One Summer: America, 1927 (28 page)

Calvin Coolidge was born on the Fourth of July, 1872, in Plymouth Notch, a scattered hamlet of two dozen or so people in a lofty cleft of the Green Mountains of central Vermont. The Notch, as it was known, commanded a lonely valley about a dozen miles from Ludlow, the nearest outlet to the wider world. “The scene was one of much natural beauty, of which I think the inhabitants had little realization,” Coolidge wrote in later life. His birthplace was the general store and post office that his father ran, though the family later moved to a larger house across the road—the house where Coolidge was sleeping on the night he learned he was president.

The Coolidges were reasonably well-off. Calvin’s father also owned the blacksmith shop and a small farm, from which he produced maple syrup and cheese. But the family had its share of suffering. Calvin’s mother died from tuberculosis when Calvin was just twelve, an event that touched him deeply. He recorded the event simply but rather movingly in his autobiography:

When she knew that her end was near she called us children to her bedside, where we knelt down to receive her final parting blessing. In an hour she was gone. It was her thirty-ninth birthday. I was twelve years old. We laid her away in the blustering snows of March. The greatest grief that can come to a boy came to me. Life was never to be the same again.

That was no exaggeration. Forty years later in the White House, according to Coolidge’s Secret Service agent Colonel E. W. Starling, Coolidge “communed with her, talked with her, and took every problem to her.” Coolidge also lost his only sibling, his beloved sister, Abbie, early. Five years after his mother’s death, almost to the day, Abbie died from a ruptured appendix.

In the fall of 1891, Coolidge entered Amherst College, then an institution of 350 or so students, in central Massachusetts. He was a conspicuous oddity. His hair was iron red and his face a splodge of freckles. Painfully shy, he failed to find a single fraternity that wished to have him as a member—a level of rejection that was more or less without precedent. Only the kindly Dwight Morrow befriended him. With all others he was almost completely silent. “Often hardly a word would pass his lips for days at a time, except such as were absolutely necessary to keep him supplied with food and to report his presence in the classroom,” the writer and advertising man Bruce Barton, also an Amherst alumnus, wrote years later in a recollection.

Coolidge did eventually warm up a little and even gained admission to a fraternity, but socializing was never his strong suit. Instead he worked hard and graduated with honors. After Amherst, he crossed the Connecticut River to nearby Northampton and there studied law in the offices of Hammond and Field, whose partners were also Amherst men. In 1899, he impetuously ran for a seat on the city council and was elected. It was the beginning of a long political career. In 1905, over the strident objections of the bride’s mother, who thought him weedy, Coolidge married a teacher of the deaf, Grace Goodhue, a fellow Vermonter whom he’d met in Northampton and who was as outgoing as he was retiring. Grace was a great support and did all the talking for both of them in social situations. He doted on her and called her “Mamma.”

With Grace at his side, Coolidge began his long climb up the political ladder. He became first mayor of Northampton; then a member of the Massachusetts legislature, the General Court; then lieutenant governor; and finally, in 1918, governor. In all positions, he distinguished himself by his diligence, his thrift, and his parsimony of speech, attributes that endeared him to New Englanders. His personal frugality was legendary. In 1906, he moved with Grace into a modest rented duplex on Massasoit Street in Northampton and remained in modest rented premises for the rest of his life.

In 1919, Boston had a celebrated police strike. The city’s policemen were paid barely $20 a week, and from that they had to buy their own uniforms, so their grievances were real, but their actions alienated public opinion and left Boston at the mercy of lawless elements. For two
days, mobs roamed the streets, robbing and intimidating innocent citizens, and looters had a field day. When city authorities failed to assert control, Coolidge, as governor, stepped in. With an unwonted show of forcefulness he called out the State Guard, dismissed the strikers, and hired a new force. “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time,” he declared—the only occasion in his life, as far as can be told, that he uttered a ringing statement. His action made him a national figure and propelled him on to the nomination for vice president on the Harding ticket the following year.

As vice president, it is fair to say, he made little impression on anyone, even within the administration. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., assistant secretary of the navy, said he sat through innumerable cabinet meetings that Coolidge attended and couldn’t remember him ever once uttering a word.

When the nation awoke in August 1923 to find that Harding was dead and the obscure Coolidge was president, most were dumbfounded. Some had stronger feelings. Oswald Garrison Villard, editor
of The Nation
, wrote: “I doubt if it [the presidency] has ever fallen into the hands of a man so cold, so narrow, so reactionary, so uninspiring, so unenlightened, or who has done less to earn it than Calvin Coolidge.” Yet most people found themselves quickly warming to Coolidge, almost in spite of himself. The nation grew fond of his peculiarities and often exaggerated them in anecdote. His most celebrated trait was his taciturnity. An oft-told story, which has never been verified, is that a woman sitting next to him at dinner gushed, “Mr. President, my friend bet me that I wouldn’t be able to get you to say three words tonight.”

“You lose,” the president supposedly responded.

Beyond doubt, however, is that the president and Mrs. Coolidge once sat through nine innings of a Washington Senators baseball game without speaking except for once when he asked her the time and she replied, “Four twenty-four.” Another time while sitting through an official dinner, the woman beside him, hoping to spark a conversation, asked if he didn’t get tired of having to endure so many official dinners. Coolidge shrugged and said, “Gotta eat somewhere,” and returned to his meal. He was known, not surprisingly, as “Silent Cal.”

In some settings, however, Coolidge could be much more forthcoming—“almost garrulous,” in the words of one biographer. Twice a week he held private press conferences in which he met with correspondents and spoke freely and even sometimes animatedly, though his comments were off the record and all questions had to be submitted in advance to his private secretary, a man with a name that sounded like a W. C. Fields snake-oil salesman: C. Bascom Slemp.

His private eccentricities were even greater than his public ones. While having breakfast, he liked to have his valet rub his head with Vaseline. He was so hypochondriacal that he often stopped in his work to take his own pulse. He had the White House physician examine him every day whether he felt unwell or not. Those who worked closely with him learned to be wary of a streak of “pure cussedness,” to quote his long-suffering aide Wilson Brown, with which he rather joyously made many people’s lives hell. Once, on a trip to Florida, the secretary of state, Frank B. Kellogg, asked Brown to find out what clothes he should wear for a parade through Palm Beach later that day. Kellogg was too frightened of Coolidge’s temper to ask the president himself, so Brown went to the executive quarters for him. Brown later wrote:

I found Mrs. Coolidge knitting tranquilly while the President hid behind a newspaper. When I told him that Mr. Kellogg had asked whether the delegates should wear top hats and tail coats for the drive through the city, or straw hats and summer clothes, he answered without looking up from his paper, “That’s his hunt.”

“Now, Calvin,” Mrs. Coolidge said, “that’s no message to send to the Secretary of State.”

Mr. Coolidge angrily lowered his paper, glared at me and said, “What do you think I should wear?”

I advised straw hat and summer clothes.

He snapped, “Tell Kellogg to wear a top hat.”

No one has ever more successfully made a virtue out of doing little than Calvin Coolidge as president. He did nothing he didn’t absolutely have to do, but rather engaged in a “grim, determined, alert inactivity,”
as the journalist Walter Lippmann put it. He declined even to endorse National Education Week in 1927 on the grounds that it wasn’t necessary for the president to do so. In recent years a revisionist view has emerged that Coolidge was in reality cannier and livelier than history has portrayed him. Well, perhaps. What can certainly be said is that he presided over a booming economy and did nothing at all to get in the way of it.

Calculated indolence could not be called a good policy exactly, but for most of his term it wasn’t a bad one either. With the markets constantly on the rise, he didn’t need to do anything except keep out of the way. Under Coolidge’s benign watch, Wall Street rose by more than two and a half times in value. Not surprisingly, the success of the economy did wonders for Coolidge’s popularity. As the newspaperman Henry L. Stoddard wrote in 1927, “He inspires a deep, nation-wide confidence that all will go well with the country while he is in the White House.” It became known as “Coolidge prosperity,” as if it were his personal gift to the nation.

Coolidge was also morally impeccable and honest down to his bootlaces—qualities that came to seem all the more valiant and noble as the scandals of the Harding administration spilled out. Teapot Dome and the other Harding transgressions occupied great amounts of congressional and court time throughout the rest of the decade and were still rattling on in the summer of 1927. On July 6, Albert Fall and one of the two slick oilmen, Edward L. Doheny, were finally ordered to stand trial in Washington, D.C., on bribery charges—charges that both had been fighting since just after Harding expired.

In the event, Doheny was acquitted. His partner Harry Sinclair, also on trial for corruption in 1927, would also have gotten off scot free but foolishly hired twelve detectives from the William Burns Agency and had each tail a juror to see if any could be bribed, blackmailed, or otherwise influenced. Sinclair was acquitted of the corruption charges but jailed six and a half months for the attempted jury tampering. He was also given three months for contempt for refusing to answer questions of a Senate committee investigating the oil lease scandals. For those who like to think that cheaters never prosper, Sinclair is a painful contradiction.
After his short prison spell, he turned Sinclair Oil into one of the country’s largest oil companies, made a fortune supplying chemicals to the military in the Second World War, became part owner of the St. Louis Browns baseball team, and, in the admiring words of the
American Dictionary of National Biography
, became “one of the most respected business leaders in the United States.” His companies were worth $700 million when he died in 1956.

Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby, who was also implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal, was forced to resign from the cabinet but never charged with anything. Fall, the interior secretary, was eventually found guilty of corruption and sent to jail for nine months, the first time a cabinet secretary had been convicted of a felony. Also jailed was Colonel Thomas W. Miller, who had accepted bribes while in the position of Alien Property Custodian. Harry M. Daugherty, attorney general, had to resign over alleged kickbacks. He probably should have gone to jail but was acquitted at a trial in 1927. Daugherty’s close associate Jess Smith was found dead of a gunshot wound, which was ruled a suicide, but others publicly suggested it was murder.

Charles Forbes, who had lost $200 million at the Veterans Bureau, an unknown quantity of which ended up in his own pocket, was fined $10,000 and given a two-year prison term. In the summer of 1927, he was in Leavenworth, but he would be released in November, having served just one year and eight months.

In his autobiography, Coolidge was wonderfully coy about all this. He didn’t mention Teapot Dome at all and had merely this to say about Harding’s last days:

I do not know what had impaired his health. I do know that the weight of the Presidency is very heavy. Later it was disclosed that he had discovered that some whom he had trusted had betrayed him, and he had been forced to call them to account. It is known that this discovery was a very heavy grief to him, perhaps more than he could bear. I never saw him again. In June he started for Alaska and—eternity.

Although Harding was not personally implicated in any of the corruption—his only crime was to be a complete fool—his reputation was ruined. By the summer of 1927, it seemed as if it could sink no lower. Then it sank lower.

In July, an attractive young woman of his intimate acquaintance named Nan Britton produced an eye-poppingly juicy book called
The President’s Daughter
. The story was unedifying but irresistible. As a schoolgirl in Marion, Ohio, Miss Britton had formed a crush on her father’s handsome friend, the stately Mr. Harding, the proprietor of the
Marion Star
. Harding was thirty-one years Britton’s senior and was in any case engaged in a hot affair with his wife’s best friend—he truly was a bit of a dog—so a crush was as far as things ever seemed likely to go.

But then Miss Britton did something that Warren Harding always found hard to resist: she grew into womanhood. Meeting her again some time later, Harding was moved and smitten. Miss Britton was only too willing. They embarked on a passionate affair. Harding was now a successful politician, and Miss Britton often accompanied him on the campaign trail, generally posing as his niece. On October 22, 1919, she gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth Ann, in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Britton was twenty-three, he was fifty-four. Harding did the decent thing and supported Britton with regular payments of $100 or $150. He also continued relations with Britton as his political career blossomed, but he never saw the child. With his sudden death the payments to Britton ceased. When Harding’s family refused to extend any additional support, Britton decided to reveal all in a book.