Coolidge (37 page)

Another day during the inaugural rush, Mrs. Coolidge showed up at her suite to find reporters in the bedroom inspecting her dresses, which were laid out on the bed. Mrs. Stearns had pulled them out to show inquiring reporters. The journalists looked over her shoes, which were, fortunately, from Lynn, not Paris. The press noted everything about them: that Grace favored heels between one and two inches high and that the linings were printed with her name, “Mrs. Calvin Coolidge.”

Humor, the Coolidges thought, might help them through. Someone commented that they had been invited to eat at the home of someone whose name was not in the
Social Register
. “No conclusion can be drawn from that,” the vice president commented. “I’ve been in it myself only half an hour.” Grace wrote Stearns gaily that Calvin in his way was becoming a “social butterfly.” Coolidge told others he had to eat somewhere; he jollied along his small staff as well. When socialites pressured Coolidge, he merely went into his shell. But they did not relent. One story about that did not die. A lady seated beside Coolidge told him she had heard he was silent. She had made a bet, however, that she could get him to say more than two words over the course of the evening. “You lose,” Coolidge said. Grace managed the damage from the encounter by repackaging it and circulating it as an anecdote. Perhaps Washington would come to like Coolidge in time as Massachusetts had. After all, it had known Murray Crane. Coolidge, wary of squandering physical energy, liked to leave evening gatherings at 10:00
P.M.
Fortunately, his diplomatic rank as vice president meant he was free to be the first to leave.

Harding, by contrast, seemed able to work all hours. Lawmakers were staying for an extra session, which meant that the president would have a chance to pass his new agenda, especially the new budget legislation. Through violent hacking at the military budget, the Republican Congress had managed to cut the government back faster than Wilson would have liked; Wilson and the Democrats for their part had pushed up taxes, pulling in revenue. But the budget was still around $6.3 billion for 1920, and the schedule of government debt meant that in coming years many of the budgetary advances could be reversed. The aim was to retire debt, not to expand it. Harding now intended tough budget legislation with tougher review to make the tenuous surplus permanent; $6 billion was still twice as high as necessary. “We can reduce the abnormal expenditures, and we will,” Harding boomed at the inauguration. Resolve alone would not suffice; Harding maintained that the federal government needed the budget office he had campaigned for.

On the Tuesday after the inauguration, Coolidge attended his first cabinet meeting. The men posed for the photographers outdoors, and Coolidge was seated to Harding’s left. To Harding’s right was Charles Evans Hughes, and to the right of Hughes, Mellon. Indoors, at the cabinet meeting around the mahogany table, Coolidge found himself impressed. Harding sat at one end of the table, and Coolidge at the other. The ten men who sat between them in the new chairs—the silver nameplates were not affixed yet—were powerhouses; Harding had the strength to handle big personalities. Hughes would deal with the controversial issue of Versailles and international law from the State Department. Some of his first work, in fact, was smoothing over Roosevelt’s: Harding wanted to push through early an already negotiated treaty with Colombia that included a payment of $25 million to compensate for Roosevelt’s orchestrated theft of the isthmus of Panama. From the Commerce Department, there was Herbert Hoover. Hoover, who sat near Coolidge, tended to glower into the distance. But Coolidge could see that Hoover was more efficient than the rest; here was someone who could beat him when it came to getting through office work. John Weeks, Coolidge’s own Massachusetts ally, was also there, already digging deep in the details of war surplus goods in the job of secretary of war. Harry Daugherty was there as attorney general; Albert Fall, with his signature handlebar moustache, came from Interior.

It was Mellon who caught Coolidge’s eye. The new Treasury secretary sat near Harding, at the other end of the table. Mellon was a name Coolidge had first heard before in relation to Arthur Vining Davis. Today the magnate from Pittsburgh was, after Henry Ford, the United States’ most admired, and most eccentric, businessman. Mellon too felt like a newcomer; when he exited the cabinet meeting, the reporters would note, Mellon was surprised to discover the little knots of men in the anteroom and slipped away. What Coolidge saw, however, was not the awkwardness but the determination. At the end of the Wilson era, the Federal Reserve banks raised the key interest rate, the discount rate, mightily, from 4 percent to 7 percent. Two Treasury secretaries, Carter Glass and David Houston, had participated in that initiative with William Harding; the Treasury secretary sat on the board of the Federal Reserve. Those hikes had been painful, but lower prices had followed. Mellon was likely to sustain the policy of tight credit. Yet there was one area where the work had scarcely begun: income taxes, with the top rates still above 70 percent. Getting the tax code back closer to the prewar top level of 7 percent seemed an impossible task, but Mellon planned to cut as far back as he could to prewar rates. That spring Mellon would write in a circular to bankers, “The people generally must become more interested in saving the government’s money than in spending it.” Mellon, like Coolidge, did not like to be quoted, but reporters heard him warn that the United States had no “stallion dollar.” The dollar did not automatically proliferate; growth was not automatic, as some assumed. The groundwork had to be laid for it to do so.

The other cabinet members were shouldering equally heavy loads. Selling off the navy’s oil reserves made sense from both the fiscal responsibility and the efficiency points of view. The man in charge there, as interior secretary, was a westerner who understood oil and gas better than anyone else: “Petroleum Fall,” the former senator Albert Fall of New Mexico. There was a new department, the Labor Department, and therefore a new cabinet member. While the Hardings’ Airedale, Laddie Boy, waited outside, the meeting proceeded briskly. Harding let it be known that the cabinet might meet twice a week while undertaking the initial work of legislation. Harding inquired as to protocol of publicizing such meetings. Hughes, the senior presence, let him know that such decisions were up to him. At the same meeting Harding let his colleagues know that Senator Lodge would stay in the powerful position of Republican Senate leader.

In the Senate chamber Coolidge had his own work cut out for him. There was much to learn that differed from the rules and the protocol of the General Court. There were plenty of people around to help him, including an assistant to communicate the basics. In the House the speaker was Frederick Gillett, Amherst class of 1874, who had nominated him in Chicago. Senator William Dillingham sat before him in the Senate, the same Dillingham to whom Coolidge had addressed the tentative job application back in 1895. Dillingham had fought hard to restrict immigration in the past and plotted yet more immigration law now. Lodge loomed. The role of the president of the U.S. Senate was in many ways weaker, just as Coolidge had discerned in the old days reading at Adams House, than the role of Senate president in Massachusetts. Here in Washington the president might break a tie but not create one. What’s more, Coolidge quickly realized that this time careful study of rules might be fruitless. The Senate was more clan than forum. Rules were there to be broken. Though the new amendment had become law, most of those present had been chosen by state legislatures, and the Senate remained their club. “The Senate would do anything it wanted to do whenever it wanted to do it,” he would say. Small wonder John Adams had called the vice presidency “the most insignificant office.”

As the weather warmed, the McLeans’ estate off Wisconsin Avenue proved a crucial refuge. Mrs. McLean took it upon herself to see that Coolidge improved his golf game. The vice president had no more desire to golf now than he’d had in the days when Northampton friends had sought to lure him to the Warner Meadow Golf Club, but golf he did. Mrs. McLean noticed that he golfed in suspenders and said not a word until the seventh hole. She teased him about his suspenders; he attempted to tease back, but his tease fell a little flat. “Your dress is wet in the back,” he said. “Think you ought to know it.” Because the McLeans invited them, the Coolidges came back; Coolidge improved until he became, as Mrs. McLean commented, “quite a fair golfer.”

In some ways it was turning out to be a good time for the Coolidge marriage. In Washington, they were together as a couple, going out, far more often than they had been in all the years of politics and small children. In Washington, Grace’s beauty was appreciated. Coolidge was not frugal about Grace and even scouted the shops for dresses. Emily and Frank Stearns helped out with additional garments. Grace thoroughly enjoyed meeting all the new people, especially the eminences. She met not only Madame Marie Curie but also every sort of diplomat or European dignitary. Several she found hard to take. After Margot Asquith mocked Harding’s education, someone reminded her that Harding had gone to college. “Oh, your American colleges,” the Englishwoman had shrugged. “She should be called Ego, not Margot,” Grace wrote. Grace sat with Coolidge during his stomachaches and hay fever.

Yet as the weeks passed, life in Washington did not become easier. Unlike Harding, Coolidge was not penetrating. The initial curiosity over Coolidge was crystallizing into incomprehension. Men in Washington were not yet ready to mock the
Social Register
. “The elections of 1920 imported into the city of conversation as one of its necessary consequences perhaps the oddest and most singular apparition this vocal and articulate settlement has over known: a politician who does not, who will not, who seemingly cannot talk. A well of silence. A center of stillness,” wrote Edward Lowry, the journalist who had first noticed that for Coolidge, a coat and a pair of tails performed the same function as overalls.

Life at the Willard also proved purgatory. The rooms cost $8 a day, compared with the $32 a month for Massasoit Street. That ate into the vice president’s salary of $12,000 a year. Mrs. John Henderson, the widow of one of the framers of the antislavery amendment to the Constitution, was said to want to donate a residence on 16th Street for the vice president. That would have been convenient, but her gift was only a rumor for now. There were other costs beyond the monetary in Washington. Children did not really fit in here, though their sons came back for school breaks; Grace and Calvin, Jr., popped corn on the small electric stove. The elevator man, Harry Vogel, let the boys run the elevator, sometimes for an entire evening, when their parents were out. But it did not make sense for their boys, now teenagers, to live with them in the small hotel apartment, nor did it make sense for John and Calvin to travel back and forth on the Colonial Express from Northampton to Washington.

This last reality disappointed the Coolidges especially. “It does not seem as if it would pay to have them here,” Coolidge wrote his father morosely when the question of whether the boys might return again soon came up, “when they have only been away four weeks, as it would cost about $100.” The Coolidges considered leaving their sons in Northampton for the next year and asking Colonel Coolidge to come down and live with them in Hampshire County. But the Colonel did not seem enthusiastic about leaving Plymouth Notch. Uncertain about his sons’ future, Coolidge temporarily assigned Stearns to look after them during a Northampton school holiday and escort them to a play at the Hollis Street Theatre in Boston. The subject of the play was the life of Abraham Lincoln.

Adding insult to injury, the Coolidges, great animal lovers, found they could not have pets, either. Cats, like children, did not fit in at the Willard. One evening Grace found a tiny consolation in the form of a family of mice who had found their way into the room. The mice returned often, and Grace fed them bits from the hotel table. The other visitors might criticize her etiquette, but in the mice, “I firmly believe that I thus acquired some friends in Washington who would have pronounced me the perfect hostess.” Coolidge, for his part, read. Beside his bed was a table stacked with texts on tariffs from Morrow, as well as the Constitution and other documents.

Meanwhile, Harding simply barreled forward, even calling an extraordinary session of Congress, which meant that the usual March or April finish of Congress would be delayed. Shortly Congress passed, and Harding signed, the budget law. The law featured several interesting attributes. The law unified the budget, just as promised, so that the executive could review the budget all at once before his signature made it law. Beyond that it gave the executive the power to review a budget already passed. He might, if he had the patience, then demand that departments spend less than the amount first appropriated to them. In addition the law created a research and enforcement office for the executive, a Budget Bureau. “Good for Mr. Harding,” wrote
The Baltimore Sun
in approval. “Mr. Harding is a good natured man but he is showing the Republican elephant that on occasion he can use the goad as effectively as Mr. Wilson used the whip on the Democratic donkey.” Harding followed that legislative coup with a coup of an appointment: the first head of the new Budget Bureau would be Charles Dawes, the flamboyant general who had snapped a Hell-and-Maria at Congress when lawmakers had questioned wartime outlays. Now Dawes committed himself with theatrical zeal to the new cause, reducing the budget.

On June 29, Harding showcased his new bureau and its new director at a large administration-wide event at Albert Fall’s Department of the Interior. With Coolidge beside him on the platform, Harding himself opened the budget event, pulling the whole room in to share the drama of their negative endeavor: “Fellow workers: I do not think there has ever been a meeting like this.” The war, the spending, the out-of-control budget had to stop; the scope of his project was nothing less than a total change in direction: “We want to reverse things.” With enormous fanfare, Dawes then spoke, promising to make government fairer, cleaner, and, above all, less expensive. Dawes’s primary challenge boiled down to a simple phrase: army surplus. The government must divest itself of all the extra goods and departments the war growth had generated. Dawes was even creating a Federal Liquidation Board, an entity whose entire purpose was to shutter government and military offices. He was already boasting that he could shave a percentage point or two off that year’s budget. To dramatize his austerity, he carefully furnished his new office with secondhand furniture and his own two brooms. The new budget law was already making a difference. Harding was not just saying “no,” he was inventing a whole theater of “no.” The meeting was just one of a series; they would take place every six months from now on.