Coolidge (46 page)

The tree going up on the Ellipse, south of the White House, was the symbol of all they had achieved thus far. Perhaps the president might, after all, together with Slemp, manage the Congress and get the legislation he sought the next term. Perhaps some of the challenges might take care of themselves. Every month that a federal bonus was not passed, one state or the other passed some kind of bonus. That, to Coolidge’s mind, was proper; it was the states’ job, not the federal government’s, to take care of citizens. By the end of 1923, nineteen states had found ways to finance the bonuses.

At 5:00
P.M.
on Christmas Eve, Coolidge pulled the switch to light the thousands of lights on the Christmas tree. Many members of the cabinet were in Washington, including secretaries Hughes, Hoover, and Daugherty, but Mellon had gone home to Pittsburgh. The Coolidges celebrated alone with Mr. and Mrs. Stearns. In the Blue Room, Grace and their sons put up their own small tree and trimmed it. There were also Christmas carols; several thousand people joined the choir of the First Congregational Church to sing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and a new tune composed by Jason Noble Pierce, “Christmas Bells.” John and Grace joined them. Mrs. Coolidge gave a dance for sixty boys in the blue room, and took a turn with each.

The Coolidges were well satisfied with their first Christmas at the White House, Grace wrote to her Robins, the sorority sisters, “In no sense does it overwhelm me, rather it does inspire me and increase my energy and I am so filled with the desire to measure up to this God-given task that I can almost feel his strength poured into me.” Coolidge, too, could congratulate himself that his efforts had been worthwhile; finally he had enough to take care of others. Grace’s mother, Mrs. Goodhue, was already living at the Coolidges’ house in Northampton. His father was turning seventy-nine that year, and Coolidge thought he might arrange for a relative, Josiah Coolidge, to work Colonel Coolidge’s farm so that his father might have a bit more leisure. Coolidge would pay for that. Aurora, the housekeeper, was there to make a home for John. It had taken decades longer than he imagined, but now funds were clearly flowing from Coolidge to his father. To his father Coolidge sent a check from a life insurance policy that represented “20 years of small savings,” as he told Colonel John. Father Coolidge received a check of $477.80.

Coolidge’s preoccupation with money, the perceptive Starling noticed, was not necessarily hostile: it sometimes was part of affection. Behind the grouch, there was sweetness; if you spent enough time with the man, you could feel it. Sometimes the men went into the kitchen; Coolidge made sandwiches from cheese as strong as a billy goat. If one sandwich was larger than the other, Coolidge would add cheese, or shave some down, to make them even. Starling expressed his admiration for a chief executive who made his own sandwiches. “I have to furnish the cheese, too,” the president muttered.

As the New Year approached, Coolidge smelled legislative victory and, rather than relenting, picked up the pace. The exhausted Slemp was dispatched on a trip to the South to recruit conservatives for the Coolidge presidential campaign of 1924. On December 30, all four Coolidges, the Stearnses, and General Lord took another ride on the
Mayflower.
Mrs. Lord was along and so was Alice Longworth, her own status slightly elevated with the rise of her husband to the position of House majority leader.

On January 1, Coolidge and his cabinet marked the opening of his first full year of the presidency by shaking 3,891 hands in four hours; Grace wore a dress of red chiffon and entertained Ailsa Mellon, Mellon’s daughter, and others in the Blue Room. Coolidge’s first scheduled meeting of the year was with the all-important Mellon on January 3. On January 8, the Coolidges hosted Mellon for dinner at the White House. The more he knew Mellon, the better he liked him. Mellon offered so many insights, including one relating to the time that Lord and he spent cutting and paring the budget. Members of the Mellon cabinet recalled a lesson Mellon had once given them all on sunk costs. The administration had hesitated about the case for renovating an old war plant and had turned to Mellon. Quietly, with many qualifications, he had described what he had done in a similar situation with one of
his
war plants. His advisers had thought about rebuilding, and the investment had already been $15 million or $16 million. Was it better to invest or to “wipe it off,” in the accounting parlance of the time, and start over? The latter, Mellon had concluded. “I told ’em to scrap it.”

Now, on taxes, Coolidge and Mellon pushed forward. The men told themselves they had the angles covered. The Treasury was readying a plan to publicize the tax problem: a National Tax Reduction Week, scheduled for early April. Mellon, cheered to have the support of such an ally, even planned to market his ideas. Mellon’s deputy, David Finley, was pulling together statements by Mellon and the administration into a little book that Macmillan would publish. The regular worker did not pay the income tax, but, Mellon believed, the regular worker would benefit from the tax rate cut. Therefore he titled his book
Taxation: The People’s Business
. The book was remarkable in its clarity, and for what it did not contain: the word “tariff” appeared only once, and revenues from customs were described as “abnormally high.” For General Lord that month, Coolidge scheduled six meetings, one the day following the Mellon meeting and five others at 9:30 in the morning. The semiannual budget presentation, which would come on January 21, would provide the valuable final reminder of the government’s seriousness and goodwill. After that meeting, they reckoned, getting the law passed would be easier.

There were more signs that the Coolidges were beginning to feel at home in the White House. Grace’s sorority sisters at Pi Beta Phi commissioned Howard Chandler Christy to paint her portrait. She posed in a sleeveless red dress with another new dog, a white collie named Rob Roy. Grace was stunning in the dress, so stunning that it gave Coolidge pause. It was one thing for his wife to be his ambassador, another for her to be glamorous; he did not like to admit it, but it irked him to have Grace so available to the world. Did the dress in the painting have to be so red? Could it not be another color? The artist told Calvin the dress had to be red; contrast was important because the red set off the white dog. If contrast was necessary, Coolidge countered, why not dye the dog red?

At Continental Memorial Hall on the twenty-first of January, Coolidge and Lord gave the case for saving their all. Standing before the crowd, Lord reminded his colleagues of their progress. A former newspaperman, he knew that stories lived in details, and he supplied them. Lovingly, Lord rehearsed the savings he had managed to elicit through some combination of coercion and cajoling from the departments. $55,747.41 in telephone and transportation bills had been saved for the District of Columbia in the preceding six months. The federal government had long wasted money paying rail freight for the 55 million pounds of paper that the Government Printing Office used annually. This year the federal government had forced a rewrite of the contracts so that payment included delivery of paper; the use of federal trucks to deliver the paper to the printing sites alone saved $25,000 annually. At Fort Bidwell Indian School, in California, a fire had destroyed the laundry. Indian reservations were a federal responsibility. Instead of buying new equipment, the officers in charge had found a surplus boiler at Mare Island, California, and taken it to the Indian School; other surplus government equipment had been shipped from Camp Lewis, Washington. The coordination had spared taxpayers the bill for new equipment.

Lord also made sure to mark the progress of the great budget cut campaign. Through their cuts they had saved more than $100 million, so that spending would be $3.053 billion, very close to the $3 billion target. The surplus, once ephemeral, was now more solid, at $300 million. It fell to the president to frame it all, to remind the audience of the change. This was the government’s sixth such meeting since Harding had signed the budget law; only a short time earlier, the budget law had not existed; this was “a new kind of meeting,” as Harding put it. The budget law was a success, Coolidge said. But it was only the beginning. “As for me, I am for economy,” he told the crowd. It was the wrong time to fall into extravagance. Mellon and Coolidge could congratulate themselves; the law was almost in their hands. Longworth was proving wonderfully feisty. House Democrat John Nance Garner had a proposal that emphasized tax cuts for the lower group of earners on the tax schedule. Others offered pension plans and made the case, compelling to read, that veterans should come before tax cuts. But Longworth was insisting boldly on the Mellon-Coolidge plan, and feistily. “We have you beaten,” he told the soldiers who wanted to put the bonus first.

Longworth spoke too soon. The floor leader had not realized how tough the veterans were or how determined the progressive Republicans. Some attacked the Mellon Plan. Congressman James Frear of Wisconsin took Mellon’s idea of prospectively removing the special tax status of municipal bonds and recast it so that the tax break would be denied all municipal bonds, including the billions-worth already outstanding. That, Mellon’s lawyers wrote, would be unconstitutional, retroactive confiscation. Senator James Couzens of Michigan argued that there was not enough evidence that Mellon’s dramatic plan to halve the surtax of 50 percent on the rich “would be for the good of the country as a whole.”

Mellon, stung, stung back. The Mellon Plan, he said, was not to help an individual millionaire; it was to make capital available for all. Now, feeling feisty himself, he made his first error: he went directly after the senator. His Treasury staff wrote to Couzens, “It is reported in the newspapers that all your capital is now in tax-exempt securities, and I have not seen any denial from you. This means, if it means anything, that you pay no income tax.”

That was a slip Couzens was too clever not to exploit. By referencing Couzens’s personal finances, Mellon had legitimized the discussion of all politicians’ finances, especially, of course, his own. Couzens did not squander the opportunity and assailed Mellon personally: “So long as you have entered into the record of my securities, will you please tell us what your securities are; how much you own of each and how you will benefit by the reduction of the surtaxes as proposed by you?” Mellon was working on establishing an independent appeals board so that citizens might get their tax cases heard in a fairer and more systematic fashion. Progressive lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, began preparing additional language for the tax legislation requiring their own version of transparency: that the amounts of all filers’ tax payments be put on public view at their local post office. Posting the returns of the wealthy in their communities would provide fodder for a million progressive investigations.

Democrats could write tax plans and go on the radio too, as Joseph Robinson of Arkansas, the Senate minority leader, showed with a WRC broadcast of his own critiquing the administration’s plan. Perhaps Mellon’s idea wouldn’t work, said Robinson; after all, this was theory, it could “not be demonstrated that 25 percent is the one and only rate which will diminish investment in tax-exempt securities and commercial enterprises.” He went on, “From what evidence does it appear that a maximum of 40% levied on incomes above $200,000 will not have the same effect to a greater degree?” Democrats had their own ideas about tax cuts: The Democrats preferred a surtax rate in the 40s, not the 30s or the 20s. They wanted what the papers described as an “earned income” credit applied especially favorably to farmers and small store proprietors. They wanted to repeal or reduce more of the small consumer taxes that remained. Meantime, of course, the Democrats, were working on the bonus bill, racing to vote it through before the tax law. Robinson knew how to frame ideas in the intellectual contest. The father of tax cutting was not Mellon, Robinson said, but Woodrow Wilson, now so quiet in his home in Georgetown. It was Wilson who had urged changes in the tax system back in 1920.

Very soon after this came word that Wilson had died. Calvin and Grace heard the news while in church and instantly headed over to the Wilsons’ to leave their cards. Later, they rode in the funeral procession. Wilson was buried in Washington in the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. The death reminded Coolidge that he could not forget his international duties despite the ferocity of the tax fight. The bill to restrict immigration continued to enjoy more support than his tax plan. Its details depressed him. He supported slowing immigration for a while, but remained concerned about the exclusion of Japanese people and the Japanese government’s response; it had always monitored emigration itself. Coolidge cared about the dignity of the immigration process; in January, he and Lord had, unusually, spent some extra cash when they ordered an appropriation of $300,000 to improve conditions in the detention quarters on Ellis Island, including adding new equipment for the nursery and kindergarten for detainees, electric wiring for the station, and 350 new beds to replace the flimsy wire-bottomed cots. The World Court was worth fighting for too, and in that campaign Coolidge might find allies among those who opposed the tax bills. After all, fellow politicians were always hunting for common areas with their opponents. While Mellon and Couzens were trading blows, coconuts arrived in the mail for the president: they were a gift from another progressive, William Jennings Bryan. Bryan wrote to ask if Coolidge would consider debt forgiveness for Europe. Coolidge could not agree to breach of contract. That seemed immoral. But he could agree that one partner might in a new contract agree to easier terms; that was what Mellon was doing with foreign debt when he could.

The Harding scandals were also finally closing in on him now. Democrats were alleging that Daugherty had known of a kickback scam that had benefited his late deputy, Jess Smith. Again, Coolidge was torn. Sometimes Daugherty overwhelmed him. But he was loath to unseat someone just because others were attacking him. Hoover and Hughes advised the president to ask the entire Harding cabinet to submit their resignations; then the president need only accept the ones he wanted to. “No, don’t do that,” Coolidge joked to Hughes. “It might leave me alone with Daugherty!” Hoover, the commerce secretary, thought Coolidge was too slow. “He greatly delayed the removal of Daugherty from the cabinet,” he later wrote. At the end of January, Burton Wheeler of Montana, a progressive, found a way to put Coolidge on the defensive, just as Couzens had done with Mellon: he introduced a resolution that the president had to call on Daugherty to resign. Coolidge summoned both Daugherty and Senator Borah to hash it out at the White House. As Coolidge sat in silence, Daugherty and Borah railed at each other. Meanwhile, the Democrats were on the hunt for evidence of Coolidge’s complicity in Teapot Dome. Coolidge sought out an Amherst man, New York congressman Bertrand Snell, a classmate of Harlan Stone, for advice.