Coolidge (59 page)

On February 25, Coolidge did veto McNary-Haugen, appending a thoughtful message of more than three thousand words—long but necessary to show the seriousness with which he took the petition. “The chief objection to the bill is that it would not benefit the farmer,” he wrote. The bill would push up prices. That would make commodities expensive and decrease demand. “To expect to increase prices and then maintain them on a higher level by means of a plan which must of necessity increase production while decreasing consumption is to fly in the face of economic law as well established as any law of nature.” The president also signed McFadden-Pepper, a bank law that could help farmers. Hopefully that would buy time as well.

The farm bloc blustered and roared. But somehow, especially because of approaches like that of Senator Norbeck of South Dakota, Coolidge reckoned that there were ways to mend rifts. His summer stay in New York had enabled him to face off with Governor Al Smith. A stay in South Dakota in the summer of 1927 would be a good way for Coolidge to begin to make it up with at least some members of the farm bloc, and Starling, the Secret Service man, began to think about whether the hills might really be the right choice for the summer White House. Beyond politics, Starling was thinking of the president’s mood. Starling now assigned himself the job of cheering up Coolidge. The White House was making a move to a temporary house while repairs were made; the repairs would finish while the Coolidges were away for the summer. But where? The summer before, on vacation in New York State, Starling had taught Coolidge the rudiments of fishing; the trout of the Black Hills might be just the place to develop that skill or even make the transfer from worm fishing to fly fishing. Hoover was a master fly fisherman. The senators and state representatives lobbied hard for South Dakota; they pointed out that the Black Hills were known not only for trout but also for cool, mosquito-free nights. Starling traveled out and saw that Dakotans, whatever their votes on agriculture in Congress, were more than eager to have the Coolidges. It would be a coup for the state to host the summer White House, a move that would bring commerce and launch a new industry, automobile tourism. The Harney Park Lodge, thirty miles from Rapid City and alluringly private, could be the president’s summer home. The governors and senators guaranteed fine fishing. The hills themselves were what lured Grace, who loved long walks. It was decided: a summer in South Dakota it would be.

Beyond assenting to the travel plan, however, Coolidge gave no attention to the summer. His mind was on the results of the great tax experiment, which would come in June at the semiannual meeting of the Budget Bureau. Before any move to South Dakota he and Grace would have to move to a temporary home at Dupont Circle, the McKim, Mead & White mansion built for the R. W. Patterson family. They left the White House awaiting substantial renovations on the residential floor; Grace was creating a “sky parlor” up top where she could take the sun. They were weary of their own “megaphone” effect; when they whispered something, the world received it as a roar. Their fondness for animals yielded a perpetual parade of new gift pets. The mayor of Johannesburg, South Africa, sent the Coolidges a gift of two lion cubs. Exploiting the publicity opportunity in the gift, the White House let it be known that the animals would be named “Tax Reduction” and “Budget Bureau.” But the animals themselves were too much for either Dupont Circle or the keepers at the White House; they went to the zoo.

To be at Dupont Circle was itself a kind of recognition of how far Calvin and Grace had come. In the old days Florence Harding had denied the Coolidges a house like the Patterson mansion; more important, the Coolidges had denied themselves such houses. Grace was no longer thinking of Washington in any case; she wanted to head to Northampton, where both her son and her mother, who was ill, waited. Yet Coolidge insisted that she stay; he needed her. Even their church was unsettled; Reverend Pierce would hold services that spring in the Metropolitan Theatre while the church building itself underwent repairs. Both Coolidges kept going by telling themselves that the weight of the work was temporary, as were the constraints. Their son John was dating Florence Trumbull now; they liked the Trumbulls and hosted their daughter Jean, Florence’s sister, for a meal after the New Year. The Coolidges now joked about a return to private life, especially the use of public transport—warning that Grace “would soon be walking, riding in streetcars and taxicabs.” The idea of walking on the street like a common citizen, Grace replied pointedly, held “no terrors” for her.

Coolidge diverted himself yet again by looking heavenward and following the Orteig Prize. One of the most likely winners was Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd, who had already flown from the North Pole to Spitzbergen, Norway. Another was the great French flying ace Charles Nungesser, who had served with Quentin Roosevelt. Yet a third was the midwestern mail pilot Charles Lindbergh. Byrd was a navy man; Lindbergh’s employer, the Robertson Aircraft Corporation, was, by contrast, a private company, albeit one that maintained a contract with the U.S. Post Office. Lindbergh was opting for a monoplane; he placed his order for the plane with Ryan Airlines in California, buying the item on credit. He was spending March at the firm, watching the plane as it was built from two lengths of steel tubing. Lindbergh was already known for his bravery; the papers reported that he was a member of the “caterpillar club,” made up of pilots who had repeatedly been forced to parachute from planes and so were said to have seen their lives “hang from a slip of silk.”

Of course, Coolidge was not the only one in the administration who placed faith in the transformative power of new technology. On April 7, Hoover tested out a new medium. In Washington, before a kind of telephone camera, he spoke, and people in a New York Bell Laboratories auditorium both heard and saw him. A large public had seen the transmission of “human sight,” as Hoover, momentarily awed, put it, and for the first time in history. Hoover, Coolidge noticed, was omnipresent in that period. One day the question was flood control, the next aviation or radio. Much of his advice was good, but he pressed in so; people murmured that Hoover was secretary of commerce and assistant secretary of everything else. Unhappy with Secretary Kellogg’s management of China, an area Hoover knew very well, Hoover put forward his own views on how to deal with Chinese nationalists in Nanking and even permitted talk that he might take Kellogg’s place at State. He thought he knew better how to deal with Chinese nationalists in Nanking. Coolidge fumed. Kellogg, his appointment after Charles Evans Hughes, was an old-time lawyer, not a China hand like Hoover; in fact, Kellogg had gone straight from the farm to reading law in Rochester, Minnesota, at age nineteen, skipping college. His experiences as a lawyer and senator had given him something Hoover lacked: long experience in judging timing in diplomacy and politics. Even if Kellogg were wrong and Hoover right, Coolidge’s impulse was always to back up his man. There was no cabinet split over China, he told the press on April 15. He had never “considered that it was for one member of the Cabinet to have any very great weight in trying to indicate to another member of the cabinet how the latter member should conduct the affairs of his own Department.” Just to close out the possibility, Coolidge became explicit: “While I am on that I might state again that Mr. Kellogg isn’t going to resign. If he does resign, Mr. Hoover will not be appointed Secretary of State.”

Coolidge meant the sharp words to end a controversy; instead, they triggered one. The sitting president was tangling with one of his likeliest successors. At a time when floods were spreading, Hoover’s stock was moving up. The world’s greatest engineer, it was presumed, must know what to do in the South, where there was more troubling news. The Mississippi had continued to swell since the high-water mark at New Year’s at Cairo, and yet more water came. Three separate tornadoes had raged through the lower Mississippi Valley that March, killing forty-five people. The administration sent in the Red Cross. But the floodwaters continued to rise. A wall of water pushed down the river, covering an area where nearly a million people lived. After yet more rains, the levees from Cairo to Helena, Arkansas, were still holding, but a total of fourteen people had drowned in damage further south. In the Midwest, railroad service was paralyzed and eleven had died when waters sloshed across Kansas and Oklahoma. By April 15, the Mississippi waters had torn the great levees and thousands of acres were underwater; the Arkansas River hit 36.1 feet at Fort Smith, the papers reported, the highest level in nearly a century. Half a million people were expected to be forced out of their homes in coming days. Governors and mayors began to talk about the president coming down.

Almost overnight, between one budget meeting with Lord and the next, Coolidge was confronting an event to trump events, a real flood, not a figurative one. And it was fast becoming the greatest national emergency of his time in Washington.

This was the very sort of test George Washington had warned of, a test of federalism. A commander in chief might lead a nation in war. He might order destroyers around the Atlantic; he might dispatch troops to Nicaragua. But Coolidge did not deem it appropriate for a president to march south like a general into governors’ territory to manage a flood rescue. The job of the executive branch in such situations was to coordinate, offer limited supplies, and encourage. But the job of the chief executive did not go further. It was wrong, on principle, for a president to intrude upon a governor; that was basic federalism. Rescue was work for the state governments. A number of governors and senators shared this view. Governor Austin Peay of Tennessee, a Democrat, took a position to the right of Coolidge on that: he turned down the Red Cross, too, because he “felt that the people should be expected to provide for themselves,” as a Red Cross official had noted. Praise for Coolidge’s position came from
The New York Times
: “Fortunately, there are still some things that can be done without the wisdom of Congress and the all-fathering Federal Government.”

The decision not to go to the flood areas cost Coolidge: in the towns and refugee tents, families and whole towns were losing their livelihood and more; this was a photo that made the president look inhumane. The reality of the suffering in the South was far clearer than in prior disasters because of the aerial photos and the reports that rattled off the telegraph. But his resolve hardened. If he looked inhumane, so be it. The federal government had not often spent on large-scale rescues before; Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, had vetoed an appropriation for drought sufferers in Texas. Theodore Roosevelt had been cautious about sending cash to Louisiana during the yellow fever epidemic. The situation was similar to the ones Cleveland and Roosevelt had encountered. It would do another kind of damage to change precedent.

Instead the president did what he could do: send his best emissary, Hoover. On April 22, Coolidge appointed Hoover chairman of a relief mission to coordinate the rescue. The War Department would draw on surplus supplies and send 1,453 war tents, 16,207 pyramidal tents, and 11,102 cots to refugee centers; 27,405 blankets would come from the government as well. But much of the rest of the money, Coolidge said, would have to come from the private sector. “The Federal departments have no funds for relief,”
The Washington Post
wrote, transmitting the Coolidge message painstakingly. As it turned out, $5 million would not be nearly enough; more levees were breaking, and seventy-five towns found themselves in the path of a wall of water. Many dozens, and then hundreds, were drowning, and in the end, the papers now reported, more than 3 million acres would be flooded.

Hoover slipped into the role as flood chief so naturally that it was as if the war had never ended, as if he were again rescuing Belgium. The commerce secretary popped up everywhere in the news: He talked railroads into transporting the displaced for free and carrying freight at a discount. He commandeered private outboard motors and built motorboats of plywood. He urged the people who were not yet flooded out, such as the population around the Bayou des Glaises levee, to evacuate early, then rescued by train the tens of thousands who had ignored his warning. He helped the Red Cross launch a fund drive; within a month the charity had already collected promises of more than $8 million, an enormous sum. Within weeks of Hoover leadership, several hundred thousand people were safely housed in new refugee camps—many planned, right down to the latrines, by Hoover and his team. Hoover asked governors of each state to name a dictator of resources—he used the word “dictator”—and the governors complied. Hoover managed the dysentery and the hunts for the missing along the floodwaters in their states hour by hour. He and the Red Cross sent the refugees to camps at Vicksburg, Delta, and Natchez. A hundred thousand blankets from army warehouses were shipped to warm the refugees. Not everyone in the South approved of all Hoover did. Later it would become clear that he had undercounted the dead significantly—there were hundreds—and that he failed to help the black populations of Greenville, Mississippi, and elsewhere.

Still, given the scale of it all, Hoover’s feat amazed. At the end of April, the governors of four states invited Coolidge down to inspect the devastation. The Mississippi River was now swelling so that below Memphis it spread sixty miles. “A vast sheet of water as yellow as the China Sea at the mouth of the Yangtze,” is how a writer for
National Geographic
would describe it. In some places, the water rose to fifty feet deep. A great majority of those displaced were poor and black. The national disaster made the case for federal management of water, whether on the Mississippi or on the Colorado, far more effectively than Hoover ever could.

Coolidge worked hard in the other areas that, to him, made sense for a president: raising charity money, for example. By endorsing the Red Cross and speaking publicly, he drove the appeal money from $5 million to $10 million a matter of weeks. As much as Hoover’s work, the administration’s ability to raise charity funds struck foreign governments.
The Times
of London expressed its awe at the charitable response in the United States: “Hardly less bewildering than such catastrophes is the speed with which the American people rush to rescue, organize generous relief and make it seem as though such things”—the disasters—“could never have been.” Coolidge sent thirty-six navy seaplanes to help Hoover in his work. He established and tested a policy position for the federal government: rescue, yes; reconstruction, no. Hoover issued a report that backed the president up, writing that it seemed to the Mississippi Flood Committee, which he chaired, that reconstruction work, resettlement and long-view construction “must be undertaken under the leadership of the states involved. . . . and therefore the federal and other national agencies should give support rather than attempt to direct.” Hoover privately backed a greater role for Washington but was not ready to say so.