Coolidge (38 page)

In the areas where Dawes confronted trouble, Harding backed up his budget deputy with a series of executive orders. Harding also used an executive order to transfer the petroleum reserves from the Navy Department to the Department of the Interior. Fall had a plan to realize great savings for the country. The war debt that hung over the country could be lightened through the sale of natural resources in Alaska, if properly handled. Then taxes need not go up. Fall saw a whole future in enterprise if only America’s energy could be unlocked. “All natural resources,” he preached, “should be made as easy of access as possible to the present generation.”

In that active period, Harding made several other advances that earned admiration. The first was to call a naval conference to reduce the number of battleships in the world, so that the great waste of war did not repeat itself. The Washington Naval Conference, as it was formally known, instantly became the number one topic in Washington. Again, Harding had managed to reward the city while doing as he pleased; hosting such a conference, underscored, as almost nothing else could, Washington’s power and élan. One of the demands of the disarmaments conference was ferocious entertaining by the White House. Over and again, Harding hosted groups of men to haggle over the details of the treaty.

Nor were the treaty participants the only White House visitors. The Hardings invited all parties in all negotiations to the White House; Harding smoked, chewed tobacco, and drank. Mrs. Harding, called “the Duchess” in her crowd, was always there, playing poker or tending drinks. “She asked me upstairs at the White House and in what had been my father’s library I was shown every known gambling device and drinks galore,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, her sense of propriety finally offended. The Harding White House featured “the general atmosphere of a convivial gambling saloon,” all in the era of Prohibition, she noticed.

When Harding didn’t celebrate at home, he was with what was known as his golf cabinet (usually including Senator Frank Kellogg of Minnesota) or his poker cabinet. The latter group was a larger group that met in parties of eight at the White House or at the homes of friends and included Attorney General Daugherty, Secretary Fall, and sometimes General Dawes, General Pershing, Charles Forbes, and, from out of town, Harry Sinclair, the oilman. Even Mellon attended the poker cabinet sometimes. The poker cabinet averaged twice a week at the White House with another night elsewhere; the games started after dinner and went to twelve thirty but usually not much later. This was hours after Coolidge retired.

The Harding pace exhausted the White House, including the chief housekeeper, Elizabeth Jaffray, who had been there in the days of serving lobster Newburg to the Tafts. She rode about in her brougham collecting food for the Hardings and their hundreds of guests. Harding, however, seemed to enjoy it all. The only concession he sought was in the menu. Germany itself was still under suspicion, but not German food. “Please, Mrs. Jaffray, couldn’t I have sauerkraut and wiener wurst?” the president asked her often. “You know men do like that.” Mrs. Jaffray was charmed. From the housekeeper with the wurst to Senator Lodge, Washington understood Harding and liked him.

June passed, July came, but Harding’s special session showed no sign of ending. On the last day of the month of June, the Senate voted 60–4 to confirm William Howard Taft as chief justice of the United States. “Men do what I tell them,” Coolidge had once told his father, but here, clearly, they never would. Some of the policies under way were ones he could not sanction. Jobs were finally proliferating. Yet Herbert Hoover was convening an enormous unemployment conference that seemed an invitation to expand federal spending. There was no escaping his own weakness in the Senate. Some of the lawmakers seemed to live to upstage him. Senator Oscar Underwood, a veteran lawmaker and the minority leader, chided Coolidge because he had failed to completely state an issue presented, the practice of the Senate. Because the Republicans had a large majority in the Senate, even the tiebreaking authority of his post mattered little.

In that early period, Coolidge also committed an error that would haunt him. The Harding administration did not want to support large farm subsidies—another new area the government seemed to want to enter. But some progressives among Republicans and Democrats were in favor of them. Coolidge promised the progressive George Norris that he would call on a Democrat who supported such subsidies. Then, perhaps remembering his loyalty to Harding, Coolidge decided he could not and left someone else in his chair, the unhesitating Charles Curtis, to recognize someone from the administration’s side of the debate first. Norris deemed this slipup by a new Senate president an unforgivable breach of trust. Photos of action inside the Senate chamber were rare in those days. But the senators had what they sought: the equivalent of the new vice president looking shifty. Even in Massachusetts, there was some criticism.

There was an additional rub. In the Senate Coolidge might be the titular leader, but Lodge was the true ruler, “a figure apart,” as the writer Edward Lowry described him, as senior senator to whom others, including Harding, always bowed. An intellectual snob, he presented himself as a poet rather than a lawmaker. Alice Roosevelt Longworth—now married to a congressman, Nicholas Longworth of Ohio—noted that Lodge had disdained even Wilson, the former president of Princeton, as not in his own league. Every senator wanted something from Lodge; an easy way to get it was to pander to him by poking fun at Coolidge. Pat Harrison of Mississippi, a leading Democrat, was particularly attentive. “One of his favorite indoor sports,” wrote a colleague of Harrison, “was to rise and comment, with sarcasm tinctured with good humor, upon some reported act or utterance of Vice President Coolidge.” Lodge was always there to ignore or challenge him directly, to remind him why he was in the Senate and not in the White House in the first place. He was the bane of Coolidge’s existence.

Grace’s Lodge was Florence Harding. The first lady’s tyranny was a tyranny of the weak. She had been a single mother in her youth and had endured the ferocious snobbery of senators’ wives when she had first come to Washington. That rendered her compelling. But now that she had risen to the position of first lady, she exploited her status. She took out her anger and her poor health on others, summoning mediums to talk with the dead or raging through the White House that someone had robbed her when she misplaced a necklace. Mrs. Harding told Alice Longworth she had a little book from her Senate days in which she had noted the names of those who had snubbed her. Now she could get her revenge. Toward Grace, Florence Harding evinced a mixture of friendliness and envy. Florence Harding had her own color, “Harding blue,” to match her eyes. But as the other women noted, every color looked good on Grace.

Coolidge’s general sense of frustration was so great that he could not always contain his anger. It came out in a series of articles he worked on in this period for
The Delineator
, a women’s magazine published by the pattern publisher Butterick. Coolidge delivered the first manuscript just after his inauguration; indeed, the letter he wrote when he submitted the article was, he noted, the first he had penned on vice presidential stationery. The articles were remarkably incoherent and hostile, attacking a section of New York public school teachers as a branch of the Socialist Party; Coolidge quoted
The New York Times
as saying “the teacher’s desk has been made a soapbox platform” for politics at one high school, DeWitt Clinton. “Enemies of the Republic” detailed the work of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society at various women’s colleges. “Smith Seems Sane,” read one headline, perhaps a reflection of the Coolidges’ acquaintance with Smith and the fact that its president, L. Clarke Seelye, had hosted Coolidge’s acceptance ceremony there the summer before. The attitudes in the article reflected the times and also criticisms he and Morrow were fielding about Meiklejohn’s Amherst: that Amherst was impious, that its faculty and guest lecturers featured too many progressive instructors. But the articles did not sound like Coolidge, who made a point of avoiding public statements in areas he hadn’t studied: “I am not qualified to discuss educational matters,” Coolidge had written once to Morrow when refusing an invitation to dine with the president of Colorado University. Writing of Coolidge’s criticism of Vassar, Professor Burges Johnson of that school noted accurately, “It tends to bring about just the opposite result from that for which Mr. Coolidge has notably fought. He does not believe in government by emotion, and yet such an article containing innuendos based on insufficient evidence tends to let loose a flood of emotional antagonism to this college, and colleges in general.”

As July moved forward, legislating became an outright contest of wills between the Senate and Harding, with each side pressing to outlast the other. Here the president again demonstrated stamina. Just after July 4, Coolidge’s birthday, Harding went back to Capitol Hill, his old haunt as a senator, with Frelinghuysen, his golf ally, to reconnect and recruit allies. “The president’s arrival was a surprise to Capitol employees,” commented
The New York Times
. The gesture worked. The senators were glad to see Harding, their old brother.

Bonuses for veterans dominated all budget talks. The veterans were so numerous, and, in 1921, so many of them were still in need. Yet the general program for all that the lobbyists sought would reverse the direction of the savings campaign. Harding made his own case, arguing that the bonus would “virtually defeat the Administration’s program of economy and retrenchment.” The lawmakers were not ready to accede. So a few days later, Harding went back to argue against the bonus yet again. A new commitment to such a large group would be a “disaster to the Nation’s finances.” Lawmakers should get back to work on tax cuts and other measures. If Harding and Coolidge could fend off the senators and congressmen, the pressure from the veterans might lessen. Thirty-eight states had already created some form of bonus or pension for the veterans, and it seemed important to Harding and Coolidge to keep these responsibilities at the state level. Another principle Harding and Coolidge aimed to guard through their opposition to the larger bonus plans was insurance: here, they both believed, the appropriate role for the government was to broker or create private life insurance policies for vets; the government already had an office in that business, the War Risk Bureau.

Yet again, Harding’s boldness yielded results: the Senate voted 47–20 against the great bonus. But the vote came at a cost to peace in the Senate chamber. On July 15, Grace Coolidge took her two sons to watch the proceedings on the bonus bill. It was the first time they had observed their father preside over the Senate. The boys were quiet; the reporters noticed that one read a book as the bonus debate droned on. That same day the Coolidges visited, Senator Porter McCumber of North Dakota, a Republican, began a heated debate with Senator Reed of Missouri, a Democrat. A crowd surrounded them; Coolidge pounded his gavel. In less than a minute each senator was ready to do battle. “Only the most polished finesse,” the
Los Angeles Times
reporter noted, “prevented Senator McCumber and Senator Reed from engaging in a ‘fistic encounter.’ ”

When the dust settled, Coolidge could see that Harding again had struck a masterful compromise. There was no big and permanent bonus commitment for Washington that year. But the funds would flow to those who required disability benefits and rehabilitation. The concession was the abolition of the old War Risk Bureau, with a new Veterans Bureau to replace it. Colonel Charles Forbes, his old friend, would move over from the War Risk Bureau to head the new Veterans Bureau. The bureau and other related funding represented a significant outlay: $600 million or $700 million a year instead of $300 million. It would build hospitals in fourteen regional offices to serve the vets all over the country.

Later in the summer, the Coolidges made it back home for a brief visit, only to realize how much they liked New England. “I love every stick and stone,” wrote Grace. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, they hosted the president and Mrs. Harding at an extravaganza commemorating the anniversary of Plymouth Rock. It felt good, too, to be able to host some of Washington on their own turf or in their own waters. In Northampton, they found themselves turning to local projects. That summer Coolidge, using the vice presidential privilege, appointed Thomas Plummer, the boy who lived in the other half of their two-family house, to West Point; Thomas’s father was the Northampton High School principal and a Democrat. The Coolidges also decided their charity would be helping the Clarke School for the Deaf. The Coolidges and Dr. Alexander Graham Bell announced a plan to raise $500,000 for the struggling school. It was a rare move for Coolidge because it opened him to the appearance of compromise: a vice president who invited friends to give to a certain charity might appear susceptible to bribery. There Coolidge’s sense of gratitude for once overcame his caution: it was Grace’s charity, and he wanted to thank Grace. In that period or soon after, he picked up the patronage pen himself and signed a letter to Stearns regarding Grace’s old school. “Some time ago I became a Trustee of Clarke School for the Deaf of Northampton,” he wrote. He invited Stearns to join a national board of directors. “It is my privilege formally to invite and personally to urge you to accept a place,” he added. “I know the value of the work of the school.” The letter was typed out on his Northampton stationery, as though he were still a small-town lawyer, but the heading above the date read “Washington.” But he did not send the letter.

In Washington that fall, the Coolidges again tried to advance. They had a routine now. On Sundays they sat in a pew not too near the front at the First Congregational Church. Coolidge “liked it because it was not too far forward and he could enter and leave without being overconspicuous,” the minister, Jason Noble Pierce, noted. At the suggestion of Joel Boone, the navy doctor, the boys were boarding at Mercersburg Academy, a school ninety-odd miles outside Washington. In the rush of Washington, the school made sense for the boys; the distance was in any case less than that of Boston to Northampton. Calvin, Jr., was writing his first essays. In one, he wrote, “At my Grandfather’s house in Plymouth, Vermont I can go to the woods anytime. Sometime I hunt for spruce gum. It grows on the side of a spruce tree and can be cut off with a knife. I like to go nutting.” Another recalled his sickness as a boy: “When I was five years old I caught pnewmonia. I was taken to the hospital. I missed about two months out of the first grade, but I passed all right.” Grace took dancing classes at the home of Mrs. John Henderson, the doyenne who had mooted the idea of a house back in 1920. She coaxed her sons to dance: John was willing; Calvin, Jr., less so. She found stores she liked, such as the Martha Washington candy shop, which was also favored by Evalyn McLean. Grace became a fan of the Harper Method of hairdressing and adopted a distinctive hairdo, the horseshoe marcel.