Coolidge (5 page)

But even in the period of grief, curiosity stirred in Calvin. John Coolidge and Aunt Mede thought to send the children where they themselves had studied, Black River Academy in Ludlow. On the morning of the first trip to school, it was icy, which meant a fast ride but a cold one. Coolidge and his father climbed into the sleigh while it was still dark. A calf happened to ride with them, going to market in Boston; John admonished his son that the animal would reach the great city now, but the boy would have to wait for years to be ready. Yet Calvin was in good spirits. As they rounded the hill, the light of day struck them. Much later, the boy would recall the ride as magic: “I was perfectly certain that I was travelling out of the darkness into the light.”

One of the first places the boy inspected in Ludlow was the railroad depot. The depot overlooked a mill; in that town there was noise, not only Central Vermont Railway trains heading back and forth but the noise of the mill and the bells from all the churches. For amusement he would visit the railroad yard, formidable in its scale and noise. It was there that Calvin got a sense of what Plymouth was missing. He wrote of his inspection of a shipment from Canada, “saw a fir tree 24 foot in circumference it was a monster.” The train made everything possible. Marvelously, he found, he could travel by himself to see relatives. Aunt Sarah Pollard lived at a nearby station in Proctorsville. She was his mother’s sister, so it was almost like going home to his mother; his uncle Don ran his own store, and Coolidge could work there, shelving or delivering. Oranges and lemons were making it to that part of the world now, and some fruits were even going to Plymouth, but there was a larger selection in Ludlow. For a time he even worked a job at the Ludlow Toy Manufacturing Company making miniature doll prams or wagons with bright vermilion wheels. The boy put his wages in the Ludlow Savings Bank.

The school itself was its own illumination, and there were others like it all over New England. The school, Black River Academy, Baptist in background, enjoyed great independence; its head could shape its curriculum and had time to get to know the children. Secondary school was not compulsory: parents contracted with schools and paid them. The schools did not always have dormitories. Coolidge would board with friends or acquaintances and attend the school. After a few terms he might return home to Plymouth, as his father and grandmother had, to farm or run the store.

At first it seemed that he wanted to; being on his own was hard. Rooming with friends and hired hands selected by his father was not like life in Plymouth. When his grandmother wrote to him in the spring of 1887, Calvin replied with alacrity, telling her that hers was the first letter to arrive from Plymouth Notch: “I rec. your letter today and was very glad to get it for it was the first one I had rec. from home since I left there almost three weeks ago.” The letter featured an ambivalent tone that family members would shortly come to recognize as typical of Calvin: “I am in first rate health and I am having a good time but I wish I was at home for there I could have a better time but having a good time is not everything to think about in this world. I am going to stay to the reunion so tell papa he can come down for me Friday night late or wait until Sat.” Calvin hoped to convince his father to send Abbie to join him. In February, 1887, he wrote Abbie, another of his wavering commentaries, “I suppose you are having a good time fact is I know you are having a better time than you will ever have down here though you do not probably see it in that light.” At home he was qualified to teach school to elementary pupils, but here at Black River Academy he had, at least at first, trouble keeping up. Most of the pupils at the academy had other obligations; some of them stayed home for one term a year to work. Some, such as Ida May Fuller from Rutland, seemed destined for clerical work. Another classmate, Albert Asa Sargent, came from Ludlow itself. Yet another, Ernest Willard Gibson, came from Londonderry. The pupils from out of town boarded with families in Ludlow. Calvin’s roommate was not a pupil at all but a man in his late twenties, a clerk known to his host family, the Boyntons.

Even in that small group, Calvin did not shine. In his first term, he took algebra, grammar, and civil government. His grade average was 83.8. The boy required coaching in several subjects, but especially in an area that would plague him for the next decade: math. He studied, but that did not always help. “I do not expect to pass in algebra,” he wrote Abbie in an 1887 letter. He would squeak by with a 71.

Still, over the course of the years in Ludlow, life smoothed over for the red-haired boy. He moved in with other boys his own age from the school, dwelling for a time with another boy from Plymouth, Herbert Moore. Alone, he turned to the library: “he didn’t play ball or skate nor did he hunt, swim or fish, or go in for any sports, except that he walked every day,” Moore recalled. Instead, he read his way through the library—“every book in it,” Herb said.

Little glints of the boy’s humorous confidence began to shine through. A classmate recalled later that Calvin used to come to his room in the evening for help with math problems. “I remember one night as he came in he said to the housekeeper: ‘Well, I’ve come down to help Henry do his algebra again.’ He said it so solemnly that she asked me afterward if I was falling behind in my algebra.” He wrote his father to ask whether his sister might join him in Ludlow. Abbie, a cheerful girl, the opposite of Calvin, did go to study at Black River toward the end of Calvin’s career there. She arrived in February 1888, just before a blizzard. Tough where Calvin was hesitant, she wanted to teach again, and directed her father without hesitation. “I hope you can get me a school, and I think you can if you try I don’t care where it is,” she wrote to her father. Calvin’s grades moved up from the low eighties to the low nineties. He moved up to a higher track with more classes, even though that track was more expensive: $7.20 a term instead of the $6 a term for the standard course. He gained an affection for the orations of Cicero and saw that he might use oratory in his own life. His own equivocations continued, whether they referred to humans or the animals he knew: “I do not think she [a cow] is gaining much so I guess she will die but hope she will not.” But Cicero did not equivocate, and Calvin began to learn from him.

At home, the rural economy still tested the family. John was wondering how to make better money from dairying. Sheep farming had enjoyed a boom and then fallen back. If a business did survive, it seemed to the Coolidges, that was in part because tariffs protected it. John’s work in law enforcement was wearying. A feud that began while he was still at home and continued through Calvin’s years at Black River Academy was typical. Over the years a cousin, Warren Taylor, had worked a farm with his father south of Plymouth Union. Taylor had married a woman from Sherburne. To avoid the tax collector, Taylor moved to Sherburne each year in March at tax collection time. In 1884, the selectmen of Plymouth ordered the tax assessor to go to Sherburne and assess Taylor’s property there as well. Then Coolidge, the bailiff, was ordered to arrest Taylor and take him to Woodstock Common Jail. But Taylor could not be found.

The schoolboy followed the reports his father gave of each stage of the drama. Taylor paid but then sued, contesting the assessments. In 1887, the county court decided for the town, and John was assigned to collect $269.63, which included back taxes and penalties. In 1889, John Coolidge would arrest Taylor and take him to Woodstock Common Jail, the same one where Oliver had sat four decades before, albeit updated with brick and an addition. Taylor would spend the night in the prison, which he described as a “stone house with an iron bedstead for a couch,” among “thieves and ruffians.” After his release, Taylor would take John Coolidge to court for improper arrest. William Stickney, an old classmate of John Coolidge who lived in Ludlow, was engaged to represent John. It was an unpleasant business, and one had to ask what it was about the place that put people like Taylor into the straits they were in.

Now, toward the end of the decade, President Grover Cleveland and Congress pulled down the tariff wall as a farmer might pull down an old wall on his property. Cleveland, a Democrat, was a true free-market and hard-money man. Cleveland’s consistency inspired many, including an old New Englander, William Prescott Frost, who, transplanted to the West Coast, campaigned for Cleveland with his young son Robert, later to become a poet. Cleveland’s change benefited those who used wool to manufacture clothing and other goods, because now, without a tariff, good foreign wool was cheaper. But in the part of Vermont where Coolidge lived, and in Ludlow, the effect of Cleveland’s move was to give an unassailable advantage to Australian merino over Vermont merino. The farmers joked about it: they said the lower tariff policy had so decimated the wool farmers that “a Democrat couldn’t look a sheep in the face.”

In 1888 Coolidge turned sixteen and gave his attention to a national election, that between Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, for the first time. One question of the contest was protectionism; another was the durability of prosperity: villagers such as Coolidge’s father did not always know whether they could comfortably pay that $7.20 a semester for their children’s schooling. Calvin became so interested that the contest even penetrated his dreams: “dreamed C carried Ind by some over 4000 and NY by 30.” In fact, the election proved wonderfully intricate. Cleveland won the popular vote, but Harrison triumphed in the electoral college, taking the presidency. That was all right with Vermont, which had given Harrison almost three times as many votes as Cleveland.

The spring of Calvin’s final year at Black River Academy took a sudden and dark turn. His sister, Abbie, became ill with a fever and terrible pains in her stomach. At first the doctor thought the illness would pass; Calvin was the more delicate one, everyone believed. But Abbie did not get better. Three doctors were brought in, but she died within a few days in March 1890. Years later, the doctors would guess that it was appendicitis that had killed her, but at the time it was just another of those mysteries borne away with the winter hearse. John gave his son an obituary, which Calvin delivered to the newspaper in Ludlow. In April, Coolidge wrote to John, “It is lonesome here without Abbie.”

After wavering and despite the death, Calvin began to look forward again. He was finishing well at the academy. A principal who had recently arrived, George Sherman, thought Calvin was college material. Sherman took care to help the boy prepare for his college exams. Sherman was plotting the boy’s application to his own college in Massachusetts, a morning’s train ride south from Ludlow. Calvin too was considering how his life might be at Amherst and how to soften the isolation of entry.

For graduation, in May 1890, Calvin wrote and memorized a speech about the power of oratory; he noted that it was Cicero’s voice, “the force of Cicero’s oratory,” that had helped drown out dictators and “made even Caesar tremble.” The speech was also about the advances Great Britain had enjoyed after free traders had won their case there: “What mighty changes have been wrought in England’s political system within the last fifty years by the indomitable energy of such orators as Vincent, Cobden, Bright and scores of others, who traversed the kingdom advocating the repeal of the Corn Laws and other measures which were once deemed Utopian and hopeless.” There was an inconsistency between his praise for the free-trade Britons and the pro-tariff rule in his region. It was actually an inconsistency typical of New England, which liked to see old England’s markets open even when some of its own were closed.
The Vermont
Tribune
lavished praise on him: “Calvin Coolidge gave an historical resume of the influence of oratory in the formation of public opinion and in the great movement of history.”

But with school ending, the question pressed: what might Calvin do now back in Plymouth Notch and without Abbie? It was the isolation that troubled them all again. Yet again, John Coolidge was trying a new venture. Without a train or, yet, refrigeration, it was hard to commercialize the milk of Plymouth Notch. He and the nearby farmers therefore thought they would try their hand at making cheese. Cheese, after all, could be preserved and could withstand slow transport. Breaking the old rule of do-it-yourself, they imported a cheese expert from Shrewsbury, Eugene Aldrich.

By early summer, the new factory was buying thousands of pounds of milk from surrounding farms. The cheese factory was an intrusion upon the life of the Coolidges. The cheesemaker, Aldrich, even moved in with the family for a time. The wagons of milk went past the Coolidges’ door; the smell of it permeated Plymouth Notch. The village did not mind, though; this stink was the stink of commerce.

But the cheese factory was still a modest venture. Plymouth did not feature a big lake or river for easy transport, as did the towns on Lake Champlain. In 1877 and 1878, a merchant and quarry owner on Isle La Motte in northern Lake Champlain made money shipping ice to New York, where the Hudson had not frozen over in two warm years. But such opportunities did not seem to come to Plymouth. The prospects for a railroad to the town were still dim. And with each year that passed, it became clearer that whatever the Coolidges did in rural Plymouth would have to be on a small scale. The Great Plains were unrelenting in their competition with old New England. In the past year alone, as Calvin had finished school, six new states had been admitted to the union: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming. Looking around themselves and at the factory, and at the neighbors with whom they sometimes quarreled, the Coolidges came to a cautious decision: they would follow the advice of the principal. Calvin would go down to Amherst College to sit the entrance exam in September. He was often sickly. But it was clear that something with books, maybe medicine or the law, would suit him more than keeping store or farming. If he became a doctor, he could come back to Plymouth; if he became a lawyer, he could practice in Ludlow. It was evident that he wanted to move into the greater world. John and his mother, Sarah, took comfort in the thought that Amherst was not really so far away, just down the Connecticut River Valley, in an area where Coolidges had been before. But everyone understood. Calvin was the heir to the family that stayed. Now he was leaving too.