Coolidge (25 page)

Coolidge’s gubernatorial victory coincided with that of the country to the week: the election was November 5, and the armistice came on November 11. Coolidge beat his opponent, Long, but only by a narrow margin; Walsh, the Democratic candidate for senator, beat out Coolidge’s party ally John Weeks. “It was 2:30 before the election was sure so I telegraphed Stickneys office in the morning to notify you I was elected by 17,000,” he wrote his father. Then he admonished, “That is enough.” Stearns was aching to move the Coolidges to an appropriate house, “if possible on Beacon Hill, but not on the Back Bay,” as he wrote to Morrow. But Coolidge had already made up his mind not to undertake such an expense. Stearns saw the potential for Grace as a hostess, but the Coolidges decided to keep the family at home on Massasoit Street.

A mishap marred Coolidge’s inauguration: the seventeen cannons to mark the event were fired too soon. It seemed appropriate, a signal the new governor had to get to work early, for there was so much to undertake. At the same time they had elected him, voters had endorsed a plan to consolidate the departments of the commonwealth government, more than a hundred all told, to twenty; soon the legislature would pass a law detailing the plan for enforcement of that, but it would be up to him, the governor, to make the cuts. That would mean laying off friends and political constituencies crucial to his election campaigns. Both railroads and street rails could not make ends meet; even if railroads were denationalized, it was hard to know when they might ever make a profit. The street railways everywhere could not raise fares without demonstrations, yet they did not have enough revenue without the fare raises. Coolidge took time in his address to comment that with the railways, “the problem is where to get the money.” Massachusetts had to face reality: “there are only two sources, increased fares and the public treasury”; the companies were broke. Coolidge eschewed ad hominem attack. But the reality was that the very public service commission to which he had reappointed Joseph Eastman was the one keeping the trolley fares down so far the companies starved.

Looking back now, the governor-elect could see great change from the war to the careers of men he knew. The war had changed reputations and created new enemies and alliances. President Meiklejohn at Amherst, for example, might teach well, but the alumni would forever remember that he had not led in the war, but followed. Harlan Stone had come in late, but had held a difficult job, judging the cases of conscientious objectors. Morrow had taken the lead at J. P. Morgan; his work for Liberty Bonds, in New Jersey, had elevated him. So had the fact that he had journeyed across the seas to Europe during the war. What mattered about Roosevelt now was not his rash attack on the Republican Party eight years earlier but his leadership on preparedness from the early days in Plattsburgh. The labor leader Samuel Gompers was covered with glory now, for he had left no light between himself and Wilson, telling members of the American Federation of Labor as early as January 1918 that to impede the war with actions at the factories was “treason.”

There was also great damage from the war, starting with damage to principles. Freedom had been lost defending freedom; the property rights Coolidge had defended as an attorney had often been overlooked. The primacy of the states over the federal government could no longer be assured. The great progressives of Massachusetts had decamped to Washington; Brandeis now sat on the Supreme Court, and Joseph Eastman was confirmed as a commissioner at the Interstate Commerce Commission that very month. Massachusetts, too, was a fiscal disaster: the budget he would present for the following year would be $39 million, higher than what the state had spent that year. Other states were in the same boat. Percival Clement of Rutland, the new governor of Vermont, put the problem even more plainly than Coolidge in his address. “We have reached our taxing limit,” Clement said on January 10. “The war is over but the expenses of it are not paid.”

Reversing the spending would be difficult. The war was being taken as a progressive victory. The old way of life was changing. Some of the useful old knowledge was being lost. At dinner with Clarence Barron that year, Coolidge talked about the future of ships. You needed great pieces of wood to build a mast. “There were men trained to go into the Maine woods and check the timber to be cut to make the knees in the wooden ships. Few know that you cannot build ships as a carpenter works and the curved parts or joints annexed to the keel must be grown.” How would the new keels be steadied? Coolidge asked Barron. “There are no longer the men in existence to pick that timber.”

Shipyards were on all their minds, not only because of the engineering of ships, or because of returning soldiers, but also because of the revolution in Russia. Even as Barron, who headed Dow Jones’s
The Wall Street Journal
, and Coolidge, the governor, dined, British battleships were cleaning up after a brutal battle with Bolsheviks at Kronstadt. The horror stories from Russia put them all in a mood to compromise with labor organizations here in the United States. Indeed, companies might have to give in again and again to forestall something like what had happened in Russia. In Seattle that February, workers mounted a general strike; only concerted countering pressure from the mayor, Ole Hanson, caused the men to stand down. No one knew what would happen in a similar situation here, but it seemed likely Coolidge might respond less forcefully than Hanson. Boston had been through so much. Early in the year a terrible molasses spill at the waterfront in Boston had killed twenty-one and injured hundreds, adding to the sense of misery in the city. Shoemakers or police, they expected his new administration to give now, in 1919, what the commonwealth had not been able to give during the war. They knew that Coolidge would continue to meet them at a middle ground as he always had, and he knew that. They knew that he, Coolidge, feared anarchy, and would use that advantage against him.

The last cost, the greatest, had come in human life. The war had taken more than 100,000 American lives. The Yankee Division alone had had nearly 12,000 casualties. Theodore Roosevelt had not recovered from the death of his son Quentin and died early in the year at Sagamore Hill, around the time Coolidge was inaugurated. One of Coolidge’s first acts was to send a eulogy for Roosevelt. Another was to sign a bill covering some of the transport costs of the thousands of troops who would converge on Boston to parade. Yet another was to write the state farm bureaus to inquire whether the soldiers might find work helping in the spring and summer harvests.

An opportunity to express such thoughts presented itself to Coolidge in February when President Wilson chose Boston to land at upon his return from Europe. Wilson’s goal was to solidify U.S. support for membership in the League of Nations. Senator Lodge was flamboyantly opposed, but Wilson sensed rightly that many in the Bay State supported him. A few days before the president’s visit, Coolidge had issued a proclamation saying that Wilson had come “to a city and Commonwealth that have loyally supported his efforts to prosecute the war, that are eager to pay him the tributes of respect and honor that are due to the position he holds.” Coolidge greeted Wilson and Navy Assistant Secretary Franklin Roosevelt in the harbor and escorted them to Mechanics Hall, where he introduced the president before a packed hall; tens of thousands had applied for tickets. Coolidge’s remarks struck the assistant secretary of the navy. Roosevelt saw that Coolidge had his speech on cards but then diverged from the cards, and spoke freely. Coolidge, Roosevelt noticed, hailed Wilson as “a great leader of the world who is earnestly striving to effect an arrangement which will prevent another war.” Such a statement, friendly as it was, would infuriate Senator Lodge, who was now opposing Wilson. It also revealed Coolidge’s own sentiment. He did not think that sacrifice on this scale should be made easily.

But Coolidge also spoke positively, drawing a direct comparison between Wilson and the presidents who had been his own inspiration these four years. “We have welcomed the President with a reception more marked even than that which was accorded to General Washington; more united than could have been given any time during his life to President Abraham Lincoln.” In that way Coolidge was also saying that whatever the future held, this past sacrifice had to be honored. He had done what was difficult for him. He, the party, and the state had found the middle ground. They had prevailed. Lincoln especially had been right: the middle ground was the most stable.

COOLIDGE SHUT OUT ANY
concern about reelection because his job now, as governor, was to reward his citizens. That early April, ship after ship docked at the harbor, and with each docking it was time to greet more soldiers returning home. On April 3, there was a parade for the returning black soldiers. On April 4 it was the turn of New England’s own, the 26th Division. One hundred and twenty-three policemen showed up for special duty at Commonwealth Pier to help bring the soldiers in. Special trains would carry the men arriving on this transport to Camp Devens where they would be served beans and clean up. The
Springfield Republican
sought to provide a rough arrival estimate for anxious families: “North Adams, Adams, Springfield, Greenfield and Northampton ought to begin to assume khaki-colored hue about mid afternoon tomorrow as Companies I, K, L, and M are to be the first to benefit by the furlough arrangements.”

That day Coolidge rode out into the bay with other governors to greet 6,000 returning troops. The fog obscured the view, just as it had so many other times in the war. But soon enough the great ship rose before them. She had been there before. It was the old
Kronprinzessin Cecilie
. Now the
Mount Vernon
, she listed under the weight of her passengers, thousands more people than she had borne on the Atlantic that evening in 1914. The people were the soldiers, and they were waving. Amid the din of the steam whistles, Coolidge lifted the megaphone to respond to them. “I welcome you to Massachusetts,” he said.

Six
: The Strike

Boston

ON MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8,
1919, Coolidge showed up at a meeting of the American Federation of Labor in Greenfield, north of Northampton. The governor offered bland remarks about the need for more production to revive the Massachusetts economy. Then he departed for Boston, without commenting on the issue preoccupying everyone in the room: a possible police strike in the state capital. The month before, the old Boston police association, known as the Social Club, had formally affiliated with the AFL as Boston Police Union Number 16,807. Now the new union was threatening to walk out if patrolmen did not get better working conditions, higher pay, and recognition of their union. The very existence of a police union that could strike broke the rules of the Boston Police Department manual. In 1918, police commissioner Stephen O’Meara had underscored that by stating, “A police officer cannot consistently belong to a union and perform his sworn duty.” O’Meara had died suddenly. But now his replacement as commissioner, Edwin Curtis, was hearing the cases of the officers who had decided to unionize nonetheless.

The AFL men meeting in Greenfield expected that in coming days Coolidge would make a display of studying the Boston police case. They also expected that at some point or other Commissioner Curtis, who reported to the governor, would negotiate with the police and make concessions to avoid a strike or halt one that the police had begun. Finally, the union men expected that the governor would in the end support such a compromise.

Conciliation with organized labor seemed the only course for a governor of any big industrial state in 1919. The return to prewar routine that most politicians, including Coolidge, had in their turn expected had not come yet. In the war, peace at the workplace had been paramount to support the military effort; now peace at the workplace was paramount to prevent unrest and violence. Europe, after all, had segued straight from war to revolution. That year in Russia, Lenin and his Bolsheviks were tightening their hold. In Germany revolutionary groups like the Spartacus League were claiming not just the right to strike but also the right to confiscate property. Civil war was racking Mexico. Authorities across the United States wondered whether American workers would move next. One of the speakers following Coolidge in Greenfield was Éamon de Valera, the Irish leader who was seeking support for the Irish Republic’s independence from Britain. De Valera had appeared earlier that year at Fenway Park before tens of thousands. The
Globe
had described de Valera as “electric”: “He said the things which Irish-Americans feel,” the reporter, A. J. Philpott, had commented. Many of the Irish of Boston, among them many police, drew more inspiration from de Valera than from Curtis or Coolidge. And Curtis and Coolidge knew it.

Any American politician deciding whether to stand up to a union had to consider what had happened in another port city, Seattle, during a general strike earlier that year. The Seattle mayor, Ole Hanson, had condemned the general strike and “domestic bolshevism” and had even managed to force the city back to work. But the mayor had endured many attacks subsequently, and even an assassination attempt. Just a week or so before this Greenfield meeting, Hanson had resigned his job as mayor, telling reporters, “I am tired out and am going fishing.” Other politicians saw what Hanson had been through and began to pick their battles. A union for police was a tame concept, one of the milder ideas that had come in from Europe with the tide that bore the returning soldiers. It would not be the end of the world for a governor or a mayor to permit it.

There were other reasons for officials like Coolidge to move softly. Veterans were not all finding work. Many were in pain or disabled. Wages represented an even greater source of tension. For years, employers and the government had warned workers that wage increases would impede the war effort. That was what the AFL’s Sam Gompers had meant with his “treason” statement. President Wilson himself had promised that with peace, large companies would give overdue wage increases. Now, however, the raises were being postponed yet again. With sales lagging, companies could not make good on their promises to lift wages. Nor could town governments.