sisters from her sorority, Pi Beta Phi. Like Calvin, she won her peers’ respect by making herself useful, starting at the bottom, opening the Massasoit Street home to member meetings.

The Boston and Maine Railroad line that Coolidge rode to the state capital was another big topic in Boston. Another line, the New Haven Railroad, had plans to purchase it. Both companies, but especially the New Haven, were already powerhouses in the economy. New Englanders were by now accustomed to railroads serving as cash cows. J. P. Morgan had gained control early in the century, but to many shareholders, that did not seem to matter. What mattered was the stability of the railroads. Evidence suggested that the rails would succeed, if only they had enough capital. After all, traffic grew every year; earnings from the New Haven’s operations stood at nearly $18 million for the fiscal year that ended in June 1907; in 1901, its earnings had been only $12 million. The little trolley lines Coolidge had inspected and studied would have their best shot at survival if they could hook into the great Boston and Maine or the New Haven. Trains were everywhere, the seemingly unstoppable future.

But the very scale of the railroads made the progressives’ blood boil. Here was a target worth taking down. Anything this big must be wrong. The possibility of getting the House of Morgan, that emblem of capitalism, and Morgan’s appointed executive at the New Haven, Charles Mellen, was too good to bypass. The progressives’ leader on the railroads in Boston was Harvard Law alumnus and attorney Louis Brandeis. But Roosevelt’s Hepburn Act, along with an earlier law, the Elkins Act of 1903, was evidence of Roosevelt’s commitment to rail regulation. Brandeis argued that those were not enough: the state of Massachusetts must also constrain the powerhouses and prevent mergers among them. Among Brandeis’s disciples was a young Amherst alumnus, Joseph Eastman; Eastman worked for the Public Franchise League, an antimonopoly watchdog group.

The Dow Jones Transportation Average had been dropping all fall and winter from over 130 in the summer and fall of 1906. In the first half of the year, as Brandeis intensified his probes of the railroad companies, looking to see if the companies were violating the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the transportation average hit a new low of 100. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, a more general index, likewise sank sickeningly during 1907. Perhaps commerce as George Bancroft had described could not outride this storm, the storm of progressivism. Legislators, anxious to curtail the damage, tried to block Brandeis. After all, many shareholders didn’t see J. P. Morgan as the demon Brandeis did; they thought, rather, that Morgan’s presence guaranteed a higher share price. Brandeis wanted to take the railroads apart and make them small; he saw size itself as an evil. Much later, his papers would even be published under the title
The Curse of Bigness
. House speaker John Cole hurriedly put forward a measure to fight back, allowing the New Haven to own Boston and Maine stock until July 1, 1908.

Challenges such as the attack on railroad trusts made the critics wonder whether they had taken Roosevelt seriously enough. Back when the Hepburn Act had passed, Samuel McCall, a Republican from Massachusetts, had been one of seven in the House to vote against it. What if the regulator picked prices that hurt the companies more than he intended? McCall warned that Americans passed laws too casually, with an “easy optimism” that overlooked the effects of the laws. He hadn’t liked strengthening the ICC either; he told colleagues he preferred “the natural and beneficent liberty of the courts to the cast iron regulations of a commission.” E. H. Harriman of Union Pacific had seemed to exaggerate when he called the act an “anti-railroad conspiracy.” Harriman had even alleged that the law had the intentional purpose of promoting the water projects Roosevelt favored, especially the Panama Canal. “I am not opposed to the canal, but the attack on railroads apparently is to create a sentiment in favor of some other method of transportation.” Now people wondered whether McCall and Harriman were correct. The blow Roosevelt had struck to reduce the power of the railroads might be crippling them instead. The Hepburn Act might be deterring trade by making cross-country trips uncompetitive. From 1905 to 1907, overall U.S. exports to China dropped by half and those to Japan more than 20 percent. “The railroad campaign for the trade of the east was at an end,” a trade scholar, Edwin Clapp, would later summarize.

COOLIDGE WAS NOT SURE
yet what to make of the railroad fight. He kept clear of Charles Mellen, J. P. Morgan’s man at the New Haven Railroad. But he understood the railroads’ argument that their survival was at issue. After all, Plymouth was struggling precisely because it had no railroad. If capital like Morgan’s aimed to link everything up, there should be more of it, not less. He concentrated on keeping his Hisgen bill alive and protecting local merchants. Even at the very end of the session, it looked as though passage might be possible; still, when the bill failed just hours before the recess, he was not disappointed. Getting that close was achievement enough. Thinking of 1908 already, he carefully approached the preoccupied speaker, John Cole, who failed to remember him despite the witty “singed cat” letter. Coolidge had seen that Speaker Cole planned to visit Northampton after the legislative session and offered to put Cole up at his house. The speaker replied that he would be glad to stay on Massasoit Street, and did pay the promised visit.

In September 1907, making good on Roosevelt’s many threats, the federal government, represented by a star progressive, Frank B. Kellogg of Minnesota, showed up in court to prosecute Standard Oil, having already framed a full six thousand indictments. Coolidge could read all about the case in the Northampton papers and talk about it with colleagues. By now he had qualified not only as an attorney but also as a justice of the peace and a notary public; that meant that he met more voters. The Coolidges were not in Plymouth as often as they liked, and had to content themselves with sending reports by mail. “John creeps up on his knees and goes upstairs and runs all over the house,” Coolidge wrote his father. His stepmother, whom he routinely referred to as “mother,” was ill again. He told his father that he hoped he and Grace would make it to Plymouth the following summer, in 1908, saving, in typical Calvin fashion, a bit of news for the end of the sentence: “—with another baby.”

The law practice provided some stability to Coolidge and his family that fall of 1907, which brought a genuine panic. Shares in the United Copper Company went from $62 to $15 within two days after one investor tried to corner the company’s stock. The contagion spread to New York’s Knickerbocker Trust Company, a major bank; on one day, October 22, depositors withdrew $8 million in three hours. Morgan had been the progressives’ enemy all spring, yet in the end it was to Morgan that Roosevelt’s Treasury secretary, George Cortelyou, turned for help. Morgan led other bankers and firms in rescuing banks and struggling trusts, the most spectacular buyout being that of Tennessee Coal and Iron Company by Morgan’s U.S. Steel. The Clearing House, the club of banks, did its part by supplying liquidity. The trouble was wider than a single commodity speculator, metal, or bank; money had been too tight. Yet together, the Clearing House and Morgan rescued both the banking and monetary systems and the corporations. The irony was that the scapegoat had become the savior.

Coolidge’s victory in the fall of 1907 came by a narrower margin than the previous year’s, but he resolved that that did not matter: what mattered was that he had won, that he was still in Garman’s stream. He was gaining recognition and solidifying his presence in Boston. In December, around the time he returned to Boston, Roosevelt delivered a speech that seemed to overlook what had just happened at the banks. The trouble with money, Roosevelt suggested, was that people were hoarding it rather than placing it in banks. He also assailed businessmen. “In any large body of men,” he said in his annual presidential message, “there are certain to be some who are dishonest.” Their example, he said, was “a very evil thing for the community.” What did that mean? That Charles Mellen, whose management of the railroad had left much to be desired, required more punishment? That Morgan himself was not off the hook? Most people knew that there had been errors at the railroad, but they also thought that the merger Roosevelt had sought to stop was a good idea. Brandeis too struck again. He published a sensational pamphlet attacking the New Haven and its investments. Brandeis argued that the New Haven had hurt itself, unwisely draining its own cash by acquiring the Boston and Maine. Its dividends would have to come down. That those points contradicted the general thrust of his original antitrust case, that railroads were so mighty that they must be constrained, Brandeis did not seem to notice. The normally phlegmatic
Wall Street Journal
was now roused to a fury: “Probably never before has so audacious an attack been made on the credit of an American railroad of recognized financial stability as that contained in the pamphlet of L. D. Brandeis, an attorney of Boston, who is generally supposed to be acting on behalf of certain Boston and Maine stockholders.” Even Brandeis knew that passage. Passenger ticket rates, the paper noted, had decreased 8 percent since 1901; in other words, there was not much evidence of price gouging. It was possible that Brandeis’s prediction of failures was a self-fulfilling prophecy: any company so targeted would become weak if it were not already.
The Boston Globe
alleged that Brandeis’s antimerger obsession would result in seeing “the state destroyed, the republic gasping its last breath and humankind swept away from the starry watches of the night.”

A well-known market player, Thomas Lawson, went one further, issuing stock advice on the basis of his ability to predict the impact of Roosevelt’s speeches. Some might sound portentous but be mere fury, and money could be made off that. “Tomorrow comes his first thunderbolt,” announced Lawson in an advertisement he placed in
The New York Times
at the end of January. “Let the American people loosen up their ear drums, for in the vernacular, it is a syrenated corker. It doesn’t do a thing to the System and the frenzied financier but shake them as a tiger does a blood-stained meatbag.” Lawson’s conclusion: “Buy stocks on tomorrow’s message.”

The Union Pacific, Harriman’s western railroad, held Coolidge’s attention, in part because its story paralleled that of the familiar New Haven like a second track. The Union Pacific had acquired the Southern Pacific several years before; it was Harriman’s empire. All the claims of the Roosevelt skeptics seemed vindicated; the Roosevelt administration was suing to break the company apart again, arguing that the Union Pacific had in its acquisition violated the old 1890 Sherman Act, representing restraint of trade.

The advances with which Coolidge personally had to content himself were small. His son was getting ready to walk. Coolidge was back for a second year as a representative in Boston. The visit from Cole had paid off: Cole had assigned him to better committees, judiciary and banking. And Coolidge found that he liked fighting for Northampton; more than ever, he sided with town over gown. In February 1908, he argued that the state should reimburse towns for the transport of paupers to the state hospital at Tewksbury. That same month, the General Assembly debated the question of whether college towns, which received no real estate taxes from their colleges, ought to be compensated by the state government for the revenue they forwent.