Coolidge (18 page)

Coolidge himself boldly assailed the exemption; after all, what Smith or Amherst did was not really for the town but for the whole world. The Amherst motto was not “Let them illuminate Amherst,” after all; it was “Terras irradient,” “Let them illuminate the earth.” Smith College was a bigger financial institution than the town of Northampton itself. Why should James Lucey or the other citizens of Northampton have to pay when Smith did not? The Northampton team pointed out that Marquis Fayette Dickinson, a trustee of Amherst College, had received $1,700 from Amherst to defend its tax-exempt status in Boston; that alone was an abuse. Why was Amherst paying lobbyists instead of tax to the town of Amherst? In that session Coolidge also took care to serve the trade unions of western Massachusetts. Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor were fighting judges’ injunctions to halt strikes or union activity. Coolidge backed a bill that was both prolabor and progressive: the legislation barred injunctions that stopped one worker from attempting to induce another worker to strike. The
Northampton Herald
commended him: “Mr. Coolidge is entitled to the thanks of the wage laborers of his district for his manly defense of their interests.”

Again money problems distracted him. The veteran clerk of the Senate, Henry D. Coolidge, was voted a salary of $3,500. But the salary of a representative like Coolidge was still $750. Almost two decades into his career, the money was still mostly flowing from Plymouth to Northampton, instead of the reverse. In April 1908, Coolidge missed committee meetings, and when he finally did return, his fellow lawmakers teased him. “No, I just had a boy born,” he said. He was back in Boston less than a week after the birth but still preoccupied with his family. Coolidge’s stepmother, Carrie, was still sick, and he took her to a hospital in Brookline, Massachusetts, for surgery. “She is under the care of one of New England’s most celebrated surgeons,”
The Vermont Tribune
approvingly reported. To his father, Coolidge wrote from the hospital on April 21 of his stepmother: “Mother continues to improve. . . . John Grace and the baby are in fine shape. John would like some apples so he claims, he says apple, apple, apple. Mother is as bright as can be. . . . I think she will be well again.” By May, his stepmother was truly on the mend, and Coolidge was back in Northampton. He worried that his first son might become spoiled. “John is well but he is pretty bad,” wrote Coolidge to his father on May 13. “He is very fond of the baby and keeps saying baby, baby. He pats him on the head and kisses him. . . . We have not named him yet.” Eventually they settled on the name both had known all along was the right one: Calvin, Jr.

On May 21, 1908, after noting that Union Pacific Railroad had declared a dividend of 2.5 percent, Coolidge took the opportunity to give his parent a minilecture on the puzzling movements of copper and railroad stocks. It reflected his own ambivalence: was he an investor or a regulator? And if he was a regulator, what were the right regulations?

When the session of 1908 ended, Coolidge decided he would not run again that year, in part to spend time with the new baby and John, in part to scare up some cash. The Coolidges could also take stock of the Grand Old Party from the outside for a change. Theodore Roosevelt stuck to his word and did not run again, pointedly asking that he be referred to as Colonel Roosevelt, and not President Roosevelt. After William Taft beat Bryan, Roosevelt vowed to stay out of politics: Elihu Root, his old secretary of state, warned that that would not be easy. “No thirsty sinner,” he told TR, “ever took a pledge which was harder for him to keep than it will be for you to maintain this position.”

But Roosevelt determinedly signaled his commitment by heading off to Africa to hunt. By leaving the stage, he was helping the credibility of the entire progressive movement, which clearly had much more to accomplish. A national income tax was coming. Despite the critical assistance of J. P. Morgan in the Panic of 1907, many argued that some kind of government chartered central bank was necessary. A generational turnover was also occurring. The makeup of the Supreme Court was likely to change; shortly Melville Fuller, the great chief justice, would retire. So would Laurenus Clark Seelye, the head of Smith College since its founding. Many Amherst friends thought the college needed new blood; without Garman, there was no charismatic teacher. New spots at Amherst, in the courts, in the government—all looked to be filled by progressives.

FOR BOTH GRACE AND
Calvin, 1909 provided a break, a chance to settle in. The Nonotuck Savings Bank had survived the crash, as had all the other banks regulated at the state level in Massachusetts. In January, the same issue of
The Bankers Magazine
that reported the details of the Knickerbocker Trust Company reorganization announced that Coolidge had been elected second vice president at a meeting in which the bank had declared a semiannual dividend of 3.5 percent. Perhaps the economy would now find a way around Roosevelt’s machinations; E. H. Harriman, the great railroad executive, seemed to suggest that when he fitted his yacht
Sultana
for a trip down to inspect the Panama Canal. Business took Coolidge to Phoenix, Arizona, his first trip out west. The Union Pacific was engaged in a war with other railroads in the Southwest, seeing who could build trains and rails the fastest. The only limit to the region’s growth seemed to be the problem of water. Coolidge liked the people’s enthusiasm. Arizona was not yet a state, but he could see its possibilities. The trip suggested to Coolidge that whatever momentary troubles preoccupied the country, the American venture generally was strong and would succeed.

Early in 1909, Coolidge represented Thomas Hisgen, the petroleum dealer who was battling Standard Oil, before his old colleagues at the Committee on the Judiciary in Boston. Coolidge challenged them to acknowledge the reality: that small businesses were being hurt by larger ones. He took his colleagues to task: “You forbid a labor union to injure a man’s business, but a giant corporation can do exactly the same thing.” He railed that “Havoc, spoil and ruin follow these aggregations of capital.” At home, temperance, as usual, divided the town. Here Coolidge was pragmatic, rather than idealistic. He took work as general counsel for the Springfield Brewing Company. That too involved a Boston connection: James Curley, a legendary Democrat from Boston, was its president.

Still, lawyering did not compensate for the fun of the political chase. The mayor of Northampton, a Democrat, was retiring, and Coolidge considered running for the office. Idle now after the Senate, he suddenly had a sense that he could achieve something greater, if only by becoming a probate judge, like Henry Field, who had just been named to that post by the governor. He worried about his father and Carrie, about his own family, and wondered whether he could afford time away from them. By autumn, he was running for the mayor’s office after all. The post paid only $800—just $50 more than the representative’s job—and he was not sure he could win it.

Each campaign proved a novelty, for each time, the electorate was different. The 1910 Census would show that 41 percent of adult males in Massachusetts were foreign-born, Irish immigrants being the largest group, a great change from 1890 or even 1900. Coolidge admired the immigrants’ bravery and went out of his way to help them. He understood their interest in religious instruction, having attended Black River Academy, a Baptist school. Father Daley, the priest of a church in nearby Haydenville, wanted a space to build a mission in the Leeds part of Northampton; Coolidge helped arrange it. Harry Emerson Bicknell, Calvin’s opponent, was in business and well liked in the town. Bicknell spoke at the Edwards Church, where Coolidge and Grace went, and argued the dry side of the Prohibition controversy. It was clear that Bicknell might win if he shook every voter’s hand.

Coolidge could shake hands too. In those races, he became famous for his style of asking for aid. “I want your help, I need your help, I appreciate your help,” he told voters. In the still rural community, he enjoyed the advantage of a man raised on a farm: he knew where the tobacco fields were and what they produced well; he knew when a farmer was watering the milk and when he was giving a customer extra. That knowledge impressed the farmers. They teased Coolidge and allowed him to tease them back. Republicans also counted on the fact that Northampton was a “license” town—it had, in the past, sold liquor when other towns were dry. Companies such as Rahar’s would depend on Coolidge’s victory for their livelihood. Northampton was a small town; the total votes cast ran in the thousands, not tens of thousands. Coolidge’s Republican allies assumed that his connections with Rahar, the innkeeper, would help in the Irish wards. It was Rahar who had helped him get the Springfield Brewing Company work in the first place. The proliquor tactics of the GOP were too much for some observers. “Rum flowed like water,” alleged the
Northampton Herald
in criticizing the campaign effort. Its headline was “Rottenest Campaign Ever Carried Out in This City.”

Coolidge did win this 1909 contest, but only by 107 votes. “My dear Harry,” wrote Coolidge, “My most serious regret at the election is that you cannot share the entire pleasure of the result with me.” That characteristic, the Coolidge habit of staying friendly, was beginning to win notice. “There is one thing we like about Coolidge,” said the
Hampshire Gazette
. “He does not say anything about the other candidate.” And now the furious
Herald
backed off: “The
Herald
did not support Mr. Coolidge in his candidacy. The
Herald
thought honestly that it would be better for the interest of the city if the candidacy of Harry Bicknell were to prevail. . . . but not for a single moment now in all the year to elapse . . . is the Herald going to be unmindful of the fact that the votes of a majority of the free voters in Northampton gave Calvin Coolidge Victory.”

To his father, Coolidge transmitted the details. “At least 400 Democrats voted for me,” he reported on December 10, 1909. “Their leaders can’t see why they did it. I know why. They knew I had done fine things for them bless their honest Irish hearts.” The Coolidges’ friendships had paid off. “The nearer I got to my house or office, the better I did, and it was the opposite way with the other fellow.” Grace was thrilled. Calvin could stay home the following year. She loved music, and the post of mayor came with three seats at the Academy. But it was sobering for both to think of yet another year of financial struggle. “I have got to have an overcoat, a business suit, an evening suit, and a cut-away suit. Grace has got to have a suit, a dress, an evening dress, an evening wrap, a dress hat and a street hat,” Coolidge wrote his father, “total about $300.”

There was a grimness to such accounts, and a kind of trade-off between home and job that would become familiar. If he could not balance his own household books, Coolidge determined, he would balance Northampton’s. For years, a plan for a new city hall had been ready because some people had voiced concern that the old structure would catch fire. Coolidge saw the theoretical merits of the project but determined that he would prevent the building from going up on his watch. The tiresome liquor issue never went away. Northampton had its own rules on liquor, passed in the context of state legislation. Now the progressives in the state legislature were pushing the issue again, putting forward a tighter bill from Boston with mandates that would cramp Northampton vendors’ ability to sell. It would be easier, under the “bar and bottle” bill of Boston, as it was called, to challenge business licenses. Under the old law, inns had been able to procure two licenses, one to sell liquor for consumption on their premises, another to sell it for consumption at home, often on Saturday night. The law forbade the sale of both licenses to the same entity. It all represented Boston’s “bad faith” toward the west of the state, Coolidge charged. It was not really a moral issue; it was just more regulation that people would get around in any case if they wanted to drink. His interests and those of the barkeepers were allied on this, for the license revenues flowed to the town. If the law changed, he joked pointedly, the police chief would not get the fire engine he sought but rather have to stick to buggy and horses.

The mayor’s job suited him; he found executive oversight less enervating than negotiation. His frustration turned to contentment when, after hours spent hours combing Northampton’s finances, he found ways to save. Revenues were up, and he was able to reduce rates even as he reduced the debt chargeable to revenues. The city had received $45,000 for the sale of town land to Holyoke; that he invested. He saw that teachers were needed and raised teachers’ pay. Grace, for her part, was finding her way deeper into the community. The church, just under a mile down Elm Street, was proving important to her. The year Calvin became mayor, her fellow Pi Beta Phis elected her president of their western Massachusetts alumnae group, which included nine chapters in eleven towns. That spring of 1910, Coolidge attended the Amherst reunion and saw Dwight Morrow, who reported to others how impressed he was with his classmate’s success.

But Coolidge was not sure he would be reelected that year—or should be. Money remained a factor. But he was also unsure about politics. Theodore Roosevelt, tiring of his jungle safaris, was back, suddenly making big speeches. In late August, he called for a new Progressive movement to promote what he termed a “square deal.” Roosevelt cited Lincoln to make the case for more support for organized labor’s battles: “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital,” Lincoln had said. Roosevelt was making it clear that he would also fight for labor, “equalize opportunity, destroy privilege.” That the Republicans tolerated their old hero’s return so well reflected their anxiety that the Democrats were going to succeed in snatching away the progressive label. If it came to a contest, Teddy would be a better warrior than the affable, reflective Taft. When it came to votes, the Democrats were winning, especially among new immigrants. The overall trend in the Republican state of Massachusetts was Democratic. Coolidge wagered that Democrats would make big inroads in Northampton come fall. The challenge weighed on him. By the time he was ready for high posts, his party might be out of office.