Coolidge (7 page)

With no exit, though, he gradually pulled himself together. There were bright points if you looked for them. Coolidge’s work in mathematics was good enough for him to move up a level. Though he was not chosen to speak at the freshman dinner, his recitations in class didn’t go too badly. Politics somehow afforded distraction from loneliness. The local Republicans were beginning to catch his eye. He saw that they and other parties advertised; even college boys hung out signs reading “Womens’ Rights and Free Cider” or “Free Silver and Non Compulsory Church”—an appealing idea at a school where chapel was mandatory. His stepmother kindly sent him graham crackers and jelly, which he shared with his roommate, Alfred Turner; together he and Turner even decorated, putting up a curtain at the door to insulate their room. There was even the possibility, but just that, of a fraternity membership; a senior, Charles Stebbins, asked if he would join a new fraternity, Phi Gamma Delta, which was establishing a chapter. Coolidge, timid, offered one of his ambivalent answers: “I don’t know but I would.” The possibility faded. Still, he determined that he would loyally follow Amherst sports and began to report scores and stories of games back to his father. Somehow the dread second half of freshman year finished. He had not succeeded, but he had not failed; five or six men left the college, but he was not one of them.

Though Coolidge was an ouden at school, he was somebody at home, and that summer Plymouth welcomed him back and did its part to cheer up its native son. Dell Ward, an old friend, was there waiting for him; the two plotted to steal the old cannon back from Plymouth Union, where it had been for the year, and succeeded, at 3:00
A.M.
, in moving the weapon and its carriage up the hill to their own village. His fellow villagers invited him to speak, another boost, and Coolidge took the challenge of oratory seriously, preparing a rousing speech: “Roll on America! Roll on, bearing rich blessings with o’erflowering hand through the endless ages of all eternity.” The cannon he carefully dismantled and hid under his grandmother Moor’s bed.

Back in the autumn, he found Trott’s discombobulated, with twenty-six boarders, often strangers, eating at different times; he still sometimes had to eat alone. He decided to move to shift his meal place. It didn’t hurt matters that the price was cheaper: $3.50 a week instead of $3.75. The proprietors of the new place were black: “They are coons,” he wrote in the language of the day. He wrote also, in regard to football, that “our best man of last year” was now playing football for Harvard, advantaging Harvard. “He is a negro by the name of Lewis.” This was William Lewis, who was now studying law at Harvard. Calvin was endeavoring to talk more of “we” and “us” to try to find ways into the community.

But the community was not ready for him. Beyond Turner, his roommate, and a few others, it was still hard to make contact. He noticed a lack of resilience in himself. Other students, such as Dwight Morrow, seemed to be able to turn circumstances to their own favor in a way Calvin could not. When he compared his Amherst progress with theirs, he fell short. Coolidge wrote home asking for money: there was scarcely a letter to Plymouth, in fact, that did not contain some kind of request for cash: “I think I forgot to mention in my last letter the gymnasium uniform that I have to get, each man is measured the first of the term and they send off and get the uniforms made, they are eleven dollars.”

Morrow, by contrast, had taken on the task of finding cash himself, in part by borrowing from his soldier brother, in part through tutoring in math, and, eventually, by winning cash prizes. What money Morrow took from his father he considered not a gift but rather a loan, borrowed “off Papa.” Coolidge’s own arm had healed well enough from a boyhood break, and he stood, as Hitchcock had noted, slightly above average height. Morrow was decisively short; one of his arms bent oddly, the result of a fall from an apple tree when he was twelve. Another student, Mortimer Schiff, handed down shirts to Morrow, but the shirts bore Schiff’s monogram, “MLS.” Morrow’s mother asked what the letters stood for. “Morrow’s Little Shirts,” her son told her blithely. Morrow had a way of turning disadvantage to advantage, of pushing on, so that people admired his humor and pluck. Even in politics, Morrow seemed to move ahead fast. It was Morrow, not Coolidge, who went onto the board of the new Republican Club.

His sophomore year, Coolidge took Greek, rhetoric, German, and analytic geometry. He had not yet conquered the undergraduate challenge of managing time and sleep. William Tyler, his Greek teacher, was famous; that was the last year he would teach “Demosthenes on the Crown.” Coolidge wrote home drily that if Demosthenes’ speeches were the best to be found, the world had not made much progress in rhetoric in the two millennia since he had spoken. He sometimes could not stay awake in the class. An anonymous classmate published a rhyme in
The Olio
, the yearbook:

The class in Greek was going on

Old Ty a lecture read.

And in the row in front there shone

Fair Coolidge’s golden head.

His pate was bent upon the seat

in front of him; his hair

Old Tyler’s feeble gaze did meet

With fierce and ruddy glare

O’ercome by mystic sense of dread

Old Ty his talk did lull—

“Coolidge, I wish you’d raise your head

I can’t talk through your skull!”

Though he may have slept, Coolidge was coming to value his teacher’s lectures and discovered a new blessing; these courses, heavy in logic, focused him. He was beginning to plan instead of merely to react: he posted a paper on the wall to remind himself when homework was due. Perhaps too the subject matter compelled him. Like Coolidge, Demosthenes had started out sickly. He had even spoken with a lisp. He had become a great orator notwithstanding. Demosthenes’ rebellion against the kings paralleled the rebellion of Calvin’s own forefathers against England.

In the fall of 1892, politics were also heating up, and that cheered him on. He knew his father supported Benjamin Harrison, who had endorsed a strong tariff that included protection for wool. This time he was able to take in the national questions, along with the Vermont ones. After a boom, prices for steel were coming down. Carnegie Steel in Pennsylvania had cut wages significantly, by 20 to 40 percent. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers struck at Carnegie Steel’s Homestead Plant over wages; then the strike broadened. This wage issue was a new one: before such big factories had been established, workers hadn’t been able to compare salaries easily. The companies, led by Henry Clay Frick, the chairman of Carnegie Steel, saw the outcome at Homestead as crucial: if they could not cut wages when they needed to, they believed, they would not survive, especially if the 1890 tariff was repealed. By the summer of 1892, eighty thousand men west of the Allegheny had laid down their tools. With the aid of the state militia, the steel company broke the strike, but only after Alexander Berkman, an anarchist, found his way into Frick’s office, shot him three times, and stabbed him for good measure. Frick survived, but the horrifying event shocked all. Coolidge doubtless followed the story, even from Plymouth Notch. After the Homestead strike was settled—the company won a bitter victory—the papers carried stories of Berkman’s trial and conviction, as well as his association with a flamboyant woman anarchist, Emma Goldman. Depending on whom you talked to, that was the problem of either Harrison’s predecessor, Grover Cleveland, or Harrison himself.

Harrison was a big spender; under him, the federal budget had reached a million dollars for the first time. Harrison also supported tariffs. Cleveland campaigned against the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, passed in 1890, blaming it for instability; by expanding the money base beyond gold, he alleged, the Harrison administration had set the stage for a panic. Americans were choosing to redeem their new silver money for gold, which in turn was reducing the gold supply and forcing a contraction upon the economy. At Yale, which Amherst played against in football, there was a professor, William Graham Sumner, who was laying out the argument against protectionism. But Cleveland was living it.

In addition, the political experts noted, Cleveland was a champion of the so-called pocket veto, refusing to sign a bill until Congress adjourned, at which point it died. A regular veto could be overridden, but not a pocket veto. With a pocket veto, the executive enjoyed the additional advantage that he might veto without the usual enumeration of his objections. It took an aggressive, even bloody-minded, president to reject Congress’s work in that way. Cleveland had vetoed more than four hundred bills, many of them individual favors, such as pensions to veterans.

The professors at Amherst cast their vote—for stability, the gold standard, free trade, and Cleveland.
The New York Times
reported that “[of] the thirty-three professors constituting the Faculty of Amherst college, seven are for Harrison and twenty-three for Cleveland.” The Amherst fans included Edward Dickinson; David Todd; John Bates Clark, who would become famous for his economic theories; George Olds, a new math professor from Rochester who was already a favorite of the students; and Anson Morse, the college’s expert in politics. Some of the professors felt strongly enough to write a public letter supporting Cleveland and send it to the
Times
. “We remember his tariff message, his pension vetoes, and his letter against free silver as conspicuous instances of disregarding personal considerations for the public good,” they wrote.

Harrison lost to Cleveland, a shock to the student body of Amherst, which was more Republican than its teachers. On November 17, 1892, Coolidge wrote to his grandmother to report, “The democrats have a celebration here this evening and I shall go out to see some of it.” Coolidge’s letters home were fast shifting from accounts of homesickness to discursive analyses of politics. After the election he wrote to John about the fickleness of the voter, “The result of the election was as much a surprise to the Democrats here as to the Republicans, and nobody seems able to account for it satisfactorily yet. I do not think it much use to blame Chairman Carter [Thomas Henry Carter, the chairman of the Republican National Committee] or the tariff or the Homestead affair, the reason seems to be in the never satisfied mind of the American and in the ever desire to shift in hope of something better and in the vague idea of the working and farming classes that somebody is getting all the money while they get all the work.”

AS THE YEARS PASSED,
the student’s confidence grew. The oudens formed their own society. The first of Coolidge’s new friends was John Percy Deering from Saco, Maine, another rural New England Republican and a prominent football player. In early 1893, Coolidge moved with Deering and another man into Morse’s boardinghouse, closer to campus. A second new friend was Ernest Hardy of Northampton, the county seat, the boy who, Dr. Hitchcock had noted, was the largest in the class. He was an ouden, most likely, out of economy. Together Hardy and Coolidge were a noticeable pair, the heavy and the thin. It was to Hardy’s town, Northampton, that Coolidge went on errands; Hardy introduced him around. Coolidge found a cobbler on Gothic Street he liked, James Lucey, an Irishman with a growing family who had arrived from County Kerry in 1880. Lucey had bought a home but was still paying off the mortgage. Coolidge noticed how hard Lucey worked. Like Coolidge’s father, Lucey derived pride from crafting his work and told Calvin that the best way to secure a good future was to deliver quality.

As an undergraduate Coolidge also attended lectures by traveling experts, sometimes about religion and often about economics. Such excursions into the real world fortified the oudens, reminding them that college joy was ephemeral in any case. To boys such as Hardy and Deering “town”—the municipality—meant more than “gown”: campus life. Deering later recalled in a newspaper interview that during the holidays they “used to visit each other and work on each other’s place. It’s always more fun for a boy to work on someone else’s place, you know.” On and off Deering and Hardy ate with the brothers of the fraternity Beta Theta Pi. Shortly, Deering and Hardy were approached about entering Beta Theta Pi. Hardy said “yes,” but Deering asked whether Coolidge might join as well. The Beta Theta Pi brothers, however, including Dwight Morrow, did not want to include Coolidge. Morrow made it explicit that he was unwilling to take the oddball. Deering refused to join without Calvin. The two stayed proud oudens.

In 1893, an incident at the college called to mind why one might be ambivalent about joining other boys in fraternity-style fun. After the annual freshman dinner, some students in the class had fallen into “the meshes of the law” and “were forced to give up a small quantity of plunder in the shape of porcelain and gilt letters which they had taken from the store windows,”
The Amherst Student
reported. Such activity was not unusual. There was a tradition at Amherst of the sophomores preventing the freshmen class from having their picture taken; several years later the sophomores would break up a photo session of freshmen so violently that the photographer sued for damages; he was represented by the firm of the two Amherst grads in Northampton, Hammond and Field. Coolidge did not join in the small-time looting; he already deemed himself as much town as gown. As the son of a shop owner, he could see, too, that that year, merchants could ill afford extra costs. Banks were failing all over the country. National Cordage, the most actively traded stock at the time, went into receivership. The supply of gold the Treasury held dropped below $100 million for the first time since 1879. In Massachusetts employment figures were added up for industrial plants. In April 1893, the plants employed 320,000. By September, that number was 248,000, a drop of more than 20 percent. Students could see with their own eyes that people were losing jobs and walking away from their homes rather than paying their mortgages. In Boston, R. H. Stearns, the department store run by Frank Stearns, the devoted Amherst alumnus, was hosting a fire sale on black clothing: “When we planned to alter our store we intended to very much enlarge our black goods department and so gave much larger importation orders than usual. Now that we are compelled to give up the changes for the present, we are left with this large stock.” At Amherst and other colleges, currency crowded out all other topics. William Graham Sumner of Yale was lecturing that this crisis was not a bank or a market crisis at all but a currency crisis actually caused, in good measure, by the very step meant to mitigate it, the 1890 Silver Act.