Coolidge (33 page)

One word from the speech hung in the air: “normalcy.” By normalcy, Harding did not mean that people should all be normal. He meant that the environment should be normal and relatively predictable. The old progressive swings in policy disrupted too much. A currency that changed value was a problem. Extreme Red-baiting was wrong; now that the war was over, it was time for compassion. Harding had taken a sentiment felt by everyone—that there had been too much upheaval—and broadened it into a plan. Sometimes the country felt normal now; but if it could get all the way back to normalcy then commerce could do the rest of the work. Then the knotty issues of money, prices, and even tariffs could be sorted out.

Several days later, Carrie finally did pass away. Coolidge went up to Vermont. Disconcertingly, this family loss came just at the same time as the Massachusetts primary. In Massachusetts, Wood took nearly 70 percent of the vote, doing especially well in country towns. Early returns showed Hoover and Hiram Johnson after him, Coolidge in fifth place. Coolidge’s allies still hoped for their candidate and drew consolation from one thing: they had been right to shut down the fancy office. In Washington, hearings over campaign spending were embarrassing the other candidates and even sidelining one of the likeliest names, Lowden of Illinois. On June 1, two GOP delegates testified before a Senate committee that that they had each received the equivalent of a laborer’s annual salary, $2,500, from the Lowden campaign. Overall, the Missouri Lowden campaign manager had given out $32,000 to create sentiment for Lowden in Missouri. Senator Reed of Missouri asked one recipient what the campaign man, Jacob Babler, had said when he pushed the money across the table. “He simply said ‘here’s a check for $2,500,’ and I asked him what it was for,” the man said. “Mr. Babler told me to take it and use it for whatever I saw fit.” The same reports carried talk of trouble in Ohio, whether from the old Mark Hanna crowd or those around Harding; Robert Wolfe, a publisher, explained that many in the state worried about Harding’s tight crowd, especially Harry Daugherty, Senator Harding’s campaign manager. They seemed to trade favors too often. Voters had no tolerance for corruption; if they were to vote for Republicans, it was because they wanted to vote the war-spoils party out of office. The issues would be what to do with navy ships such as the
Mount Vernon
, the former
Kronprinzessin
, which was now patrolling the seas carrying refugees and German prisoners of war.

As the weeks passed, there was more criticism. The Senate investigation of campaign expenses had left several of Coolidge’s competitors looking spendthrift or worse; a scandal was growing about the purchase of delegates by campaigns. Wood had received close to a million dollars. The papers were reckoning that he had spent about $5,000 apiece of donors’ money for his delegates. Lowden, it emerged, had spent about $415,000, one-fourth of what Wood had spent; $196,000 alone had gone to printing documents for his candidacy. Some papers were saying that Coolidge’s tiny donation receipts of $68,345 might work to his advantage. Money had not been sent to other states to collect delegates, Reynolds, the manager of the short-lived campaign, testified. “His campaign has been conducted on a high plane,” wrote
The Boston Post
. Harding’s budget was also relatively small: $113,109 was reported. There was yet a final factor, Coolidge knew, that worked in his favor: the Republican delegates resented the senators’ control of the convention; they wanted to pick their own man. “It’s about time the other Republicans be heard from. I mean the governors from the great states,” R. Livingston Beeckman, the governor of Rhode Island, told a group of delegates and reporters. “All the wisdom is not concentrated in the U.S. Senate.”

The Boston Globe
had not given up on its campaign for Coolidge and, toward the end of the month, wrote a friendly feature on Grace’s homemaking. The aim was to highlight the Coolidges as savers. Silent Cal and his wife, the paper noted, paid $32 rent, recently boosted from $27; his telephone was a party line. The Coolidges lit the area around their hearth with a small tube of a gas heater. Mrs. Coolidge answered her own doorbell. Keeping his head down, Coolidge, tense, busied himself finishing out the legislative session. “You cannot realize what a burden they are,” he wrote his father of the laws and lawmakers he had to steward. His father supplied the usual steadying report: “Your letter of the 6th inst. also one from each of the boys in hand. We have had a cold rain and I fear a frost to-night if it clears off. I am glad you sent thanks to those contributing flowers at time of funeral. It would have pleased Carrie much. . . . I am about as usual.” He would have liked to have his father there, to help him sort out all his questions, but John stayed in Vermont.

On a warm day the week before the convention, Coolidge took a walk to clear his head, going three miles to Massachusetts Avenue and back, stopping at the Algonquin Club, where Stearns had first feted him what seemed a lifetime before. “Things are shifting very rapidly,” he wrote to his father, “and I think in my favor but no one can tell what will happen there.” He was still hoping his father would come down to sit with him in Boston during the convention. “Gov. Coolidge’s friends believe that his chance for the nomination lies in the possibility that he may be agreed on as a compromise candidate in case a deadlock arises,” wrote the
Globe
.

On June 6, the Coolidge for President contingent joined the rest of the Massachusetts delegation and rolled away on a special train toward Chicago. The Coolidge supporters and the Boston Roosevelt Club had created a new booklet, slim enough to fit into a gentleman’s pocket, to circulate among the delegates. Called
Law and Order
, it was bound in imitation black leather and, thanks to Stearns’s foresight, featured each delegate’s name embossed on the cover. One of the quotations selected was from a Lincoln Day Speech by Coolidge, a line about the importance of Lincoln’s mother: “About his cradle all was poor and mean save only the source of all great men, the love of a wonderful woman. When she faded away in his tender years, from her deathbed in humble poverty she dowered her son with greatness.” Coolidge’s friends said what they had always said: the fact that the convention would begin without a sure candidate gave Coolidge a shot. Coolidge’s allies expected Murray Crane to lead Massachusetts in putting forward a fellow westerner. But the delegation was not united behind Coolidge, and Coolidge therefore had not shown up at South Station to wave: it would have made him look desperate.

The cause of the split was Lodge, who had refused to pick a candidate in the end. A poll of the delegates from the Bay State indicated that seven would go to Wood, campaign peccadilloes or no, and twenty-eight to Coolidge, far more than the indications of the spring had suggested. Lodge’s disaffection was now out in the open. The senator’s concern clearly was winning on the League; sometimes he pushed another candidate, General Wood. Riding out to Chicago, the newsman Clarence Barron spent time with William Coolidge, the railroad lawyer and brother of Lodge’s ally Louis Coolidge. Coolidge touched on the concern that his distant cousin, the governor, might become indeed collateral damage in the Republican quarrels at Chicago. The governor, William Coolidge allowed, was indeed something of an Abraham Lincoln type. “He might be the hardest man to nominate and the easiest to elect,” William Coolidge told Barron. Murray Crane’s allies hoped he would strike back, but they could see now that Crane was ill and that the leader of the western Massachusetts faction might be incapacitated at the crucial moment. “You know there is no chance for me except when it may appear none of the leaders can get it. Then if it all my chance will come,” Coolidge wrote his father as his friends traveled west.

The reports from Chicago were not auspicious. Lodge poisoned the well by opening what was now clearly his convention with an overly lengthy attack on Wilson’s League of Nations. H. L. Mencken wonderingly described the speech as “bosh,” but bosh “delivered with an air somehow dignified by the manner of its emission.” Others were harsher: Lodge’s speech was too hostile to be respectable and was quickly dubbed a “Hymn of Hate.” No matter; Lodge had successfully moved the focus of the convention to war. Claiming his post as permanent chairman, Lodge then presided over the early rounds of the nominations, supporting Woods. When he wasn’t doing damage from the dais, Lodge was making mischief in backroom meetings. The moment the topic of Coolidge came up in a discussion with Henry Stoddard of the
New York Evening Mail
, Lodge offered an annihilating response: “Nominate a man who lives in a two-family house? Never!” Stearns’s plans, his publications, all suddenly seemed naive.

Other candidates were constantly being proposed: Governor Lowden, General Wood. But not Coolidge. Crane, whom Coolidge had counted on to push back, seemed confused and spoke inaudibly. The
Chicago Tribune
complained that listening to Crane made one wish he would “shout his whispers through the electric resonator.” On June 11, Coolidge wrote his father the cheeriest letter he could come up with: “Before this reaches you the nomination will probably be made. Just now Johnson is out of it. Balloting just beginning. Probably Wood or Lowden cannot win but may. If not my chance seems best.”

Coolidge’s name was finally presented to the convention at 2:00
P.M.
on June 11; the nominator, Frederick Gillett, quoted Coolidge’s old line from the telegram to Gompers to spontaneous but brief applause. A former musical comedy star, Alexandra Carlisle Pfeiffer, seconded Coolidge. Grace was in Boston, and the two sat at the Adams House to receive returns, which Henry Long delivered with an explanation. After the fourth ballot, the name Coolidge was still alive but with only twenty-five votes. Lowden and Wood, who had started with hundreds of votes each, were now losing delegates with each round.

This was the moment that Coolidge, Stearns, and the others had identified as their last shot. The leaders of the convention retreated to the ninth floor of the Blackstone Hotel to haggle. But Crane was absent. The other men learned that a fainting spell was keeping him away. The hours passed and the Republicans haggled into the night. At 2:00
A.M.
, Senator Harding, who, unlike Coolidge, had traveled to Chicago, was summoned from his hotel. At the Blackstone he was invited to swear to his colleagues he knew of no personal liabilities that would prevent his candidacy. Harding swore.

Coolidge’s small team fought to the end. Morrow converted his hotel room into a lobbying office. He was so enthusiastic that he followed the delegates around; there was even a photo of Morrow pursuing a delegate wearing only a small towel around his waist. Soon the floor of his room was thick with cigarette stubs. Coolidge followed it all by reading occasional wires to the governor’s office at the State House. But while Morrow of J. P. Morgan was wealthy, he commanded little political currency. The kingmakers were people like Lodge and the senator from Indiana James Watson. Asked explicitly about Coolidge, Watson dismissed the idea. “The speaker of the house is from Massachusetts and the leader of the senate is from Massachusetts, and that’s enough,” Watson told a
Boston Globe
reporter. The leaders were conferring in “the smoke filled room,” a United Press reporter wrote. The phrase captured what was going on at the convention: notwithstanding decades of progressive changes to allow voters more say in the selection of lawmakers, notwithstanding the recent Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, party leaders were making the calls yet again. The men finally emerged from the room to announce their compromise. On June 12, on the tenth ballot, it was all over; Harding, a senator, had been chosen by his fellow senators.

Upon learning of the Harding choice, Coolidge took his hat and disappeared from the Adams House onto the Boston Common. The convention appeared over: the vice president had already been settled. The plan of the men gathered at the Blackstone, Congress, and Auditorium hotels was to select Lenroot of Wisconsin, who had made a good impression at the Home Market Club of Boston, for the slot. Lenroot made sense in all sorts of ways as a complement to Harding: he was a semiradical who would pull in the progressives under the Republican umbrella but whose own patriotic war record sufficed to defuse those who attacked him. Senator Medill McCormick climbed onto the platform to nominate Lenroot. The midwesterners found Harding too conservative and wanted Lenroot, experienced yet more progressive, to balance the ticket.

At this point, though those in Boston could not know it, something in the hall changed. Lenroot was not getting through. Lenroot might be a progressive, but the method of his selection was retrograde. Another name was ringing; “Coolidge, Coolidge, Coolidge,” the delegates began to shout, even though his own Bay State delegation was still not sure whether he was their man. Finally Wallace McCamant of Oregon, the lawyer, rose to nominate Coolidge. Coolidge, he said, was a man “whose name traveled all across the country last fall when he stood for law and order and for the safety of the republic.” McCamant’s action surprised even those colleagues from the Senate who had been concerned about a Harding-Lenroot ticket. “He never at any time mentioned to me about what he intended to do with reference to Coolidge, and I have since been told that he never mentioned it to anybody else,” remembered James Watson of Indiana much later. The crowd at Chicago, grim over the smoke-filled room and the wheeling and dealing from which it had been excluded, lightened up on the realization that it might determine the outcome.

Fifteen states seconded McCamant’s Coolidge nomination. The cheering drowned the other names out to such an extent that some of those attending were displeased. It was as though “a cow kicked over a lamp,” the
Globe
reported, referring to the original Chicago fire. “The flames bursting out in every delegation ran around the galleries as if on the wings of a gale, and Senator McCormick was left standing on the burning deck whence all but him had fled.” Impressed, the reporter opined that the Coolidge fire was “the first real, wholly unpremeditated stampede that ever took place at a national convention.” Commented George Pepper, a Pennsylvania senator, “Some humble delegates had defied the Olympian thunder and stampeded the convention for Coolidge.” Commentators observed that the nominator had come from the West and that the enthusiasm that had been lacking for Harding was there for Coolidge, as a stampede occurred and everyone waved flags. “For Once Delegates Have Own Way,” trumpeted the
Chicago Tribune
. The newspaper noted approvingly that the delegates had picked Coolidge “without any management visible in the process.”