Coolidge (61 page)

Everyone seemed to want something of Lindbergh. The facts about him were shared like treasure: That his plane had flown faster than the experts expected. That, during his days barnstorming, he had learned that another pilot wanted to test a parachute by simply jumping from 1,500 feet; Lindbergh had devised a sandbag dummy to make the test safe. Word was that someone had checked with the Bureau of Internal Revenue as to whether a prize like Lindbergh’s might be subject to income tax. Embarrassed, Mellon’s staff had to report that the Orteig Award was subject to the levy. “It’s just something that can’t be helped,” said an anonymous bureau spokesman. “When we tax the money paid to a beauty contest winner, I don’t see how we can pass up the Lindbergh Prize.” Lindbergh owed $1,233.75 by the graduated code. Instantly, though, donors were there, offering to foot Lindy’s bill. In a cable, a Dallas man, William E. Easterwood, Jr., offered to pay the amount so that “the kid can have every cent of the prize money.”

Nor would the enthusiasm abate after Lindbergh departed Washington. Hoover was trying to lure him to the Department of Commerce. Lindbergh thought that instead he might embark on a new cross-country tour to promote aeronautics. The tour was to be subsidized by a charity, the Daniel Guggenheim Foundation for the Promotion of Aeronautics, and between flights Lindbergh could work on his autobiography. Lindbergh wanted to capture not only the flight but also his specific analysis of the industry: that planes were so dangerous because the military had crafted them first, and that the design had been for war, not safety; that U.S. civil aviation suffered the disadvantage of lacking much support in the past, but that this very absence might prove an advantage in the future. “Now that the public is realizing its value and is supporting it, commercial flying will grow rapidly,” Lindbergh predicted.

As soon as the Lindberghs departed, the Coolidges began to plan out their summer. They would leave shortly, and John would join them later in the Black Hills. Coolidge wrote him a friendly letter, letting John know that “we were pleased you did well this year.” John was heading up to summer school at Burlington, and Coolidge wanted him to stop at Plymouth to check up on their house and farm. It was not yet clear whether Coolidge himself would make it to Vermont at all that year.

Though the Coolidges could not know all the details, South Dakota that month was engaging in its wild preparations, not as large as those for Lindbergh in Washington but still, by Black Hills standards, fit for a king. The sculptor Borglum was laying wires and hiring men to display his presidential monument; his federal funding, after all, remained only a promise from Mellon that Coolidge and Lord might yet kill in one of their sessions. The town of Rapid City was readying an office for Coolidge at its high school; Coolidge’s private secretary, Everett Sanders, would get his own place in the principal’s room. A private telephone line from the school building to the lodge had gone in, and a telegraph wire from the school to Washington. The road from the presidential office at Rapid City to his lodge was rough, and state surveyors were in a quandary; they did not have time to survey and grade it before Coolidge’s arrival. Grade the road without the surveyors, Governor William Bulow had ordered. The South Dakota prep work was also culinary. Seventy-five chickens were being nourished on a special diet of milk and fine grain, so that the fried chicken dinner to be made for the president and other guests at an agricultural picnic in mid-July would please the presidential palate. But it was to fishing that the Dakotans gave the most attention. In their enthusiastic promotions, they feared, they had created a trap for themselves. They had to deliver the fishing trip to end all trips. Yet Coolidge, unlike Dawes or Hoover, remained the most basic of fishermen, and the Dakota fish had earned fame for their wiliness. “We knew that he never would be able to catch one of our Black Hills trout,” Governor Bulow later recalled. Colluding with gamesmen from all over the region, Bulow and his fish warden hatched a plan. As far away as Omaha, night crawlers had been fed on their own special diet, milk and oatmeal, so that worms twelve inches long would bait the presidential hook. At the state’s Spearfish Hatchery swam thousands of ancient, fat trout, fish so domesticated they could hardly be likened to the wild trout of the stream. Some of them were fifteen years old. The warden’s deputies netted hundreds of the hatchery fish and put them into trucks, then transported them by night to the president’s pond. They also stretched a wire net at each end of Squaw Creek, where the president would fish, and unloaded the hatchery trout between nets. Squaw Creek would give the president the finest trout fishing ground in the world. “Those trout would fight and battle one another to see which one could grab the President’s hook first,” Governor Bulow predicted. To show their respect, the hosts even renamed the creek after Grace Coolidge.

The reason for the frenzy was something the Coolidges had not yet themselves fully taken in. Coolidge too had become a symbol—similar, in many minds, as improbable as it seemed, to Lindbergh. “Maybe we can get Cal to fly to the Black Hills,” mused Rogers aloud in his column. Coolidge’s achievements seemed to many worthy of emulation. Republicans looked likely to win the presidential election in 1928. When asked to rank which national issues mattered for the party, party members placed “continuation of Coolidge policies” ahead of “economy in government,” They placed “economy in government” ahead of tax cuts or tariffs. If the policies of Coolidge continued long enough, Republicans believed, as with aviation, the remotest corners of the country, the tiniest village, could at last be reached.

Even at last Plymouth Notch. Late in July, the storekeeper Florence Cilley’s ward Violet, one of the girls in the village, discovered something strange: a paper that had apparently fallen from the sky. She picked it up and found a greeting from Colonel Lindbergh, addressed to “The City of Plymouth.” Lindbergh himself had dropped it from his monoplane as he toured, passing Plymouth on his way to Bellows Falls and Keene. The ribbon in the sky that landed on the ground of the village that the railroad had passed told of something more than flying. Commerce could do anything and touch any place now that it was, finally, aloft.

Thirteen
: Decision at Rushmore

South Dakota

IT WAS ONE THING
to hear tell of Gutzon Borglum, and another to hear him with your own ears. The roar of his jackhammers cut through the forests above the mining town of Keystone. The jackhammers were drilling holes into some of the oldest granite in the world, preparing to carve the faces of the country’s great presidents out of a great wall of stone. The dynamite broke up the rock so that more work could proceed. If Borglum finished, Mount Rushmore would be the greatest monument ever constructed in America—the presidents chiseled from head to waist, the figures in the rock on a larger scale than the Statue of Liberty. The finished group, Borglum said, would be 465 feet tall, 150 feet taller than the lady with the lamp. In the images in the newspapers, Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln held their heads together and overlooked the hills. The granite there was harder than the granite of Vermont. The weather was such that Borglum could work only a few months a year. The geologists estimated that a millennium could pass before the wind eroded even an inch from Jefferson’s chin or Lincoln’s brow. If Borglum could be sustained in the job, the undertaking would be completed and the presidential profiles would slice into eternity.

But only if Borglum stayed.

“Only if” was also the sentiment of many Americans about Coolidge that summer of 1927. They wanted Coolidge, the trusted pilot. Even with another Republican at the helm, the prosperity might stall. Fortunately, the president seemed willing to run again. If anything, this western trip to the Black Hills, where Borglum drilled, was proving that. The best test of any candidate’s goodwill was how he chose to deal with his party’s largest problem: in the Republicans’ case, reconciling western farmers and eastern manufacturers. Reconciling in turn would be easy if he could win the hearts of the westerners. That was exactly what Coolidge had begun to do the moment his train, complete with Mrs. Coolidge, five canaries, two dogs, Rebecca the raccoon, Miss Riley, and dozens of aides, rolled out of Union Station. He may have irritated Boston and New York by situating the summer White House farther west than any preceding president had dared to.

“Never so far off,”
The New York Times
commented acidly. But even in the first few hours of his ride, he found thousands of new fans. At Hammond, Indiana, a smoky steel town known for angry strikes, 50,000 people showed up to hear Coolidge lecture on the tame conservative topic of religious faith—and applauded. One of Coolidge’s tasks was to highlight the fact that farms were doing somewhat better; commodity prices were up. Another was to show that while all Americans came from a farm, not all of them had to stay there. In Minnesota the president asked a man how the crops were. It turned out that the man was a car salesman. The president’s error caused general amusement, but it also underscored his point. As the train crossed into South Dakota, “the state turned into a 400-mile cheering section,”
Time
magazine reported. Five thousand supporters greeted the Coolidges in Huron; Mrs. Coolidge chatted up those who gathered near the train and was given peonies.

At Pierre, amid yet more crowds, the train halted, so that the governor, William Bulow, might show the president around the capital. This was an unexpectedly hot and noisy diversion on a day when Coolidge was hoping to get to the hills and his cool lodge retreat. Bulow, a Democrat, had plenty to say about the Grand Old Party policies, but at first he found Coolidge’s famous silence disconcerting. The president’s first question, when he finally asked one, sounded to Bulow like a trap: how did South Dakota enforce Prohibition?

“Pretty well, but not absolutely,” Bulow finally replied, a response crafted to evade legal trouble but also to elicit more conversation. That did not come. But Bulow saw that Coolidge took in what he said. The crowds chattered and shouted around them. Sitting with Coolidge, Bulow found, one began to fall into Coolidge’s rhythm. After more silence, Coolidge inquired about the population of Pierre. Thirty-five hundred, Bulow estimated. Well, said Coolidge, they must be about all out.

In Rapid City, the people in the next crowd craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the Coolidges disembarking. The first thing the Dakotans could see was the white paws of the collies as they climbed out of the railroad car. Then came the Coolidges themselves. Joining them was Senator Norbeck, who had boarded the train at the state line. In moments, the raindrops stopped, and the sun cut through the clouds. The cameras clicked, catching the light on the presidential pair. The crowd around them waved flags and offered gifts. Mrs. Coolidge was given Canterbury bells and roses. Upon inspection, the Dakotans decided that the easterners, the Coolidges, did not look so different from themselves. For all the talk about eastern banks, a place like Vermont was where many of them had come from. The granite here might be older than the granite of Vermont, but granite was granite. Here gold fever had come and gone; it had done the same in little Plymouth. Here farming was a challenge; that was even truer, of course, in Plymouth. The president, word already had it, planned to visit with relatives, Brewer cousins, who had settled in Fulton, South Dakota. Reconciliation came more easily than all had thought. The Coolidges and the Dakotans might have been eyeing one another for the first time. But they didn’t merely meet. They recognized each other.

Looking around at the ungraded roads, the Coolidges saw that their visit was a crucial one for the South Dakota economy. With automobile tourism just beginning, it was important for a place like the Black Hills to get its bid in early. First, though, the state needed some attractions. Borglum’s sculpture would be one. The ability to claim that the Black Hills had been the site of a presidential visit was another. If investors and tourists knew about South Dakota, then there would be money for the roads or electricity that South Dakota needed to host them. The Coolidge stay was an opportunity for Senator Norbeck to win federal support for South Dakota’s state parks, including Harney Park, on whose acreage the game sat. Every gain tourism made meant that farming’s troubles would matter less.

The Dakotans were relieved to see that the first couple understood that. Grace praised everything at the lodge, especially the foliage. Coolidge patronized the local tobacco shop, J. H. Roberts, in Rapid City. Miss Riley placed her orders with the Black Hills grocery. When Prudence Prim, the female collie, fell ill, the Coolidges sent her off to Fort Meade for care. Churches were important for tourists. The Coolidges made their way to the Congregational church in Hermosa, a simple clapboard structure, which, the photos showed, differed not so much from the Houses of God in Vermont. A twenty-year-old student preacher, Rolf Lium, happened to be preaching his first sermon on June 19. The eighty-four citizens of the town showed up, many in Model T’s, to greet the Coolidges and attend church with them. Grace’s strong soprano could be heard clearly on Sundays thereafter, and the ladies noted that the first lady knew her hymns.

Crucial for South Dakota’s future was that the president display enthusiasm for trout fishing, the key attraction in the state’s new tourism drive. Here Coolidge got off to a slow start, trying it out hastily one day in his business suit before departing in a hurry to his office in Rapid City. But soon after, he tried again, and the results made it to the table at the lodge. “Exactly what I like,” he pronounced gratifyingly upon eating a breakfast of his first catch and touring the area. The next trips to Grace Coolidge Creek were more leisurely, and the papers reported each visit. “President fishes a second time,” the headlines cheered. Even Grace, they were proud to announce, was trying fishing, along with the Secret Service man Jim Haley. By now Haley, like Starling, had been with the Coolidges for four years. Reporters noted that unlike the president, Grace baited her own hook.