Coolidge (64 page)

The wording that had confused his friends and the papers had not represented indecision. With the “I do not choose to run” statement, Coolidge was placing a kind of bookend at the end of his career, which he had begun with that other ambiguous statement: “I have not decided to study law.” New Englanders relished their independence, which was why Coolidge had said, “I do not choose,” emphasizing his own authority. Starling was seeing his initial analysis of the thirtieth president confirmed. “Nothing is more sacred to a New England Yankee than this privilege as an individual to make up his own mind,” Starling thought.

Standing by this resolution not to run would be difficult. Another term represented a chance to clean up messes, big and small. Columnists were already criticizing Coolidge’s legacy. The columnist Mark Sullivan wrote a biting piece criticizing his appointments, noting of appointments, “That was the kind of thing that Theodore Roosevelt, on the contrary, excelled in.” Several days after the climb on Rushmore, and even before Sullivan’s column was published, General Lord would arrive in South Dakota to meet with Coolidge. Calendar records showed that Lord and Coolidge were closing in on their two hundredth meeting. Yet their $3 billion goal seemed farther than it had a year before.

But once Coolidge chose, the choice would be final. If Coolidge sought to stop the spending, he had to set an example himself. And if he believed in the mechanisms he and Mellon had established, he had to let them run for themselves, and not hover over them. By tending too long to the commerce or freedom he had fostered, Coolidge might stunt that very commerce or freedom. If Coolidge believed, as George Washington had, he would retreat as Washington had, prove that the office really was one of “president,” literally one who presided, not autocrat. Any remaining goodwill should be dedicated to a final, great project Coolidge had in mind for the end of the presidency. As for Mount Rushmore, Coolidge knew where he stood. Composing the inscription Borglum sought represented service. A colossal bust beside Roosevelt and Washington did not. There was a case for monuments to other presidents. But the best monument to his kind of presidency was no monument at all.

Fourteen
: Coolidge Agonistes

Washington, D.C.

LIKE A SHIP, NEW
England hove into view. Boston, Amherst, Northampton, and Vermont all claimed the Coolidges’ attention when they arrived back in Washington that September of 1927. It was if they had never gone to South Dakota. In Northampton, Grace’s mother, Lemira Goodhue, waited on Massasoit Street. John was just a few miles across the Connecticut River from Northampton at Amherst College, starting his senior year. In Vermont, where the mills struggled to survive and agriculture remained weak, the cheese factory was still running in Plymouth, producing eight hundred pounds a week. The managers were hopefully making yet another of their infinite adjustments, selling not just in bulk but also in smaller three- or five-pound boxes, more convenient for the household. The president had missed the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Bennington that summer despite the entreaties of John Spargo, the curator of the museum near the enormous Bennington Battle Monument. Though the post office had issued 40 million special Green Mountain Boys stamps, Coolidge had not materialized. Vermonters were getting over the fact that their kinsman had forgone the opportunity to honor the colonists’ victory over General Burgoyne for the pleasure of donning a Sioux headdress of feathers in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and being initiated into the tribe by a direct descendant of Sitting Bull. But the Green Mountain State was ready to forgive, if only he came soon.

Coolidge did intend to return north, indeed, to make up whatever he could to Vermont, Grace, his son John, and others whom the presidency had forced him to neglect. But not right away. His main goal now, in the last eighteen months, was to serve effectively, to use what capital he had accumulated wisely. That intention applied to whatever literal capital, dollars, might flow his own way in coming months or years. Morrow and Barron were fund-raising for him. Instead of allocating that money to burnish his own memory or even that of Judge Forbes with a presidential archive, Coolidge was insisting the donor gifts go to the charity that meant the most to Grace, the Clarke School for the Deaf. The other kind of capital, the political kind, Coolidge intended to use to defend his established policies; a consistent legacy was a stronger legacy.

There was even one area where something more than defense work, new legislation, seemed warranted. That area was foreign policy. The French foreign minister, Aristide Briand, was seeking a bilateral treaty renouncing war between the United States and France. That idea did not seem satisfactory, but Coolidge might try something else. He was wary of a great treaty, which looked like an easy way to a fiasco; the memories of his recent failure in Geneva in disarmament, or Wilson’s League of Nations downfall, were fresh. Still, Coolidge reckoned, he had banked enough capital for one more big project. His party and colleagues on the Hill, he figured, would be grateful that he had made his election decision early, leaving the Republicans time to find a new candidate. For them to reward him in his last year and a half with support for his legislative projects, whether budgets or a new law, was simple logic.

Unfortunately it was logic his colleagues did not see. From those very first hours back in Washington, indeed, Coolidge discerned that his fellow politicians and lawmakers interpreted the summer’s events differently. Instead of gratefully accepting his decision about the 1928 race, the Republican Party still fixated upon him as the only possible candidate, pestering him relentlessly. And instead of granting him support for his policies, Congress was already treating him like a lame duck, someone who would find no partner for his plans. Indeed, with unexpected boldness, lawmakers were pressing for him to give ground in areas where he had drawn the line.

The pressure started with the loud demands to call a special session of Congress to discuss extra appropriations, an idea lawmakers knew Coolidge would deplore. The navy sought another fleet of ships; the army and merchant marine wanted more money to refurbish old ones. It seemed Coolidge’s success at halting a great waterways program last spring had been only temporary. Now lawmakers were ready with an update of their law, which would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and rival the damage of the bonus legislation. Southern lawmakers had exploited his voyage to South Dakota to plot their own laws. “Coolidge Away, Mice Enjoy Play,” as
The New York Times
put it. “Mr. Chief,” as some southerners now called Hoover, was too sophisticated to publicly advocate for a giant new flood control system that his boss would dislike. If the government followed the recommendations of some of the engineers, it would spend $325 million, greater than the surplus most years and one of the largest single expenditures since World War I. But the commerce secretary was already quietly laying the groundwork for such a law.

What’s more, the lawmakers’ case for extensive flood spending was stronger now than it had been a few months before. The suggestions in the press of total recovery had been premature: now, in the fall, the Red Cross estimated 607,000 southerners still needed winter clothing. Hundreds of thousands of southerners were not yet resettled; the planters were finding themselves in difficulty because many blacks had seized the opportunity to head north forever Coolidge had developed his argument on the floods: states were a larger presence in the economy than the federal government; in peacetime, they spent more than the federal government, at least twice more. Next to business or the states, the federal government was a pygmy, and asking Washington to spend was to change its role. But he was finding less sympathy for that argument now, as well. One senator, Thaddeus Caraway of Arkansas, argued that Coolidge was being disingenuous in taking the position that the responsibility for the flood was not with Washington because the waters that came down the Mississippi covered 40,000 square miles and came from thirty-one states. Caraway also made it a point to praise the commerce secretary and contrast his performance to Coolidge’s: “The South appreciates what Mr. Hoover has done.” Caraway even framed his argument as a personal challenge to the Vermonter Coolidge: “I venture to say that if a similar disaster had affected New England that the president would have had no hesitation in calling an extra session,” Caraway jeered. “Unfortunately he was unable to visualize the situation.”

This time, even the normally friendly press was joining the attack on the president.
The New York Times
wrote, “The Administration viewpoint is that with no plans for flood control yet formulated there can be no approbation of public money for that purpose in the immediate future. As to the purposes of the Administration concerning Government relief for the distressed people in the flooded areas, no information was forthcoming.” But Coolidge mostly stayed downstairs, pushing back when the calls for a special session came, denying that a consensus was forming on the matter. “As far as I can see there won’t be any occasion for a special session of Congress,” he told his press conference grimly on September 20.

The unexpected challenges were forcing Coolidge to consider how he allocated his own time, just as he had in those tense days in the summer of 1919, or in his first hours as president after Harding’s death. The White House looked good after its renovations; the sky parlor up top especially pleased Grace, who retreated there with her birds and animals. But Coolidge was stuck downstairs at his desk. “I am having the usual experience with a good many members of the House and the Senate that are returning to Washington,” he complained to his press conference on October 4. “They are all interested in some plan that calls for a considerable expenditure of public money.”

This was a period when Americans were celebrating the nation’s sesquicentennial. But what Coolidge noticed was how much time went to military or diplomatic meetings necessary because of World War I. The effects of earlier wars and incursions, dating all the way back to the Spanish-American War, claimed many hours. The reality was plain to see in the president’s appointment book. In these first six weeks back from South Dakota, Coolidge attended exercises at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania; worked to repair relations with Mexico by inaugurating a direct telephone line with President Calles; met with Wilhelm Heye, the chief of the German army; heard out an emissary from the Ras Tafari, the Ethiopian prince regent; endeavored to placate Japan by receiving a rear admiral from a Japanese training squadron; received his own secretary of war several times; and met with the former German minister of finance and the governor of the National Bank of Belgium to gain perspective on European debts.

The cost of past wars was also evident in the pages of accounts over which he and Lord labored. They would have reached their $3 billion goal, passed it even, long ago, if not for wars. Outlays that fiscal year for veterans’ care and other payments to vets were about equivalent to all the payments made for civilian government together, and larger than any other single kind of payment by the federal government. If you totaled the veteran payments with the military costs and the amount paid in interest on debt mostly generated by wars, you could see that about three-fourths of the federal costs had to do with war in one way or another. And of course both the veterans and the military wanted more: he and Lord spent much time plotting to fend off military spending demands, whether an army request for airplanes to defend the Panama Canal or a navy demand for battleships. You could even argue that the war was damaging the political culture. Charles Forbes, Harding’s original Veterans Bureau chief, was still in Leavenworth Prison for the fraud he had committed with federal moneys. All over Washington could be found the detritus of war-related scandal, such as the Teapot Dome decision relating to naval reserves; Albert Fall lay ill in room 765 of the Mayflower Hotel. War had left other kinds of messes, including legal trouble. It was hard to fight with Calles of Mexico over private property claims when Andy Mellon had not yet, even to this day, been able to clarify the status of alien property seized by the United States. It was all a waste, like the
Mount Vernon
, the army’s name for the
Kronprinzessin
. The once glorious ship was now rotting in dry dock near Norfolk.

War even, still, affected seemingly removed areas like interest rates, although the effect featured multiple stages that one had to trace. Lower interest rates benefited Europe and its ability to pay wartime debts and therefore gain its own normalcy, or “normality,” the word Mellon preferred. When U.S. rates were low relative to Europe’s, European investments looked attractive, and Germany, Great Britain, France, or Italy could draw cash and gold and find it easier to pay off war debts. But lower interest rates in the United States were tenable only if U.S. conditions actually warranted such rates. And those conditions occurred only when commerce was strong and Washington was unobtrusive. “To get the government out of business,” as Mellon had written a colleague, “whether it be in banks, utilities or monopolies, has become one of the most essential steps to a permanent fiscal restoration of Europe.” A new war would instantly interrupt Mellon’s virtuous circles, whether of interest rates or taxes. Coolidge was beginning to tell himself that commerce, low taxes, and even civil aviation might work in the short term but did not suffice in the long term. If war caused waste, men of law and law itself had to be used to stop it.

The men of law were already at work: in Mexico, Morrow was using all his formidable skill from his years as an attorney and at J. P. Morgan to isolate the commonalities between angry American property owners and the Calles government. Colonel Stimson was in Nicaragua, where he too might succeed at his brokering, winning an agreement for elections that fall. Stimson was disarming Nicaragua by buying up rifles from the rebels. Rather than intervene in national conflicts, the administration often found itself helping to arm or disarm one side or the other in a conflict. That seemed an acceptable proxy. Lawyering or brokering was also the great skill of Coolidge’s secretary of state, Frank Kellogg, a skill Kellogg had begun to amass all the way back in the days when he had read the law and prosecuted great antitrust cases. One reason Coolidge liked Kellogg was that Kellogg was the old-fashioned kind of lawyer, like himself and Sargent and Lincoln: men who had read the law, and worked in the country before the city. Kellogg, who had gone straight from the farm to the law office in Rochester, Minnesota, without attending college, was turning seventy-one that December. Kellogg was older even than Sargent, just a year younger than Mellon. With Kellogg and Morrow, Coolidge planned to do some lawyerly diplomacy of his own by making a strategic trip to a Latin country; he would address the Sixth Pan-American Conference in Havana in January.