Coolidge (57 page)

That technology had such transformative power was something Coolidge had known since his afternoons at the depot of Ludlow or the period when street trolleys of the Connecticut River Valley had enthralled him and Alfred Pearce Dennis on their evening rides. Lately, it had been cars that had sped up commerce. Even as Mellon’s tax experiment proceeded, trucks were replacing rail freight faster than anyone had suspected, and Coolidge hoped to profit from his own conviction that transport had more distance to run. That month, via his broker, R. L. Day, Coolidge had picked up 100 shares of Mack Trucks preferred stock at 108¾ dollars a share. Technology could not do everything forever, but it could help you through an impasse. If civil aviation, not the military, took the lead, all the better. In the private sphere, invention worked especially powerfully. Conversely, as Coolidge knew, the price was especially high where machines failed, where connections were not made, when technology came too late.

The price of being too late had become all too clear again to him just the spring before. Coolidge’s father had begun to fade in January and February. One of John’s legs had no longer worked. The Colonel had suffered some kind of a stroke. The telephone line to the bed no longer sufficed; Coolidge was ready to travel up when the doctors ordered. But the busy legislative season had kept his eyes on Congress in that period. Every deal Mellon cut with a foreign government to refinance its loans had to be approved by Congress; an especially generous one with Italy, whereby the debt was readjusted down to a fifth of the old level, had required forceful backing from Coolidge in January and February to win passage.

The week the doctors attending his father deemed it time to summon the president north, Plymouth had been, still, literally snowbound. Coolidge paced as Colonel Starling dictated the elaborate preparations for the trip up to the village to men in Massachusetts and Vermont over the phone: the Presidential Special would travel to Woodstock; there they would transfer to cars and then to sleighs for the final leg of the journey to Plymouth. Workers from both Woodstock and Ludlow engaged in a competition to clear the roads for cars. Some new to the task had been chagrined to discover that the last mile of the trip to Plymouth was “nearly perpendicular.” By the time Coolidge and his wife reached Plymouth in their double sleigh, the men were already shoveling another path, to the cemetery.

The death of his father hit Coolidge harder than he had expected, and his father’s affairs preoccupied him for months. He sorted through John’s bankbooks and found that his deposit box at the bank contained a diamond ring and savings account books and bonds adding up to $43,601.25, an enormous amount in those days and a testimony to the thrift John had practiced. Neighbor Edward Blanchard, Walter Lynds, and others were left to oversee the Coolidge properties. Lynds had a secondhand boiler to process the sugar. Coolidge corresponded with them; he was now a landlord. But it was hard to go back with John gone. That summer the Coolidges had established the summer White House not in Plymouth with Aurora Pierce but in New York’s Adirondacks. It had been a pleasant enough time, including fishing excursions arranged by Colonel Starling. A comfort to both Coolidges was that Mrs. Jaffray had finally departed the White House for good. Frank Stearns had arranged for a replacement, Ellen Riley of Ipswich, who had worked in Boston at R. H. Stearns. The papers reported that Miss Riley had been picked “because of her wide knowledge of New England food.” Still, physical distance had not kept Coolidge from reviewing, link by link, that chain of events that had led up to John Coolidge’s death; instead of mourning just Calvin, now he had to mourn them both.

Now, in Washington, Coolidge and Mellon had their hands full defending the tax cut. Coolidge had laid siege to Congress before; now they felt themselves to be the ones besieged, like Will Rogers. With each month that passed, lawmakers readied new plans to convert their revenues into deficits or to change the law so that the value of the experiment would never be visible. Muscle Shoals, the nitrate plant at the Wilson Dam on the Tennessee River, remained in the federal government’s hands; progressives such as Senator Norris of Nebraska, who had just ascended to the position of chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, might yet make Muscle Shoals into the basis of a chain of federal hydropower plants. In the halls of the Senate, the topic of Muscle Shoals would not die; its nickname was “The Alabama Ghost.” Though Harding and Coolidge had fought off agricultural subsidy before, the farm senators now sought a new kind of intervention, a government office that managed prices and guaranteed farmers parity, which was defined as the same high price levels that had been the rule years before. The case that farmers deserved regulated high prices remained easy to make as long as the farmers had to pay the artificially high prices for their tools and goods that were ensured by the Coolidge-backed Republican tariff.

Other challenges kept popping up. Many Democrats were like Senator Robinson, and wanted to beat Coolidge and Mellon at their own game, cutting rates, but then using any extra revenue not for debt reduction or tax rebates but for new large programs. The loudest and most authoritative demand for costly programs came from infrastructure engineers, led by Herbert Hoover. Hoover stood by Coolidge and his agriculture secretary, William Jardine, in their hand-to-hand combat with the farming bloc. But in exchange the commerce secretary demanded much, including White House backing for an expensive system of dams and sluices and a new rerouting of the Colorado, Mississippi, and Columbia rivers, not to mention the Great Lakes. The military thought that any extra cash ought to be spent on new cruiser ships; the House Naval Committee was applying all its weight to get Coolidge to put more cruisers into the budget. Policymaking was likely to become tougher after the midterm. If the Republicans, the incumbent party this time, lost seats in the midterms, then their foothold would become weaker. If the progressives or labor parties gained, they too might interrupt the tax plan. There had been costly natural disasters, like the floods in the Midwest. Then there was the economic weather: Ford planned to shut down his factories to build a new model to replace the Model T; that might cause a recession all by itself and strengthen the progressives.

When aviation would be able to realize its potential was not yet clear. Nearly a decade before, the New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig had established the prize offering $25,000 to the first flier who traveled nonstop from the United States to Paris. Now airmen and navies were getting close to succeeding and figured they could hop the Atlantic in a mere day or day and a half. In September, the French fighting ace Captain René Fonck had set off from Roosevelt Field in New York for France. Coolidge, still at Paul Smith’s Hotel in the Adirondacks for the summer, had wired Fonck and his American partner, Lieutenant Lawrence Curtin, to cheer them on in their “fine and courageous adventure.” A gas tank leak in the end had prevented that crossing. Storms at sea had caused the next delay. Then, on September 21, Fonck’s plane crashed at takeoff, cartwheeled on the runway of Roosevelt Field, and exploded into flames, killing two of Fonck’s crew.

In October, eager to sustain the budget side of the experiment as always, Coolidge met with Lord six times and reduced a tariff on paintbrush handles by half, his second cut that year, the other a reduction in a duty on live bob quail. Coolidge planned a speech, but another event intervened: the aurora borealis interfered with the telegraph communication. The midwestern floodwaters receded; a visit from Queen Marie of Romania ate up days. Meanwhile, the progressives duly made the expected advances. Though he had missed the graduation of John at Mercersburg in 1924, Coolidge hoped to travel out to dedicate a new memorial chapel at Mercersburg. The bells of the chapel had been cast in Croydon, England, using copper from all over the world, including bits from Lord Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, a tiny shaving from the Liberty Bell, and a copper wire from an airplane, PN-9, which had made the first flight to Hawaii.

Grace went, taking white roses; yet other roses were dropped from the sky by an airplane. But again, Coolidge was not there, owing to another crisis: too much bounty. The crop that year was so great that farmers feared the volume would drive down their prices enough to kill their farms. Coolidge arranged a credit for farmers; it was a compromise that placated the cotton men, reducing the pressure for the larger sin of passing systematic price management. That week there was good aviation news: a Marine Corps captain completed a cross-country flight from San Diego to Washington, the best record of flying hours for the navy without accident. Coolidge did take time for this, bringing the flier to the White House and awarding the trophy on the lawn.

The floodwaters of the Midwest subsided yet further, but by December the results of the election brought a new tide of trouble. In the House, Republicans retained their majority, but lost seats, including two to the new Farmer-Labor Party candidates who would press for some version of agricultural price setting or subsidy. In the Senate the blow was worse. Coolidge’s old ally William Butler of Massachusetts lost his bid for election to the Senate seat he had been holding since the death of Lodge after 1924. Overall the Senate was now effectively tied, with Republicans holding forty-eight seats to the Democrats’ forty-six. Dawes’s vote became crucial.

Aware that money spoke louder than words, Coolidge and Mellon decided to demonstrate the value of their cuts by making Christmas come early that year, rebating some of the cash the cuts had generated. “Tax Refund, Coolidge Plan” read the headlines, announcing that they would redistribute $150 million of the surplus, a 10 or 12 percent cut in the tax bill people paid, if Congress backed the concept up with a resolution. Nearly every area of the economy was prospering; even the cotton surplus was of course prosperity, if only the mismatch of farmers to buyers could be sorted out. The Commerce Department’s annual report, released that fall, would note that nearly every industry from mineral production to mail-order houses had seen significant increases since 1923, with electricity up to 179 compared with a 1919 base of 100. Farm prices were not down. Department store revenues were at 133 compared with those of 1919, though the chain stories, which emphasized price, were prevailing over service stores like RH Stearns. The United States’ standard of living was higher than ever before.

The
Chicago Tribune
, reporting the tax giveback news, underscored that Coolidge in no way saw the election as a repudiation “of himself or his party.” In the same pages the
Tribune
carried a story of yet another of that autumn’s many aviation mishaps. Caught in a snowstorm, a mail plane had suffered engine failure over Bloomington, Illinois, on a trip between St. Louis and Chicago; the pilot had parachuted 13,000 feet and landed in a farm field. The pilot’s name, the paper said, was Charles A. Lindbergh. It was not the first time he had bailed out; after engine failure in September he had parachuted down in Ottawa, Illinois, as well. Two weeks later a navy aviator, Lieutenant Edward Curtis, died in Norfolk at the navy base hospital after injuries received in a crash. In England, the Royal Air Force suffered three fatal crashes in a week.

Coolidge was eager for more evidence from his tax experiment, in part because he knew Mellon, seventy-one now, would not want to fight the tax wars forever. The wedding of Mellon’s daughter, Ailsa, had taken place that past spring; the Coolidges had attended; indeed, they had had their portraits painted by the same artist who had rendered Ailsa the year of her marriage, Philip Alexius de László. The Treasury secretary now wanted to focus on a federal building project with the Fine Arts Committee that would give Washington a complex of edifices worthy of its rank as a world capital. If Washington were to be the world’s creditor—and Mellon was ensuring that it would remain so—it must be more beautiful, like London, whose structures, such as the National Gallery, Mellon so admired. The new project was a set of buildings, which would be known collectively as the Federal Triangle. A well-known sculptor, not Bryant Baker but Gutzon Borglum, who was famous for carving heroic figures in stones in the landscape, was seeking out Mellon for an appropriation for a new project, giant profiles of presidents he would cut into the ancient granite of South Dakota. Mellon was also making other outlays, some personal. In 1926, while the federal government had purchased the Oldroyd Lincoln collection, Mellon had himself been busy purchasing paintings for himself and the National Gallery, a great Rembrandt,
A Young Man Seated at a Table
, and Rogier van der Weyden’s
Portrait of a Lady
.

The talk of another term for Coolidge was already loud; however the party fared, however angry committees were at his reluctance to appropriate, Silent Cal’s ways were enormously popular. To be sure, Grace was still homesick for her friend Therese Hills, her street in Northampton, and her son, John. She was at work on a patchwork coverlet for the enormous Lincoln Bed, which expressed her view about the amount of time they should stay in Washington: it would be forty-eight squares, the number of months Coolidge would serve in his first full term. There was also space for a dateline: “August 3, 1923–March 4, 1929.” Still, the Coolidges were now as much at home in Washington as they would ever be. Their menagerie had only grown, to include more dogs, birds, and a raccoon, Rebecca. Without Mrs. Jaffray, Grace found the White House more comfortable and was plotting a renovation of the upstairs to take place during the summer of 1927. She liked Miss Riley, who took care of Rebecca and kept meticulous books for the president. With Miss Riley, Grace found with satisfaction, she could be a better host and could experiment. “Did you ever eat a green salad with tiny bits of fried bacon scattered over it just before serving with oil dressing?—Rather nice,” Grace wrote to the housekeeper. Or, “Please have mint sauce for the lamb.” Grace found she could also respond to the president more easily: “Dear Miss Riley, When the ham is carved tomorrow will you see that it is cut so that the President can get that little round piece which lies near the bone?—G.C.”