Coolidge (19 page)

At this juncture Coolidge’s father provided perspective. So many years after his service in the Vermont lower chamber, John Coolidge was making a comeback: he had been nominated by the Republican Party as the candidate for state senator. That meant they both might serve at the same time. On September 6, 1910, Coolidge wrote to congratulate him: “When this reaches you I suppose you will be duly chosen a Senator for Vermont.” Coolidge proffered some advice for his father: “You will not find any one at Montpelier who is better qualified to legislate than you are. You need not hesitate to give the other members your views on any subject that arises.” Then came another thought that was uniquely Coolidge: “It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.” He was, like McCall, beginning to see the extent of the damage that bad legislation could do.

Vermont elections fell early, that same month, before the ice set in. His father won, and to the tiring Coolidges of Northampton, that victory almost sufficed. To celebrate, Calvin and Grace took their sons to visit his father, the senator, in Montpelier. John Coolidge’s assigned seat in the Vermont State House was number 13, way off on the side of the Senate chamber, to the far right of the president; he was one of thirty senators, ten fewer than in Boston. He lived at one of the Vermont equivalents of the Adams House, Montpelier House, and listed himself in the 1910 directory as Baptist. If John was sitting in the Senate, he was “sitting in the seats of the mighty,” as Grace Coolidge put it, and little John ought to see it as he had seen his father and the stuffed catamount on the wall in Montpelier.

There were so many parallels between their lives. His father’s service record was impressive: he had served as a school director for nine years, a justice of the peace for sixteen, and a constable and tax collector for thirty-three. Calvin was a director at the Nonotuck Savings Bank; John was vice president of the Ludlow Savings Bank and Trust. Colonel John was a member of both the highways and the bridges committees, which gave him plenty to talk about with Calvin. Grace, who appreciated the continuity between father and son, wrote a report to Carrie Coolidge: “If I leave it to Calvin and his Father to give you an account of the trip to Montpelier they will never do justice to the matter.” Though they had had trouble getting out—a pipe had burst, causing a kitchen flood—they had made a 1:13
P.M.
train, which arrived at seven. That was no shorter than the rail ride Calvin and his mother and grandfather had taken back in 1874, when it had taken five hours to get from Woodstock to Montpelier. This time the grandfather, the legislator, was at the station to meet the reelected mayor and his family. The next morning, “John went to the state house with his father and grandfather,” Grace wrote to Carrie in Plymouth. They phoned the Goodhues and asked them to come over. John sat in the lieutenant governor’s chair and called the senate to order with a mallet. Grace herself had a mission, to get help for a deaf girl; “Went to see the Gov.,” she reported. Her letter was that of a happy family in tune with itself. To Carrie she concluded, “We all wished so many, many times that you were there.”

Coolidge’s prophecy about the Democratic trend proved true: for the first time in his memory, both Northampton’s aldermen and a second chamber, the common council, went Democratic. Coolidge himself had won, and with a slightly larger victory than before. In his victory speech, he tried to be cautious. “We have had a victory, that is all,” he told the people in Northampton. But that Coolidge had prevailed where the party had lost caught the attention of Republicans across the state.

Even as he commenced his second year as mayor, Coolidge was feeling that it was time to return to Boston; he was ready for statewide work but would probably first have to serve in the Senate. In the fall of 1911, he campaigned all over Hampshire County, even in Amherst. He won, which meant another half year of weekdays in Boston. To sit in the Senate was an elevation. Now he was no longer Coolidge of Northampton but Coolidge of the Connecticut River Valley. His territory included not only Hampshire but also Berkshire and Hampden counties. He represented both Amherst and Springfield, where the Crane factories were. In his first term he chaired the Committee on Agriculture and the Committee on Legal Affairs. He was assigned seat number 3, close to the Senate president, Levi Greenwood.

The Boston of 1912, however, was different from the one of 1907 or 1908. It was lonesome at the Adams House in 1912, for with Crane finishing up a term in Washington, the old Western Massachusetts Club that had met there was disbanded. The salary for Coolidge’s job was $1,000, not much even for a half year, the Senate term.

Coolidge, always tentative around cars, found that he was now surrounded by them. Though he never became completely comfortable, he was beginning to make his own version of peace with them. “It was as good as a show to watch him cross Tremont Street,” a reporter later wrote. “The traffic was thick, of course, and sometimes Coolidge came to the street before the traffic cop was out in the morning. He always stopped, glanced, birdlike, up and down the street, measured the distance to the nearest car, and if he thought he could make it, started across. If that car brushed his coattails, he would not run. He had faith in his calculation.”

In politics that year, he found himself dodging not cars, but progressives. Edward Filene, the merchant, had established a futuristic project, called Boston 1915, to make Boston a modern, progressive city, and had engaged the muckraker Lincoln Steffens to help him. The idea was that the Back Bay aristocracy, the middle class, and the reformers would all cooperate to cast Boston into the future. Politically, the progressives knew their support was necessary to win elections and delighted in playing the two old parties off against one another. On the national level, it seemed, everyone was vying for the progressive label. One of the cases the progressives made was that antitrust law would stabilize the country by giving small businesses a chance. At Christmas, a member of Congress from Minnesota, Charles Lindbergh, had charged on the House floor that J. P. Morgan was responsible for past and future instability. “We know that a few men control by stockholdings and a community of interest, practically all the important industries,” he said.

Incorporating progressive thought was on the minds of Amherst men, who were hunting for a new university president. Some sought another minister or theologian; men of the cloth had always headed the school. Some wanted secular leadership. The division was also over what kind of man a college should produce. In a letter to Henry Field, Coolidge’s old employer, Morrow tried to summarize what their hero, Garman, would have planned. Perhaps this time a preacher was not best: “Professor Garman shortly before his death put it about right when he said that during the first period of Amherst’s history it had been its main function to train ministers; that during the second period which is about ending it had been its main function to train professional men other than ministers; that during its next period it would probably be its principal function to give an all-round training to men who would take a large part in the business affairs of the nation.”

The demand for progressive leadership was so strong that even Roosevelt was tempted now to leap back into the fray. After all, he was still enormously popular. What’s more, Taft’s Progressivism did not satisfy TR as sufficient. To the surprise of Taft and many Republicans, the former president began to stake out positions as if he were running for office. “I believe in the protective tariff,” he thundered in Fargo, North Dakota, that year. Roosevelt’s cockiness piqued other Republicans. One was Warren Harding, the proprietor of a newspaper in Marion, Ohio. Roosevelt, Harding thought, resembled Aaron Burr in the magnitude of his egotism, with “the same towering ambitions.” Dwight Morrow understood the importance of Roosevelt’s dynamism and how it trumped Taft’s moderation. “I believe,” he wrote Charles Burnett, the classmate who had once debated Coolidge on the merits of Dutch culture over English, “that if Roosevelt should be nominated he will be elected. . . . Roosevelt, after a month’s rest, will make one of his astounding turns and will outdo Burke as a conservative.” Wherever politics were going, Morrow wanted to be involved now too. “Dwight absolutely absorbed in politics,” Mrs. Morrow wrote in her diary. “He has spoken seven times today.” Morrow put his own name forward to represent the district at the 1912 GOP National Convention and managed to draw Taft to New Jersey to campaign.

The emerging Democrat in 1912 was Woodrow Wilson, the governor of that state. Wilson’s arguments against tariffs to protect big companies were so obvious and clear that they were hard to resist; tariffs, he said, were like a disease that plagued the Republican Party. Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore’s young cousin, had surprised some people by publicly aligning with Wilson and the Democratic Party. Everyone was bidding for the name “progressive.” In Massachusetts the legislature, for example, had recently enacted a reduction in the working hours at factories. The new fifty-four-hour-week plan was intended to help the workers. But employers promptly cut workers’ wages, arguing they could not afford to pay the same for fewer hours. That in turn infuriated the workers.

From Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt’s Long Island home, emanated periodic smoke signals, the evidence of the fire of frustration that burned in Roosevelt over Taft. In a speech in Columbus, Ohio, he criticized the courts for their retrograde decisions; perhaps, he said, judges ought to be fired, or recalled, if the government wished: “We cannot permanently go on dancing in fetters.” It was clear now that he might seek the Republican nomination, the long-denied third term, after all. At that Coolidge bridled; even if judges were corrupt, this process, recall, could be corrupt as well. Roosevelt was putting himself above tradition and law. Coolidge lined up with eighteen other senators to block a primary reform that would have made it easier for Roosevelt to bypass Taft and capture the nomination.

As Coolidge commuted back and forth from Northampton to Boston, he and Grace began to imagine ahead to a life beyond the train. Maybe Coolidge could advance to the top of state government with the full-time, all-year job of governor; maybe he could be a senator or a congressman after all. But when it came to the substance, Coolidge was ambivalent; he still considered himself a progressive. That spring he voted for women’s suffrage, the state income tax, a minimum wage for female workers, and salary increases for teachers, thereby preempting territory before Democrats or other new candidates might get to it. At Amherst, his old friends were favoring a charismatic educator open to progressive experiments, Alexander Meiklejohn, to serve as the next president. Meiklejohn would be something new for the boys; he, like Roosevelt, felt that college sports needed some new rules. And unlike preceding presidents, he was a philosopher, not a theologian. That itself was modern, especially for a college like Amherst. The trustees were proud of their choice and planned a grand festival for Meiklejohn’s inauguration. Amherst was making itself over again. “Ye have not passed this way heretofore,” commented the
Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly
.

But he could not remain undecided forever. And as it happened that February an event forced him to confront the issue of progressivism as never before. Workers at the American Woolen Company in Lawrence announced a strike. They were protesting the wage reduction that had followed the new progressive law. The leaders this time were a new radical union, the International Workers of the World, known by their initials, IWW, or simply by their nickname, the Wobblies. At Ayer Mill, workers broke down an iron gate; bobbins and larger objects were hurled in every direction, and 11,000 workers found themselves idle. It was another difficult case; the workers, many of them Italian and Irish, were poor and lived crowded in wooden structures. In Lawrence, seventeen people crowded into a five-room dwelling. There were street battles; a striker was killed, and the authorities blamed fellow strikers, arresting Joseph Ettor, an Italian-American labor activist who had come up from New York City. Ettor was charged with murder. He and other IWW leaders were committed to a new tool, the general strike: that workers bring a whole town down in order to change corporations’ policy. Police shot at protesters on Common Street in Lawrence. The IWW leaders, Bill Haywood, William Trautman, and others, set up in a hotel and called for donations to support the strike, and they poured in; the IWW collected $5,250 in a single day. The Wobblies’ goal was to strengthen industrial workers’ rights around the world. From all over New England bluestockings converged upon Lawrence to help the striking workers. Some sought to take the children of strikers to stay with sympathetic families in other towns; the police took the children to the Lawrence poor farm. One of the activists was a Smith alumna, Vida Scudder, who had joined the Socialist Party and now taught at Wellesley College; Scudder lectured Lawrence workers in early March.

The president of the Senate appointed Coolidge chairman of a special committee to negotiate the strike, an honor and an opportunity to retrace Murray Crane’s footsteps as labor go-between. Women led the strike, and that alone made it compelling; later it would be called the Bread and Roses Strike, after a poem that had appeared in a progressive periodical,
The American Magazine
. All women wanted, they said, was decent conditions and higher wages so that they might live—bread and roses. Some inhabitants of Lawrence supported the workers, but many, especially older families, were appalled at the disruption of their town. Five thousand citizens joined a new group, the Lawrence Citizens’ Association, which painted what was going on in Lawrence as outside meddling. The group also published a pamphlet that sought desperately to remind the country that Lawrence was not all Wobbly: “Lawrence as It Really Is: Not as Syndicalists, Anarchists, Socialists, Suffragists, Pseudo Philanthropists and Muckraking Yellow Journalists Have Painted It.”

Coolidge worked hard, cajoling workers to pull together a committee of strikers to negotiate with a committee of company treasurers. After all, each day that the strike went on reduced the ability of the owners to pay in the future. The fight drew not only local but also national attention; in Washington the first lady sat in the first row at hearings when activists described how the police had taken the children from their mothers and caregivers their mothers had chosen. Somehow, by March, Coolidge reported that he had sealed a strike deal. The young senator helped to arrange a wage increase over what had been planned for the workers in exchange for a return to the bobbins and weaving machines. He walked away from it all unsure, struck not by the case for or against the strike but by the violence and the cynicism of the strikers; Bread and Roses did not feel, just as the paper said, like Lawrence at all; it felt like something from outside. There was nothing quaint about it; in the end the strikers and the progressives had hurt themselves. Exasperated, he wrote his stepmother, “The leaders there are socialists and anarchists, and they do not want anybody to work for wages. The trouble is not about the amount of wages; it is a small attempt to destroy all authority, whether of any church or government.”