Coolidge (58 page)

Coolidge for his part also found pleasure in hosting, playing up the role of the Vermonter in Washington. Lynn Cady, the farmer who worked his father’s acres, sent him a one-gallon can of maple syrup. “I have used some and find it very fine,” the president had written back, enclosing a check for $5. “I think the House has ordered some but if you need a market for some let me know.” Coolidge served the syrup at the congressional breakfasts he hosted, along with sausage. Through Cady and Lynds, who worked the limekiln lot, Coolidge continued to experience the difficulty of farming. He had asked Lynds to send him payments for whatever Lynds took off the limekiln lot, but those payments clearly could not be much. A reporter noted that Plymouth’s age-old problem of isolation remained: “The sirup producer is in the same boat as the milk producer. Indeed he is the same fellow. He lives far back from ready transportation.” The Vermont Maple Products Cooperative Exchange had been established years before, but distance, again, was a problem for some producers, including the limekiln lot, even when Plymouth was not snowbound. “It lays half way up the mountainside between Plymouth Church and the March sunset,” the same reporter had noted.

Meanwhile, Coolidge and Lord scoured preliminary reports on the taxes, meeting sixteen times in November and December. When not with Lord, Coolidge busied himself planning and pushing back when pushed. The United States kept a contingent force in Nicaragua more or less constantly; Coolidge wanted to end that conflict and would send the former secretary of war, Henry Stimson, down to mediate. Regular vetoes had to be used sparingly, for overrides like the one he had experienced on the bonus bill hurt the authority of the administration. Coolidge could continue to use pocket vetoes at the end of sessions, killing bills by failing to sign them in the recess. Pocket vetoes were difficult to undo; they could not be overridden. Congress had to start anew with a new law in the next session. He used the pocket veto to kill a bill that introduced new pensions for widows of Civil War soldiers. Like so much pension legislation, it affected a tiny group, but established a principle that could be broadened to provide a benefit for millions. Coolidge, like Harding, found himself playing Scrooge.

In the budget message Coolidge sent to Congress on December 9, 1926, the president made aviation his cause, asking specifically that $3 million be spent to regulate the skies and promote aviation commerce. In aviation he saw profits where he did not see them in, say, shipping: none of the lines being operated by the government was self-sustaining, he warned. Most important, he made the case for his tax experiment. “With the experience of another year’s test of the Revenue Act of 1926, and with a more accurate knowledge which the year will give,” he said, the United States could set policy, but only then.

He’d asked for “another year’s test,” but as early as that Christmas Coolidge and Lord were receiving preliminary results of the tax experiment. The Treasury’s surplus for the next fiscal year was already $218.3 million, or $74.4 million higher than it had been the previous year, before the 25 percent top rate. Mellon had saved so much, a billion dollars in fact, that for the 1927 fiscal year the national debt would be $19 billion, a third down from the $28 billion that had greeted Harding. The White House would have three large trees, which Grace promised to decorate herself with electric lights, tinsel, and candy canes. This year the Coolidges gave the White House staff gold coins. Grace hosted diplomatic dinners, to which not only the cabinet, including of course Mellon, but also old friends were invited: George Pratt from Amherst; Mortimer Schiff, whose shirts Morrow had received as hand-me-downs during college; Bruce Barton; General Lord; the Stearnses; and Evalyn McLean. On Christmas Eve Coolidge and Grace went to the living tree, which had itself taken root at Sherman Square; Coolidge himself touched the button and “under leaden skies that threatened to bring snow tomorrow, lights flashed.”

Coolidge wondered when the outlook would brighten for flight. If only flight could be made safer. On December 22, the president received the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce, a delegation of men representing two hundred companies in some part of the new industry, all arguing that aviation was the future of the U.S. economy. But in Great Britain the House of Commons was stirring over the appalling number of air deaths, eighty-three, that had taken place up to early December 1926. “We are constantly making experiments,” Prime Minister Baldwin apologized, trying to suggest that the Royal Air Force might improve the following year. The very same day that Coolidge received the Chamber of Commerce men, three army aviators met their death when their planes collided over Rantoul, Illinois; a fourth died later. But Governor John Trumbull of Connecticut, whose daughter Coolidge’s own son, John, was now seeing, was becoming a pilot. Senator Hiram Bingham of the same state had flown since the war. The more Coolidge thought about planes, the more enthusiastic he was. He had always argued that aviation had the potential to obviate, at least to some extent, destroyers or battleships, perhaps eventually allowing savings in outlays for the War Department. His conviction strengthened: the future was brighter for flight if commerce, not the War Department, drove the industry. Here, though, he encountered resistance. Years before, it had been Mitchell who pushed for military spending, a force in the air, so stridently that he had been court-martialed and mustered out of service; Dwight Morrow’s board and a law he had signed afterward had pushed aviation away from the military and over to commerce. But now Coolidge confronted a tougher antagonist: Will Rogers. Rogers, like Mitchell, wanted more military spending on planes. “Mr. Coolidge on account of his economy plan has suggested they fly as high as they can on what little gas they have and then coast. In that way they get twice the amount of distance out of the same amount of gas,” wrote Rogers.

Rogers was picking up on something: the administration itself was tired of its own saving policy. Lord might still be holding up that $3 billion budget as the target. “That $3 billion,” Lord told the departments at the January budget meeting, was “still beckoning us on.” But Lord and Coolidge, as hard as they were trying, knew they could not cut much more. “With a full treasury and revenues at flood it requires courage to continue along the lines we have been following,” Coolidge confessed to the same crowd. Even after a record of ten meetings that December, and a record of sixty-three meetings for 1926, the debut year of the Mellon Plan, they were not sure they could do much more. The old Two Percent Club he had created to reward departments that saved was no longer feasible. Departments could not find 2 percent more to cut. Now Lord was running a One Percent Club. By selecting those who had served General Pershing in the war, the Budget Bureau had given the directors a certain protection from criticism: what military man would attack General Dawes or General Lord? But now that immunity was wearing off. The Naval Board and the army general staff were alleging that, Morrow Board or no, General Lord was jeopardizing national defense. The tax experiment was not yet ready to yield all its evidence. “We are waiting [for] a test of the producing ability of the revenue act of 1926,” Coolidge clarified. The tax experiment and the flight experiment moved together in his mind. The Orteig Prize was in the news all the time now, trumping little bits of more mundane news, little stories like that of high water at Cairo, Illinois. More fliers were building or finding planes to compete for it. The radial air-cooled engine, high-lift airfoils, and lighter construction made easy flight likelier. The questions were whether the prize flight would be by monoplane or biplane, or whether it would be a Frenchman, American, or Englishman who would win the prize, not whether the prize would be won.

Meanwhile, though, Congress pressed Coolidge harder. Senator Carter Glass, seeking new cruisers, was especially eager to haul General Lord before a senate committee. “I don’t think he is so hedged about by titled consequence that he can’t come here,” Glass said. In February, Glass’s colleagues pushed on farms. Senator McNary and Representative Haugen were offering up yet another farm bill. This one created a government fund of $250 million to stabilize the price of five commodities: cotton, wheat, corn, rice, and swine. Though commodity prices were high, they still stood nowhere near where they had been in the war. Considering the farm legislation, Coolidge also tended to his own land, farming by letter, wire, or telephone. He worried that Cady, his tenant at the Notch, was not prepared for such surprises as drought or flood. “If you have a little dry weather, I am afraid your feed will be short for ten cows,” he wrote Cady, advising him to consider letting another lot to graze the cattle. Coolidge went on, adding more instructions: “I should cut some spruce trees on the limekiln lot and draw them into the mill and have them so as to have some spruce lumber.” The economics of it all did not necessarily add up. Cady was talking of an investment in an evaporator. That made sense only if Cady committed to continuing to farm, Coolidge noted. The president also included a quiet line of resignation: “If you should leave I should probably close up the farm.”

On February 15, the Coolidges retreated to the
Mayflower
for dinner with Secretary of Agriculture Jardine and his wife and other agriculture department staffers. The Senate had already passed a version of the legislation. The House of Representatives had then passed the bill. Sometimes the
Mayflower
made him feel like a captain, and sometimes, like a prisoner. Angering such a large constituency was not a pleasure, especially since there was one area where it was not wrong: the poor situation that the farmers endured was in part the result of Republican tariffs. The tariffs hurt not only foreigners, but also the international comity Coolidge so often sought to foster.

As if to rub it all in, the president of Cuba, whose entire economy was hurt by U.S. sugar tariffs, canceled his plan to attend a dinner at the White House scheduled for the day Coolidge vetoed the farm legislation, February 25. Gerardo Machado canceled on such short notice that the fresh raspberry sauce, birds, and butter to prepare the dinner had already been ordered, not to mention $100 worth of cigars. Miss Riley was able to recycle some but not all of the items purchased and regretfully alerted Coolidge that they had to write off $32.33 from her budget. A veto “will be the political finish of President Coolidge,”
The New York Times
reported farm bloc politicians as warning. By vetoing, Coolidge might also hurt his party. The Republicans could not stand without the West, and many western senators wanted the legislation.

February was the month of George Washington’s birthday. As plans for celebration this year were made, everyone was conscious that a few years hence, in 1932, the country would mark the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of the first president. Even Congress was already preparing to mark the occasion and had established a commission to plan it, which the president chaired. Washington would have understood; when Coolidge scrutinized Miss Riley’s accounts, he was merely replicating the scrutiny Washington had applied to Mount Vernon’s. The details of Washington’s life—his work as a farmer and businessman, what he had done with his stock shares, how he had arranged his retirement—held Coolidge’s attention now. As with Lincoln, Coolidge thought, one must guard against deifying Washington, making him an imaginary character: presidents failed, and that shouldn’t be obscured by the superlatives. But of course Washington was one who, unlike Lincoln, had emphasized the authority of the states. A president had to respect the states. On February 22, Coolidge delivered a speech about Washington before both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court and greeted forty-two descendants of the first president, who lined up to meet him. Honoring presidents was a constant theme for both Coolidge and Mellon. The sculptor Gutzon Borglum had selected the presidents whose profiles he would chisel into the Black Hills: Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. In its scope, Borglum’s ambition recalled the ambition of the transatlantic flight, or Hoover’s waterways system: the Borglum figures would be 465 feet high. He had already selected the spot for the sculpture; Mount Rushmore, a great crag named after a New York attorney who had wandered through decades back. Accompanying the monument was to be an “entablature,” on which would be “deeply graven an outline of the history of the United States.”

Like many others, Borglum was seeking federal funds and sought to craft his project so that it would win Coolidge’s acceptance. He and Senator Norbeck of South Dakota, one of the Republican senators who supported McNary-Haugen, estimated the cost at $500,000. But when he won an audience with the Treasury secretary that February, Borglum asked for only half that, saying that private donors or the state might pay the rest. Participation was key; that was federalism: “I want to get the people’s teeth into the thing.” Mellon agreed, but Norbeck was furious that Borglum had not gone for more. “You could have gotten it all,” said Norbeck, feisty in his confidence that the administration was agonizing over turning down the farm bloc yet again. He wanted to get something out of all the exchanges. The first couple was planning to spend the summer somewhere out west; it would be an enormous boon to commerce in South Dakota if the Coolidges chose the Black Hills for the summer White House. But Borglum cleverly understood that the buy-in mattered more than the amount. “Before we know it Borglum will be working with his air drills and mastodonic outlines,” the
Aberdeen Press
wrote at the good news.

Norbeck was not the only one taking advantage of Coolidge’s vulnerability on farms to advance other issues. Herbert Hoover was pressing hard for a bill that would appropriate $125 million, a good share of the annual surplus, to help the states build a dam on the Colorado River. Many of the same senators and congressmen who wanted a farm subsidy also supported this law. Senator Gifford Pinchot, the old conservationist, championed Hoover’s project with such superlatives it was hard to challenge him: “The boulder canyon dam will be incomparably the greatest of all dams.” But others mounted a filibuster against the dam, again mostly to exact concessions in unrelated areas, such as loans for veterans or passage of the Muscle Shoals legislation, which had been waiting for resolution for nearly ten years. Nature was conspiring in a tragic way to bolster Hoover’s case for outlays and water management: in California a great storm was driving ranchers from their homes; San Diego was virtually isolated, and water had flooded to heights over men’s heads in the Mission Valley. As if California were not enough, a great northeast gale hit New Jersey and Long Island the same week Coolidge was formatting his final thoughts on farm legislation. The storm was so rough it tossed houses in Long Beach into the sea; on normally tranquil Staten Island, 1,500 had to flee their homes.