One Summer: America, 1927 (42 page)

But elsewhere anger and a sense of injustice seemed to be on the increase. Among those who asked for a new trial were Alessandro Berardelli’s widow. The conservative
Boston Herald
, which had previously
supported execution, reversed its opinion after reading Thayer’s statement.

No one gave more attention to the case than Massachusetts governor Alvan T. Fuller. Fuller appears to have been a thoroughly decent man. He began adult life as a bicycle salesman, then went to Paris and brought back two of the first automobiles ever imported into North America. Eventually, he became sole New England distributor for Packard at a time when Packards were the best cars in the country. The relationship made him a millionaire many times over. He lived in a Boston mansion and collected eighteenth-century English paintings—Gainsboroughs and Romneys in particular. In fourteen years as an elected official, he never took a paycheck.

On May 10, 1927—just at the time that Nungesser and Coli went missing—a bomb was mailed to Fuller, but luckily was intercepted and defused. In the same month, Fuller appointed a commission of three worthies—Abbott Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard; Samuel Stratton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Robert Grant, a retired judge—to consider formally whether Sacco and Vanzetti had been given a fair trial and should be executed. They were not young. Grant was seventy-five, Lowell seventy-one, and Stratton sixty-six.

Fuller at the same time made a private study of the case. He read every word of transcript. He had all the physical evidence—pistols, bullets, articles of clothing—sent to his house so that he could study them. He called in and personally questioned all of the eleven surviving jurors (one had died) as well as witnesses from both trials. He several times devoted twelve- to fourteen-hour days to doing nothing else but studying the Sacco-Vanzetti case.

He twice interviewed Sacco and Vanzetti and even the hapless Celestino Madeiros, as well as members of their families. Fuller found himself particularly taken with Vanzetti. In prison Vanzetti had studied English by correspondence course, and his vocabulary and grammar had improved enormously. In his later years in prison he wrote many moving and articulate letters and essays, and struck everyone with his sensitivity and intelligence. Vanzetti’s lawyer, Fred Moore, said he had
never met a man of such “splendid gentility.” Governor Fuller, after their first meeting, came out gushing, “What an attractive man!”

On the day of Lindbergh’s visit to Boston in July, Fuller went first to Charlestown Prison to meet with the convicted men. He spent fifteen minutes each with Sacco and Madeiros, but a full hour with Vanzetti. It was clear to everyone that Fuller wished not to execute the men, Vanzetti in particular.

At about the time of Lindbergh’s visit, the Lowell Commission, as it was known, revealed its findings. It concluded that Sacco was guilty beyond any doubt, Vanzetti probably so, and that there were no grounds for a reprieve. Anger among liberals was almost immeasurable. Heywood Broun called it “legalized murder” and wrote: “It is not every prisoner who has a president of Harvard University throw the switch for him.”

That was that for Sacco and Vanzetti. On August 3, Fuller announced with implicit regret that he could find no grounds for clemency and that the executions must proceed. Sacco and Vanzetti would be taken to the electric chair the following week.

The news did not cause quite the stir that might have been predicted, and this was almost entirely because President Coolidge in far-off South Dakota had just dumbfounded the nation with an unexpected announcement of his own.

*
In fact—and this can’t be said quickly enough—Italians were not unlawful. Italians in 1910 constituted 11 percent of the immigrant population but accounted for 7 percent of foreign-born people in prison. As John Kobler notes, in terms of imprisonment rates per 100,000 people, the Italians came twelfth out of seventeen nationalities.

21

August 2 was a cold, wet day in South Dakota. The thirty or so members of the presidential press corps were surprised to find themselves summoned to Rapid City High School for a special announcement at noon. Ushered into a classroom, they were even more surprised to find President Coolidge sitting at a teacher’s desk. It was the fourth anniversary of Warren Harding’s death and so also of Calvin Coolidge’s assumption of the presidency. Coolidge looked inscrutably pleased about something.

The reporters were instructed to form a line. As each man filed past the desk, Coolidge handed him a two-inch-by-nine-inch strip of paper bearing the message “I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty-eight.” That was all. The decision caught everyone by surprise. “A bolt from the blue would not be too extravagant a term to describe the Coolidge cryptogram,” wrote Robert Benchley in
The New Yorker
. Even Grace Coolidge, the First Lady, was apparently unaware of her husband’s decision, and learned the news afterward from one of those present.

Coolidge spoke just five words at the press conference: “Is everyone here now?” before it started and “No” when asked if he would comment further on his announcement. Then the reporters rushed out to break the news to the world. The message itself was either ten words or twelve words long, depending on whether one counted “nineteen twenty-eight”
as one word or three—no one could agree—but the correspondents filing reports from the Western Union office in Rapid City sent nearly a hundred thousand words that day and the next.

Why Coolidge decided not to run is a question that has fed speculation for over eighty years. Probably there were many reasons. Both he and his wife had no fondness for Washington, particularly in the sapping mugginess of summer, which was why he was pleased to take such a long vacation in 1927. Nor was it as if he had a great program to see through. Whatever mark Calvin Coolidge was going to leave on the world was unlikely to be altered by another four years in office. Coolidge also seems to have enjoyed a certain prescience regarding the economy. “Poppa says there’s a depression coming,” Grace Coolidge remarked to an acquaintance soon after her husband announced his decision.

But there was one other reason, nowhere noted at the time, that may have stood out above all others. Calvin Coolidge was depressed, chronically so. The reason was a family tragedy for which he blamed himself. Three years earlier, on the last day of June 1924, Coolidge’s two teenage sons, John and Calvin Junior, had a game of tennis on a White House court. Calvin Junior wore sneakers without socks and thus developed a blister that became infected. Within a day or so, he was running a high fever and was drifting in and out of delirium. On July 3, the day before his father’s birthday, he was hurriedly admitted to Walter Reed General Hospital.

Coolidge wrote to his father: “Calvin is very sick.… He blistered his toe and infection got into his blood. The toe looks all right but the poison spread all over his system.… Of course he has all that medical science can give but he may have a long sickness with ulcers, then again he may be better in a few days.” In fact, three days later the boy was dead.

Coolidge had been president for just over eleven months and had been nominated to run for president in his own right just two weeks earlier. Coolidge and his wife were devastated. All interest in affairs of state seemed to drain out of the president. “When he went the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him,” Coolidge wrote later.

Coolidge was convinced that his role as president was entirely
responsible for his son’s death. He wrote in his autobiography, “If I had not been President he would not have raised a blister on his toe, which resulted in blood-poisoning, playing lawn tennis in the South Grounds.… I do not know why such a price was exacted for occupying the White House.” The final sentence of Coolidge’s autobiography was strangely heartfelt: “It costs a great deal to be President.”

Among the nation’s press, the question concerning the president’s announcement was not why he decided not to run, but why he chose such an ambiguous phrase as “I do not choose to run” as opposed to a more direct “I will not run” or “I have decided not to run.” Many saw it not as an outright refusal to run but almost as the very opposite—a reluctant willingness to be drafted if that was the will of the people. The humorist Will Rogers put it succinctly in his popular newspaper column: “I think Mr. Coolidge’s statement is the best-worded acceptance of a nomination ever uttered by a candidate. He spent a long time in the dictionary looking for that word ‘choose,’ instead of ‘I will not.’ It don’t take much political knowledge to know that a man can get more votes running on the people’s request than he can running on his own request. Mr. Coolidge is the shrewdest politician that ever drew government salary.”

The most excited person in America by the announcement was Herbert Hoover, who saw himself as the clear front-runner to succeed Coolidge even if the rest of the nation did not, or at least did not necessarily. Hoover was vacationing in the redwood forests of Northern California when the news broke and was as puzzled as everyone else by Coolidge’s diction. “The word ‘choose’ has various connotations in its New England usage,” he reflected later. “I determined at once to say nothing until I could have a talk with the President.” According to Hoover’s memoirs of 1952, he waited till both he and Coolidge were back in Washington in September, though other sources say they met sooner. When at last they caught up, Hoover, looking for clarity and perhaps even a kind of blessing, asked if Coolidge thought he should run. To which all Coolidge would say was “Why not?”

If Coolidge secretly hoped that he would be implored by his party to stay on, that never happened; and if it bothered him, he never indicated.
All that can be said is that he declined to endorse Hoover or any other candidate on the ground that people should make up their own minds. He also, at once, looked much more relaxed, even more amiable, than he had in a long time.

Within a couple of days he was happily allowing himself to be inducted into the Sioux Indian nation as an honorary chief with the name of Womblee Tokaha (Leading Eagle). For this ceremony he was presented with a large feathered headdress, which he proudly donned for photographs. He looked ridiculous, but somehow enchantingly so. The nation was delighted.

So high were Coolidge’s spirits that five days later he cheerfully traveled twenty-three miles into difficult backcountry to dedicate a seemingly hare-brained scheme on behalf of one of the most fantastically obstreperous men of the twentieth century. The scheme was Mount Rushmore. The man was Gutzon Borglum.

Mount Rushmore was a granite outcrop so off the beaten track that no one had even noticed it until 1885, when one Charles Rushmore of New York happened to pass by on horseback and bestowed his name on it. The idea for a mighty carved monument there originated with the state historian, Doane Robinson, who saw it as a way of attracting tourists. It would be, as
Time
magazine epically described it, “the largest piece of sculpture ever wrought in the Christian Era.” The notion was eccentric, to put it mildly. The project had no secure funding and no government support at any level. There was no certainty that anyone could actually carve a mountainside, and the site was unreachable by road, which meant that people would struggle to see it anyway.

Just one man on earth had the necessary skills and experience to carry out the project, but he was one of the most hot-tempered, quixotic, and maddening individuals ever to grasp a jackhammer. He was also, as it turned out, the perfect choice.

In the summer of 1927, Gutzon Borglum was sixty-one years old. Nearly all the details of his life must be treated with a certain caution
since Borglum liked to change them as time went along. He occasionally awarded himself a new year or month of birth and frequently claimed achievements that were not his to claim. In his
Who’s Who
entry he declared himself an aeronautical engineer. He was not. Though born in Idaho, at Great Bear Lake in 1867, he sometimes claimed, for no evident reason, to be from California. He listed two different women as his mother, though there was a certain justification for this. His father, a Danish-born Mormon, had married two sisters. One gave birth to Gutzon, but then withdrew from the family, and the other sister raised him as her own. Fiery-tempered and barrel-chested, he was pathologically pugnacious. “My life,” he once reflected, “has been a one-man war.”

Borglum grew up mostly in Nebraska. As a young man, he worked as a machinist and apprentice lithographer but then decided to pursue an interest in art. He took lessons from a woman in Los Angeles named Lisa Putnam, and eventually married her, even though she was eighteen years his senior. Together they moved to Paris, where Borglum trained as a sculptor (one of his teachers was Auguste Rodin). Borglum lived in Europe for eleven years before he abandoned his wife and returned to the United States, where he quickly established himself as a sculptor.

During the First World War, and evidently from out of nowhere, Borglum developed an obsession with inefficiencies in the aircraft industry. Without encouragement or authorization, he conducted inspections of several factories, during the course of which he actually uncovered several significant failings. President Woodrow Wilson asked him to write a report, and on the strength of this Borglum secured an office in the War Department Building in Washington, D.C. Eventually, Borglum made such a nuisance of himself that Wilson dismissed him, even though he actually held no position to be dismissed from.

When the war was over, Borglum persuaded the United Daughters of the Confederacy to let him carve a tableau four hundred feet high and a quarter of a mile long into the face of Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, to celebrate the heroism and bravery of the Confederacy. Stone Mountain had certain resonances. It was where the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in 1915. Borglum was a member of the Klan himself for a time. With financial
support from the United Daughters, Borglum undertook a great deal of preparatory work, but he fell into dispute with the women and departed abruptly in 1925, leaving behind stacks of interesting sketches and unpaid bills. The United Daughters had him charged with malicious mischief and two counts of larceny, but by this time Borglum was already in South Dakota, where Doane Robinson had invited him to come and have a look at Rushmore.