Coolidge (40 page)

Men seek you over e’ery land,

But scanty few have you in hand.

Men slave for you and with life pay

If they can clutch you for one day

You are the subject of their prayers

To you they give their thoughts and cares

Men say untruths for you alone

And by foul means you’re called their own

Yet rest not till their dying day

Because they grasped you in such way.

Grace preserved the poem, typed on the stationery of the Willard.

Still, the spring of 1922 was the Coolidges’ low point. They were now beginning to derive some comfort from the sense Coolidge was not alone in his struggles to promulgate quality policy in Washington. Mellon was struggling with plans for tax simplification and also with the Harding gang’s plants in his own department. The secretary prevailed in a skirmish when a Mellon loyalist, Internal Revenue Commissioner David Blair, squeezed out several Harding supporters. One Harding man was C. C. Childs, a former Yale football star who had competed in the hammer throw at the 1912 Olympic Games. Mellon’s staff suspected that Childs and a colleague had removed privileged documents from the office when they had left. Blair sent the Secret Service after them. Furious at being followed, Childs pushed a Secret Service man against a tree and punched him unconscious. There were rumors that Elmer Dover would back Childs up and bring the fired men back. But Mellon, after calling on Harding at the White House, confirmed that the men would not be reinstated.

Each hour that Mellon spent on politics was an hour away from cleaning up after the war, itself a never-ending struggle. Congress had created a debt commission to collect money it was owed from foreign governments, and put forward a plan for twenty-five-year payment, which foreign governments promptly attacked as selfish. “There once existed a ferocious creditor he was called Shylock,” a French senator from Martinique, Henri Lémery, was quoted in
The New York Times
as saying. “Has America, which but yesterday we acclaimed for her generosity and idealism, fallen to the role of a Shylock?”

The great domestic legacy of the war, even beyond the debt, remained the size and waste of government. Out west, one of the navy properties was a great oil field that lay under a butte, officially Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 3 but known as Teapot Dome for the butte’s funny shape. Some engineers were arguing that the surrounding private companies were tapping the oil out from under the Dome. The best thing to do might be to grant a concession to drill there; that would both allow commerce to take over the business there and reduce the United States’ dependence on oil drilling in Mexico. (Clarence Barron commented often that though New England did not know it, much of its oil came from Mexico.) Granting oil concessions to private companies was like granting a great company the right to operate Muscle Shoals, the dam that had been constructed to produce nitrates during the war. It was important to do this now, Harding and Coolidge believed. If they did not then these sectors might stay forever in public hands.

But the lawmakers were suddenly querying the way Harding went about his commercialization of Teapot Dome. They were realizing that the interior secretary, Albert Fall, intended to lease the valuable Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 3 without putting the project out for bids. The transfer to Interior from Navy had already taken place with the seeming endorsement of all, including the navy secretary and the navy assistant secretary, Theodore Roosevelt, the president’s son and Alice’s half brother. The early word was that Fall was writing a contract with Standard Oil. By Good Friday, April 14, 1922,
The Wall Street Journal
was serving up a scoop: the Wyoming reserves, some 200 million barrels of high-grade oil, would be leased to Mammoth Oil Co., a company created by Sinclair Oil, the company of a Harding campaign donor, Harry Sinclair. Fall claimed that Sinclair was a good choice, better than the alternative, which was teaming up with a giant like Standard Oil.

Now the Progressives had the issue they had been longing for. Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin was moving with alacrity to spotlight the transaction and demanded an investigation of the Teapot Dome concession. The administration hoped that La Follette, who was often pooh-poohed as a mere blowhard, would not find a following for this. Yet the Senate unanimously passed La Follette’s resolution while Coolidge watched from the Senate president’s seat. More resolutions followed. As Miles Poindexter of Washington State put it, there were two questions hanging over big oil concessions: “Was it necessary for the government to sink wells or to have wells sunk upon its reserve in order to meet an attack upon the oil underneath its own property by which it was being drained? In the second place, are the means which have been adopted by the Government for doing that the proper ones, the best ones, to the greatest advantage of the Government, which could be obtained?” The gas price at the pump was not up especially, but the prospect of profits from gas was even more enormous than people had guessed in the spring, and the markets knew it. Oil share prices in total had risen by a billion dollars since the beginning of the year as shareholders tried to get their part of the auto boom.

In June, Coolidge took a breather from it all and went up to Amherst, where he had, so long before, speculated as a student about the corruptibility of any larger government created by an income tax. His son John was coming nearer to college age. The vice president even spent an hour at Phi Gamma Delta house. At Amherst, however, a general skepticism about the flamboyant Meiklejohn was sweeping the trustees and alumni. Meiklejohn had just spent yet another year in Europe; the faculty resented his absences, and the trustees resented his failure to raise more funds. In the background was the old war issue. “I have heard from so many sources that there can be no doubt whatever Mr. Meiklejohn threw as many obstacles as he could in the way of military training and participation in the war by undergraduates,” wrote Harold M. Bixby, a St. Louis banker, adding, “He does not understand the Amherst spirit.” Others were concerned with Meiklejohn’s attitude toward religion; he was not against it, but seemed to be pulling the college away from faith and toward philosophy or politics. Meiklejohn was establishing classes for local workers in Holyoke and Springfield; that seemed to be pulling the college into the world in a way some of the faculty disliked. There was something disingenuous about Meiklejohn playing at conciliation with workers when union and management seemed ready to go to war.

That summer, they did go to war. In June, the administration won a key case against violent strikers:
United Mine Workers v. Coronado Coal
affirmed that strikers were liable for the damage they inflicted on companies’ property. On July 1, 300,000 rail workers walked out, shutting down commerce. The strikes halted the upward trend of business; the strike was taking the recovery hostage. The administration had begun to appoint conservative judges who would be a help in the endless battles between companies and unions. A key judge was James Wilkerson, confirmed recently as a federal judge in Chicago, replacing the progressive Kenesaw Landis, who was doing double duty as a federal judge and baseball commissioner. On September 1, Attorney General Daugherty struck: the administration sought and won a temporary injunction against strikes from Wilkerson, the Harding appointee, in Chicago. It was an example of Harding at his toughest. Gompers was furious; he called the injunction a document that suspended “every constitutional guarantee of free speech, free press, and free assemblage.” As for Wilkerson, he was a mere Daugherty “pet,” Gompers said. But Harding stood firm: the strikers were wrong, as the injunction said, because they represented interference with interstate commerce. Writs were served across the country to union leaders; they could no longer, after eight weeks, halt work. Later in September, Judge Wilkerson handed down a second injunction, of stronger power. There Harding, like Coolidge, saw no middle ground.

The Republican prospects for the midterm did not look good. Harding, Coolidge noted, faced a challenge in another area: the veterans. The senators had finally succumbed to the pressure and passed the bonus bill Harding had persuaded them to reject the year before. They figured, as the police had, that Harding would sign it: the midterm elections were close. His veto would certainly lose the party votes. But Harding vetoed. The least Coolidge could do was campaign loyally, and he did, discovering something surprising in the process. In Washington, Lodge still reigned, but the campaign reminded Coolidge of a funny thing: he was more popular than Lodge, who might even lose his seat. To lose Lodge would mean “a loss to Massachusetts in prestige and influence in Washington that might not be regained in a generation,” the Republican Club of Massachusetts said. During the campaign they all, including Grace and Governor Cox, found themselves back together at Treadway’s Red Lion Inn. At the town hall in Great Barrington, the Republican noted, the enthusiasm for Coolidge was especially strong: “Given Ovation at Rally,” the
Springfield Republican
reported. Afterward, Lodge bought the papers and saw the headline. Lodge bitterly tore the paper into pieces. “I wish they would accept me as an institution or a monument this one time,” he complained to a friend.

In the end Lodge did hold his seat, but only barely. And Harding’s Republicans did hold on to their majorities. But the Grand Old Party leaders found the party had narrowed its lead in both houses significantly; its fifty-nine-seat majority in the Senate dropped to fifty-three. In Minnesota, the isolationist Lindbergh did not win, but Frank Kellogg, a venerable Republican who had endorsed Wilson’s League of Nations, a member of the old golf cabinet, was also defeated. Emboldened, bonus fans pushed through another bonus bill, daring Harding to veto. Senator Holm Bursum of New Mexico, a fellow Republican who had taken Albert Fall’s seat when Fall went to Interior, led the legislation, which created monthly payments of $72. These payments were not for the veterans of World War I, but rather for veterans of preceding wars and their widows, of whom there were in total about 200,000, all of whom were now able to vote in federal elections. Although this kind of bill did not cover the millions of World War I veterans, it was a wedge; once it passed you could pass another one like it.

The Christmas season neared. Mrs. Florence Henderson, the owner of the wonderful residence, invited Grace to a dance at her house; Grace, who had become a better dancer, was given the honor by Mrs. Henderson of leading a march with Mrs. Henderson’s son, John B. Henderson. Bursum suggested that Harding would sign on Christmas Day “a Christmas present from the nation to the veterans.” Vetoing this modest-seeming bill would make Harding look like Scrooge. As Harding thought over all this, Mrs. Harding was recovering from a serious bout with kidney disease. There was little time to prepare for the holiday season. The White House Christmas would be simple; each White House employee received a $5 gold coin from the Hardings.

In early January, Fall resigned, a shock to all. Fall had been so popular with Harding and his fellow senators that they did not know how to handle his downfall. The next day, not pausing, Harding vetoed the bonus bill with an unyielding statement. The Bursum bill, he noted, established a precedent of paying veterans, regardless of need, each month. “The commissioner of pensions estimates its additional cost to the Treasury to be about $108 million annually,” Harding noted, an outlay that took the country in the wrong direction at a time when each dollar saved was hard won. More important, “I venture the prediction that with such a precedent established the ultimate pension outlay in the half century before us will exceed 50 billions of dollars.” The country could not help any one group without helping the other groups.

The cabinet members who had sat around the mahogany table for two years now were concluding two things. The first was that Harding’s personal dedication made Harding worth supporting. But the second was that the trouble around Harding now stood a realistic chance of bringing his party down in the next election. The magic they had seen in Harding in those early days had been illusion. Though Harding had seemed to succeed by making “no” sound like “yes,” the reality was that he had succeeded with the Washington crowd because he did say “yes,” and too often. That was his temperament, to say “yes” no matter what his mind or his party told him. Harding, winningly rueful as always, even quoted his own father at a press conference to explain his troubles. It was good that Warren had not been a girl, his father had said. He would always be in the family way—because he couldn’t say no. Among the senators, especially, there began to be more discussion about Harding. What was their former colleague doing at the White House? Why were there so many contracts given out? James Watson, who represented Indiana, drew his own rueful conclusion. “The simple fact is that my dear old friend just did not like to work. . . . He simply was not adapted to the place and daily shrank from its exacting and grueling toil.” In his choice of people Harding might have squandered the opportunity to complete the steps necessary for normalcy. Alice Longworth, as usual, put it all the most damningly: Harding was not a bad man, she thought. But he was a slob.

That winter, there was more illness on the East Coast. A virus, the influenza—passed through Washington. Secretary of State Hughes and the British ambassador both came down with it. So did Sam Gompers. Even Harding fell ill. The same period brought the death of John B. Henderson, with whom Grace had danced at a party in December. Henderson expired at the hospital after an intestinal operation. Harding came down with the “grippe” the third week in January. While he was recovering, Mrs. Henderson, the lady with the mansion, announced she would honor her son by giving her house, now valued at $500,000, to the American people as a vice presidential residence. Congress needed merely to approve the gift.