Coolidge (39 page)

Coolidge’s challenge remained supporting an administration with a temperament wilder than his own: Harding’s crowd seemed constantly to find itself in little scandals. Across the country, papers were noticing that Harding and his party were particularly liberal with post office jobs. Normally only the best-qualified candidates were recommended for postmaster jobs. President Harding changed the policy by an executive order and allowed the postmaster general to select among three candidates, a shift that gave his post office cover for picking political favorites. “We all know that politics is politics and we are not finding any great fault with the Harding administration of applying the policy of ‘to the victors belong the spoils,’ ” wrote the
Tribune
of Fairfield, Iowa, after the local post office job was handed to what it deemed an unworthy Republican. “But we would like to have the Administration come clean and not indulge in these little pleasantries about the merit system.”

Soon there was even more trouble for Harding, especially in the area of the Veterans Bureau. The bureau was expanding at an alarming rate; in the Bay State alone, Forbes was building a giant government hospital, with capacity for 500 tuberculosis patients and 500 additional patients. The veterans, still unemployed, were finding they were not getting what was promised, and that the prices in the contracts for the buildings Forbes was constructing seemed inflated. The Harding recklessness drove Coolidge to an inspection of his own acts and conscience. Second thoughts about even the Clarke School overcame him. On top of his note to Stearns, which he had not sent, Coolidge now appended a note on a piece of stationery of the U.S. Senate, in which he expressed his reservations. “Do not consider this a request from me,” he wrote tersely, “Probably you better say no.”

As it turned out, Coolidge was assigned to represent the administration’s conscience in public very soon after, at a giant convention of the American Legion at the end of October planned for Kansas City, where 83,000 citizens had given $2 million to build a memorial to the veterans and casualties of the Great War. The stakes at Kansas City would be high. Every senator who had failed to vote for the bonus bill was receiving angry mail. Senator Medill McCormick, whose wife was friendly with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, received one such blast from the American Legion’s Theodore Roosevelt Post 627. “We are now frankly giving you an opportunity to take a positive open stand disregarding party and presidential orders, and show us if you are our friend or foe.” Yet more veterans were claiming that the Veterans Bureau was not fulfilling its specific mandate to serve the wounded. In fact, Forbes was being brought to the convention specifically to address those concerns.

Frank Stearns and Coolidge traveled to Missouri together by train. The trip took a day and a half, and was tentative up to the last minute; a rail strike was threatening schedules of the Santa Fe line. Coolidge was such an unknown in Kansas City that the
Star
got his name slightly wrong, listing him as “Calvin F. Coolidge.” But there were those among the vets who knew him, especially vets from New England; Governor Hartness of Vermont was in attendance.

Bunting and other decorations adorned Union Station in Kansas City when they arrived, a welcome organized by Harry Truman, whose haberdashery in Kansas City was struggling. It fell to Coolidge to represent the federal government before restive veterans. Like his speech before the American Federation of Labor that September day in Greenfield, this speech was difficult, aiming to please a group with which the administration profoundly disagreed. Coolidge was forthright: “Your glory lies in what you have given and may give to your country not in what your country has or may give to you.” The vets liked Coolidge and invited him to stay.

Back in Washington, Daugherty was running a very popular campaign of clemency and forgiveness for citizens jailed during the Red Scare. He was preparing to commute the sentences of several dozen prisoners held in penitentiaries for war crimes, evidence of the administration’s generosity. This was a Republican way of showing respect for decency, freedom of speech, and dissent. At Christmas, Debs did walk free, and Daugherty and others carefully publicized the news.

But by December there were more Harding stories. Without regard to how this looked in a time of austerity, Daugherty was also brazenly insisting that Mellon accept appointments of Harding loyalists at Treasury. The important office of assistant treasury secretary in charge of internal revenue and customs—tariffs—had gone to a key Harding man from Tacoma, Washington, Elmer Dover. Mellon, the secretary, found he had little say over the matter. Coolidge’s reservations found expression in his speeches, especially when he was away from Washington. “Shall we use our power for self aggrandizement or service?” he asked that December at an address in Montpelier, his father’s and grandfather’s old haunt. “It has been the lack of moral fibre which has been the downfall of people in the past.” In the state with the Mountain Rule, he was reinforcing the concept behind the rule, character in leadership. After the speech, Colonel Coolidge approached Earle Kinsley, a leading Republican in the state, to say, “Calvin wants to see you in his room.” Kinsley asked Coolidge whether Harding would be a candidate for renomination in 1924. If not, they would nominate Coolidge. “No president can decline a renomination,” Coolidge said. Then he added an ominously final-sounding plan: “I will serve my term as vice president and then return to Northampton to resume the practice of law.”

Stearns too was disappointed in Daugherty, and sensed something off about the Justice Department. Prices were down. At R. H. Stearns, silk stockings with lisle tops and feet had sold for $2 in November; by Christmas the firm had dropped the price of the stockings to $1.85. Yet Attorney General Daugherty at the Justice Department was just launching a new campaign against stores for their prices. On December 22, just before Christmas, Daugherty announced a federal investigation of prices for food, fuel, and clothing. Daugherty’s department would do its part to drive down prices by spotlighting “unconscionable” profiteering; it was time the Justice Department set out to “get these smart fellows.” Stearns desperately sought an interview while in Washington, and failed to get one. Denied his interview, Stearns returned to Boston and exploded. Why was the administration not more solicitous of commerce? “I am sorry that I did not have a chance to talk with the Attorney General,” Stearns wrote to Coolidge. “While his Secretary was very courteous and intelligent about the matter, he was buried deep in papers.” Daugherty found time for Debs but not for business.

The point was a larger one, Stearns wrote. What infuriated merchants was that they had hoped for more freedom in peacetime, but here Daugherty was perpetuating wartime price management, and that was itself unbearable. “The Administration should realize that for several years merchants were rasped almost beyond their capacity to stand it.” Seventy-five-cent veiling, a topic that had animated the committee the month before, preoccupied Stearns. “When they were making some of their investigations here two or three years ago, they investigated one of our neighbors and they discovered a piece of veiling which was being sold for 75 cents a yard. The store when asked what it cost, said it cost 10 cents, but it was bought in a miscellaneous lot of goods on which the store had to make desperate efforts to come out even.” Perhaps, wrote Stearns of Daugherty, “he can differentiate between robbers and respectable people a little more carefully.” The cynicism of the Harding crowd also struck Earle Kinsley, the Vermont Republican. A vacancy fell open in the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which covered New York, Vermont, and Connecticut. The Vermont bar wanted to recommend the appointment of John Redmond of Newport, Vermont, and delegated John Sargent, the state attorney general and friend of the Coolidges, to make the case to Daugherty. It was Vermont’s turn, the Vermonters felt: Vermont had never had a judge. But all that Daugherty asked was “What did the Vermont delegation do for us at Chicago?” The Veterans Bureau continued to spend and that year was set to outgrow the navy in size, with a budget of $455 million in 1923.

Grimly, Coolidge determined to focus on service. The economy was finally picking up. For the year 1920–1921, Ford had sold more than 1.25 million touring cars; this was the first twelve-month period in which sales had topped the one million mark. Dawes was moving forward in the same dramatic fashion. On February 3, 1922, Dawes went before a thousand officials, again with several brooms, to dramatize Harding’s original commitment to sweep Washington clean and his own determination to continue rationalizing the still considerable inefficiency of government. This time his emphasis was not on budget numbers but on redundant purchases. With one broom, Dawes pounded the floor of DAR Hall: “There is your broom that meets navy specifications. And”—another broom—“here are brooms that don’t meet those specifications that sweep just as well.” The navy had sinned by buying new brooms rather than taking 350,000 army brooms that would have done fine. Dawes bragged that Mellon handled the intrusions of his inspectors well: “Secretary Mellon is a businessman. His fur didn’t go up or his back arch when my coordinators came in.”

Dawes was claiming that his work would lead to savings of a full $2 billion; the savings in another eighteen months would be $3.5 billion. If enough was spent on help for veterans, and the disabled were taken care of, and the economy continued its recovery, then Dawes’s enterprise might be worth it, for the unrelenting pressure to create a permanent payment system for veterans, a great federal pension, might abate.

If not, the Dawes budget work was in vain: the Congress would only add back in what he cut. Lawmakers from both parties were wildly scrounging about for ways to finance a bonus; a tax increase seemed inevitable. On February 16, Stearns telegraphed his two cents on the bonus from Room 730 of the Hotel Touraine. “From any point of view believe it is a mistake,” he wrote, but “if it must be then sales tax least objectionable.” When Coolidge discussed taxes with Clarence Barron, he did not discuss whether there should be a tax increase; he discussed the difficulties of passing a tax increase: “How we are going to raise the taxes, I don’t know.” There were always other challenges. Grace maintained her rule of no politics in public. That January, however, Mrs. Harding, perhaps inadvertently, managed to position Grace to violate it. Unable to attend a meeting of the National Women’s Republican Club, the first lady asked Grace to substitute. Grace found herself reading a message from Mrs. Harding that called upon women for “party loyalty, conviction and devotion.” This document was, the papers commented, “the first political manifesto by the wife of an American President.” It was an embarrassment for the Coolidges.

Sensing that Coolidge was in a funk, Stearns wrote to him frequently and even, in one letter, unconsciously promoted the vice president to chief executive. Writing on January 20, 1922, to let Coolidge know of some praise Coolidge had received from Wirt Humphrey of Chicago’s Hamilton Club, Stearns reported that the club members “were very much pleased to meet President Coolidge.” In the same letter, Stearns went on to assure Coolidge that Humphrey had heard of Vice President Coolidge and “repeated suggestions that he will be the logical candidate for President after President Harding has served his eight years.” Stearns commiserated with Coolidge for his various setbacks but then reminded him, in case Coolidge had forgotten, that neither of them had sought the vice presidency for him in the first place. Later he chided Coolidge, “I came away from Washington quite a little disturbed by your statement that you were getting suspicious of everybody.” He went on, “It makes me a little sick at heart that you should not get much more comfort out of your success.” The only one who could destroy goodwill toward Coolidge, Stearns wrote, was Coolidge himself. “I cannot imagine any way in which even you can destroy it unless you persistently for years make folks feel that you are not interested in them. I know you are. Let them know it.”

Now it was Coolidge who exploded. If expressing interest where he had none was the price of success, it might not be worth it. “Your letters all received,” Coolidge shot back. “I do not think you have any comprehension of what people do to me. Even small things bother me. But that is no matter. I can’t go to New York for Mr. Mott or anyone else. I have been there
eight
times.” The senators noticed that he dined alone and with his face to the wall. The ladies’ magazines praised Grace in order to blame Coolidge. “Heaven only knows how much the Coolidge family needs her leavening,” commented the
Woman’s Journal
, the periodical of the American Woman Suffrage Association, noting that Coolidge presided over the Senate “like a sphinx over Egypt.”

Over the course of the spring, Coolidge’s mood did not improve. That April also brought a Gridiron dinner, a ritual press event at which the newspapermen entertained the government and grilled the politicians. The dinner took place at the Coolidges’ hotel home, the Willard. It was a mark of the recovery that this year the coal strikes were not even a subject at the dinner; the event’s planners found the topic too old to address yet again. The same night, a fire roared through the Willard and the rooms were evacuated. When Coolidge tried, quietly, to reenter, one of the many guards asked him who he was. “The vice president,” Coolidge answered and was allowed to move forward until someone asked, “Vice president of what?” When Coolidge replied that he was the vice president of the United States, the guards sent him back safely behind the barriers. They had mistaken him for the vice president of the hotel.

The price of their status, having it or lacking it, was becoming clear to all the Coolidges. Around this time, the president’s son Calvin wrote a poem that captured the family ambivalence about Washington. The title he gave it used the same word Stearns had used: “Success.”

Success, O magic word, Success!

How much you mean to happiness