Coolidge (41 page)

As more news of the Veterans Bureau reached him, a fury was finally building in the president. To others, he looked weak—the recovery from the flu seemed incomplete. Forbes went to the White House, and Harding took him by the neck and shook Forbes “as a dog would a rat,” as one surprised witness reported. “You double-crossing bastard!” Harding shouted. Forbes headed for Europe, and cabled his resignation. By now it was clear that Forbes had stolen not thousands of dollars but hundreds of thousands, even millions, from the hospital construction. Nicholas Murray Butler, the Columbia president, happened to visit with the Hardings around this time. The topic of the residence came up, and Mrs. Harding, forgetting perhaps that Butler had written the introduction to a book by Coolidge, responded with such a flash that it took Butler aback: “I am going to have that bill defeated. Do you think I am going to have those Coolidges living in a house like that? An apartment hotel is plenty good enough for them.” The Senate Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds wrote to Mrs. Henderson to refuse the offer, noting that the maintenance would be $15,000 a year, “and it is the policy of Congress to practice the strictest economy.” Mrs. Harding was also sharing her thoughts about Coolidge with others in Washington. She was thinking they should change the Republican ticket, jettisoning the awkward Coolidge. Her cousin wrote Mrs. Harding that Governor Lowden was a good partner for Harding. “From the present viewpoint Governor Lowden would be more helpful than anyone whose name has been mentioned.” The first lady also had a plan for a political makeover: a trip out west, to new territory.

The Senate was hurrying because this year it planned to leave in March; the special sessions were over. In the last days, Lodge, his ego raging, could not resist another insult to Coolidge. It was traditional for the Senate to vote a resolution of thanks to its president when the session concluded. With Lodge close by, Coolidge steered the Senate to the moment. But when the minute came for the resolution to be offered, it was not. The silence was heard throughout the hall. Then Lodge announced that he had nothing further to communicate from the chief executive. Coolidge simply called the sixty-seventh session of the Senate to a close.

It was not the slights but the scandals that gnawed at Coolidge. Of course the Coolidges would not take the residence: the general concern about scandal was too great. The Hardings might plot a new term, but meanwhile their projects were losing credibility before the nation’s eyes. The Veterans Bureau was the single biggest new department of the Harding administration, its signature statement. If the bureau was siphoning off public money and spending it, then the entire government case against waste became risible. Here was wrongdoing significant enough to besmirch the administration. Normally a sound sleeper, Coolidge was suffering great bouts of insomnia. Morning came too soon, marked by a blast from Fort Myer on the other side of the Potomac. “How I hate that sunrise gun,” he told Grace.

The Harding administration, and with it the whole Republican plan, was stuck. The political capital Harding was spending reducing scandal damage was leaving him too depleted for important projects. If he didn’t bring taxes down more and further rationalize government, if he didn’t rein in the ICC and FTC, Harding’s revolution would abort. A top tax rate in the 50s or 40s was still too high for Mellon. But the evidence that Harding had tired of tax cuts was plain to see in the bond market. Long before, a decision of the Supreme Court in the case of
Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co.
had exempted municipal bonds from taxes. When tax rates were high, the bonds had great value, which was reflected in the difference between their prices and those of taxable bonds. The spread between corporate AAA bonds and high-grade municipal bonds tended to narrow when tax cuts were likely. Every time the tax rate was cut a point, the tax-exempt status of the bonds lost value. Now the spread was widening again. The market valued the tax-exempt bonds because it knew Harding was tired. The bonds’ advantage was likely to endure. Harding himself conceded as much. “My own best judgment is that for a year or more to come we had better leave the question of modified income taxes alone,” he wrote to Otto Kahn of Kuhn, Loeb in April 1923.

Harding was also weakening in the area of credit and money. William Harding, the governor at the Federal Reserve, was the emblem of hard money, and Wall Street believed he had contributed to normalcy. “It was William Harding who ‘stemmed the tide’ ” of inflation, wrote a columnist in Clarence Barron’s new namesake magazine,
Barron’s
. “Harding’s masterful stand in forcing the speculators to unload and calling upon the banks to restrict credit to necessities only” had met with “loud cries from those whose toes had been squeezed.” As a result of William Harding’s strict policy, the periodical concluded, “That is all history now.” Once the markets had understood that the government was serious about tightening money, interest rates came down everywhere. Yet now President Harding was shipping Governor Harding off to Boston, where he would serve in a less important post, head of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank. For the top job at the Federal Reserve, President Harding appointed another friend from Marion, Daniel Crissinger, who had been serving as comptroller of the currency. Crissinger was more likely to lead the Fed banks in loosening money and credit than William Harding might have been; the farmers noted with elation that he owned several head of cattle and hogs, in addition to holding various positions at banks and companies. Mellon was not pleased.

Such issues, however, could be momentarily set aside: Congress had recessed and the Coolidges were heading home. Grace was thrilled to return to her “refuge,” as she called Northampton. Once more, she might see her friend Therese Hills and ride around in Mrs. Hills’s car, which they had nicknamed “Dulcinea,” with their sons. Now Grace realized that in the end it was religious faith, her churches in Washington and Northampton, that helped her find her way through and past Washington. Before her departure from Washington a friend snapped a reflective picture of Grace in the Willard. Grace autographed it, “Not in rewards but in strength to strive the blessing lies.”

From Washington might come reports of trouble. On March 14, Charles Cramer, Forbes’s former general counsel at the Veterans Bureau, shot himself with a .45-caliber revolver. In late May one morning at 7:30 the White House housekeeper, Mrs. Jaffray, heard Attorney General Daugherty in a rage; he was unable to get his deputy, Jess Smith, to the phone. A White House usher had to tell the attorney general that Smith had committed suicide that morning.

But in Northampton, these reports were just distant thunder. The real preoccupations were family: Grace’s father was failing, and in late April, he finally died. Coolidge canceled a speech and the Coolidges traveled up to Burlington from Boston. It was a sad but calm time for the couple, and the Coolidges finally had a chance to think about their hectic two years in John Adams’s “insignificant office.” That high society in Washington had not brought Coolidge into its fold was not due to his style of dress, the expression on his face, or his breaches in etiquette, Coolidge realized now. Alice Longworth slighted Coolidge because he represented a threat to the activist wing of the Republican Party and the legacy of her father, Theodore Roosevelt. Mrs. Harding, likewise, was not snubbing them out of pure nastiness; she was protecting her own husband’s patronage. Society ladies of the District had often mocked the Coolidges’ interest in Vermont and Massachusetts. But the ladies were mistaking federalism for provincialism. By talking about a state and its interests, you reminded Washington that the states had made the union. The Coolidges’ difficulties had to do less with personal failings than with a disagreement about what they had come to Washington for in the first place.

At Amherst, the Meiklejohn drama was playing out in disquieting fashion. The trustees, led by Morrow, had polled the faculty and found that more than half supported Meiklejohn’s removal. Meiklejohn, Robert Frost concluded, had taught the boys to favor thinking instead of learning. But as Frost, now no longer on the faculty, also noted, “by thinking, they meant stocking up with radical ideas, by learning, they meant stocking up with conservative ideas.” It was not, in the end, merely that Meiklejohn’s overspending and his appointments were so off; it was that the confidence of the school was lost. Progressives such as Meiklejohn seemed to push and push: one gave in to them only to feel them push farther. The sessions where Meiklejohn met with the trustees were difficult; like Garman, he would not leave without a fight. The Amherst board determined itself nonetheless ready to act. In a battle far more unpleasant than they had imagined, the board now finally wrestled a resignation out of Meiklejohn. The event took place in the philosophy room of the library on a hot night with students and reporters outside observing it all with field glasses.

Meiklejohn indeed did not go quietly. He refused an offer of a chair in logic and metaphysics as a professor and announced he would sever his connection with Amherst after a year’s paid leave. He delivered a lecture about Christ and his revolt against the Pharisees, who supported the traditional order, a clear jab at his board. Furious at the board, students set the flag at Johnson Chapel at half-mast and tolled the bell as for a funeral. Three out of twenty-nine full professors and five of the fifteen associate professors quit with him.

The Meiklejohn case was in its way a version of the police strike: an ugly snapshot that had to be endured for what seemed a more important cause. Only this time, Coolidge and Morrow were not even sure they themselves were in the right. The drama was a recasting, after all, of the dramas of the Amherst of their young years. Meiklejohn was what Garman had been in their day, the young Turk who challenged the establishment. That scenario made them, Morrow, Coolidge, and the others, the old reactionaries, like President Gates in their time as undergraduates. At commencement, Coolidge was seated awkwardly, with Meiklejohn between him and the board chairman. Several students hissed and booed when the trustees were seated. The
New York World
described Coolidge: the vice president “glared straight ahead, his cigar long since dead,” through the ceremony, and then, after the degrees were given, “hastily turned about and slipped off the dais.”
The New York Times
criticized Coolidge as one of the trustees “who could not be said to be in sympathy with liberal doctrines.” Walter Lippmann sneered in the
New York World
that Meiklejohn had fallen short because “he is a patriot, but not, by Calvin Coolidge standards, a 100-percenter.” The owner and publisher of the magazine
The Nation
, Oswald Villard, printed part of Meiklejohn’s final speech in his July 4 issue.

There was nothing Coolidge could do, or ought to say, about Meiklejohn now. He could only talk about what was on his own mind, which he did at a less awkward speech on Memorial Day in Northampton. The American spirit was not about what happened in Washington, he said. If the republic was to be maintained and improved that would “be through the efforts and character of the individual.” The American spirit, by which he meant the spirit that lived between men, always survived, and “those who have scoffed at it from the days of the Stuarts and the Bourbons to the days of the Hohenzollerns have seen it rise and prevail over them.” Neither Stuart nor Bourbon could compare to the American settler who had started out in New England and pioneered across the country. Coolidge plunged himself into the delicious detail of local politics, visiting the trustees of the People’s Institute, the new name of the old Home Culture Club, speaking at the anniversary of a local bank, and talking to the papers about the advisability of constructing another city hall instantly or later on. Coolidge counseled postponement.

The details of the Harding travel plan filtered through to New England, eerily similar to Wilson’s plans just four years before. Harding and the first lady would head west, on a 15,000-mile trip, and greet the country, ending up in frontier territory, Alaska. Accompanying Harding would be those cabinet members whose visits might please the troubled workers and farmers of the West. That included the new interior secretary who had replaced Fall, Hubert Work; Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, for the farmers; and Herbert Hoover, the Californian. In addition, General Sawyer, the doctor, was along, as was Dr. Boone, his deputy. Harding had wanted to bring the
Mayflower
to transport him from Alaska on the last leg, but his party was so big that the navy ship
Henderson
had to be booked.

On June 21 in St. Louis, Harding was still campaigning for his World Court, listing the “indispensable” conditions under which it might exist. But by July 1, when Harding was resting at the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone Park, his plan, which had seemed ready to pass a month before, now faced certain defeat in Coolidge’s Senate. Harding, whose health had provided such a contrast to the outgoing president’s just two years before, was now ill. Yet Harding, like Wilson, did not relent; he spoke and toured nonstop. By midmonth, when Coolidge went to Waterbury for the funeral of Senator William Dillingham, Harding arrived at McKinley Park in Alaska. The papers reported that Harding had run the locomotive himself for twenty-six miles.

At the end of July, as the Coolidges headed up to Plymouth, there was word that Harding had fallen ill again. On the trip to Seattle, Harding was ill during the night but insisted on going ashore the next day. The Coolidges tried to proceed calmly, though the knots of reporters who began to materialize made them aware that something had changed. The reporters who accompanied them inspected the Holstein cows and watched them try to get at the hollyhocks. The reporters visited John Coolidge’s cheese factory and saw the 120-quart tanks of milk that arrived at the cheese factory on Fords. Coolidge, half-smoked cigar between his fingers, showed the reporters around; they inspected the town meeting place in the cellar of a little church and waved appreciatively at the wooded hills, where new spruce, valuable as timber, was growing up. When the reporters moved to depart, Coolidge came after them with a pile of letters he needed mailed from Ludlow.