Coolidge (12 page)

Mrs. Lavake died; Coolidge changed rooms more than once, scarcely noticing. The law was becoming his home, the cases his substitute for furniture, or friends. Hammond’s spot as district attorney gave him a wonderful window into criminal law. And now Mabel Todd of Amherst, the astronomy professor’s wife, was contesting Austin Dickinson’s will in Hampshire County Court. On November 16, 1896, just after the elections, Hammond and Field filed a bill of complaint alleging that the Todds were taking Dickinson property by “misrepresentation and fraud.” Field was also representing Susan Dickinson, Austin’s widow, in another case. It involved graft by one of Austin’s employees, Edward Baxter Marsh, at the Treasurer’s Office. Marsh had used college funds to buy stocks. There was no evidence that Austin had known of it, but the case reflected poorly on Dickinson’s stewardship.

Sometimes, very briefly, Coolidge did get away from work. He rowed, albeit rarely, and sometimes tried a little golf; the others found playing with him wearying because he treated the task as work. In the summer of 1896, he finally made it home to Plymouth. Again, his village magnanimously gave him a stage to debate on. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, William Jennings Bryan had warned that the East was killing the heartland with its gold standard; the farmer, he said, must not be crucified on a “cross of gold.” The villagers, farmers but still mostly Republicans, were divided on the issue. They asked Coolidge to debate the gold topic. It was a pleasure to perform before his family. Just as in college, being home reminded him that he was making progress. Back in Northampton, he began to find friends. From time to time he dropped in at the S. E. Bridgeman Bookstore, where he befriended Robert Weir, a clerk and the grandson of a temperance activist. John Lyman, Coolidge’s new landlord on Center Street, was also a “dry.” Coolidge noticed Mabel Maynard, the daughter of a neighbor, Henry Maynard, and several years younger than himself. Mabel had red hair, like Coolidge himself and like Abbie. She was an accomplished musician, sang in public, and was at the center of the Republican political crowd in Northampton. Coolidge seemed to gravitate toward lively women with skills, rather than homebodies.

As he learned the law, the silent clerk began to speak, if only tersely, and his colleagues began to see a utility in his manner; his terseness appealed to clients. Like the friends at boardinghouses years before, they now began to set him up, so that his silent act would have greater effect. A selectman named Orville Prouty from the neighboring town of Hadley came to ask about whether he could move the body of a man killed while rowing on a lake. Prouty explained the problem to the slim man at the desk, who happened to be Coolidge. “Can move body,” was Coolidge’s three-word reply. Reports are that Prouty then asked, “Are you sure?” only to receive a four-word reply, “Yes, can move body.” Prouty asked the boss, Hammond, how to react to the short understudy. Hammond replied: “I’ve found out when he says a thing is so, it is.” The client soon saw that Hammond and Coolidge were correct. He was ready to come back with more business.

The 1896 presidential election pulled them all in; the clerk looked for ways to help his employers and his party. William McKinley, the Republican candidate, was a gold-standard man; the GOP, he said, needed to defend the standard. A former mayor of Northampton, John O’Donnell, had written a letter in the
East Hampshire Gazette
defending bimetallism. Coolidge penned a breathy, floral rebuttal to O’Connell for the Republicans to the
Hampshire Gazette
but also began to think about his own career. Northampton was made up of seven boards; for each board there were an alderman and a city councilman. The Republican City Committee selected the candidates. Coolidge joined the Republican Committee for Ward 2 in 1897, a year in which Field was running for election again. The issues were services such as streetlights and plumbing; towns needed to spend more, and more rationally. Field wanted to create a Board of Public Works for the young city and add a policeman, who would be Northampton’s eighth. Field and Hammond both won.

In 1897, Coolidge finally found better rooms, this time because of a friend. Robert Weir had become the steward of the Clarke School for the Deaf and been given a house at 40 Round Hill Road as part of his compensation; he in turn made Coolidge his tenant. Though it was a year earlier than planned, Coolidge thought he would see if he could pass the bar exam. The county committee that oversaw the bar exam included Hammond, so Hammond withdrew to let the two other judges, William Bassett and William Strickland, evaluate his clerk.

Coolidge badly wanted some kind of victory. His Amherst peers were heading in various directions. Herbert Pratt was working in the family oil business and even donned blue overalls for a stint at the Queens County Oil Company; that year he had married Florence Gibb, whose family, like his, summered in Islip, Long Island. Dwight Morrow was studying law at Columbia and had an on-and-off girlfriend, Elizabeth Cutter, a Smith alumna.

Around his twenty-fifth birthday, July 4, 1897, the clerk finally had something to show: he had qualified with Bassett and Strickland, a year earlier than expected. Hardy too had qualified, as had the other clerk at Hammond and Field, Edward Shaw. His first goal was as good as accomplished. His family could see that “John” was really gone: his new business cards and other official documents now read “Calvin Coolidge.”

Staying at Hammond and Field was not an option; the attorneys had let him know that. Coolidge therefore played down his achievement, warning his father that the next years would be hard: “Apparently there is no course for me but to open a law office in Northampton at a cost of about $700 and the probability of not making a living for a long time. What do you think about it? I suppose this is what you contemplated when you sent me back to college five years ago and when you sent me down here two years ago—rather than let me try to live in Plymouth.” He would need money, and he sent the usual peremptory orders to his father: “My books will cost $400.” Back and forth went the letters from Plymouth to Northampton. Coolidge’s uncertainty in turn made his father and stepmother anxious. In August 1897, Carrie wrote to send him a $3,000 life insurance policy, one of a number taken out in Calvin’s name over the years. She also wrote to inquire, “Your father wants to know if there are any new developments in your business prospects.”

Calvin considered practicing law elsewhere, including in Lee, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires. But Lee, which lacked streetlights, was no longer enough for Coolidge, now a Northampton “city doll.” “It is just about like Ludlow,” he wrote his father of Lee. “There is not a steam pipe in the town. Office rent $100, not lighted or heated. . . . The things I care for in life were not there. I know coal stoves are not very good for me.” The great rail depot at Ludlow that had so impressed him as a boy now seemed tiny next to what was going up in Northampton and Boston. In another letter, Calvin laid out his image of his own independence: “I wish to furnish my office myself. I shall make my expenses as reasonable as possibilities permit. You will have to peace out my income until I can make it meet my expenses as you do now. An overcoat will be all I need for a year”—he wrote “peace,” not piece, probably unconsciously, but it reads like a bid for his father’s support. After throwing out a few names of possible employers, John, in one letter, finally suggested that Calvin work it all out by himself. “I cannot advise you in regard to best place for you to locate. Everything being equal I think Mass. preferable.” Then he added a line to cheer his son on: “At first no doubt it will be a struggle to live but perseverance and fidelity will bring success.”

As he settled himself in the fall of 1897, Coolidge chattered on about investments, perhaps in part to distract himself from the daunting thought that he would probably be hanging out his shingle alone. He tried to get his father to invest in a railroad between Northampton and Amherst, even working out the math for him: if the population between the towns rode back and forth once a week and there were 12,000 people in Northampton, 4,700 in Amherst, and 1,700 in Hadley, he reckoned an investment of $150,000 total would earn between 8 and 9 percent. A distant cousin, the engineer M. A. Coolidge, had worked on a rail line from Amherst to Sunderland; the new line would take one “from Amherst House [a fine hotel in Amherst] and set him down at the Mansion House [in Northampton] quicker than steam.”

By February 1898, it was settled: Calvin would stay in Paradise. He opened an office of his own in the Masonic Building on Main Street. It was just a few steps from Hammond and Field, but still it was his own. An ad in the Northampton City Directory listed him as “Calvin Coolidge, Law Office and Justice of the Peace”; the listing came under those of another attorney and the Northampton Paper Box Co. The office rent was $200 a year, double what he would have paid in Lee. He inherited some money from the Moors, his maternal grandparents, after his grandmother Abigail died in 1892, and that gave him a little breathing room. The cases he took were the common fare of the small-town lawyer: writs, deeds, rent collection.

That spring the United States was readying for war with Spain; President McKinley signed a declaration of war in April. Coolidge, who was very busy, could scarcely look up. When he did, he saw that Roosevelt, the municipal reformer and now assistant secretary of the navy, was heading for the front, believing that a man who took the position that one should fight for free Cuba ought to demonstrate his goodwill by fighting: “he should pay with his body.” The Second Massachusetts Infantry, headquartered in Springfield, mustered in for war on May 10.

It was a brutal war with disconcerting collateral damage, and when a man from the town of Amherst fell, killed by a falling mango tree at the Battle of El Caney, it took eight mules and ten Cubans to exhume him and transport him to a ship back to the United States. The man was Walter Mason Dickinson, a distant cousin of the Dickinsons at the college. Roosevelt won at San Juan Hill and became a hero, but the war itself was not popular at home. “Send Second Home! Emphatic Demand of People in Massachusetts,” read a headline in
The Boston Globe
on August 12, 1898. The regiment was mustered out by November, just around the time of the election. Coolidge could see that the war of liberation that the Cubans had thought they were waging had not turned out to be quite that. The U.S. Congress passed the Platt Amendment, formulated by Secretary of State Elihu Root, which stipulated that the United States would remain in Cuba until Cuba was ready for freedom.

In the fall of 1898, Coolidge sought his first serious political office, a seat on the city council. “Running for offices can be divided into two kinds of activity,” wrote Quintus Tullius Cicero, the younger brother of the more famous Marcus, “securing support of your friends and winning over the general public.” Coolidge found that what had applied in the day of Cicero applied in his as well: not only Mr. Lucey or Hammond and Field were important, though they were; finding new voters along the streets of Ward 2 was necessary as well. He managed well enough to win the slot.

The most important thing in Coolidge’s life, though, was to make money through the law and end his requests to his father. Clients seemed to like him. In a trade where talent bills by the hour, the long-winded often fared well. But clients resented the extra charges. Coolidge’s taciturnity, as in the case of the man on the lake, proved an advantage. So did his intuitive tendency to settle rather than litigate. In September 1898, the
Amherst Record
reported that Coolidge was representing the estate of William Kellogg, an Amherst man; Coolidge received $184.91 for the work, inclusive of expenses. Some days, he envied day laborers, writing his father, “There must be a good deal of satisfaction in knowing on Saturday night where you can earn twelve dollars the next week, and that the town will pay you. In the practice of law one never can have that feeling.”

When the law failed him, at least once, he tried investment, with Hammond as his guide. Transport, which was always improving, still fascinated him. Through Hammond, and on his own, he had learned about trolleys and rails. Having personally experienced the great difference transport could make, he was thinking of investing in the trolleys. Hammond and Field represented the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company. The railroads were consolidating, and the antitrust crowd was focusing on railroads as an evil target. Coolidge was trying to offer the perspective of the railway’s innovators and investors to a professor who, he sensed, might not yet have been exposed to that perspective.

To get a look at the inside of banking, he became counsel for and vice president of a new bank, the Nonotuck Savings Bank. He sent his father a birthday present, a signal of his hopes of earnings to come. Late in 1899, the city council selected Coolidge to be solicitor general, a job that did pay $600, a useful addition to the revenues from the practice. Like Round Hill itself, the curve of his rise was not steep, but visible.

As he left his rooms and came back, Coolidge found he was often bumping into Alfred Pearce Dennis, a young teacher at Smith College. Dennis too lodged on Round Hill, but in better rooms. Dennis, like most people, was initially fascinated by Coolidge’s silence. They ate together at Rahar’s, a new inn on Old South Street, where Hardy boarded. Liquor was legal in Northampton, and Rahar’s advertised “foreign and domestic liquors and cigars,” as well as “purest beer imported.” There Coolidge found himself in another discussion about gold; Mrs. Rahar, the innkeeper, demanded that she be paid with a gold coin; the men delighted in complying with her request. The new trolley circuit was up; passengers might ride a splendid thirty-two-mile circuit over two hours and a half. The entire circuit, from Northampton to Hadley and Amherst, cost seventy cents.

Coolidge’s infatuation with commerce was not something all his friends, including Alfred Pearce Dennis, could share. One night, Coolidge and Dennis tested out the electric road. They rode a car that traveled the tracks up to Mountain Park, an amusement park, to observe the horses and the roller coasters. As they rode together on the roller coaster, Dennis later recalled, there were five minutes of silence, during which he dreamed of one of the Smith girls who had graduated the day before, “clothed in filmy white raiment.” When Coolidge finally did speak up, it was to talk not about women but about the nuts and bolts of the railway: “I have been counting up the amount of material such as labor and crossties, rails, poles, copper wire, to say nothing of rolling equipment that have gone into the line. Some of our folks think we ought to strike for a nickel fare to Mountain Park.” It was good politics to agree with a strike, he said, but he was not sure that it made sense. “Just as a matter of fairness,” he told Dennis, the railroad was entitled “to a chance to make a living just the same as you and I.” Dennis was dumbfounded; here was a man who seemed to miss the joy of Northampton, or another paradise, altogether.