Coolidge (22 page)

Since Coolidge’s boyhood he had been drawn to Lincoln. The Great Emancipator had become a country lawyer, just as Coolidge would. Lincoln had moved slowly, as Coolidge and the Republicans had to. Lincoln had unified. No one had matched his ability to deal with practical affairs of his time. Lincoln had often found the middle ground; he had easily sacrificed the limelight to the cause. Coolidge had been present earlier that year in Boston, when William Lewis of Amherst, the assistant attorney general, had warned Republicans at an evening smoker that they were forgetting the principles upon which the Republican Party had been founded. Lewis had identified the right hero. Other Republicans agreed. It seemed symbolic that the one innovation Lincoln had registered for patent had been a design to stabilize boats by lifting them over shoals, the result of his trips on flatboats down the Ohio and Mississippi. To reorient, especially in a time of war, Coolidge and other Republicans had to look past Taft or Roosevelt, maybe all the way past, to their own evening star. To succeed now, the Republicans had to show they were still the Party of Lincoln. The only problem was that Coolidge himself did not know whether he personally could manage all these compromises, whether he was the right leader for this period.

For now, though, Coolidge would go along. After all, in any case, these thoughts were still theory; the United States was not yet even fighting a war. On August 20, President Wilson made a formal and stiff case for U.S. neutrality. He even suggested that it was unpatriotic to oppose neutrality: “Every man who really loves America will act and speak in the true spirit of neutrality, which is the spirit of impartiality and fairness and friendliness to all concerned.” In Wilson’s view, the best role for the United States to assume was that of the city on a hill. But within days of Wilson’s careful speech, news came to contradict him. The Germans were not merely marching through neutral Belgium; they were killing and destroying whole towns as they went.

On one day, August 22, tens of thousands of Frenchmen died trying to fend off the Germans east of Paris. Belgians were surveying the ashes of the 300,000 books burned by the Germans at the library of the University of Louvain. In London, a businessman, Herbert Hoover, was setting up a station at the Savoy with five hundred volunteers and was planning a great relief action for Belgium. Samuel Untermyer, the same progressive firebrand who had challenged J. P. Morgan in the Washington hearings, was not busting trusts that week; he was in London, running a rescue operation in his hotel and trying to hail down ships leaving the continent in the hope that they would stop and pick up U.S. citizens before they crossed the Atlantic. Congressman Gardner was calling for a new movement of preparedness: that U.S. youths be ready and trained to fight. It was only a matter of time before Colonel Roosevelt weighed in.

Coolidge began his stabilizing work immediately. On August 13, he addressed a crowd of three hundred farmers in agricultural Hatfield, informing them of a rather large appropriation he had gained for the agricultural college in the town of Amherst. When a Republican congressman, the Berkshires’ Allen Towner Treadway, hosted a giant meeting for the statewide party at his Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Coolidge was there to speak of funding for road construction that the party had secured. He sounded the familiar themes, such as the necessity of tariffs, and pointed out that the General Court had increased appropriations for highway construction for Berkshire, Hampshire, and Hampden counties. In that period the party platform was completed; Coolidge and his colleagues threw in just about every progressive item they could think of, except the vote for women, which, Coolidge had discovered, didn’t seem to have much support that year among the party’s constituents. The senator also, however, included some lines that gave a first inkling of the state party’s position on war. The Republican platform called for “the defense of those two citadels of freedom, representative democracy and independent courts.” It demanded “justice everywhere.” Then Coolidge was off to campaign for reelection.

Coolidge was by now a veteran campaigner; voters knew and liked his style. His silence was now established lore, part of the campaign. In her living room, Grace hung a sampler with an epigraph to remind visitors:

A wise old owl lived in an oak

The more he saw, the less he spoke

The less he spoke, the more he heard

Why can’t we be like that old bird?

That October, Coolidge appeared as much as he could, talking to voters directly. He always fought for what was important for his constituents; that fall, it was trolley connections and lines to link more people. Though he was attacking Democratic tariff levels now, he still did not attack individual Democrats, in the Senate or in western Massachusetts. The muddle of policy actually mattered less than a sense of calm and evidence that he was willing to serve. Across the state and across the Republican Party, his followers counted on him.

Coolidge did not disappoint. On November 3, the Democratic candidate for governor, David Walsh, won reelection, but only narrowly. The lieutenant governor slot went Democratic as well. Coolidge, however, trounced his opponent, the Progressive Ralph Staab. With the Grand Old Party’s platform so progressive itself, Staab had no case. “I was elected by about 2800,” Coolidge wrote to his stepmother. In his exhaustion, though, the senator-elect reversed his digits: he had beaten Staab by a margin of 8,200; Coolidge’s 15,326 votes were more than double what Staab had won. Forgetting the bull moose episode would be easier with numbers like those. “Senator Coolidge is the best vote getter in the state,” commented the
Hampshire Gazette
smugly, “and he will be heard from later.” The gratitude toward him was outsize: the strategists concluded that he had helped the GOP gain votes where it otherwise might not have. Other Republicans noticed that Democrats also liked him. All seven of the Democrats in the Senate voted for him as Senate president. In choosing Coolidge, they ignored James Timilty, who was Democratic Party city chairman. Coolidge had unified again. Meanwhile, the war news poured in. The Edwards Church, Grace’s church, hosted a Belgian, Lalla Vandervelde, who detailed the hardships of the German occupation. The conditions the Belgian described horrified the Northamptonites. German Zeppelins had raided England. Germany had announced a submarine blockade of Great Britain in early February.

The supposition of the cruise line North German Lloyd was still that the neutral United States was the best place to keep its ships during wartime. But in the United States, as the reports of German aggression mounted, people were not so sure. Around election time two navy torpedo destroyers had carefully escorted the
Kronprinzessin
down from Maine to President Roads, the Boston Harbor; a court had determined that it was not safe to keep her in Maine because of the ice. Though her captain, Charles Polack, had not wanted her to cross the three-mile line into international waters for a moment, she had needed to travel as far as ten miles out to find water deep enough for the passage to Boston. The
Kronprinzessin
was now in custody of the U.S. marshal for Massachusetts; the Guaranty Trust Company of New York was suing her for damages alleged by her failure to deliver the gold that had been shipped on her.

Not far from Boston’s harbors, at the State House, Coolidge prepared an opening address for the 1915 Senate, the second such address. He had to treat war, remind his colleagues of the concept of service, deliver his message about overlegislating, and do all of it in a new way, for to repeat his “Have Faith in Massachusetts” exhortation of 1914 would have been to serve up dull fare. As much as he sought unity, Coolidge could not help himself: he wanted to warn against unwarranted spending. The State House itself, with the new additions going up, reminded everyone of the government’s extravagance. In Boston and Northampton, he pondered and came up with a new kind of speech: one whose length made his point. The remarks he delivered that day contained only forty-four words, powerful in their combination of form and message:

Honorable Senators: My sincerest thanks I offer you. Conserve the firm foundations of our institutions. Do your work with the spirit of a soldier in the public service. Be loyal to the Commonwealth and to yourselves. And be brief; above all things, be brief.

“In brief, Calvin Coolidge approximates our idea of the ideal orator,” applauded the
Globe
. Coolidge’s skills as a legislator were also winning appreciation. Coolidge, people noticed, always undersold and usually delivered more than he had promised. Though they could see that he was becoming more conservative, his colleagues also saw that he reasoned out every issue and made his own decision. Edward Filene, the merchant, and Louis Brandeis had pushed for the ability of savings banks to sell insurance policies. The pair saw the private insurance companies as price gougers. There was a small state appropriation in support of such policies; the private insurance companies pushed to kill it, viewing government aid as unfair competition. It was not clear that Coolidge knew what he thought about state subsidy of insurance. But it was clear that he believed that insurance was important, that his mastery of Senate procedure was only growing, and that he was not above playing a few tricks, especially in the case of voice votes.

One day when the future of that subsidy was to be decided, Judd Dewey, the unpaid lawyer for the savings bank life insurance project, called on Coolidge to lay out its value. Coolidge, typically, said nothing, except, at the end: “What you say sounds reasonable.” Dewey left the office concerned; it was already late, and if action for his side was to be taken, it would have to be soon.

“What did Mr. Coolidge say?” asked a senator who saw Dewey leaving the office. “He didn’t say anything,” answered Dewey, “except ‘it sounds reasonable.’ ” “My God,” said the senator, “did he say that? Then you’re all right.” Within half an hour, the vote came, and the president of the Senate uttered his usual line: “Those in favor say ‘Aye.’ ” There was no response. A loud outburst of “nays” went up when Coolidge asked for those opposed. His response was remembered forever by those who supported the new legislation. With no change in facial expression, he announced, “The yeas have it, and the bill is ordered to a third hearing.”

Over the winter, the country struggled to form an opinion about the war. At Amherst, President Meiklejohn thought it best simply to air the issue and staged lectures for representatives of both sides. Thomas Hall of Union Theological Seminary made the case for Germany; for Great Britain, Maurice Low, a newspaperman. Much of what transpired on the financial level left Americans baffled. Forces like laws of physics were at work—they could see but could not always discern which laws or why. The gold that had fled the United States to pay for the European war suddenly poured back in, and the stock market reopened—at a higher level than many expected. European money was following the
Kronprinzessin
and making the United States its haven. The recession was quickly turning into a boom as Europeans placed orders for the war. The Aluminum Company of America, for example, received stunningly large orders from Great Britain: 72 million pounds total over two years, starting in 1915. The Aluminum Company was the sole U.S. producer; suddenly Arthur Davis, the Amherst man, was a true titan.

Led by Congressman Gardner and others, the Republicans of Massachusetts now were boiling down their war policy to one word: preparedness. If the United States was not going to enter the war, at least it must train young men. In Washington Gardner, with the enormous help of his father-in-law, Lodge, was pushing for an investigation of whether the United States was spending the $250 million a year it allocated to the army and navy correctly. That gave Lodge an opportunity to goad Wilson. The state militia of Massachusetts was known as the best in the country; the War Department in Washington was already equipping it, sending machine guns and escort wagons to the state armory at Framingham. But lawmakers in the state still wanted to inquire further. They were already introducing resolutions that Massachusetts investigate her own preparedness. The paper carefully laid out which citizens of the Bay State would qualify for military service in the event of U.S. involvement: every male between the ages of eighteen and forty-five except government officials, clergy, doctors, lighthouse keepers, government staff, train conductors, Quakers, and Shakers.

Producing leaders was also on the minds of Amherst alumni. At the college, President Meiklejohn led discussions about the war. But the Amherst men were also looking for political leaders among their own. They had Robert Lansing, class of 1886, who was working on foreign affairs in Washington. But Frank Stearns’s eye kept coming back to Coolidge. The quiet Senate president embodied the principle Stearns tried to follow at his department store: giving the customer more than he expected. The more he saw, the more Stearns liked the whole Coolidge package, of which Grace was a large part. She had her own network now in Northampton; she made friends with neighbors easily and was well liked at her church. The very thought of dressing her in R. H. Stearns finery pleased him; Grace was a natural beauty. Coolidge had the capacity to spread Amherst’s name across the United States.

Stearns’s father had always said the trick to good business was to acquire quality goods and then shout—advertise. Now Stearns was ready to do the same. He drew up an elaborate plan for a dinner of dozens of alumni and men of influence at the Algonquin Club. He hosted meticulously: he sent Grace flowers and provided seating charts for Morrow, who was coming up from New York, to give him a chance to make his own suggestions. Stearns also distributed reprints of the 1914 “Have Faith in Massachusetts” speech prior to the event. He even invited Coolidge’s father.

Several events distracted Coolidge from those flattering dinner preparations. Among them was the sinking of the
Lusitania
, an English ship, by a German submarine; more than a thousand people died in the waters off the coast of Ireland. That was “murder on the high seas,” said Theodore Roosevelt, and Republicans had to admit that he was right. The war was permanently altering the U.S. political constellation. An Amherst alumnus, Edwin Grosvenor, was already warning that the
Lusitania
would be a turning point for the United States just as the sinking of the
Maine
had been for the Spanish-American War. The alumni newspaper published a sorrowful poem that sought to capture Amherst’s chagrin at the shift: “Can we forget a nation’s word once forfeited?” William Jennings Bryan was transmitting placating notes to the Germans after the outrage; Wilson, stiffening, wrote to the Germans demanding that they cease such attacks.