Coolidge (65 page)

But when it came to a grander plan, that new law or treaty, Coolidge was stymied. His old rule had been that the United States intervened in nations when U.S. property or lives needed defending, but that did not seem to suffice. Aristide Briand’s bilateral treaty between the United States and France was a trap that might destabilize instead of stabilize. As William Castle at the State Department explained to Paul Claudel, Briand’s ambassador, what Briand sought would merely enable France to bully Germany with the confidence the United States would not intervene. Wrote Castle in his diary of Claudel, “I countered by asking him what effect he thought a treaty between the United States and Germany outlawing war would have on France. He admitted that would have a very exciting effect, that people would say that Germany was purchasing security from attack by the United States so that she could more readily attack her neighbors.”

One of Coolidge’s many visitors that September, the emissary from Ethiopia, had brought a splendid gift from the prince regent: a heavy golden shield studded with thirty-two diamonds. The renovation of the summer had spiffed up the White House, but the shield outshone its surroundings. Even its red velvet casing was luxurious, so lush it too caught the eye. Along with the gift came a plea. Currently the United States had no representative in Addis Ababa. The prince regent hoped that the United States would send an ambassador. Ethiopia was asking for a U.S. presence because the United States “has no selfish political interest.” This was an indirect way of telling Coolidge what he already knew: that the Ethiopians were concerned that the British and Italians were colluding against them. American companies had their own interest there: shortly the government of the prince regent would negotiate a contract with J. G. White, a New York company, to engineer a dam in Ethiopia. Ethiopia was trying to buy American rifles, and the State Department was trying to limit the number to 50,000.

Coolidge left the shield on his desk while he worked. If he could see his way to a multination treaty, there were several ways in which such an agreement could reduce the tensions in a place like Ethiopia. It could deter both Italy and Great Britain from pressing Ethiopia. If the language in the treaty left the country free to defend itself, it might not do so much damage. It might bring goodwill. It might represent economy. There were plenty of supporters for this kind of peace treaty. William Borah, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had been pushing for the outlawry of war for years. And there was Briand, whose picture was on the cover of
Time
magazine that autumn. Borah of Idaho resembled Briand of Paris in style: both men lived to be contrary. To a party loyalist like Coolidge, the habit was disconcerting. Time spent demonstrating your independence was sometimes time squandered. Senator Watson of Indiana had been with Coolidge when the president made his sarcastic comment about Borah for once riding the same direction as his horse. Now Watson and others were watching to see what Coolidge might do. By supporting some kind of global accord denouncing war, Coolidge might coopt both posturers, not to mention numerous advocates of some form of global peace or accord across the country. If Coolidge could get a multilateral treaty he could himself accept and get the Senate to ratify it, he would unite the party Henry Cabot Lodge had so long before divided, rope in the independents for once, and succeed where Wilson had failed.

That autumn of 1927, Briand was playing hard to get. Both he and the British were frustrating Secretary Kellogg’s effort to win the naval treaty at the Geneva Conference; in fact, irritatingly, Great Britain and France were colluding to exclude the United States by writing their own bilateral agreement. That in turn, Kellogg wrote sadly to Coolidge, meant that the United States would probably have to invest in a great program to build new ships. Congress seemed hardly in the mood to be lassoed—in fact lawmakers were openly mounting rebellion. They sought not only hundreds of millions for flood reconstruction but also nearly $300 million or $400 million in tax reductions, about a fourth more than Mellon deemed prudent. The leaders were John Nance Garner of Texas, the ranking minority member on the House Ways and Means Committee, and Senator Furnifold Simmons, who sat on the Finance Committee in the Senate. Their tax plan called for the repeal of a tax on cars, reductions in the middle brackets of the income tax, and a corporate tax cut. This was not quite scientific taxation, for it did not entirely emphasize cuts at the top and in Mellon’s analysis was therefore less valuable. If the tax plan wasn’t structured correctly, and if a certain share of its harvest wasn’t used to reduce the government debt, the revenues might not flow in, and the evidence of their experiment would be muddied.

Like jealous parents, Coolidge and Mellon fussed over any outsider’s demand for change. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which had long supported Coolidge, this time was backing the Democrats’ tax plan. What was worse, the Chamber of Commerce was staking out a new position on deficits. “While no deficit is looked for should the rate reduction herein be made effective,” it announced in early November, “it is obvious that in view of the excellent credit standing of the government and the low interest rates at which it can borrow money there would be no great cause for alarm even though a deficit should, through unexpected developments, arise in any year.”

At the White House, Coolidge exploded. To give intellectual credence to the idea that a government could permit a deficit, he deemed folly. Intentionally lowering interest rates to ease European recovery was one thing. That was what the Federal Reserve, with Mellon’s blessing, was doing. But a deficit of the federal government was a signal to the market that the United States was not a good investment. And countries that were not good investments lost control of their money; if the United States looked as though it was heading toward insolvency, dollars and gold would go to Europe, whatever Coolidge, Mellon, and the Federal Reserve intended. The virtuous circle would be broken.
The Wall Street Journal
, politely paraphrasing Coolidge, said that the president reckoned that the Chamber’s plan had been made “without knowledge of the budget law” and that the plan overall was “the most absurd thing he ever heard of.” If now, in good times, high times, the government went into deficit, there would be no money left for the downturn that he suspected was coming.

Next came another shock. Even Mellon, who had been so faithful until now, betrayed impatience with the impulsive Coolidge thrift. In a report about case delays at the Board of Tax Appeals, his Treasury found that Coolidge’s relentless budgeting policy represented the basis of the delays. At the salary level at Treasury, Mellon wrote, “it has been impossible to build up and retain an adequate personnel.” A full fifty-two attorneys had resigned from the general counsel’s office. A total of 4,727 professionals and technicians had left Treasury in the past seven years. Since it took years to build up an expert, the loss caused by that false economy, he estimated, was “incalculable.” The departure of one man, a key expert in negotiations of a tax settlement with mining companies, had been caused by a dispute over a $300-a-year salary difference. That man’s departure had cost the Treasury a full $100 million in revenues, he wrote pointedly in his note to Coolidge.

He had not felt so much alone since the vice presidency. John, at college, had just blithely agreed to serve for a third year on the “hop committee” that planned proms even though he knew Coolidge disapproved of too much socializing. Grace expressed concern about Coolidge’s workload for the year ahead and, especially, Coolidge’s health, but often kept her distance, retreating to her new sky parlor, or busying herself about Washington. The papers reported that Grace had paid a courtesy call at a tea room on Seventeenth Street opened by the new wife of Jim Haley, the Secret Service man Coolidge had transferred. The fact that he was now actively raising money for the Clarke School with Clarence Barron did not seem to compensate for the offenses of recent years.

Nor were others readily available. Coolidge’s relationship with Vice President Dawes seemed destined never to recover from the poor start they had had in 1925. Many Republicans, including Borah, were plotting to move the party to the left; Borah had allowed he might back George Norris, who sought federal ownership of hydropower. The most obvious example of Coolidge’s challenge with Congress in this period was the attendance record of his presidential breakfasts. Ike Hoover, the White House usher, noticed something about them: Congressmen would go to extraordinary lengths to find a reason not to come. Hoover even collected the RSVPs for one breakfast, as they represented such an amusing roster of excuses:

Senator Heflin: regrets, sick.

Senator Norris: unable to locate.

Senator Pittman: regrets, sick.

Senator Reed, of Missouri: regrets, sick friend.

The guests who did materialize found Coolidge too silent. “What did he have us here for?” they muttered on leaving. To the usher, such extraordinary lack of communication was evidence that Coolidge had become an impotent president. He could no longer negotiate, perhaps even no longer delegate or choose personnel well.

At the State Department Kellogg’s deputies found much to criticize in both Kellogg and Coolidge: Kellogg they deemed overly moody, an aging Minnesotan who sometimes greeted his staff in the morning with a storm of rage. Kellogg’s hands shook, they noticed; he was blind in one eye, and his uneven education—skipping high school and college for law school—meant his manner was not always smooth or diplomatic, a source of great irritation to the protocol-obsessed staff at the State Department. Kellogg’s assistant secretary, William Castle, found Kellogg especially disconcerting. Castle, a former member of the Harvard faculty, was typical: he worked meticulously to complete the tasks Kellogg assigned but was already cultivating a relationship with Hoover. In the press, hostility was also mounting. The writer Sinclair Lewis was working on a novel mocking Coolidge, targeting the president and his admirers as the ultimate in empty-headedness and banality.

That fall there was yet another artist present at the White House, commissioned by Amherst, to paint the president’s portrait, Ercole Cartotto, an Italian American. Concerned at the hostility, Grace overcame the distance between herself and Coolidge, albeit only momentarily, to beseech Cartotto not to paint Coolidge as a stereotype, a “fearsome man without a vestige of kindness.” Cartotto told Grace he did see a grimness. Cartotto sketched every weekday; he observed Coolidge in meetings with General Lord and tried to capture the line that his mouth formed when he was going over the budget. Men misunderstood Coolidge, Cartotto explained to Grace after a few days. The painter was not willing to soften the president, despite what Grace said. “In New York, people think of the President so”—and Cartotto slumped down, to pantomime a weakling. Where the others saw weakness in Coolidge, he said, he saw strength. For Grace, he bared his teeth. “I show them tiger,” he told Grace.

But not many others, even in Coolidge’s entourage, saw the tiger. Coolidge sat for Cartotto, met with the dignitaries, and took morning and afternoon walks with Starling. It was to Starling that Coolidge tried to articulate his concerns. The Dow Jones Industrial Average that fall of 1927 hung just below 200, a third higher than its levels in 1926. As far as Coolidge was concerned, this was too high. He “feared the results” of the current policies, especially the ones the progressives had imposed. He also believed in principle that it would be worse to intervene at the Federal Reserve, at the Treasury, or in markets. It was an odd fix for Coolidge, Starling reckoned. “It was strange that he, the most popular man in the country, was the exact opposite in every way of what the public was taking for its model.” On December 6, there was a Republican meeting at the White House, the kind of East Room event at which Coolidge could count on being cornered by Republican National Committee men and pressured to reconsider. Their pressure was likely to be so great that Coolidge lost courage and asked Sanders, his secretary, and Starling to go with him: “They’re going to try to get me to run again, and I won’t do it.” He handed out a new text: “My statement stands. No one should be led to suppose that I have modified it. My decision will be respected. After I had been eliminated, the party began, and should continue the serious task of selection of another candidate from among the numbers of distinguished men available.” The verb “had,” Coolidge thought, ought to allay the political uncertainty.

Coolidge’s own mind was on another kind of uncertainty, economic uncertainty. “He saw economic disaster ahead,” Starling later recalled. But Coolidge also believed it was wrong to do anything about it. Living an exemplary life was proving more difficult than even he had imagined, and he grew crabby, exercising control in those few areas where he would allow himself. One day, as they walked together down the street, Coolidge held his silence, then finally said to Starling, “Well, they’re going to elect that superman Hoover, and he’s going to have some trouble. He’s going to have to spend money.” He went on, “But he won’t spend enough. Then the Democrats will come in and they’ll spend money like water. But they don’t know anything about money.” They would want Coolidge to come back again, but he wouldn’t be available.

The issue he and Hoover were most likely to tangle about that winter was waterpower. Hoover, coy before, was now heating up. Hoover sought a victory that winter, and reasonably enough: a great program of hundreds of millions would give him something solid to campaign on in an election year. Compared with the progressives, who sought complete government ownership of waterpower, not to mention a law that ensured that Muscle Shoals would stay in government hands, Hoover suddenly looked like a moderate. The papers were picking up on Hoover’s new energy. “A Water Power Battle Is at Hand,” read a
New York Times
headline on October 30. “All Afraid of Hoover,” read the
Los Angeles Times
. Coolidge for his part was girding to block the flood of spending. He had some time, but not much, to lay out his arguments; the opening of Congress was barely a month away.