Coolidge (52 page)

There was still a danger. The tax cuts could also have the opposite of the intended effect, making the government bigger. If the tax cuts yielded the full coffers Mellon promised, those coffers in turn would tempt Congress, Republican or Democratic, to spend more. Still, Coolidge now found himself enthusiastic enough that he was willing to run that risk. His experts saw yet another advantage in Mellon’s scientific taxation. Tariffs were like Prohibition enforcement, one of those burdens one carried for the party. A request for a reduction in sugar tariffs had traveled with him to Plymouth; instead of making the decision he had wandered into the woods to check out his own sugar maples. If Mellon got his tax experiment right, then the tiresome question of tariffs would finally recede; soon income tax revenues would dwarf them entirely in size. On September 1, the day the papers carried the news of Mellon’s surprise, Coolidge received labor leaders at the White House. Even labor would benefit if the tax rate came down; companies might pass on their savings to workers. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had remained stuck at 100 or less for years, might finally move past the 100-point barrier.

The election was the first hurdle Coolidge and Mellon had to get over. Senator La Follette, the Progressive presidential candidate, was doing well in California on a platform of nationalization of railways, power, light, telephone, and telegraph. In Peoria, Illinois, one of Lincoln’s storied stops, La Follette went after Coolidge for corruption, charging that Coolidge “saves at the spigot and wastes at the bunghole.” Coolidge might have been attentive when it came to the pennies, but tariffs were graft on a large scale; Mellon too got the tax refunds his treasury sent out when there was a surplus. Under a plan like La Follette’s, as Herbert Hoover said, officeholders would proliferate, whether bureaucrats or elected officials. Together all officeholders would number 6 million; now that women could vote, their wives would join them and the government vote would be 25 percent of the electorate, Hoover said. John Davis, the Democratic candidate for president, was more conservative, but under Wilson the country had seen that Democrats too were capable of great nationalizations. If they teamed up, the Democrats and progressives could undo all that he and Harding had done. If he wanted to push the government back farther, Coolidge had at most only a few more years. The economy needed to grow so fast that all the errors of the past regarding the railroads no longer mattered, so that people could see that where the railroad enterprise had slowed, cars or aviation might take its place in the future.

To convey their respect for the future of aviation, the Coolidges and the Coolidge cabinet went down to Bolling Field on September 9 to inspect it themselves. Star aviators from all over the country had been traveling the continent in small hops to demonstrate the potential of the new means of transport. The airplanes were hours late, and it rained; Coolidge stood waiting in a black raincoat and rubbers, smoking cigars. Grace huddled in the car in a cape trimmed with fur. But no one at the event minded the wait. When the first planes landed, the
Chicago
and the
Boston II
, Coolidge went out to shake the fliers’ hands and peered into the cockpits. Those mechanics were at least as interesting as the mechanics of tax cuts.

Even with a plan in place and with his weekly meetings with Lord, Coolidge sometimes lost heart. They had held John back from a summer at Camp Devens, but now John must leave for college. Without him, the reality of their loss hit the Coolidges. Suddenly the only child, John, bore the heavy weight of his parents’ anxieties. The Coolidges had already arranged for John to room with Stephen Brown rather than on campus. Coolidge’s fraternity had already invited John to become a member. Grace missed John, and Coolidge became anxious about him. On September 24, he dropped another line to his old friend from Amherst Frederick Allis with a request to watch over his son. “I thought you might help him in avoiding mistakes,” he wrote. He also sent John a testy letter:

My dear John,

You have not told us anything about what you are doing at Amherst, as to what you are studying, where you are boarding. . . . I want you to take a book and set down in it all your expenses, so that you will know for what you are paying out your money. I am giving you a letter of introduction to Mr. Allis for you to give him. . . . When you don’t know what to do about anything, you can go and ask him. . . . I have already indicated that I want you to stay in Amherst and study, and not be running to Northampton.

Coolidge was also tense because now he was beginning to lay out his tax plan; that week he took a stab at explaining it in a speech he delivered to several thousand druggists on September 24. It included not only lower taxes, he told them, but also a general commitment to less interference. If the government stayed out of the way and prices became more stable, businesses would not have to worry so much as they had in the past. “The successful merchant no longer attempts to thrive on sharp dealings but on service and mutual consideration.” Contacts between government and business, he said, should be “as few as possible.” Here he was seeking to show that he was more than merely the nominee of Ford Motor Company, which just a few days later would report yet more stupendous success, the production of a record 1.26 million vehicles in the first eight months of 1923. He was not for individual businesses but rather for all businesses. Harmony with foreign governments, Coolidge added, would limit the possibility of the greatest disrupter of business, war.

The Coolidge-Dawes Caravan set out from Plymouth that same week, stopping in Northampton to call on Mrs. Goodhue on Massasoit Street. Judge Field and James Lucey went out to greet it, along with Frederick Gillett, who was now running for the U.S. Senate. Lucey had decided he would run for office himself; like Coolidge, he had stocked up on cigars. Herbert Hoover had promised to campaign in California. Charles Evans Hughes, Coolidge’s secretary of state, would also give speeches. Across the country, the caravan made its way, with speakers arguing the points: budgets, economy, and tax cuts. Once in a while, a question came up that provided the president a chance to speak succinctly. Black leaders had in the past been disappointed with the cold reception they received in his office, too little aware that this reception was accorded just about every interest group. Coolidge saw his work as freeing the individual rather than the group. Now a voter wrote to complain that a black man was competing for a nomination to run for Congress. Coolidge saw to it that his reply was published. He wrote, “I was amazed to receive such a letter. During the war 500,000 colored men and boys were called up under the draft not one of whom sought to evade it. A colored man is precisely as much entitled to submit his candidacy” as any other citizen. In general, though, Coolidge spoke little but sat with Lord, trimming and tending. Not everyone understood the Coolidge thrift or its connection with other concerns. The White House staff was irritated that he tipped poorly. Mrs. Jaffray favored her specialty shops and could not share Coolidge’s interest in the new and cheaper supermarkets or in the economy of scale. Grace had to play the broker between her husband and her housekeeper.

“The budget idea, I may admit, is a sort of obsession with me,” he told a group of Jewish philanthropists in a phone conversation from his room at the White House. “I believe in budgets. I want other people to believe in them. I have had a small one to run my own home; and besides that, I am the head of the organization that makes the greatest of all budgets, that of the United States government. Do you wonder, then, that at times I dream of balance sheets and sinking funds, and deficits, and tax rates, and all the rest?” He continued, “I regard a good budget as among the noblest monuments of virtue.” When you budgeted, you could take care of your own people; that was important, too. Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutchman who had ruled the colony of New Amsterdam, had asked Jews to make what became known as “the Stuyvesant Pledge,” to commit to taking care of their own ill and indigent should they stay in New Amsterdam. The colonial community had honored that pledge and had sustained the tradition through the centuries. Coolidge let the charities know he appreciated that: “I want you to know that I feel you are making good citizens, that you are strengthening the government.”

The presidential campaign seemed to be going well, principally because the economy was. Farms still struggled, but those who left farms did all right. All fall the Fords were cranked out; even if they slowed now, people believed, the assembly lines would pick up later. The public debt was down below $21 billion. Interest rates stood now at 3.5 percent, down from 7 percent when Harding had taken office. Even Victory Bonds, still held by more than 12 million Americans, sold better now, at par, whereas they had sold below par at the end of the Wilson administration. At the Civil Service Commission, the officials could show that there were 544,671 federal workers, about 100,000 fewer than in 1920. Yet the expenses still exceeded the total expenses in 1915; it seemed reasonable, therefore, for the Republican Party to win the presidency again.

On October 2, barreling around Brooklyn, the Roosevelt campaign party nearly caused a bad accident when a small truck heading along Wythe Avenue careened into their advance motorcycles; the motorcycles ended up on the sidewalk, but Roosevelt, like his father, proved unflappable and ably stumped for economy and Mellon’s scientific taxation.

John Davis did not have a great caravan, but the Democrat campaigned by train. Davis stopped at Springfield, Illinois, to make the point that Lincoln did not belong to the GOP alone by laying a wreath at the sixteenth president’s grave. Charles W. Bryan, his vice presidential candidate, campaigned by car and drove himself, a sign of a can-do temperament that reporters admired.

La Follette zeroed in on Coolidge’s delay in returning the sugar schedule with lower tariffs. Coolidge was beholden to sugar, clearly. Indeed La Follette announced some arithmetic: every week Coolidge delayed cost housewives across the nation a million dollars in higher prices. “He evidently does not intend to make it until after the fourth of November,” said La Follette, accurately enough, of Coolidge. “That is what the Sugar Trust wants.”

James Couzens, Mellon’s old adversary, also would not relent, targeting Mellon’s connections to Wall Street rather than his tax return. Mellon, Couzens was out to prove, had not really left Wall Street when he came to Washington, an allegation that contained some truth: Mellon had resigned directorships but still communicated with his firms and kept up with their management. Couzens had new ammunition: an interim report from the FTC, which was still investigating Aluminum Company of America for antitrust violations. The commission report included testimony by Aluminum Company’s president, Arthur Vining Davis, that seemed to confirm just what the trustbusters were alleging: that the Treasury secretary still ruled Wall Street. Arthur Davis had said that the company “really consists of A. W. Mellon and R. B. Mellon.” The FTC claimed that the tariff enabled Aluminum Company to control the price of its product and that the company was violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. It said that the company had a “practically complete monopoly of the aluminum in the United States.” John Davis, Coolidge’s opponent, was publicly estimating that current tariffs on foreign aluminum were allowing Mellon to charge an extra 5 cents a pound.

Mellon and Arthur Vining Davis duly countered that the Aluminum Company and Mellon had not violated the law. Mellon’s holdings in Aluminum Company were in fact only one-third of the company. But the tariffs made their defense weak. As long as tariffs protected them, U.S. companies were shutting out foreign companies and thereby hurting consumers by depriving them of lower prices. The “Battle of the Millionaires,” as it was known, between Mellon and Couzens, stayed in the press.

In a way, the Coolidges found, their mourning protected them. Though both of them wanted Coolidge to win office, they no longer cared about the comments made by their political opponents. They were happiest with plants and children. On October 13, Grace surprised a crowd when she showed up at a Lincoln Memorial event for another planting; the local chapter of the American War Mothers charity was dedicating a new tree at the Lincoln Memorial. Grace had in mind that she would have another spruce, a bigger one, for the Christmas tree. This year the Christmas tree would be a living tree.

Children, especially, drew them both. Grace thought of John all the time; when she spoke of him heading north to their house in Northampton or to Amherst, she spoke of him heading “home.” Despite her own loss, or perhaps because of it, she found it in herself at every instance to signal she welcomed children or even the prospect of them; it was to Grace that Alice Longworth ran when she learned she was pregnant, calling up the stairs of the White House “Grace, Grace, I am going to have a baby.” Edward McLean now stood under the cloud of Teapot Dome; it was he who had fixed many things for the Harding ring. But neither Coolidge could forget the friendship the McLeans had shown them. Grace knew that Evalyn Mclean had lost a son of her own, Vinson, in a 1919 car accident. “I know you count, as we do, the boy who is singing his carols in heaven,” Grace wrote to Evalyn. One morning, arriving at the White House, Colonel Starling found a boy pressing his face to the iron fence. “I thought I might see the president,” the boy said. “I heard that he gets up early and takes a walk. I wanted to tell him how sorry I am that his little boy died.” Starling took him in; the boy was so overwhelmed, Starling later recalled, that he could not speak. Starling explained to the president. And that time Coolidge nearly did break down; the president, Starling saw, “had a difficult time controlling his emotions.” Later, when they walked through Lafayette Park, Coolidge told Starling, “Colonel, whenever a boy wants to see me always bring him in. Never turn one away or make him wait.”

Coolidge took solace in service. The nature of the service he needed to render had changed over the years. Service as vice president had meant diplomacy, then the service of continuity; now the service was the tax legislation. But even more than before, the idea kept him going. Selden Spencer, a Missouri senator who had visited that summer, told a story about him. One day, walking with the president on the White House grounds, Spencer had pointed to the White House and made a joke: “I wonder who lives there?” “Nobody,” Coolidge had replied. “They just come and go.” Starling was surprised at how little attention Coolidge paid to the technicalities of the presidential election. While the parties worked themselves into a frenzy around him, Coolidge was quiet. “He was, in fact, more serene during that autumn than at any time in the years I knew him,” he later wrote. The most consoling work of all for Coolidge, perhaps because he believed in it and because it distracted him, was the budget work, the meetings with Lord or Treasury. Rather than return to Massachusetts to vote, the Coolidges filled in their ballots on the White House Lawn, with Rob Roy between them; then they sent their envelopes to the Northampton city clerk.