Coolidge (71 page)

That reconciliation had taken place back in September 1928. The long-delayed moment had finally come to make a trip to his birthplace. Amid reports of another natural disaster, this time a gale in Florida, the president, the first lady, and Attorney General Sargent had boarded the Presidential Special to inspect Vermont’s recovery work. The Coolidges had stopped in Northampton to visit Mrs. Goodhue; Mrs. Coolidge spent half an hour beside her mother at the hospital. They were likely to settle there; Coolidge could practice law, and Grace had the Clarke School. Next they had traveled north to Greenfield, Massachusetts, near the Turners Falls Dam, where the water had flowed over a year before. That time John had not been with them; he was settling in as a boarder at the house of a professor of divinity at 233 Edwards Street in New Haven, Connecticut, and beginning work at the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad.

Soon the Presidential Special crossed the border into Vermont and met the people: at Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, Windsor, and nine other towns the crowds were there, waiting. Park Pollard, the cousin who had seconded the nomination for Al Smith at the Democratic Convention in Houston, climbed aboard. Later, the train pulled into Bethel and Montpelier, where the flood had been so disastrous, and picked up Governor Weeks. Then it was on to White River Junction and Burlington, where they went to Green Mountain Cemetery to lay a wreath on the grave of Grace’s father. Four thousand stood at Middlebury, where the streets had become rivers and the inhabitants and animals had fled to the hills. Shortly it was on to Rutland. All in all the Coolidges made twelve stops, and at each stop Vermonters watched the first couple’s eyes take in their progress: the tracks were down, the trains were running. The most skilled railway men of Vermont were selected to man the train. The state had made itself whole. From Rutland, the Coolidges rode in a car to Plymouth Notch. The Coolidges stopped at the little cemetery below the village. They laid white roses on the graves of Colonel Coolidge, his mother, and their son. A fried chicken supper was provided to them by Aurelia.

They slept in the old white house at Plymouth. In the morning, Coolidge had checked his cow stalls (there was enough hay for the winter but not enough oats, he told Mr. Cady) and studied the dairy business: his cows’ milk went for $.0488 a quart, and the cows produced 75 quarts a day apiece. Everything came in for inspection: Coolidge pounded the sills and announced that they were ready for replacement. The
Times
reporter watched him, “a man of small stature dressed in a blue business suit and brown hat.” Last of all, Coolidge, the
Times
reported, “drove some distance over the hills to the twenty-five acres of maple grove given to him by his grandfather.” Leaving Grace in the car, the president walked the lot and “climbed over rock and fence,” as the paper noted.

They had been ready to begin the return trip to Washington, but Vermont did not want to let them go. They stopped at Ludlow to see the Black River Academy, where the water had risen. At each station on the way down, cheers and applause greeted them. In Rutland, a former student of Grace, Charlotta Walker, gave the first lady a bouquet of flowers. At Bennington, the last stop before Massachusetts, five thousand waited at the rough blue marble structure for the first couple. It was about 7:00
P.M.
when the Coolidges’ train pulled up and the president and the first lady appeared on the rear coach platform. “Speech, speech!” the crowd cried. John Spargo, the director of the Bennington Museum, was finally getting the visit he had sought since the anniversary of the Battle of Bennington. The shouts, the crowd expected, would be in vain. The press had been warned there would be no newsworthy speech on that trip—perhaps no speech at all, or if anything, a line or two.

The president started off routinely. First he offered a simple thank-you to his fellow Vermonters for the two days of hospitality. Then he praised the railroads that were running, the highways open to traffic for “those who wish to travel by automobile.” This was a kind of “Open for business” declaration from the president for which Vermont business leaders had so long waited; it was welcome, but standard and not different from what Coolidge had done for the Black Hills. Then Coolidge surprised them all by continuing. He was in fact going to give, as the
Springfield Republican
noted, “the only rear-end speech since he became chief magistrate.” There were no microphones. The president spoke without notes. But then, he was telling old friends what they already knew.

“Vermont is a state I love,” Coolidge said, and a reporter could hear the emotion in the voice. “I could not look upon the peaks of Ascutney, Killington, Mansfield and Equinox without being moved. It was here that I saw the first light of day; here that I received my bride. Here my dead lie buried, pillowed among the everlasting hills. I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all I love her because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who almost impoverished themselves for a love of others. If ever the spirit of liberty should vanish from the rest of the Union, it could be restored by the generous store held by the people in this brave little state of Vermont.”

The moment Coolidge finished, the reporters bent over their notebooks. If what he had said was to be recorded, they would have to be the recorders. In fact the speech was reported with different wording, as each reporter heard it slightly differently.
Time
magazine wrote “impoverished” and “buried.” Other papers transcribed “beggared.” Some heard the word “Whittier,” which was a mountain, but in New Hampshire. Perhaps the president had erred? He loved the poet. Some reporters heard “Equinos,” not “Equinox”; some thought Coolidge might have read a poem and reviewed the syllables to see if they scanned as verse. Across the state and, a day later, across the nation, the telegraph wires clattered again. “Vermont,” “state I love,” “pioneers,” and “indomitable” were set in type over and over again. There were many ways to help a people, Coolidge had said. Vermont’s way was to allow people to help themselves, as the reporter had noted during the flood. That had been the greatness of the speech. Later, Coolidge would select his own version for history. But all the versions were a reminder that all Americans had a little Vermont in them. Vermonters did not mind starting small if they could do something themselves. They preferred it. Small was not the way of Hoover, the man who would be succeeding him in the presidential office, but it was Coolidge’s way. The trip to New England had given him a touch of the peace he might yet find.

At Sapelo, Coolidge had thought again about his treaty, even as he fished and hunted with Starling. The reasoning behind the treaty was not perfect, he knew. Coolidge wrote a note to Morrow to try to explain his choice. “By nature I am a barbarian. I should like to revert to savagery and spend all my time hunting and fishing. I have a strong opinion this feeling is shared very generally by many people. Probably none of us however are going to do what we should like to do most but are going to struggle on somewhat unsuccessfully trying to do what we think we ought to do.” When the Coolidges returned from their holiday early in the year, the Senate was already opening debate on the treaty.

Kellogg, wisely, was insisting that the Senate vote on the treaty without qualification. Coolidge backed him up: “I do not think any reservations ought to be attached.” For a full two days, Coolidge and Kellogg waited while Borah led the Senate as the members blasted their opinions to their heart’s content, lecturing one another on the history of outlawry. Those who advocated the building of new battleships were soothed with the promise of legislation to fund new ships in coming years, but even those new ships could not offset the drama of the pact. Senators Thomas Walsh of Montana and William King of Utah spoke for a total of three hours. Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama, the same senator whose absence the usher had noted at the Coolidge breakfast, spoke for the pact as well. Senator Carter Glass of Virginia denounced the treaty as idiocy. “I am not willing that anybody in Virginia shall think I am simple enough to suppose that it is worth a postage stamp in the direction of accomplishing permanent peace,” he said—and signaled that he would vote “yes.” Senator Hiram Johnson of California, one of Coolidge’s erstwhile presidential opponents and a foe of the World Court, argued that this treaty would prove ineffectual without enforcement mechanisms. To capture the weakness he saw, Johnson quoted an old poem: “A helmless ship, a houseless street, a wordless book, a swordless sheath.”

Yet while the senators yapped, whispered, shouted, and bloviated, as Harding would have said, it became clear that the lawmakers would not block the treaty. The opposition simply was not there. “I find myself more or less in a state of irritation,” Dawes, who was presiding, wrote. Suddenly, the reporters recognized the game Coolidge had played, the extent to which he had been in control from the start. When the moment seemed ripe, Coolidge, who had been taking reports at the White House, alerted Dawes that he wanted a vote. This time, Dawes sprang to it. He promised to “steam up” the process. Names were called. Votes were counted. Glass, Johnson, and Borah had all voted “yes.” The Kellogg-Briand Treaty had been ratified by a thundering margin, 85–1.

In this pact Coolidge won his final political victory. He had proved that he was far from isolated or weak. He had made a new partner of a cabinet member, this time Kellogg instead of Mellon, and with that partner had passed a law as ambitious as his tax legislation. He had demonstrated yet again his skills as an administrator, productively delegating to a crucial deputy, Kellogg, and thereby achieving a legislative victory far greater in scope than he could have won alone. He had outwitted fellow Republicans, shown he was ahead of them, and unified the Republican Party, pulling together the fabric of the party so many years after Lodge had first torn it. He also had unified the country in a way that neither party had managed since the Lodge-Wilson feud.

Already scholars and journalists were recasting the past to depict the country as a place that would always have supported such a treaty. The state legislature of Wisconsin, whose Senator John Blaine was the only member of the chamber to vote “no,” was so furious that members promptly introduced resolutions to point out to Washington that Blaine’s position did not reflect general sentiment in the state. Posthumously, Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Rider, joined in service of Coolidge’s treaty. At Oyster Bay that month, members of the Theodore Roosevelt Pilgrimage Association read aloud from a 1910 text by Roosevelt: it was the duty of wise statesmen, Roosevelt had said, “to encourage and build up every movement which will tend to substitute some other agency for force in the settlement of international disputes.” Coolidge had succeeded where both Wilson and Harding had failed in winning a great multilateral treaty that united not only a party or a nation but the world.

At the White House signing of the treaty resolution, the reporters crowded in. “Keep perfectly still,” they said to Kellogg, who was shaking, and “Keep your hand steady”—difficult for him. Coolidge was tense, as at all signings, even telling a State Department employee who hovered too much to “go away” from the table. Castle of the State Department wrote that “the president’s face looked like murder.” But what he took for anger in Coolidge was exhaustion and determination. He was once again demonstrating service. The vast majority of the United States had wanted this treaty. Toward the end, Kellogg’s office had received up to six hundred letters a day and the White House two hundred, of which, Coolidge had mentioned to reporters, “I haven’t seen one that is in opposition.” He had tired toward the end but had not flagged.

The determination this time regarded the law. The treaty had drawn the smaller nations. The Cuban senate had ratified the pact in a unanimous vote on December 12. So had Ethiopia, the country whose prince had sent the shield. But whether the treaty would protect those nations or make them vulnerable was not clear. The greatest threat to Ethiopia, the Italy of Benito Mussolini, had not yet ratified the agreement. The treaty might in future years merely provide fatal cover for dictatorships. Still the treaty had value as law, as precedent, as a model. If the United States leaned on law, the restless nations of the world might do the same. It took the United States away from its habit of arbitrary interventions like those he himself had been party to in Nicaragua, the kind of intervention that had been especially common since Theodore Roosevelt.

It was of New England again that the president thought. In the end what New England meant to him was upholding the law and sharing what he found in the Forbes Library even as he prepared to go back to it. Now he was exporting the law to the world, illuminating the way, just as in the Amherst motto itself: “Terras irradient,” “Let them illuminate the earth.” Every hour that remained in his presidency was an hour he could use to emphasize the primacy of law. Let the potentates send their golden shields. He would send back law books.

Coda: The Blessing

Northampton

SOON AFTER THE PRESIDENTIAL
inauguration of 1929, William Allen White, the editor of
The Emporia Gazette
of Kansas, called at the White House. The Hoovers were just settling in; it had been only a month or two since the army trucks had backed up to the service door to collect the Coolidges’ boxes for storage and to be shipped to Northampton. Yet a shift impressed White. “There is another atmosphere around there from the Coolidge atmosphere,” he wrote in a letter to his friend Henry Haskell in London, thinking of the old Rough Rider. “It is the Roosevelt atmosphere, stepped down through a vast transformance, but still Rooseveltian, muffled but quite as vigorous. At the table Hoover lets the conversation die. Roosevelt never did. But at the desk, I fancy, Hoover gets more done than Roosevelt. And both are going in the same direction.”

There were other changes. The new president publicly decommissioned the old Coolidge favorite, the
Mayflower
, in the name of a cause Coolidge could not assail: economy. Another outlay of the Coolidge White House, costing $15,000 a year, was also publicized by the Hoover administration: the White House stables. Hoover shut them down noisily. General Lord, Coolidge’s old partner at the Budget Bureau, was leaving government. For the first time since 1920, June came and went without a semiannual budget meeting.