Coolidge (51 page)

Other Republican voters might follow the farmers and the intellectuals. The progressives might be the party’s future. At Amherst, Morrow and others had made a distinctly conservative choice for the new president after the contentious Meiklejohn: George Olds, the math teacher whom Morrow and Coolidge had liked so much in the 1890s. But that did not mean Meiklejohn would go unemployed. In Wisconsin, authorities were preparing to welcome Meiklejohn: Young Robert La Follette, Jr., the son of the candidate, was already talking with Meiklejohn about serving at the top as a dean or president. The key state for the Republicans’ future remained California; Harding had taken it in 1920, but this time voters in the state might turn to La Follette.

La Follette and Davis might be able to use Teapot Dome to bring Republicans down. New York Democrats mounted a large teapot image on the chassis of a seven-passenger car to drive around and sing songs against Theodore Roosevelt, the president’s son, who served as navy undersecretary and so was part of the controversy. Among the singers who rode in the Teapot Car were Emily Smith, the daughter of Governor Al Smith, and Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, the daughter of Franklin Roosevelt. William McAdoo, a potential Democratic candidate, had lost out to Davis in the competition for the presidential slot on the party ticket in part because he had served as lawyer to the oil executive Edward Doheny. Coolidge, the vice president in the period of Teapot Dome, was still much closer than McAdoo to the Harding scandals. The papers had already identified a blemish: that spring, not expecting a second term as vice president, Coolidge had accepted a payment of $250 for a speech, plus $10 for expenses, for addressing veterans in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Thomas Marshall, the former vice president, rushed to his defense; Marshall, too, had given speeches for fees while vice president. Still, the payment looked bad at a time when Coolidge was promulgating policy relating to veterans.

The Republicans were also anxious because they worried about Coolidge’s public speaking. “Fighting Bob” La Follette did not speak, he roared; grief muted Coolidge’s already weak voice, making him, just as Lodge had always noted, a poor candidate on the stump. DeForest Phonofilm wanted to record three presidential candidates and package the recordings together to show in theaters. Coolidge’s voice was so quiet that the crew had to adjust their equipment to capture it. Their apparatus was at the same settings when La Follette took his turn at the mike; La Follette blasted so hard the recording failed, and the technicians had to readjust and ask La Follette to record it all again. America was not made, La Follette said, “but in the making.”

Responding through the grief, Coolidge had found that he could formulate policy. Two lawmakers from the West, Senator Charles McNary of Oregon and Representative Gilbert Haugen of Iowa, were seeking federal subsidies to drive the prices of farm commodities up and help farmers. Coolidge’s too believed farmers needed cash, but thought the best way for them to get it was by establishing cooperatives, like the cheese factory in Plymouth, but on a larger scale. Even something like the cheese factory had limited potential, as the Coolidges knew all too well. John had even penned a funny, rueful poem about his cheese earnings:

A poet I do not claim to be

So don’t expect a rhyme from me

Earning the dollar was very plain prose

So every tinker in the town well knows

For earn it I did what think you of that

Tinkering and soldering the cheese factory vat.

Coolidge was always seeking to translate John’s message about the nature of farming into policy. “Well, farmers never have made much money,” he said to R. A. Cooper of the Farm Board at one point. “I don’t believe we can do much about it.”

Coolidge, who had suffered the beratings of Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace week after week in cabinet meetings, still opposed subsidies and the McNary-Haugen plans. The problem in the end, he believed, had come out of World War I. “If there had been no war, with its urge for increased production, we would by this time probably have quietly entered on a new phase of our agricultural experience, wherein we would have become an importer, rather than an exporter of most farm products,” as he would put it shortly. He believed that farmers needed to look ahead: perhaps the best life was not on farms but rather in cities. Even since his arrival in Washington and his first encounters with La Follette, the number of factory jobs had risen relative to those on farms. Back in 1910 farmers had been a third of the employed population; now they were a quarter; in 1940 they might be just a sixth. “Brass tacks and common sense” was the theme the Republican Party settled on that year. In all areas he would work to prevent incursions by the government into the private sector. And above all, he would fight on savings and taxes. The prosperity his changes would yield represented his own dream, different from La Follette’s but still real.

A mighty factor in that prosperity, Henry Ford himself, had been trekking around New England that August with Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone. Ford, too, was probing the history of American growth, collecting arcana from the colonial time; recently he had purchased the colonial Wayside Inn in Massachusetts, whose innkeeper, it was said, had inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to write “Paul Revere’s Ride.” On August 19, Ford, Edison, and Firestone had made a trip from Ludlow up to Plymouth Notch, where the Colonel, Grace, and Coolidge had hosted them. Once again, Grace had been the bridge; she had especially charmed Edison, who was partially deaf, with her clear speech and lipreading. The Coolidges had come up with what seemed to them the most appropriate gift: an old maple sap bucket, large, with
J. COOLIDGE
burned on the bottom.

Coolidge inscribed his own note: “Made for and used by John Coolidge an original settler in Plymouth. He died in 1822. Used also by Calvin Coolidge as a boy in the sugar lot when he was a boy at home.” He then handed the bucket over. “My father had it, I’ve used it, and now you’ve got it,” he said. The sugar bucket symbolized the fertility of early America: it had been quaint, it had lived within the painful limits of its self-sufficiency, but it had also yielded all the rest. Photos of Ford, Edison, and Coolidge were sent around the world, to show foreign governments and U.S. citizens that Ford was behind Coolidge.

Ford was buying up all kinds of American relics to memorialize the country’s heroes. Lincoln, the single most important hero of the Republican Party, was also in Ford’s mind. Ford was also in negotiations to buy up a collection of Abraham Lincoln memorabilia, including the bed in which Lincoln had died and furniture from Lincoln’s life in Illinois. Osborn Oldroyd, the collector, was, however, rebuffing Ford; he wanted the government to buy the material. Two Congresses had turned down Oldroyd’s request; at a time of budgeting, the price he wanted for the memorabilia of the sixteenth president, $50,000, was too high.

The GOP planners and Coolidge were also thinking about Lincoln, but in the context of their political campaign. As striking as it was, the parallel of the death of Coolidge’s son and Lincoln’s was hardly appropriate as a theme for a political campaign; it was the broader party hero they and Coolidge needed to evoke. The Republican leaders decided to create a Coolidge-Dawes car caravan, featuring a Ford Lincoln, that would travel thousands of miles across the country on the national road that bore the sixteenth president’s name, the Lincoln Highway. The Lincoln was not a road that had been manufactured by the federal government; it had developed organically, as town after town put up money to pave a leg of it. The more they thought about it, the more splendid the Coolidge-Dawes Caravan on the Lincoln Highway seemed. It flattered and benefited the most important man to endorse the Coolidge candidacy, Henry Ford. The caravan brought to life not only Coolidge but also the story of American migration: a truck, starting out from Plymouth, featuring a photo of the Homestead on the side, would set out with other cars across the country.

Such an endeavor could get at the weakness in the allegation that the presidential candidate was from the city aristocracy and knew nothing of the farm. After all, Plymouth Notch did not differ from Primrose. And Coolidge’s great-grandparents Israel and Sally Brewer had come to Wisconsin just as La Follette’s family had and were buried in Hampden, Wisconsin, just one county over from Dane County, La Follette’s birthplace. Herb Moore, a distant relation of Coolidge and an old Black River Academy alumnus, leaped into the role of stump speaker and told in town after town of Coolidge’s rural beginnings. Moore was something of a carnival barker, but his points were good ones: not every farmer believed in easy money; the divide was there, just as it had been in Plymouth Notch itself in the old days. “Keep Cool with Coolidge” campaign cards featured pictures of electric fans. Standing on a two-wheel wooden oxcart, Colonel John would wave the caravan off. The vehicle would stop in Pennsylvania at Gettysburg, then head to Chicago, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco. The Republican Party hoped to marshal 200,000 cars to ride some portion of the long trip and advertise the Coolidge-Dawes ticket.

The Lincoln Highway Tour turned the disadvantage of Coolidge’s silence into an advantage; his retreat represented not weakness but dignity. Dawes too would do his part. His budget achievements were legendary; when he appeared, puffing his characteristic low-slung pipe, it was like a train engine arriving: exciting and full of energy. That Dawes was given to outbursts, that he was “Hell and Maria” Dawes, made him the optimal complement to the withdrawn, quiet Coolidge. The campaign’s advertising men, especially Edward Bernays, worked hard at presenting the team, and the Coolidges went along with the public relations effort. It was the price of campaigning, and they were all nearly as practiced as Will Rogers by now. However, Coolidge also worried that Dawes might make
too much
news or that his father might not understand how reporters could make something of nothing. When Dawes called at Plymouth and lunched with the Coolidges and Colonel Coolidge in the little dining room reporters were thrilled; Dawes was much more likely than Coolidge to do something attention-grabbing. As it happened, Colonel Coolidge was the first to leave the room, and a full thirty reporters jumped him when he emerged to find out if he had picked up any gossip between the two candidates within. The president was concerned his father would say something unplanned; “I asked him to say nothing,” he snapped at Dawes. He and Grace observed the reporters converge on the Colonel. “I don’t think you need worry,” Grace said. Later, Dawes did come out and asked the reporters what the senior Coolidge had said. “My hearing ain’t as good as it used to be,” they reported the Colonel as saying.

Back in Washington at the end of the month, the Coolidges and their son nonetheless found themselves playing host to Edward, Prince of Wales. Most of the papers reported it as a society event. The White House did not often receive such royalty, and the preparations were ferocious. The prince signaled that he would like the visit to be casual, but both Charles Hughes and Coolidge donned business suits. The Coolidges were still in mourning, so the prince arrived without other guests. When the prince arrived, he was in pinstripes; someone let Grace know that he had had the cuffs cut off his shirt because of the hot weather. “The poor prince,” Grace wrote to her sorority sisters. “Some day I will again be a humble citizen, while he can never be just himself.” Mrs. Coolidge tried to chat up the prince; there was no wine, of course, as Prohibition still prevailed. In the midst of the hoopla, John Coolidge had to join in the entertaining and learn to say “your royal highness,” with Grace. John was taller than the prince and shy; he would rather have retreated to the Navy Yard for tennis with Dr. Boone. He was still far from past his brother’s death. Ike Hoover, the usher, tried to make him laugh and put it all into perspective: “Well, he may be the Prince of Wales, but you’re the Prince of Plymouth.”

The usher had put his finger on something. The Prince of Wales was not in Washington to pull rank. He was there in part because he admired the United States: it was, as he had put it to his father, “a country in which nothing was impossible.” The United States seemed to be moving ahead of Great Britain; the year before, the U.S. Treasury, under Mellon, had renegotiated the United Kingdom’s war debt to the United States. The prince was also there as a mendicant. Great Britain was hoping to restore its old status by going back on the gold standard. First, though, it had to prove to the United States and to markets that it could pay back its loans. The recent agreements that Treasury and Dawes had arranged were tough, but the fact that they had been made would help Great Britain in its own campaign. And now the United States was negotiating with other countries. As its wealth and gold reserves grew, it might be able to afford easier terms to desperate foreign governments than it was giving Great Britain. The United States’ budgeting was a virtuous circle that would benefit Europe as well.

Coolidge made up his mind to stop his wanderings and stay in Washington. As he and Grace tried to settle in, he thought more about the budget numbers. Just as he had seen his thinking change when Harding introduced the goal of normalcy, he was feeling his thinking changing now. Sustaining the budget siege was necessary, just as had been written in the calendar beside his very first official appointment with General Lord, because of that crucial need to live by example. He and Mellon still saw their work as redeeming the trust of voters lost in the war; Mellon was trying to convince those who had hoarded silver coins to bring them out and spend them again. If Congress strayed, the administration needed to distinguish itself by remaining faithful to its promise of savings. General Lord was figuring out ways to save money on the costly bonus act; he had come up with an ingenious plan to use lighter paper for the instructions for soldiers, saving $33,000.

The disconcerting extra revenue kept popping up in the Treasury numbers, just as it had in September. Mellon and Coolidge began to work on their explanation for tax reform. Scientific taxation theory actually functioned: with lower rates you get more activity and therefore more revenue. When you dropped tax rates, people kept more of their business and sometimes
did
more business. Take away the car tax, and people would buy more cars. Lower rates meant that the economy would grow even faster than the revenues grew. One could look at the economy as a fraction. On top was the numerator, the government. On the bottom was the general economy, or “commerce,” as Coolidge called it. Coolidge had been focusing on the numerator, the government, making it smaller relative to commerce. But you could also get the same result by concentrating on the mysterious denominator. If commerce grew, while the government, the numerator, stayed the same, or grew less fast, the goal could be achieved, too. No one knew how much the economy would grow if rates were cut even farther than planned. The commerce, in the end, was the goal; that in turn would obviate the need for all the new legislation for the groups. If business was strong enough, the farmers might see prices go up; if trade was strong enough, soldiers could buy their own pensions. If commerce was strong enough, the endless pressure for new laws, as strong here as in Massachusetts, would relent. Here was one experiment an administration that so ostentatiously rejected government experiments, a party of normalcy, could embrace.