Coolidge (14 page)

Instead of putting them off, their differences drew them together. There were also some similarities beneath the surface. The two were both Vermonters who had traveled down the Connecticut to Northampton. The Goodhues were descended from Puritans as well; William Goodhue had emigrated from England in 1636, and, as was the case in Calvin’s family, had made his way to Vermont via Massachusetts. One of Grace’s ancestors had represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate shortly after Vermont had reluctantly become a state. Grace’s father, an electrical engineer, had owned a machine shop on Maple Street. He had also, like John, done his time as a public bureaucrat.

Captain Goodhue, as he was known, had served as inspector of the steamboats on Lake Champlain from 1888 to 1920. Grace’s name was not so different from his sister’s, Abigail Gratia. To Calvin, getting to know Grace felt like getting to know someone he already knew. Weir told a joke about the match: Miss Goodhue had taught the deaf to hear; now she might be able to teach the mute to speak.

And speak now he did, both in person and in letters on stationery bearing his name, in curlicue Art Nouveau lettering. The tone was both romantic and peremptory. “My dear Miss Goodhue:—As I am not quite certain what you decided about the Colonial Reception, I think I will tell you that you may expect me to call for you about a quarter before eight Tuesday evening,” he wrote on June 6, 1904. “Now I shall not be happy if you do not go.” And then: “My dear Miss Goodhue, The mosquitoes, have you recovered from them yet?”

Suddenly he was going to events or places he had skipped before. He took her up to Mount Tom and bought her a keepsake, a little plate. For her, he agreed to ice-skate, though he had always preferred the more forgiving snow sport of “sliding” (sledding); the fleet Grace left him behind on the ice. Around the time Grace and Calvin got to know each other, Northampton marked its 250th anniversary. The commercial town born of Jonathan Edwards’s Puritanism and idealism saw no contradiction in sermonizing at parties. The celebrations included a loud parade a full two miles long and choral performances of “To Thee O Country” and “Auld Lang Syne” by Smith girls. The great novelty was the illumination of the town, made possible by the recent arrival of electricity. The little courthouse fountain Coolidge often passed now lit up. Rahar’s Inn, where Coolidge liked to dine, featured a flashy electric sign reading “Down where the Wurzburger flows.” Murray Crane had served as governor for several years, but now John Lewis Bates, a Boston Republican, held the post. Bates delivered a fire-and-brimstone speech entitled “Is It All Evil?” In one room at a Daughters of the American Revolution event Calvin and Grace attended, two elegant chairs stood invitingly ready. Calvin and Grace, both descendants of revolutionaries, sat in them. An usher ordered them up, remonstrating that the chairs were reserved for Governor Bates and his wife.

The governor might have seemed like royalty, but the newspapers knew he was mired in a difficult controversy. One of the oddities of Massachusetts at the time was that the governor, rather than the mayor of Boston, appointed the Boston police commissioner. Bates’s appointees at the police department were contested by the policemen, many of whom believed the state and commissioner discriminated against the Irish population of the city. That was the sort of issue even Northampton politicians confronted. They not only had to hire police, they had to promote them and keep them happy.

But for now Coolidge’s focus was not municipal policy; it was Miss Goodhue. Catching some of the city’s festive spirit, he invited her to a meal a week after the Northampton anniversary: “Miss Boyden has promised to make us a nice old fashioned strawberry shortcake and have it ready to serve Tuesday evening about six o’clock, after we have eaten the appropriate courses leading to it. I don’t just dare to turn you loose on a whole meal of short cake! . . . Besides I shall be very glad to see you, so you must not let anything interfere when I call for you.” It appears that the cake date was a success; within a few days he was writing again: “You made Tuesday evening so pleasant for me that I am wondering when I may come back.” By July, just after his birthday, things had gotten more intimate: “How like yourself your letters are—and you, you are like the morning in my own Green Hills and I am afraid I shall not get to Vermont.”

That summer of 1904 the beguiling teacher returned to Vermont for a holiday. He discovered that even from long distance, she cheered him. Carrie Coolidge was ill, and now he had a friend to share his concerns with, even to take advice from: “I know I ought to go home to see my mother, she is not very well this summer. Perhaps I will since you recommend it.” His golf practice was covered in those letters, but with none of the grimness that had come through earlier: “I am very busy at the golf club. I can hit the ball now and do not have as much trouble losing it.”

Work and politics took his attention as well. George Hoar, the old senator, died that September, and Bates named Crane to replace Hoar in Washington. “He will not be an orator as Hoar was or a scholar in politics as his colleague Mr. Lodge,” commented
Congregationalist and Christian World
in describing Crane, “but he will bring things to pass.” The new chairman of the Republican Party of Northampton—Coolidge—noticed that taciturnity had lifted Crane to the national stage.

Tariffs to protect New England businesses were the focus of Crane’s work; the more pro-tariff men in Washington, the safer New England factories would be. James Burton Reynolds, a Dartmouth man and political figure in Massachusetts, would shortly go to Washington as assistant secretary of the Treasury; Reynolds’s duty was also to ensure that New England was protected. Reynolds would hang a picture of the first customhouse in Yorktown, Virginia, on the wall of his office. At a time when tariffs were the greatest source of revenue for the federal government, Reynolds’s job was a mighty one. In 1907 the federal budget was less than $1 billion; his office alone collected $350 million in tariffs.

In the autumn of 1904, Roosevelt, the incumbent, stood a good chance of beating the Democrat Alton Brooks Parker, and he let the country know that he knew it. Coolidge’s confidence in his own campaign seemed to parallel that of Roosevelt in his. “My dear Miss Goodhue,” he wrote, “It is very nice of you to promise to show me places of interest about here, those that keep people from church. I’ll confess I am not very familiar with them but you—you can show me. . . . I have half a bushel of butternuts and tomorrow when you are reading this or when you are sitting with as much dignity as you can in the deacon’s pew I shall be eating and eating. Canst crack the butternut?” And also: “My Dear Miss Goodhue, How is it you are always so ready when I ask you for anything?”

By the end of September, the tone became more intimate: “Since I left you on Wednesday evening I have been thinking of what a delicious merry looking bundle you were. And now I will tell you something. I want to see you again. That’s really true. . . . Will you come to the golf club Saturday afternoon. . . . Will you listen for the telephone?” And in October, he was courting her in the familiar language of contract: “A source of regret to me that I did not remind you that you owed me a note—in fact several and I find you are slow in replying. Well if you are you have so many other credits I am sure I am your debtor—bankrupt. If you will come in and see me some day perhaps I will make your will—you may bring Miss Willoughby for a witness.”

As the autumn progressed, President Roosevelt’s rhetoric became ever surer; thousands of college students cheered him at Madison Square Garden; it was clear that his victory was ensured. Coolidge’s confidence in his campaign for Grace also mounted: “You must come—my bowling party is not complete without you.” He sought, above all, more time from Grace, that she might consider his virtues from every angle. “Sometimes I think,” he wrote on November 6, 1904, “the best part of having you with me is after you are gone. For it is only when I am alone again that I realize how much pleasure you really made for me and remember that I express so little of it to you at parting. . . . if
you
gave me much practice I
might
learn to do a
little
better.”

Two days after Coolidge’s suit for more time, the nation gave Theodore Roosevelt the time he sought with 56.4 percent of the vote. It felt good, TR would allow, to win “in my own right.” In 1904, the country seemed to think it was good that Roosevelt had won, too. In March 1905, the Dow Jones Industrial Average approached the 80 mark for the first time, and Roosevelt was inaugurated, promising that he would not run again; this full term, plus the time he had served after McKinley’s death, was enough. One of the first things Roosevelt did, on March 17, was to preside over the wedding of his niece, Eleanor Roosevelt, and her fifth cousin once removed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The ebullient Teddy overwhelmed the young Roosevelts and so starred at their event that they were overshadowed. But such behavior was not unusual for Theodore, as his daughter, Alice, would comment later: “He wanted to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening.” People noticed that the Roosevelts took over the White House and also that they kept wonderful pets there: when Archie, their son, was sick, the attendant even took the pony Algonquin up in the elevator to visit him.

Roosevelt warned that big business, especially railroads, was taking away from the rest. Of that Coolidge was not so sure. His own work was still largely the work of representing individual businesses in town. Business was going well now, and he could see that laws themselves could sometimes hinder commerce. Business needed freedom to pursue its own course. A transfer student at Amherst, Bruce Barton, the son of a minister from Illinois, was making a similar discovery in the same years. Barton was doing fine at Amherst but felt himself “too poor to be particularly happy.” Unlike Coolidge before him, Barton ambitiously sought off-campus work. He noted that college men “averse to intimate contact with irate old men and bulldogs” didn’t like working as door-to-door salesmen. But Barton gave it a try, vending aluminum pans to housewives. The dream of Coolidge’s classmates in the Mellon venture had taken hold: people were taking to the new product. Davis’s efforts were paying off, yet men like Roosevelt might merely regard aluminum as a trust to be dismantled.

In Northampton, the population of immigrants was swelling, and that was true in other towns as well. What might be the best future for those souls? Coolidge believed that education was the best start. That year Coolidge’s Home Culture Club achieved a coup when Andrew Carnegie, its great donor, paid a visit. With Carnegie money, Cable had purchased a pillared mansion on Northampton’s Gothic Street, just a few doors down from James Lucey. Carnegie was Judge Forbes writ large, the emblem of what private charity could do. To Coolidge, who had made himself a lawyer in a library, it all made sense; in 1905, he became the Home Culture Club’s secretary.

What was the future of the kind of laborer who went to the Home Culture Club? Was it all right for unions to organize him? The Supreme Court apparently didn’t think so; in late spring 1905, the justices reviewed
Lochner v. New York
, a case of a baker in Utica who would not follow the state’s laws when it came to his contracts with his workers, allowing them to work more than the state-mandated maximum of ten hours per day and sixty hours per week. The Court found that Joseph Lochner and his employees had been within their rights when they had signed their contracts. The employer and employee in their relations were not to be intruded upon. The state law, the Supreme Court held, impinged upon a right to be found in the Fourteenth Amendment, the write to “life, liberty and property.” The decision was written by Rufus Peckham, a justice who had himself read law in New York State.

But not everyone agreed. “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common,” read the manifesto of a new group of radical workers founded that same month of June 1905 in Chicago. The Industrial Workers of the World saw trouble ahead: “There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.” In the court itself the finding was only 5–4, and Justice Holmes dissented. At Harvard Law School, Felix Frankfurter had just been named editor of the
Harvard Law Review
. He snapped awake at the separate dissent by Justice Holmes. Holmes’s view was that the majority justices were putting their politics above the law; “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics,” he said cuttingly.

Still, the differences among political men and women did not seem to matter as much as the economic growth, which was considerable. The cities were growing. “The most distinctive characteristic of our American cities is their newness,” an illustrator, Frederick Knab, wrote in a book published that decade celebrating Northampton. The railroads were growing, and there were other, newer forms of transport. Some of the changes were harder for the older generations to take. Young men had always disturbed the peace of Northampton, but now they were doing so with a new and infuriating intrusion: the automobile. One Sunday evening in May 1905, a young man who gave his name as William S. McClintock drove a car on a joyride on Northampton’s Elm Street. Coolidge’s old boss John Hammond witnessed the ride. He made a furious report to the city on the heedless joyrider. McClintock poured salt on Hammond’s wound when he responded to Hammond’s inquiry with a curt reply: “None of your business.” Coolidge represented McClintock, who paid a $50 fine. Nor were the new cars the whole story. People were constantly experimenting with flight. That October, Wilbur Wright would make the Wrights’ longest controlled flight to date, 24.2 miles in thirty-eight minutes at Huffman Prairie Flying Field near Dayton, Ohio.

Calvin took Grace to see his father and his grandmother in Plymouth. He showed her all the beauties of his Green Mountains and the corners of his town. The houses were more primitive than those of Burlington, where Mrs. Goodhue had long since retired the kerosene lamps to the top shelf. But Grace liked Plymouth, and both the Colonel and Aunt Mede liked Grace. “That’s a likely girl,” the grandmother said, high praise from Plymouth. Coolidge returned so merry that even newspaper editors noted it, reporting that the lawyer in the Masonic Block had had an “excellent” vacation.