Coolidge (62 page)

From the Republican leaders’ point of view, the Coolidge performance only improved from there. Coolidge obligingly donned big rubber waders, chaps, and other regional symbols, and equipped his staff with ten-gallon hats. He and Grace even allowed themselves to be filmed in western outfits. Coolidge received a spirited horse, Kit, as a birthday gift from the Boy Scouts of Custer and even mounted for a July 6 trek up a steep trail. This drove the western radical progressives crazy, so crazy that they turned vindictive. “The president of the United States has become a pitiful puppet of publicity,” argued the editors of
The People’s Business
, a progressive periodical. “The movie pictures’ audiences roar with laughter as this bewildered little man teeters down the steps in vaudeville chaps and timidly grasps the reins of the gift horse which he fears to mount.” The dress-up scenes also infuriated some stuffy Bostonians. After Coolidge had shown off a pair of western high boots, along with a neckerchief, the
Boston Transcript
could not contain itself: “We believe our own Mr. Frank W. Stearns with his accurate and discriminating tastes would not have allowed this to happen if he had been on the scene.” But the Dakotans themselves were pleased by the Coolidges’ willingness to ham it up. Their suspicion that a cooperative president would draw tourists was already proving correct. Within weeks of his arrival, thousands of Americans were heading up to the Black Hills for a glimpse of Coolidge. The Cleveland
Plain Dealer
noted, perhaps enviously, “Unconsciously Coolidge blazed a motorist trail.”

To be available to his guest, Governor Bulow had decided to occupy a cabin on the state park property near Coolidge’s lodge. In those first days Bulow also busied himself arranging other treats: a local mountain would be renamed Mount Coolidge. After the first couple settled in, however, the harried governor decided to take a break from presidential hosting for a day trip of genuine trout fishing, not the staged kind, at Davenport Dam. The dam lay above Sturgis, fifty miles from the game lodge. A knock came at the door. It was Starling, who wanted to know if the governor and Mrs. Bulow could come for dinner. Well, that would be complicated; Bulow did not know if he could make the fifty miles back in time for dinner.

But Starling was not asking. He was ordering. “Boy, when you get an invitation from the President of the United States, that is a command.” At the dinner that night, Bulow came face-to-face with the harvest of his own scheming. There upon his plate lay a trout, not just any trout but one of the old hatchery liver-feds that he and the parks men had dumped into Coolidge’s creek area. Bulow was already unsteady from the thought of spending an evening with the president; the park superintendent had given him two brandies to calm his nerves. But two brandies were not enough to handle the fish. As the president tucked in, the governor struck up a conversation with the fish: “Seems to me I’ve seen you before.”

What was that? the president asked. The governor told the president he was just commenting that the dinner was trout. But for the brandy, Bulow might not have been able to eat the fish at all. “On the first bite I could taste the ground liver and horse meat upon which that trout had lived for years,” he later recalled.

Once the dreaded fish course had passed, the mood lightened, as it had in the car. Bulow discovered in Coolidge a supple and friendly intelligence. Afterward, the president invited the governor to sit with him by the great lodge fire. Coolidge offered a cigar; the governor asked if he could chew tobacco. The men began to talk about South Dakota, and the governor was surprised by how much the president knew about the state. Bulow recalled a line that the poet Oliver Goldsmith had written about the breadth of knowledge of a village schoolmaster, “And still the wonder grew that one small head could carry all he knew.” As the Bulows made their way in the dark around midnight to their cottage, the governor told his wife that though he was a Democrat, he might vote for Coolidge.

One mendicant still waited for attention: Borglum. Through reporters, the sculptor offered up to Coolidge tempting tidbits of news about the Rushmore project. The number of presidents to be immortalized had risen to four, to include Theodore Roosevelt. The explanatory words of U.S. history, what Borglum called “the entablature,” would be graven into the rock so deeply that a reader might decipher the words from a great distance. The Chicago utilities magnate Samuel Insull had recently made a great loan to the Borglum project: a diesel-powered electric generating plant for its base camp. To ensure that he really received the appropriation that Mellon had agreed to in Washington, Borglum figured, Rushmore needed a presidential visit. He therefore wanted to offer Coolidge the chance to dedicate the site and to write the explanatory text. But Coolidge’s visit was planned for only three weeks, and Coolidge was not responding. Desperate, Borglum found a new approach. In the third week of June, when General Leonard Wood, the old presidential hopeful, happened to be calling on Coolidge, discussing the Philippines, the guests at the state lodge heard a buzz overhead.

It was not Lindbergh but a pilot named Clyde Ice whom Borglum had hired to fly over the lodge. Ice dropped a wreath of flowers, weighed down by two moccasins, with a note reading “Greetings from Mount Rushmore to Mount Coolidge.” The “Lindy approach” worked here too: Mrs. Coolidge wrote a thank-you note: “Your greeting from the air found glad welcome and we echo it back to you.” Borglum got his coveted appointment and made his pitch for a presidential ascent of the mountain. The Coolidges were enjoying their stay; soon after, they thrilled the Dakotans by letting it be known they would stay beyond the planned three weeks. South Dakota swelled with pleasure; men recalled that the state had been the first to declare for Coolidge as a vice presidential candidate way back when, before the 1920 convention. Since then the state’s convention law had been changed. But George Henry, a secretary to one of the state’s U.S. senators, was now declaring Coolidge’s conquest of South Dakota for 1928 completed. “Mr. Coolidge seems to have sold himself to the state, especially the western half of it,” he told a reporter for
The Oregonian
. Two incidents, the press men noticed, did not fit into the idyllic presidential postcard. The first was the death of Prudence Prim, who, it emerged, had caught distemper.

The second came one day in late June, when the thermometer in Rapid City rose to 90 degrees, hardly what had been advertised by the Black Hills promoters who had sold the chief on the trip in the first place. When the president returned to the lodge for lunch, he found that Mrs. Coolidge was not yet back from a hike with Jim Haley. With the reporters watching, the chief executive planted himself on the porch to wait, like a sentry. Observers guessed that the great concern of Coolidge was that a rattler had got to his wife. At 2:15
P.M.
, an hour after the president’s return, Grace’s white sport skirt and sweater appeared before the lodge. Grace and Haley had lost their way in the Hills—not hard to do—and had been gone for five hours. From their posts around the property, the Coolidges’ attendants could see Grace drinking from a glass of water and the president pacing. The first couple went inside. Within days the word was out: Jim Haley had been removed from the first lady’s detail and sent far away from South Dakota. The new bodyguard was John Fitzgerald, also a Secret Service veteran.

Coolidge had misfired. This time, the notion of protecting the presidency from scandal truly was pretense. Indeed, the very press he so assiduously avoided now came to him because of his action. Coolidge sensed that most of the reporters in his pool were afraid to write a major feature about the event; they might, however, place the odd detail about the contretemps in other stories, or write short items. At a press conference the next day, June 28, he sought to throw them off the path: “You will find that at the end of your stay here that your work will be more satisfactory if you take up some particular thing and write a very good story about it.” Haley’s move was described to reporters as a change, not a demotion. No one was fooled.

Still, after several days, it seemed clear that the Haley event would not trigger a larger story. Grace was spotted shopping with her new Secret Service man, John Fitzgerald. A functioning summer White House moved in a rhythm all its own; one by one the visitors came and were heard out by the president. The U.S. marines in Nicaragua were attacked by the rebel lieutenant Augusto Sandino in the town of Ocotal. Sandino and his men charged yelling, “Viva Sandino!” and “Death to the Yankees!” In an intense battle, the marines finally flew five De Havilland bombers over the Sandino men. The Sandino men scattered. Peace would be harder to attain than many had hoped. Mexico would turn into Nicaragua if the administration and Congress did not act. The crisis in Mexico had driven the U.S. ambassador there to resign and write a furious report: the Plutarco Calles government was waging a Soviet-style war against churches and confiscating U.S.-owned properties.

Coolidge received James Sheffield, the departing ambassador, and began to formulate a response. He had Dwight Morrow in mind for Mexico, and wrote to ask him to succeed Sheffield as ambassador. Betty Morrow felt snubbed. For Coolidge to offer a post to his friend at this stage in his presidency seemed tardy, given the longevity of the friendship. Adding insult to injury, the post was not the one the Morrows had hoped for. Coolidge resembled a kind of malevolent Father Christmas, wrote Mrs. Morrow. “The blow has fallen,” she wrote. “President Coolidge wrote to Dwight today asking him to be Ambassador to Mexico and Dwight is going to do it! ‘No skates or sleds left in my bag!’ says Santa Claus, ‘but here’s a silly little whistle!’ ” In her view a more dignified position, such as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, suited a J. P. Morgan partner better.

Lindbergh himself wondered about Mexico. “From what little I have seen at our border stops, I am afraid the post will be a difficult one,” he said. Still, others, including Charles Dawes, saw the placing of Morrow in Mexico City as an example of Coolidge’s wisdom. The United States needed Morrow in Mexico. Mexicans were taking U.S. property, and the leader, Calles, was confronting the difficult decision of whether to stay on for future years. In addition, Dawes told Morrow that he reckoned taking this job amounted to a brilliant career move: “The position in Mexico, to take which might ruin the ordinary diplomat of so-called ‘high class,’ will make you. You cannot afford to take an easier diplomatic position of higher rank.” Within a year or two, Morrow’s son Dwight would follow John Coolidge to Amherst. Both Morrow and Coolidge hoped that their sons would learn from someone like Garman. A job like the Mexico post was the very kind of service Garman had taught about decades before. “The President wants me very much to go to Mexico and I am going—that is to say I am going if you stick to your bargain and go with me,” Morrow wrote to his wife. Morrow vowed above all to listen to the Mexicans and hear them out.

Coolidge was doing his listening, too, albeit of an easier variety. A large picnic of farmers from three states, a high point of the summer for the region, took place that month at a federal experimental farm in Ardmore. The president and Mrs. Coolidge were served chicken fried by farmers’ wives, along with corn grown right at the station, topped off by ice cream. Governor Bulow, ready to star, sported a high beaver hat. Grace Coolidge dressed up: she wore her signature white dress but added a red blazer and red hat. This time the president, though,
The New York Times
reported, “had doffed his Western habiliments.”

Before a large audience that included the Coolidges, Senator Norbeck and Governor Bulow debated the old tariff yet again. Did not Coolidge’s veto of McNary-Haugen mean it was finally time to reduce tariffs? Bulow’s remarks captured the attention of the
Springfield Republican
. The paper noted carefully Bulow’s position: “If price fixing is taboo for farmers, it should be eliminated from industries.” The reality, Bulow pointed out, was that farmers were the free marketeers here: reducing the tariff would merely be restoring supply and demand. “The price[s] of most things that a farmer has to buy are artificially fixed by reason of discriminatory tariff legislation.” Soon after the debate, Bulow told reporters that the combination of President and Mrs. Coolidge was “unbeatable.” The recent St. Paul conference of the McNary-Haugenites was “nothing but the reflex action of a chicken with its head cut off,”
The Washington Post
columnist Carlisle Bargeron paraphrased Governor Bulow as adding.

As the days continued, the stream of visitors at the summer White House, Rapid City, and the lodge continued as well. The same day Hoover called about flood relief, Coolidge learned to his surprise that he had another guest. Senator Smoot of Utah, a great tariff advocate, awaited him at the game lodge. Coolidge left Hoover to his paperwork and rode out in his car to see Smoot, whose aim was to convince Coolidge to call a special session of Congress where he might push for flood relief and also tax legislation. Hoover was moving on, anyway; his destination was Bohemian Grove, an exclusive retreat of the powerful in California. The West was also the goal of other Republicans. If Coolidge had South Dakota sewn up, Oregon and California were still not certain; Nick Longworth had put Oregon and Hollywood on his itinerary.

Meanwhile, there were even more meetings for Coolidge, many of which reportedly concluded with the good prospects for the fall. “Mr. Coolidge will be re-nominated and reelected,” declared the state’s former agriculture secretary after his meeting. Summed up
The Washington Post
’s Bargeron: “There is little wonder that the President is enjoying his vacation.”

On July 25, the White House postmen at the Rapid City High School opened the mail and found a letter calculated to break down the hardest of granite. It was from Borglum, designed to obliterate any further resistance to a Mount Rushmore ascent and detailing his plan for the text upon the entablature. “My Dear Mr. President,” it opened, and after reports of his own travels Borglum came to his substance: