Coolidge (50 page)

Something else rang an alarm: strange streaks ran up the boy’s leg, a sign of blood poisoning, infection. Boone telephoned Coupal, the senior physician for the White House. That night, Dawes went to the White House. He himself was still neck deep in negotiations with Europe and planned to leave that night for New York to see Dwight Morrow and Owen Young, both of whom were also involved in the German talks. The dinner should have been a celebration for the conclusion of the Dawes plan, but the president seemed, to Dawes, preoccupied. As Dawes walked out of the White House, he passed an open door. Calvin, Jr., was in bed with his illness, and the president was bending over him, a look of great pain on his face. Dawes, who had lost his own son, suddenly felt closer to Coolidge; Calvin’s illness must not be an ordinary one. Others in Washington were now getting the word that Calvin had fallen sick so fast. It was as if “the boy had been bitten by a poisonous snake,” Chief Justice Taft wrote to his wife.

Calvin’s fever mounted. Boone and Coupal, overwhelmed, summoned other doctors, including a distinguished name from Temple University in Philadelphia, John Kolmer. Blood tests confirmed that the boy had an infection. Colonel Keller from Walter Reed and the other doctors conferred in the long corridor on the second floor; perhaps it was appendicitis.

Calvin’s illness had all their attention now. It did not matter to them that in New York the Democrats’ division—they passed fifty ballots, and then sixty—was playing out to the Republicans’ advantage. Perhaps the desperate Democrats should just give up and nominate Coolidge, Will Rogers joked in a column. With each day of distance from the difficult congressional session, it was becoming clearer that Coolidge’s popularity with voters was powerful enough to offset the schemes of lawmakers of either party. Sometimes Coolidge pretended to conduct official business, meeting with the new secretary of the navy. But he could not sit still long and afterward paced around the White House grounds.

The work from the navy laboratories came back: the infection was
Staphylococcus aureus
, which was bad but not as lethal as streptococcus. Coolidge had planned a lunch with Wallace McCamant of Washington State, a kind of thank-you; he had come so far from the day when McCamant had put his name to the crowd at Chicago. But at the lunch, Coolidge was distracted. His father had not come after all, and now Coolidge wrote him a letter, falling back into their old simple way of talking. “Calvin is very sick so this is not a happy day for me. He blistered his toe and infection got into his blood. The toe looks all right but the poison spread all over his system.” Calvin had had “all that medical science can give” but that science had not seemed to get them very far. Coolidge could not concentrate; he remembered that his son liked animals, so he went out on the grounds and captured a small brown rabbit to show the boy in the sickroom. A smile flickered on the boy’s face. In Cleveland, La Follette made the formal announcement of his run, but the Coolidges scarcely noticed. The stretcher came to remove the boy to Walter Reed. The physicians tested everywhere and found the same thing: staph. Dr. Deaver of Walter Reed chiseled at some of the bone in Calvin’s leg to take cultures of it. Staph yet again. At 1:49
P.M.
on July 5, Miss Randolph, Grace’s secretary, sent Grace’s friend Therese Hills a disquieting update:
CALVIN STILL CRITICALLY ILL EVERYTHING POSSIBLE BEING DONE BEST SPECIALISTS CONSTANTLY IN CONSULTATION IT IS HOPED THAT HIS POWERS OF RESISTANCE WILL CARRY HIM THROUGH WILL KEEP YOU ADVISED
.

The next day, July 6, found the rowdy Democratic convention nearing collapse. On July 7, after the eighty-first ballot, the contentious party had still not come to a candidate. The leadership took the extraordinary step of releasing delegates from their commitments to see if the vote would fall differently. Even that did not suffice to calm the room. Around lunchtime, a flag that reached from the bandstand caught fire, with policemen and firemen adding to the sense of chaos. The Democrats, many of whom had stayed up several nights straight, were becoming punch-drunk; in between the discussions over whether to choose Al Smith or John Davis, there was rampant speculation that Senator Walsh was engaged to the social activist Florence Harriman.

At Walter Reed, Calvin, Jr., faded into and out of consciousness. John had been brought over for a visit; the White House staff noted the shock on his face at his younger brother’s state when he returned.
CALVINS CONDITION STILL CRITICAL HE IS MAKING A WONDERFUL FIGHT PRESIDENT AND MRS COOLIDGE HOLDING OUT WELL
, the telegram that day from Miss Randolph read. At points Calvin imagined that he was leading a battle and suddenly shouted, “We surrender!” Then he ordered the nurses, “Say it too. Say you surrender.” “Never surrender,” Joel Boone told Calvin, but he and Kolmer were becoming increasingly desperate. On the evening of July 7, Kolmer told the Coolidges that their son was fading. Both parents sat by Calvin’s bed; the president held his mother’s locket in Calvin’s hand to let the boy know he would be joining his grandmother. Twice, when Coolidge let go, Calvin dropped it. At one point the medics decided to give Calvin oxygen; the wrong valve on the tank was opened by mistake; the tank exploded and some part of the apparatus hit Dr. Boone on his chest.

The Democratic convention was still on the radio. Colonel Coolidge listened from his special hookup in Vermont. At 10:50 that Monday night in New York, after the eighty-fourth ballot failed to produce a candidate, Chairman Walsh suddenly surprised the crowd in Madison Square Garden by calling for a pause. Something near silence filled the Garden. Then Walsh spoke into the microphone, just a few words, which Colonel Coolidge also heard. A low moan lasting many seconds filled the hall as the crowd responded to what Walsh had said. The sound of the grief as it traveled around the room, a
New York Times
writer noted, suggested the “nearness of the White House to every American home and the solicitous regard in which all people hold their president.” A country exhausted by politics suddenly saw the presidency, and Coolidge, in a new light. Wrote the newspaper: “Their sorrows are his, as he frequently testifies, but in an especial sense his grief is also theirs.”

All knew what came next. At the White House, the staff would ready the rooms for the funeral. The flower wagons would roll on the streets. The chimes of Epiphany Church would ring. The paperboys would call out “Extra!” The special train would leave Washington with its sorrowful cargo. The letters would pour in. Now the president was like Lincoln indeed, and in a way not even the speechwriters could have scripted. Calvin was gone.

Eleven
: The Siege and the Spruce

Washington, D.C.

WHAT JUMPED OUT WAS
the number. It was $1,841,759,316.80, the total income tax revenues for the fiscal year that had ended in June. The number was too high. The year before, revenues had been $1,691,089,534.56. Nor was this the only leap. Several of the documents that were passing across his desk suggested that revenues would be higher than expected. Why? Numbers always drew Coolidge, and figuring out such a puzzle would distract him for hours.

Distract him, that was, if anything could. For if he even chanced to look up, to glance out a White House window, he would see it there, between the tennis court and the fountain: the spruce from the old limekiln lot. The tree was five feet tall, shorter in fact than Calvin had been when he died, but about the size they remembered the boy as being. On their last day in Plymouth that summer, Grace, John, Coolidge’s father, and the Secret Service man Jim Haley had gone down together to the lot with a shovel to select it. Grace and the others had wrapped the spruce’s roots carefully in burlap, sprinkling in extra dirt to protect them. Grace was planning to order an inscription on a bronze plaque for the spruce, in Calvin’s memory. If the spruce survived. For a Vermont spruce, Washington was strange soil.

“When I look out that window I always see my boy playing tennis out there,” the president told Richard Scandrett, Dwight Morrow’s brother-in-law.

Coolidge knew he had changed since Calvin’s death. In darker moments, he told himself that the presidency had caused the event. Working backward, he reverted to a logic as rigid as that of the preacher Jonathan Edwards. Had Coolidge not been president, Calvin would not have played tennis on the court outside. Had Calvin not played tennis, there would have been no blister. Had there been no blister, Calvin would not have died.

The process of politics held less interest for him now. But when it came to completing the work that Harding and he had begun, Coolidge found, he was more determined than before. Lincoln had not given up when his son had passed away; indeed, it had been after Willie’s death that he had made the decisive move that had won the Civil War, replacing the ineffectual General McClellan and eventually settling on General Grant to lead his armies. Coolidge would not give up until he completed his own campaigns: the campaign to push the government back—back from spiritual life, back from commerce, back from new sectors in the economy—and find prosperity and peace. Protecting the space that faith enjoyed in American culture, the realm of the spiritual, seemed to him especially important. In those early days after Calvin’s death he had refused many appointments, but had agreed to talk to a group of Boy Scouts in a telephone hookup. “It is hard to see how a great man can be an atheist,” Coolidge had told the boys. “We need to feel that behind us is intelligence and love.” Now he was preparing a speech for the dedication of a statue of a Methodist bishop, Francis Asbury. In that speech he wanted to make clear his conviction that government’s power, since the days of Jonathan Edwards, had derived from religion, and not the other way around.

When it came to legislation, Coolidge again rejected the scattershot approach to lawmaking and aimed for a single goal: tax reform. These revenue figures, the high numbers, suggested that Mellon might be correct in his hypothesis. Cutting rates brought more revenue. So cutting rates even more might bring yet more cash. He determined to be audacious and seek a more dramatic reduction than even what they had put forward in the spring with the Mellon Plan. The sacrifice of Calvin’s life could be offset only if something great, something that went farther than Harding or he had hoped to go in the past, was gained.

Tax reform demanded a true campaign, requiring not one but a string of victories: a surplus; a victory at the polls that November 1924; the wooing of Congress; exquisite management of the moody Senate by a new vice president, Charles Dawes, if they won; and more careful footwork by the men at the Treasury. To get Mellon his law, Coolidge needed to personally bank even more goodwill by sustaining his campaign against waste, mounting a siege of saving that would prove his administration was now virtuous enough to topple the opposition. If passage of such a tax law was possible at all, it might come, because of the oddities of budgeting and the congressional calendar, only as far ahead as 1926. That did not matter, nor did the preceding spring’s tax defeats. When one spruce failed, Coolidge thought, you did not give up. You planted again, until the roots took hold.

At first both Coolidges’ grief had been so great that they had not thought at all. The death of Calvin had seemed to them like the death of everything. When Coolidge had ordered a headstone for Calvin he ordered others for himself, Grace, and their son John. At Plymouth Notch, at the cemetery down the road, Grace had placed the boy’s Bible on his casket to be buried with the boy in the little cemetery, near Calvin Galusha; Coolidge’s mother, Victoria; and his sister, Abbie. The death of Calvin seemed to them all like the death of their family. Coolidge took John to the house to mark his height on the porch. Next to the mark, he wrote, “J.C., 1924.” Then he asked John how tall Calvin had been. They guessed together where Calvin’s new line should be. “C.C., 1924,” Coolidge wrote. And then added, “if he had lived.”

In Plymouth Notch, Grace put up an old windmill that Calvin had built and painted. Coolidge wandered around inspecting his maple trees. They decided that this time their mourning color would be white. Grace donned white dresses for the bereavement period; Coolidge and John wore summer white trousers. All of them fixed their sights not on the next presidential term but beyond it. That August, the Forbes Library in Northampton let it be known that the president had just given the library a stack of family photographs from Plymouth, the beginnings of the presidential collection that would be housed there.

In the restlessness of mourning, the Coolidges that summer had moved from Washington to Northampton to Plymouth, then back to Washington and to Plymouth again. The prospect of plunging into a political campaign seemed impossible, yet even in August Coolidge had known he did not want to give up the chance to run again. The Republican Party had been growing restless too; grief or no, the election was less than a hundred days away. It needed Coolidge to come out of mourning. The agonized Democrats in New York had in the end passed over McAdoo and selected John Davis as their candidate; Davis was reasonable enough, conservative enough to pull away votes from Coolidge. Senator Bob La Follette had been launched as a third-party candidate after his own tumultuous convention in Cleveland. Together, the Progressives and Democrats could still beat the Grand Old Party. The Democrats might win with a plurality as Wilson had in 1912.

One reason the scenario was possible was farms. Farming still employed a quarter of the population. Easterners’ tariffs and the deflation that had been caused by bankers such as W. P. G. Harding at the Federal Reserve made farmers’ existence tough. The farmers could not afford the prices of everyday goods when their corn or wheat sold for far less than it once had; mortgages they had taken when expansion seemed possible now proved fatal, and many were losing their farms. The farmers were caught in “economic thumbscrews,” as La Follette would put it. La Follette had been born in a log cabin in Primrose, Wisconsin; his campaign would be that of the farm against the big city and big money. Intellectuals were joining the farmers behind La Follette. One was Felix Frankfurter at Harvard, who deplored, especially, the ejection of Meiklejohn from Amherst, with which Coolidge was associated. “Coolidge and Davis have nothing to offer in 1924; they have no dreams,” wrote Frankfurter to the journalist Walter Lippmann. At least, Frankfurter thought, those behind La Follette were “struggling and groping for a dream.” In the Midwest, many Republicans took the Coolidge candidacy as the signal that they must leave the party: Harold Ickes, a utilities reformer from Chicago, felt “inexpressible disgust” at Coolidge and signed up as La Follette’s Midwest campaign manager. Those Republicans, like La Follette himself, presented progressive Wisconsin as a model for the country, an example when it came to taxation or even education.