Coolidge (34 page)

In the Adams House rooms, the phone rang around 8:00
P.M.
Coolidge was back and answered it. When he put the phone down, Grace asked about the call. “Nominated for vice president,” he said. “You don’t mean it,” she said. “Indeed I do,” he replied. “You are not going to accept it, are you?” “I suppose I shall have to,” the governor replied.

Still, the disappointment of the Coolidge team at their second-place showing was enormous. Stearns was furious, histrionic even, and would stay that way for many months. “Those who were at Chicago do not hesitate to say that you were crucified by your own people,” he would write Coolidge a full year later. Stearns and the others kept underscoring that Coolidge’s qualifications had been as strong as those of many of the other candidates. Lodge and Crane both had let down their man—Lodge out of indirection and vanity, Crane more because of the indecision and weakness of old age. “Many of us feel however,” wrote Morrow, “that if Senator Lodge had stood by him in Massachusetts he would have had a very real chance.” Vice President Marshall, who did not lack a sense of humor, sent a telegram to Coolidge on news of the nomination that was only half a joke: “Please accept my sincerest sympathy.”

Coolidge himself tried to take the second-place outcome philosophically. “I am sure Senator Harding is a good man, and an old friend of mine,” he wrote his father. “I hope you will not mind.” “I am some surprised and pleased to hear of your nomination for Vice President and hope you and Mr. Stearns are not greatly disappointed,” his father wrote in a letter that crossed Coolidge’s in the mail.

He and Harding, after all, had in common their relief that the machinations were over. Now they could concentrate on policy. Harding returned home to Ohio in triumph to be greeted by a crowd of 50,000, and settled down on his front porch to base a campaign there. In his homecoming speech Harding returned to the theme that had resonated: normalcy. Then Harding, himself an editor, commented on the word’s reception: “I have noticed that word caused considerable news editors to change it to ‘normality.’ I have looked for ‘normality’ in my dictionary and I did not find it there. ‘Normalcy’ however I did find, and it is a good word.” By normalcy, he reiterated, he meant “a regular steady order of things.” Not that the old order would come back, “But we must have normal order.” Coolidge would soon begin to chime in with his own version of the phrase: “old times.”

July brought the Democratic nominations for the presidential race. Thomas Marshall, the kindly Democratic vice president who had ribbed Coolidge, had had a difficult spring. His foster child had died, leaving his wife and him in a state of mourning they found hard to escape. Now he entered his name for the presidential slot but found little support. James Cox, the newspaperman from Ohio, won the Democratic nomination for the presidential slot in July. The Democrats had won the war, and the plan of Cox’s team was to collect votes as a reward for that victory. Franklin Roosevelt was chosen as his vice president. Cox set out on a speaking tour that would not stop until his election and would give 238 speeches on that tour alone. Coolidge had Barton, and Harding had his adviser from advertising, Albert Lasker, a man who had successfully marketed Lucky Strike cigarettes to women, to craft their thoughts. Cox campaigned on independence and integrity. He also spoke out for organized labor, arguing that the GOP’s hostility to unions was downright ungrateful. At last Gompers had found a new ally. “A good clean fair man” was how Gompers characterized Cox on July 6. Cox went at the labor theme. “What of the millions of men, women, and children of all creeds, religious and otherwise, who stood in the ranks as firm as soldiers overseas, undivided by things they once quarreled about?” he asked. The GOP was cruel to attack labor now, he said: “Why the sneer at labor, with the veiled charge that it was a mere slacker?”

How to respond? Fewer strikes meant more workdays and greater prosperity. But Coolidge was more aware now than before that worker frustration was warranted. “Have you harvested the fruits of your labor, the price of your victories?” a flyer for an anarchists’ meeting found in the pocket of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, one of the men arrested in the South Braintree case, had asked. The rise in prices had made people desperate and fostered the general assumption that all money was a gamble, up for grabs. Another result of the lottery mood was a business scandal Coolidge had to oversee. Hundreds had invested their money in new, untested firms that promised credulous Bostonians unprecedented earnings. The Securities Exchange Company, one of the small firms that had promised extravagant returns, was enduring a run. Critics were now beginning to say that its founder, Charles Ponzi, had invested nothing, merely recycling money to new investors. Coolidge directed his attorney general to order an inquiry. The ripple effect was hurting banks, and individuals were losing what they had thought were true fortunes. Investigation was the job of the state authorities in Massachusetts; states regulated stocks and bonds. Ponzi was arrested and sat in East Cambridge jail. The state treasurer, Fred Burrell, was mixed up in the scheme; $125,000 of the state’s funds had been in Hanover Trust Company, a bank that had closed its doors. Burrell had been working as an advertising agent on the side. As governor, Coolidge issued a warning to banks not to buy advertising from the state treasurer.

Coolidge understood his job as vice presidential candidate as supporting Harding; it was a replay of the years he had backed up Governor McCall. But the more he thought Harding’s plan over, the more comfortable he was with it. In normalcy, Harding had come up with a concept that made sense for the party and the country. And the crowds now gathering around him seemed in their turn to support his own endorsements. At Northampton, a sea of boater hats greeted Coolidge the day he formally received his nomination; photographers that summer followed Coolidge and his family around, demanding photo poses almost nonstop. He and his son Calvin, both in white shirts, arranged themselves carefully in the Massasoit Street yard before a soapbox car so that reporters could snap an image of the Coolidges at home. Images of Coolidge wearing his grandfather’s old blue wool haying smock also proliferated.

Coolidge and Grace traveled out to Marion with other Republicans to call on the candidate at his home. The Hardings’ lifestyle differed so much from the Coolidges’. Mrs. Harding had run the newspaper in Marion with Harding, and now she ran his preparations for office with him; she referred to “Warren Harding” when she spoke to third parties as if her husband were a brand, not a man. The Hardings hung close to their friends and advisers, who were in turn more talkative than a candidate’s advisers would be in New England. They spoke often and on the record, and moved the campaign focus away from the League of Nations and the wartime bitterness. The Harding advisers had understood early that even “law and order” was too bitter a motto to emphasize exclusively. “I find the underlying thing in the minds of the people is the demand for a change in the Administration,” Harry Daugherty, the attorney who was close to Harding, told the people around the porch.

Even in the good mood of the general campaign, however, the muttering about the Harding crowd continued. People wondered whether Harding was hiring too many friends—not just near allies, such as Daugherty, but old acquaintances, such as Colonel Charles Forbes, a recipient of the Croix de Guerre in France who had served state governments and Wilson and ran a construction firm in Tacoma, Washington. Forbes had helped ensure that the Washington State delegation went for Harding.

But on balance, the Coolidges were pleased with their visit. The Hardings received them warmly. To share his luck with Coolidge, Harding hunted for a four-leaf clover on his well-trodden lawn, found one, and pinned it onto Coolidge’s lapel. They could feel the comfort of being part of something larger. Now the authorities at the Federal Reserve banks were raising interest rates, so that those rates, like the prices, were higher than what adults had known before: the discount rate, the rate banks charged other banks, was 7 percent at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Many prices were coming down: “Women’s ingrain silk stockings at prices unprecedented this year,” read a
Boston Herald
advertisement for R. H. Stearns. Wall Streeters believed that this tightening would reduce prices permanently. But others were uncertain. Symptomatic of the general confusion was an editorial in a Lincoln, Nebraska, paper
The Daily Star
. The paper roasted Harding for failing to tighten interest rates enough: “Through Senator Harding’s action, wild speculation was permitted to continue while production was retarded,” commented the editors. “The youngest follower of economics will see this action merely aggravates the situation.” Farm prices were dropping in 1920, suggesting deflation, so this allegation, that interest rates might yet be too low, was an odd one for a paper to make. It was even odder when the reader realized that the Lincoln paper had mistaken the head of the Federal Reserve, W. P. G. Harding, for the presidential candidate.

The first great test of the Harding-Coolidge ticket came in September, when Maine held its early vote. Coolidge went to Portland and gave a speech emphasizing that to oppose Wilson’s League was not necessarily to be isolationist: “Ever since this nation was established, it has never been isolated. Not isolated but independent, free, rendering service to all mankind.” Franklin Roosevelt, the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate, pointedly vacationed in Eastport and not at the family place in Campobello, New Brunswick, over the border, in the days before the Maine ballot. On September 11, a Saturday, during the anniversary of the strike, Coolidge gave a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire. Coolidge stressed the necessity of withdrawing the special powers Congress had given government before the war. “The independence of the Congress” too, he said, “must be preserved.” Under Wilson, the executive branch had grown too large. The navy secretary, Josephus Daniels, snapped back that Coolidge was inconsistent or worse. “The first half of his speech was to declare for American participation in world affairs and it was essentially sound,” Daniels noted, “but he made a lame and impotent conclusion by approving Harding’s toothless Hague tribunal.” He went on to say, “But by reason of the straddle policy of his party Governor Coolidge had to repudiate his splendid recital of American duty to the world, as well as to itself.” Roosevelt was sharper than Daniels even, countering on the day of the Maine election. Republicans like Coolidge, Roosevelt said, backed a Congress that would “have the president’s office a chief clerkship for the carrying out of its policies.”

In New England, Coolidge knew, the best way to come back after such a putdown was to prove oneself even humbler than the opponent suggested. Coolidge therefore lectured on thrift. Speaking to the National Association of Life Underwriters, he announced that he had not bought a suit of clothes in eighteen months or a pair of shoes in two years. Once supply and demand could function freely again, Coolidge said, industries such as the woolen industry of Massachusetts would also function. At home, as well, the Coolidges struggled with finance. Someone had given them a police dog. Coolidge wanted his father to take it but John demurred. “A dog is no joke,” Coolidge wrote. “They cost money.”

Whether because of thrift or pride, the Republican victory that year in Maine proved historic; Harding carried more than 65,000 votes. The Republicans made gains even in cities such as Portland relative to their performance in 1916. The GOP women had come out in force. “All records broken in size of total vote and plurality,” commented
The Boston Globe
. Coolidge was even blunter in the telegram he sent Harding on September 14: “Judge nothing can prevent your election.” After Maine, Coolidge and Harding went back to their lecture circuit. Yet again, Coolidge found Harding’s themes easy to support: less injurious meddling from abroad, less meddling in business. Wilson had indeed vetoed the federal budget system legislation put forward by Republicans, but that just meant the Grand Old Party would put through a second version. Indeed, on the budget, the habitually jovial Harding hit hard. Washington was conducting a “financial orgy” that only a budget could halt, Harding said in Wheeling, West Virginia. A budget was worthy because then “there would be set up in Washington an establishment”—reporting to the president—“which would have full and complete knowledge of every activity.” There had to be a way to reduce the national debt without “undue taxation.” Government had drawn “the very life blood from the channels of business to keep itself alive.” In this bloviating, one could hear the common sense. Harding was placing faith in the restorative power of commerce.

Just a few days after the Maine vote came an event that tested such faith. As the bells of New York’s Trinity Church rang for the lunch break, an anarchist’s bomb in a horse-drawn cart exploded, hitting the epicenter of capitalism, J. P. Morgan headquarters. Just three minutes before, circulars signed “Fighting Anarchists of America” had been found by a letter carrier at Cedar Street and Broadway. The explosion was caused by a powerful “TNT bomb, reinforced with iron slugs,” as the police reported the next day. The impact was so great that one slug landed on the eighteenth floor of 61 Broadway. It was a far greater explosion than any of the individual bombs that had gone off in 1920 or the year before. Morrow, inside, sustained cuts to his head and hand as the windows blew out. The dome on the structure, the pride of J. P. Morgan, shattered. The walls were pockmarked from the stones that had hit them. Fifteen people were killed instantly. Others lay dying on the street. Every window at Bankers Trust across the street was also damaged. The precious tickers, machines that spit out the stock prices were hit, in both their glass tops and their wooden frames. It all seemed a horrible setback. Everyone knew that Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer would now have a pretext to launch a campaign to renew the deportation raids and revive his hateful sedition law. Officers were called in to guard the million dollars in gold that the Federal Reserve kept under the ground.