Coolidge (21 page)

Morrow’s temperamental inclination was to ride to the rescue of underdogs, especially those he himself had neglected before. That was what had happened with Coolidge, whom he was now beginning to see promise in. While Morrow and his wife were in Bermuda, he happened to pick up a newspaper showing the old J. P. Morgan as a vulture eating the entrails of New Haven Railroad shareholders. It struck him as wrong; the House of Morgan was trying, if not successfully, to save the railroad. Perhaps in its way the great financial house was the underdog. Fury at the humiliation of his potential company made the decision for him. After a lengthy discussion with his wife, after 2:00
A.M.
he went down the stairs of the hotel and posted a letter saying he would join Morgan. That was a job of service that he would gladly accept. “If I am going in, I am glad to go in when the brickbats are flying.” Soon it would be official, and he would be Morrow of Morgan and 23 Wall Street. His family was elated. But not Morrow, who, after the adrenaline of acceptance, felt a sense of foreboding.

The president-elect of the Massachusetts Senate, Coolidge, shared that sense. Coolidge was noticing the fateful pattern to his life: every time things went well, something happened to humble him and darken his prospects. Abbie’s death during his senior year of school and his grandmother’s, so close to his wedding, were examples. His Senate victory of winter 1913 was no different. Even as he prepared for his triumphant arrival in Boston as Senate president, Calvin, Jr., his five-year-old son, fell ill with pneumonia and was moved to the hospital. The fluid collected in his chest, and doctors drew it out with a needle. In one letter to John Coolidge, there was tentative news of improvement: “We think he is better, unless it gets into his other lung we think he will get well but he is very sick still.” Calvin underwent surgery; a tube was placed in his chest. Grace stayed with Calvin each day. Concern for their son overwhelmed them. In a rare moment of desperation, Coolidge told the doctor, “I am a poor man but I could command considerable money if you need it.” Passing the hospital, an acquaintance saw Coolidge and his son John standing at the window outside, looking up at Calvin’s room in hope.

This time, Calvin’s crisis passed. The boy went home with a nurse on December 23.

Just a few days later, the Senate met. And on January 7, 1914, at 11:05
A.M.
, the new president, Calvin Coolidge, rose to speak. The clerk who called the session to order was Henry D. Coolidge. It had been such a difficult few years, between the parties and also within the Republican Party. So Coolidge first moved to heal by unifying: “The commonwealth is one. . . . The welfare of the weakest and the welfare of the most powerful are inseparably bound together.” They must remember that they were not from just anywhere. They were from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the hub of the world. The state had led the progressive movement; it could show the way in the future. “Have faith in Massachusetts,” he told the crowd. “In some unimportant detail some other States may surpass her, but in the general results, there is no place on earth where the people secure, in a larger measure, the blessings of organized government.” The states, he suggested, not the federal government, were the natural place to solve problems. He went on to give the assembled another precept: “Do the day’s work. If it be to protect the rights of the weak, whoever objects, do it. If it be to help a powerful corporation better serve the people, whatever the opposition, do that.” Rather than make the fatal choice between progressive and old guard, a good lawmaker would act on the merits of each individual case and judge by himself. Coolidge said, “Expect to be called a stand patter. But don’t be a stand patter. Expect to be called a demagogue, but don’t be a demagogue.” He did offer some reservations about the progressives’ practice, particularly their emphasis on producing so many laws: “Don’t hurry to legislate. Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation.” Some of the ideas of the progressives, especially their plans to strengthen unions, simply might not be necessary. For every step on behalf of the worker the bluestocking ladies or the unions took, a factory with a new piece of machinery might take two. “Large profits mean large pay rolls.” With the Ford announcement of doubled pay still reverberating in the air, Coolidge was only articulating the obvious. He tried out another line that reflected a conviction growing inside him: “it may be that the fostering and protection of large aggregations of wealth are the only foundation upon which to build the prosperity of the whole people.” In a contest, the progress of business would obviate the strikes. Above all, though, he emphasized service and humility. Laws were not to be invented by politicians or judges, or, most important, righteous prosecutors. Echoing Demosthenes, whom he had studied all those days back at Amherst, he said, “Men do not make laws. They do but discover them.” Laws must rest, he said, “on the eternal foundations of righteousness.”

The Coolidge who uttered those lines sounded different from the legislative Coolidge his colleagues had come to know in Adams House or the General Court. The lawmaker from western Massachusetts with the deadpan style was taking his party in a new direction. He still endorsed some of the progressives’ plans. He would work with progressives, even if he was called a hypocrite. But he was not necessarily always going to be a progressive. Others absorbed all those nuances and seemed ready to follow Coolidge. The crowd was enormous: Grace stood for two hours, while John got a seat to the left of his father.

Taken aback by the mood of awe in the room, Coolidge’s father wrote Carrie in the unpunctuated shorthand of Plymouth: “Inaugeration is over. Calvin done fine he is praised by the most prominent men of the State.” The celebration was all so much that it made his father skeptical: “You would be surprised to see the power Calvin seems to have. I hope he makes no mistakes.”

But Coolidge knew it was time for risk, not caution. He was becoming the man of power about whom Garman had written. Coolidge had ridden the waters of politics so long, managing to stay in the mainstream. Now it was Coolidge’s turn to pilot.

Five
: War

Boston

ONE EVENING IN AUGUST
1914, the passengers dancing on the luxury ship
Kronprinzessin Cecilie
noticed something strange. The moon had been on the starboard side of the ship when their evening, one of the last before reaching Plymouth, England, began. But now, suddenly, the moon stood at port. The evening star too had somehow moved from window to window. It was only when the guests reached the smoking room of the North German Lloyd liner and heard from the captain that they understood: the ship had turned around and was racing back to North America. War was breaking out in Europe. The
Kronprinzessin
flew under a German flag; she carried $13 million in gold bullion and silver in her cargo.

A better target for French or British cruisers could scarcely be imagined. Alarmed, the passengers, a mix that included English, American, and German, watched as the crew covered the ship’s lights, shut down her radio, and headed full speed into the dark North Atlantic. Just two years before, after all, the same black North Atlantic waters had brought disaster to another ship, the
Titanic
. They beseeched the captain, Charles Polack, to blow the horn, but he would not heed them. After a few hours, the reality sank in: the threat of torpedoes was far greater than that of running into an iceberg. Soon afterward, the inhabitants of Mount Desert Island, Maine, woke to a strange sight: the great liner
Kronprinzessin
anchored like a giantess near the smaller yachts in the resort harbor.

Nor was the
Kronprinzessin
alone. Up and down the New England coast, ships were arriving unscheduled, like great birds migrating in the wrong season. In Boston, which Coolidge visited that week for the mundane purpose of dedicating a new wing to the Bulfinch State House, the
Arabic
of the White Star Line suddenly materialized. No one knew if French or German battleships would follow the fleeing liners. Boston received reports that in Portland, Maine, an employee at the observatory had heard the boom of heavy guns, perhaps the sound of the German cruiser
Dresden
and the French cruiser
Descartes
engaging in battle right there in the Gulf of Maine. This last rumor proved to be unfounded, but other disconcerting stories were true.

Coolidge had expected to pilot, but not in the waters of war. The price and provenance of marble were what he and other officials had had on their minds at the dedication of the State House; the owners of quarries in western Massachusetts, his own area, were furious because the contract for white marble had gone to a company in Vermont. The State House addition cost $750,000, a disconcerting amount at a time when Massachusetts appeared to be slowing down; the spending would be hard to justify in Northampton, when the Nonotuck Silk Company in the Leeds section, short of orders, was cutting its workers back to a three-day week.

Such details mattered less than the disruption that a European war might bring to a port city like Boston, to a state like Massachusetts. No one knew what to make of it all. Back home in western Massachusetts, Coolidge also found confusion. Just a mile and a half from Massasoit Street, a radio hobbyist named Deane Lewis was puzzling over hundreds of messages he was now intercepting as European ships called out to one another in the early hours of war. Business owners were going to newspapers to warn that the sea war would damage already slowing production. “The production of our plant is naturally dependent upon the supply of crude rubber,” the proprietor of a rubber company in Chicopee Falls wrote, warning that “as this supply comes almost wholly from London and as shipping is necessarily going to be, for a while at least, seriously hindered the supply of crude rubber will necessarily become short.” As one country after another declared war, the extent of it shocked.

Over the course of the coming weeks, more news came in, much of it also hard to believe. The sense of dislocation in the Connecticut River Valley was no match for what was reported on Wall Street, where Dwight Morrow at J. P. Morgan was observing something he too had never expected: government authorities were shutting down the stock market. After a run on gold had caused a run on stocks, panic set in as Europeans withdrew holdings to take them to Europe. Now Morrow was sending even more gold to Europe: the USS
Tennessee
, a battleship, had received papers of immunity from Germany and Great Britain and was now carrying $8 million in gold to Americans in England who needed to buy their way home.

President Woodrow Wilson for his part did not know what to say. Wilson had not campaigned on war in 1912, but now he had to take the lead on U.S. policy in Europe’s conflict. The disruption also caught Republican leaders off guard. Theodore Roosevelt was deeply mired in a libel lawsuit involving New York State politics. The senior statesman from Massachusetts, Senator Lodge, was himself caught in Europe and had to think first not of policy but of family. Lodge’s grandchildren were stranded in Dieppe, France; the senator dispatched his son-in-law, Massachusetts Congressman Augustus Gardner, to collect them before the advance of the Germans. Gardner, the papers were reporting, took his own petrol in cans for the drive and escaped with the children and their mother onto a ship at Le Havre. In the tumult Lodge had missed the opportunity to personally make a final stand against legislation he deeply opposed: on September 2, the Senate endorsed a new antitrust law, creating a new entity to manage business nationally: the Federal Trade Commission. The Republican Party was already dangerously off balance from the torpedo blow of Roosevelt’s third-party candidacy; the word of real torpedoes made the political situation even more unpredictable.

Coolidge found himself torn. The crowning achievement of his first term as Massachusetts Senate president had been killing a tax on stocks at the last minute by masterfully exercising the Senate president’s privilege to create a tie vote. War might mean he would have to set aside his concerns about progressivism. His party leaders assigned him the job of Resolutions Committee chair, which meant he would be an author of the party platform for the autumn of 1914. The platform mattered not only because of the war news, but because the state would soon hold a convention to review the commonwealth’s constitution; the platform document could set the tone and direction.

Upon reflection, Coolidge concluded that the Republican Party of the state of Massachusetts was itself like a ship, unbalanced by war news and before that the blow of the bull moose. The ship had to be centered, it needed a new keel, and at all costs. That meant first pulling in the progressives, so that they were on deck instead of outside taking shots. It meant pulling
all
factions of the party together. Balance was all: wherever there was dispute, or costs, he must nonetheless seek the islands of agreement, the middle ground. If there was to be a war, then finding that middle ground, sacrificing principles for the duration, would be even more important. Spending would be especially important, however much Coolidge personally deplored it. In wars, Washington took the lead, but it was the job of Massachusetts to make a contribution, to show that the state could lead too, and even to get out in front of President Wilson. Two competing forces had to be weighed: the need to help the state and the need to protect individuals from an overreaching government, whether state or federal. Reading the reports of the trenches that France was digging, of Paul von Hindenburg’s first great success at the Battle of Tannenberg, Coolidge and his fellow Republicans thought back to the Civil War. They all recalled how Copperhead Democrats had nearly destroyed the Union when they had failed to side with the president, Abraham Lincoln. In a time of war, unity among all governing parties would be crucial. Coolidge’s Republican Party would aid Wilson in the war as the Democrats ought to have aided Lincoln.