Coolidge (4 page)

A Coolidge forefather had signed the Dedham Covenant, which explicitly posited as its goal to keep out those who did not fit: “That we shall by all means labor to keep off from us all such as are contrary minded, and receive only such unto us as may be probably of one heart with us.” The reasoning was simple: create virtue and lead by example. Testing virtue—inviting too many different thinkers into your midst—was, in their view, too dangerous. There were still numerous Coolidges all around Boston, many wealthy and distinguished. A few were also descended from Thomas Jefferson.

That first John Coolidge in Plymouth, Vermont, a Revolutionary War soldier, had taken a farm in the town, then known as Saltash, and shortly acquired plots of land for his children. By renaming the town Plymouth the Coolidges and the other settlers signaled to the world now that they were endeavoring to make a yet another “citty upon a hill.” The old name under the New Hampshire charter, Saltash, was set aside.

Their new “citty” was really a chain of hamlets: Plymouth Notch, Plymouth Union, Plymouth Kingdom, and others with settlements that had been given less obvious names—Frog City, for example. The Coolidges had become local, married locals, and fallen into the history of those contentious people, invariably taking sides in local conflicts, bloody or pecuniary—the battle of Vermonters versus New Yorkers or debtors versus creditors.

Every July, Calvin Galusha, his son, John, Victoria, and the others marked a number of anniversaries. One was the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of the thirteen colonies. But there was also the anniversary of the first Battle of Bull Run in the Civil War, to which the state had given many men; Vermont, after all, had been the first state to call for the abolition of slavery in its constitution. Another John Coolidge, a doctor who had served at Antietam, was buried in the little cemetery as well. John and Victoria might remember July 1609, when Samuel de Champlain had discovered the great body of water, Lake Champlain, that now defined their state’s border. In July 1777, the Republic of Vermont had made its own declaration of independence at Windsor, a few miles away, announcing that inhabitants of the Green Mountains would “form a government best suited to secure their property, wellbeing and happiness.” It had been July 1782 when Ethan Allen, pounding his cane and ranting against the clergy, had finished dictating a book after leading the Green Mountain Boys in battle against their great enemy, New York. All those events and their facts jostled against one another in Vermonters’ minds; some preferred the Ethan Allen story to the Civil War or the Revolutionary account.

In July 1872, in the midst of all these anniversaries, the first child of the couple who stayed was born. They named him John Calvin Coolidge, after his father and grandfather, after all the other Johns and Calvins who had gone before. The anniversary that the child’s birthday happened to fall on was that of the Declaration of Independence, which the village marked with festivals and an annual game: the men of Plymouth Notch stole an old cannon; the men of Plymouth Union stole it back.

Within months of his son’s birth, John Coolidge went to the state capital, Montpelier, to serve as a state legislator, another quest that seemed necessary; if one wanted to ensure that prosperity would be possible in the future of Vermont, one must participate in framing that future. Victoria was young and delicate. Though Plymouth was still a hamlet, the store was its center, and the traffic there wore on the young mother. “I hope you will end your public life this year and then we will retire to some quiet place. I do not care for even the honor of being the representative’s wife,” Victoria wrote John. But John enjoyed the honor. He was working on soldiers’ legislation and told his mother he wanted to prepare so well he could give a speech on the topic. He joined the state committee on reform schools and served on it for the next few years.

Victoria drew consolation from the landscape, sunsets, flowers, and, always, books and reading. One of the first toys the Coolidges gave their new son was a set of blocks with the alphabet on one face and Roman numbers on the other. In 1875, Victoria had a daughter, Abigail Gratia Coolidge, to join Calvin. The education of Calvin and Abbie started with scripture. There was no regular minister at the church; traveling preachers passed through. But Coolidge’s grandmother Sarah taught them the Bible by the chapter.

From the start, the entire Coolidge clan focused on training this new son to take his place as a citizen in the Vermont community. When Calvin was three, his grandfather took him up to Montpelier to visit his father the lawmaker and placed the boy in the governor’s chair, hewn from the timbers of the USS
Constitution
, known as “Old Ironsides,” one of the United States’ first ships, authorized by the Naval Act of 1794. The Vermont State House was a grand structure; the governor’s chair sat in a large Greek classical office with pedimented windows. On that trip the boy spied a stuffed catamount in the state museum, and that too made an impression upon him.

Soon enough, the children came to know firsthand the challenges of rural life. When Coolidge was just learning to read, his grandfather Calvin Galusha became ill. The ailing man had his grandson read from the Gospel of John: “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.” When he died, Calvin Galusha left Calvin a mare colt and a heifer. He also deeded him “the use and yeald of a certain piece of land” on his farm, forty acres to be passed along as “absolute property” of his grandson’s children. That was the limekiln lot. The language the grandfather had chosen rendered the bequest even less valuable: one could hardly borrow against something that could not be given up. The purpose of such an inheritance, the whole family knew, was not merely to pass something on; it was to tie his grandson to the land. Coolidge’s grandmother read to him from the Bible, but also from
The Green Mountain Boys
, a book about Ethan Allen: “All that may be sir, but those who know Ethan Allen will laugh at the very idea of there being found a man in New England who can outdo him in feats of either strength or courage.” There were also law books lying around the house, along with other texts.

George Washington, who had led his great-great-grandfather’s army, loomed large. One of the volumes in the Coolidge house was
Washington and His Generals
. In it the boy read not only of the wars but also of Washington’s time as president. Washington had “made his government steady and respected abroad.” But he had also served reluctantly; after two terms the first president had seen it unfit to stay on; he had after all, the book said, “pined for the rest of a quiet home.”

The adults in Plymouth worked to pass on to the children the skills for the eternal combat with the landscape. Calvin’s father could build a cabinet; Calvin also made his own. His grandmother wove fabric, and the women made patchwork quilts; Calvin, at age ten, stitched a quilt top of Tumbling Blocks, a dauntingly sophisticated pattern. His father got the hay in; Calvin raked. His mother tended the lilac bed. The boy could whittle and knew every tree, the mountain ash, the plum, and the lilac bush around his house. The boy’s father noted with relief that Coolidge was diligent at sugaring and much later told a reporter proudly that Coolidge could get “more sap out of a maple tree than the other boys around here.”

Around the time the children began school, Victoria weakened. Her family often found her abed with an unmentioned illness—consumption, probably. She stayed home from prayer sessions. Religious groups came to her; itinerant ministers stayed at the house. She kept busy with her hands and knit a counterpane for Calvin and his future bride, an emblem of her hope for her son. That left Coolidge and his sister with their father and grandparents, to follow them about and observe the town. Even when small, the boy saw politics firsthand: at town meetings, it was his father who worked or spoke; Calvin sold apples and popcorn at the meetings, as his father had before him. The villagers noticed early that Calvin was always quiet; when someone played the violin, he would not dance, but was always observant. Though by party Plymouth Notch was Republican, it was also intensely democratic; one of the town elders was a Democrat and served as moderator. Some of the documents said, “To act on the following documents, viz.,” the old Latin abbreviation for
videlicet
, which meant “that is to say.” But the elder always read, “to act on the following questions, vizley” and so was known, with great affection, as Old Vizley. The smallest unit of government was the school district, and much of what went on in Plymouth focused on that: the room and board for teachers were subject to bid, and the family with the lowest bid got the contract. The amount, Coolidge later remembered, tended to hang around $1.25 for two weeks in winter and 50 cents for the same period in summer. It was during his childhood that Plymouth first gave women the chance to vote on school issues.

As the boy soon learned, the political life of Plymouth ran on its own annual cycle. Town officers were chosen at a March meeting, where the town also set the tax rates. There was also bonded debt to manage due to road construction and costs incurred during the Civil War and by the freshet of 1869, one of the many floods that plagued Vermont. Come September there was another meeting, a freemen’s meeting, where the town elected its delegates to the state government, as well as to Congress, and presidential electors. At an annual district meeting at the schoolhouse, villagers chose the school officers, such as Calvin’s father, and set the rate of the school tax. Everything happened on a small scale of pennies and dollars: collection of a snow tax, payment for care of an indigent. But the town felt itself the basis of all that was above it: the county authorities and state authorities in Montpelier.

The records John Coolidge kept show the painstaking effort of town leaders to budget and manage a small amount of cash. The town paid Coolidge’s father $11.40 for superintending the schools; $1 to someone else, unnamed in a town report, for a day’s labor; 50 cents to someone else for a half day of work on a road in winter; $104 to a woman, May A. Sawyer, for keeping a poor or sick man, “C.J.,” for one year. That year the town also paid $1 for a pair of shoes for a child. In all, Plymouth’s expenses in that year were $3,182. One year the other men of the town wanted to raise a large amount of money with a new tax. John Coolidge abstained from voting, saying that “he did not wish to place so large a burden on those who were less able, and so was leaving them to make their own decision,” Coolidge later remembered.

At the store too, the boy could observe the clockwork that was commerce. His father paid $40 a year rent for the store and turned over $10,000 a year in goods. That left room for fat profits. But John and Victoria would not charge high prices to their neighbors; that might turn away business. It was better to operate on narrow margins and hope to sustain volume and trust. John paid his blacksmith $1 a day to run the blacksmith shop. In the store he had to set prices and decide whether to haggle. In the end he took only $100 or so a month profit out of the store business. That was enough to pay for a maidservant around the house and some other expenses, but not enough to live richly. Many people who came to the store borrowed small sums to buy items on credit. Remarkably few did not pay the money back.

The railroad that had come to so many Vermont towns chose yet again not to come to Plymouth in the 1870s and 1880s. John Coolidge rode a wagon to another town to catch the train to Boston for business; he rode the night train to avoid the cost of a hotel. Even the school Calvin attended betrayed the fragility of the Vermont economy. One year all three teachers who taught there wrote “No,” one in capitals, on a questionnaire asking “Is the school house in good condition?” The school year began in May and ended in February; the roads were too muddy and the sugaring was too demanding for pupils to take time to go to school in spring. Coolidge did well enough at his studies; he even pulled pranks, as his grandfather Calvin Galusha had in his time. He not only liked practical jokes but saw that others liked them.

But more serious thoughts also ran through the boy’s head. His mother read the Romantics, and the style impressed the boy: “From scenes like these, old Scotia’s grandeur springs.” The town of Plymouth Notch was contemptuous of snobbery: when a maidservant needed a ride in the wagon, the children of the employer would give up their places and stay home. One of the things the Coolidges had fled when they had left Boston was the sanctimony of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. One of the Coolidge children, probably Calvin, penned a romantic short story that reflected both the popularity of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Plymouth’s skepticism at Puritan sanctimony:

Many years before the faithful echo of the Lake has answered the crash of timber as some tall giant of the forest fell beneath the pitiless axe of the white settler, a pale-faced maiden had her home beside the murmuring waters. She had been a Puritan but the stern magistrates had banished her from the cold comfort of their fireside because from natural sympathy for suffering she had shown kindness to one of the detested sect of Quakers.

A shadow hung over their lives: the melancholy Victoria was becoming sicker. One March, on her thirty-ninth birthday, Calvin and Abbie were called to their mother’s bedside. Within an hour she died. “The greatest sorrow” that can come to a boy had come to him, as he later wrote. He took a strand of her hair and preserved it in a locket. From that point on, their grandmother Coolidge, sometimes called Aunt Mede, stepped in, helping to raise both children.

The death hit the boy hard. He grew taller, thin and quiet. People wondered whether he too might be susceptible to consumption; they agreed that his small features and pale looks recalled his mother and fitted the general stereotype of the consumptive. People noticed him walking back and forth along the way to the cemetery. That was how he might be all his life. After all, the simple school in Plymouth was enough, in those days, to qualify both the children as teachers; Abbie even taught one semester in a neighboring town.