Coolidge (24 page)

At night now, instead of worrying about his own rent on Massasoit Street, Coolidge worried about the effects of all the new policies, including some he was involved in promulgating. Joseph Eastman would be up for reappointment on the state public service commission next year, and he would be asked to testify on the progressive’s competence. On May 28, 1916, Governor McCall signed a state income tax into law, 1.5 percent on incomes above $2,000. In addition, the state levied a 6 percent tax on income from intangible assets: stocks or bonds. The day the
Globe
carried the news of the tax in its business section, the front page was dedicated to a review of the Harvard Regiment of the army passing a reviewing stand at the State House. A total of 45,000 people marched in the parade. The income tax was just one of those sacrifices, like the tax on oleomargarine, that came with war. Every sacrifice seemed necessary for the war now, especially since U.S. soldiers were not in Europe. And every request was now couched in those terms of sacrifice. As usual, Coolidge was at pains not to take gifts or money.

That spring the Coolidges did accept one gift from the Stearnses: an invitation to travel together to Washington. Once again, Stearns planned carefully: the four stayed at the Shoreham Hotel, which had been owned by former vice president Levi Morton, a Republican and native son of Vermont. Shoreham, Morton’s birthplace, stood in fact only about sixty miles or so from Plymouth Notch. The Shoreham was located on Fifteenth and H streets; it was a prestigious hotel where political figures from left to right—from Big Bill Haywood, the labor agitator, to Attorney General James McReynolds—could be seen. Coolidge had his first serious meeting with Henry Cabot Lodge, but what took place went unrecorded. Stearns made sure Coolidge took in a vista that included the White House and the Washington Monument. Coolidge gave a typically restrained comment: “That is a view that would rouse the emotions of any man.”

The intensity of Stearns’s affection was sometimes hard for Calvin to weather. Stearns demanded not only political time but also personal time, including meals and meetings. “I am away so much that I do not have the time at home I hoped,” Coolidge wrote his stepmother. Stearns so admired Coolidge that he wrote Dwight Morrow to ask what he thought about giving an honorary degree to the lieutenant governor; Morrow thought it was too early. Mrs. Morrow, on her first encounter, deemed Coolidge limited. “I don’t see how that sulky red-haired little man ever won that pretty charming woman,” she told her husband. But she and Morrow also noticed that Coolidge paid attention to her children; he asked Anne, her daughter, about a bandage on her finger.

Some politicians, Lodge included, did not understand the idea of Calvin Coolidge either. Lodge did know a Coolidge, Louis Coolidge, who had served for years as his private secretary, and in the middle of his sixth decade he was not ready to get to know another. On June 7, the Massachusetts Republicans journeyed to Chicago for the party convention. The likely nominee was Charles Evans Hughes of New York, a Supreme Court justice. Somewhere second was John Weeks, a senator from Massachusetts. But when Lodge heard Coolidge’s name mentioned, he laughed outright: “My God, Coolidge”—it was risible. Apparently, the Washington visit had not had the impression Stearns hoped for. The others, though, were less contemptuous. Judge Field called on Murray Crane at his hotel, one senior Massachusetts man to another. “I see your friend Frank Stearns is in town,” Field said. “Yes, I saw him,” Crane came back. “Do you know who his candidate for president is?” “Hughes, I imagine.” “Judge, you have a poor imagination,” answered Crane. “He’s for Calvin Coolidge.”

It was half a joke to both men, but with each day, a little more real. In August 1916, Coolidge served as acting governor for a month while McCall took a holiday. Seventeen guns, the Massachusetts governor’s salute, were fired in his honor as Coolidge inspected the Coast Artillery Corps at Fort Warren and Fort Andrews in the Boston Harbor. A few weeks later he spoke at the home of Augustus Gardner, the lawmaker who had retrieved the children in France. Again, his job was to defend spending. The Democrats were blocking more outlays for homes for the mentally ill. Coolidge backed the administration’s plans: there must be “no parsimony in the care of our unfortunates,” he said. Such statements did not come easily, but he believed that this was the kind of piloting the party needed.

After all, the Republicans were not popular in the growing western states. Hughes lost to Wilson that fall, despite the fact that all the Republicans rallied behind him, including Roosevelt. Even the outcome in Massachusetts was close. Yet Coolidge won again that fall with 288,000 votes, more than his governor, Senator Lodge, or the presidential candidate, Hughes. The
Springfield Republican
trumpeted its news to the world: “Mr. Coolidge rose unvexed on the highest crest of the Republican wave.” Everyone expected now that Coolidge would be governor next—only the timing was unknown, dependent on when McCall would be ready to move on.

Coolidge’s political future was more certain, but his economics were not. Coolidge and others, especially Stearns, could see that prices were still rising, but none of them was sure why. Their old argument of blaming the Democrats’ Underwood Tariff was weaker than ever. Even with the income tax, the state did not have enough revenue to pay everyone. The Boston Police were an example. The policemen worked all the time, sixty, seventy, eighty or more hours a week. Their pay had not been raised since 1913. The radical IWW union was still making trouble. There was violence in many of the immigrant neighborhoods, especially the North End. On the first day of the year, a bomb hidden in a wicker suitcase at the State House had failed to go off only due to a flawed fuse. On December 6, 1916, the Wobblies held a rally in North Square. A riot ensued and policemen from Salutation Station and Hanover Street Station arrived.

The balancing act he had committed to became even harder the next year, 1917. The German kaiser turned more aggressive, declaring that submarines and ships would make unconditional war on the sea once more. That was a direct challenge again to the port cities. On March 19, 1917, Coolidge’s fellow legislators voted to allot a million dollars for defense, a huge amount for the state, for the protection of the commonwealth and the federal government. It was an amount that would sink the state budget. The only, but great, consolation was that the outlay gave the opportunity to declare war before Washington did.

But barely. On April 2, Wilson delivered his war message; Congress voted to declare war within days. By May, Congress had passed the Selective Service Act, which brought in conscription.

The news fell like a bombshell among the young men of Massachusetts. Meiklejohn asked Amherst students to wait to hear from the government, but many didn’t. By the college commencement of June 1917, only thirty-five members of the senior class remained. Soon a Yankee Division, the 26th Infantry, would assemble 28,000 soldiers from New England. Foster Stearns, Frank’s son, presented to the new Amherst Battalion two flags, one of the commonwealth and one of the United States, in honor of his grandfather, who had served in the 21st Regiment Massachusetts Voluntary Army in the Civil War.

Eyeing the 1918 outlays for his state, Coolidge could see that the numbers were over $30 million, three times what the state had spent a decade before. The declaration of war meant that the United States had to borrow on a scale unimagined, even more than it had in the first years of the war. William McAdoo, the Treasury secretary, created Liberty Loans, bonds to sell the country to fund the war. McAdoo tried to figure out how much he needed to raise. But in the end he made an unscientific guess, which he later described: “I had formed a tentative conclusion as to the amount of the first loan. It ought to be, I thought, three billion dollars. I can hardly tell you how I arrived at the sum of three billions. . . . I am sure that the deciding influence in my mind was not a mass of statistics, but what is commonly called a ‘hunch’—a feeling or impression rather than a logical demonstration.” The bonds were gold-backed; the government would give the bearer the preset amount of gold due him under the gold standard instead of greenbacks, if he liked. Interest on the bonds was tax-free, which seemed an increasingly valuable advantage as tax rates continued to go up, and improbably quickly. McAdoo was not only Treasury secretary but also Wilson’s son-in-law: he had married Eleanor Wilson in 1914. That meant that whatever he did, right or wrong, was not likely to be easily questioned.

When the time came for Coolidge to campaign in the fall, the whole landscape was military. Authorities had commandeered the German ships; the United States had renamed the old
Kronprinzessin Cecilie
the
Mount Vernon
; the old
Vaterland
of the Hamburg America Line was now the
Leviathan
.
Kronprinzessin Cecilie
was now serving as a homely transport ship, carrying soldiers overseas and back. Morrow was supervising war savings programs for New Jersey now, including a stamp issue where the minimum purchase price was only 25 cents. McAdoo’s Treasury was exhorting New England to contribute more to the second Liberty Bond loan campaign: as of late October, New England, whose maximum quota was $500 million, was raising almost that much, outbuying other regions. Massachusetts was beaten only by Connecticut in its own region. Senator Lodge was mounting charge after charge against the president. Lodge’s choice for U.S. field commander, General Wood, was not only the leader of the preparedness movement and the great ally of Theodore Roosevelt but also someone Massachusetts could claim as its own: Wood had attended Harvard Medical School. But the secretary of war, Newton Baker, chose another man to head the expeditionary force in Europe, Major General John Pershing.

In his fall campaign of 1917, the last, he hoped, for lieutenant governor, Coolidge studied the railroads and trolleys, which were becoming collateral damage of the war. Rails were in use nonstop. But despite greater traffic, they struggled for cash flow. Two separate events were squeezing the rail companies. The rate rules that the ICC had been imposing since the passage of the Hepburn Act had indeed kept rates that railroads might charge lower. But companies were finding their costs were higher, as well as their taxes. Meanwhile, workers were demanding pay increases to keep pace with their own costs. The railroads could not keep up with the demands of war. To serve the war effort, Wilson was contemplating nationalizing the railroads. Local trolleys, which had been denied the chance to link up with the great railroads several years before, were now paying the price. Coolidge was finding that it was easier to raise money for highway improvements, such as pavement, than for rail. And it was hard to know whether Northampton or the other towns would still seem like paradise after the war.

Coolidge joined fellow party members in spelling out Massachusetts’ contribution: that Massachusetts had equipped its own troops before the declaration of war to help the cause. “While Washington was yet dumb, Massachusetts spoke,” he said. He also listed the labor agreements that had been concluded in the name of industrial peace: Gloucester fishermen, shoemakers in Lynn, and railroad employees all had given up something in order to ensure they did not interrupt food or service delivery. “The production and distribution of food and fuel have been advanced. The maintenance of industrial peace has been promoted.” The nature of the sacrifice could be expressed well in terms of ships: “Massachusetts has decided that the path of the
Mayflower
shall not be closed. She had decided to sail the seas.” Everyone in Boston seemed to be working extra. The police had spent a full 20,000 man-hours helping out with defense-related projects, though their budget contained no extra funds for that. As for Washington, Wilson, Coolidge said, was now “clothed in dictatorial powers”—that was as it had to be, but Coolidge told voters that the dictatorship could “not be continued in time of peace.” At Christmas 1917, the Wilson administration did nationalize the railroads, after all.

All the first half of the next year, 1918, the war pounded at them. July 1918 brought news that the plane of Roosevelt’s son Quentin, who had trained at Plattsburgh, had been downed in France. Coolidge’s race for governor, when it finally came that summer and fall, was not a regular race. If he had signed on to spending, he had done so less than others. There was widespread illness in the cities that year; the Coolidges tried to keep their sons in the country as much as possible. Coolidge wrote to his father that he was running for governor and offered to send Calvin up to Vermont, even by stagecoach. As he prepared his speeches, influenza struck the soldiers at Camp Devens; soon as many as one in four was down with the illness, which hit Amherst as well. The Stearnses’ son, Foster, was wounded at Saint-Mihiel. And the Germans finally had their chance to take revenge for the commandeering of the
Kronprinzessin
: a torpedo struck the U.S. Army transport
Mount Vernon
off the coast of France; thirty-five men who were locked in the fire room were killed, including seven New Englanders. Remarkably, the ship made it back to a French port on her own steam. As the election drew close, Coolidge’s mood improved; he was going to win, and he knew it. His father had obliged his campaign team, helping a hired photographer collect photos of Plymouth for the paper. Coolidge’s father received a note of thanks signed “Calvin Coolidge”; the joke was that the handwriting was a child’s; Calvin, Jr., aged ten, not the candidate, had signed. Coolidge understood all too well that it was only luck that his sons were too young to serve; John Weeks, the Senate candidate, did have a son in uniform.

Stearns’s strategy now was to sell Coolidge the man, rather than the party. In this he had support from all over the field; even Roosevelt wrote in with an endorsement, calling Coolidge “a high-minded public servant” who understood he must base his work on a “jealous insistence upon the rights of all.” Stearns funded a small biography of Coolidge, and items like the Plymouth pictures. The strategy was not very costly. Later he figured that he personally had spent $6,000 plus food on the campaign—substantial but together with the other donors’ outlays not enormous, given the amounts their opponent, Richard Long, a wealthy shoe manufacturer, was laying out. What’s more, much of that $6,000 had been spent not on advertisement or transport but on the biography.