Coolidge (70 page)

There was more work to do. Kellogg and Coolidge had not even yet reached the ratification stage, the spot where Wilson had faltered. “I hope it will be well with the American Senate,” a Hungarian correspondent, recalling Wilson, had joked as Kellogg had passed him in Paris. But Kellogg and Coolidge were a team now. At Union Station, Kellogg and his wife were there to greet the Coolidges when they returned to Washington for the final stretch of the treaty campaign, autumn and winter.

The other party there to greet the Coolidges at the station remained the challenge: Hoover. Coolidge’s work that fall would suppress his own demon, his discontent over Hoover. Coolidge had promised to do the minimum to support Hoover, and he did. Hoover looked sure to win now on a platform of “continuation of Coolidge policies.” Coolidge’s frustration—not one that he could do anything about—remained that voters seemed to overlook the distinctions between his style and Hoover’s. The difference even showed up in the way they ran their farms. Hoover saw his farm as a showcase for his own competence. Hoover’s farm was his ranch twenty-four miles from Bakersfield. The ranch was six times as large as Coolidge’s farm, subirrigated and electrified. Nine pumps pulled water from nine wells day and night. The Hoover farm was divided into thirty plots for ten different crops, some permanent, such as grapes and apricots, and some rotating, such as melons, peas, and cotton. Hoover spoke to his manager, Harvey Kilburn, who in turn managed a flexible workforce of between forty-five and three hundred workers, depending on the crops and seasons. For Hoover, farming was a business. For Coolidge, farming was an exercise in property rights and federalism.

Coolidge’s farm was fewer than 300 acres even now, much of it not cultivated but woodland. He tended to each detail himself and not always efficiently. October 8, 1928, for example, found him writing to the tax authorities in the town of Northampton, “I wish you would be kind enough to mail my tax bill here to me in Washington.” The tax bills in his files were simple documents: “home,” “lime kiln lot,” 10 cows worth $400 for the tax year 1927. When Coolidge wrote to local authorities, he enclosed a stamped envelope ready for return mail.

Coolidge’s thoughts ran along the same frustrating lines as they had the year before. The downturn was coming. But bad policy, especially Hoover’s spending policy, would make any downturn worse; the deficit Hoover ran might cause investors to lose confidence in the United States and gold to go to Europe. Then the recession would worsen. Yet it would be wrong to intervene. Coolidge’s anxiety was only greater because the Dow Jones stock index had risen alarmingly since he had talked with Starling the year before. Indeed, the Dow had passed the 250 mark that October. His own instinct was to turn to insurance, the trusted alternate to investment in stocks. His son John had started with the railroad, which seemed on surer footing; he hoped John could stay there. Attorney General Sargent campaigned for Hoover in New England; in a speech Sargent even presented Hoover as the best insurance that prosperity would continue. Sargent described Hoover as a “hard-working, patient, understanding, sympathetic, courteous, serious-minded Christian gentleman.”

Coolidge managed to hold his silence on the race as the election neared. But there was a commentator who made the case for Coolidge’s policy on his behalf: Will Rogers. Rogers’s way of saying that something was missing in the current presidential campaign was to turn to parody: with Coolidge absent, he announced a Rogers candidacy. Rogers told readers that he was campaigning on behalf of a group he called the Silent Majority—the name that Bruce Barton had given to describe Coolidge’s following all those years before. “I am not the ‘Greatest Administrator of All Time,’ or ‘the Greatest Executive a state ever had,’ ” wrote Rogers in
Life
. “But those other fellows want to live in the White House, and in order to get there, they will promise anything from perpetual motion to eternal salvation.” Rogers’s platform featured only one plank, minimalism: “If elected, I will resign.”

Just before the election, Coolidge’s court abandoned him. “I had the smallest cabinet meeting I think this morning on record,” he told the press on Friday, November 2. “It started with 3 members but finished with four.” When Hoover was elected, Rogers desisted, and Coolidge’s own fears seemed to be fulfilled. Hoover captured a record number of votes, 21.5 million, with Al Smith of New York taking only 15 million. The hearty Smith won Massachusetts, a kind of backhanded compliment to Coolidge: if the state could not have Coolidge, it would have no Republican at all. But New York, Smith’s own state, went for Hoover.

Coolidge’s mood darkened after the election; this time, he was unable to overcome his loss or concern about the damage of future policies. It upset him that his budget seemed to be moving into deficit. “I have been keeping in very close touch with General Lord on the question of a possible deficit,” he told the press men. His legacy might be damaged even before he left office. A second concern was the Dow Jones Average. The average had climbed impressively in one week following Hoover’s election. It had risen 50 percent since the day Coolidge had announced he would not run again, an enormous amount. A crash was coming, he knew, and the higher the market went, the worse the disruption would be. The Federal Reserve was attempting to impose a new sense of caution by raising interest rates, but the market was not responding. In Coolidge’s public statements, his entire goal was to steady the market, rather than crash it: on January 6, 1929, he would tell reporters that “the prospect for the immediate future seems to be as good as usual.” But what was “usual”? The rise of the market was beyond anything he had experienced in his working life. At the very least, there might be bank crashes. Coolidge had always prepared for such events by banking at multiple institutions. At the time of his father’s death, John, Coolidge, and Coolidge’s son John had maintained deposits, all of a hundred or a few thousand each, in more than twenty local banks, from the Springfield Savings Bank of Springfield, Vermont, to the Nonotuck Savings Bank in Northampton or the Amherst Savings Bank.

Coolidge conferred with Charles Merrill, an Amherst man who had founded a firm to serve middle-class investors on Wall Street. He agreed with Merrill that there was cause for concern. Call money, the cash investors used to borrow, was now priced at 7 or 8 percent; stocks would yield less. Either interest rates had to come down or stock prices had to fall, the pair agreed. Merrill offered Coolidge a job at $100,000, but Coolidge demurred. He knew nothing about investment banking. Merrill countered that he wanted Coolidge for another purpose: to warn against speculation, to speak out so that investors made themselves less vulnerable to a coming crash. Still, Coolidge could not see entering an area where he knew so little. There was always the danger of disrupting the market unduly by speaking out: the presidency had a megaphone effect. Merrill decided to be his own spokesman and in the coming months signaled his concern by pulling out of the market.

Other glum events crowded the autumn. Clarence Barron, upon whom the fund drive for the Clarke School depended, died suddenly while taking a cure in Battle Creek, Michigan. Barron had already raised hundreds of thousands, but his death left uncertain whether the $2 million goal of the drive would be achieved. Grace in any case was still absenting herself from the White House, either visiting her mother in Northampton or spending time with John, who was planning his marriage to Florence Trumbull. It had been so many years since Coolidge had wooed Grace in letters. Now he began to do so again. “Everything seems to be going all right at the house,” he wrote in one letter from Washington to Northampton, and let her know a fact that he thought would please her, that the White House staff had found some silver in packages that had been there since the days of the family of Franklin Pierce. He concluded with a veiled question: “I wonder if you have begun to think about coming home.” In the next letter, Coolidge tried again: “I am looking forward to having you back next week, as indicated.”

Grace and Coolidge were finally planning a holiday, on Sapelo Island off Georgia, but it was mostly the president who was doing the preparing. He tried to tempt her with travelogue: “A Mr. LaGerce came in to tell me about Sapeloe Island” (Coolidge spelled it as was common in those days, with an “e”). “The accent is on the second syllable,” he wrote her carefully. “There are all kinds of fishes down there the which I am planning to catch.” As Christmas neared, on December 20, he wrote, “My dear Grace: An opossum has just come from Georgia.” December 21: “The opossum has been sent to the zoo.” December 22: “I do not seem to have any letter from you.”

That month even the treaty itself seemed, if only momentarily, to be in jeopardy. At the Senate, Dawes reviewed the votes and expressed his concern that one faction or another might still block ratification. Borah, key as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair, was spending his energy drawing publicity on two different topics: a naval limitation agreement with Great Britain and his own correspondence with President Calles of Mexico.

Hoover was making himself felt, engineering and establishing new spending categories, starting with the dam on the Colorado River. As soon as Congress came back, it honored its new president by passing the Colorado Dam legislation, the favorite of the president-elect. Coolidge’s remaining work was to thank the numerous stakeholders in the project by signing the dam into law with their pens. Perhaps to distract himself from his irritation at having to sign, he played the politician’s game with his signature. First, Coolidge picked up one pen and wrote, “Calvin.” He picked up another and wrote, “Cool.” With yet a third, he wrote “idge,” and dotted the “i.” Two pens went to the lawmakers who had sponsored the bill, Senator Hiram Johnson and Congressman Phil Swing of California, the third to a Hearst newspaperman who had followed the story. Yet Coolidge was not entirely able to sustain his restraint. Hoover planned a trip to Latin America and let Coolidge know he required a battleship for transport. Coolidge suggested that he take a cruiser: “It would not cost so much.” Hoover did not relent. Finally Coolidge offered the battleship
Maryland
for the trip south and the
Utah
to bring Hoover home from Montevideo.

This was one of Coolidge’s final swipes at Hoover. For as the holiday season came, Coolidge did find that he was able to look past Hoover, take pleasure in his own record, and look toward the treaty and the future. Gutzon Borglum’s appropriation for Mount Rushmore would make it into law and included a role for Coolidge: the text, the law said, would be “indited by Calvin Coolidge.” This small vanity he was still ready to permit himself. On November 28, a day Hoover was in Costa Rica, Frank Stearns celebrated his birthday. Coolidge knew that Stearns had always been sensitive that Coolidge had not relied upon him as Wilson had relied upon Colonel House. Now Coolidge gave Stearns
The Intimate Papers of Colonel House
. That was Coolidge’s way of saying that Stearns’s friendship had meant just as much to the thirtieth president as Colonel House’s friendship had to the twenty-eighth. In December 1928, Coolidge might have been expected to cease his meetings with Lord; the Coolidges had many plans that month, including the trip to Sapelo Island. Yet Coolidge met with General Lord five times. Though the new tax law was not perfect scientific taxation, the rate cuts had not hurt revenue after all. “The yield from corporation taxes increased in marked degree,”
The New York Times
noted. Coolidge and Mellon both wondered whether that was because interest rates had swung too low, but now the Federal Reserve branches were raising them. Then stock prices might come down. But even more important than the outcome was that the market be allowed to set the prices.

When Coolidge and Grace returned from their winter holiday, their mood was better, and Coolidge could see that popular opinion was likely to suppress any great opposition to ratification. At the State Department, some five hundred letters a day were flowing in, nearly all favoring the treaty. There was also personal good news coming to the Coolidges: the Clarke School Fund, thanks in good measure to Clarence Barron, was approaching $2 million. Their son, John, was working out the details of his life with Florence Trumbull. Dwight Morrow was himself thinking of running for office. In various ways, much of Coolidge’s work might continue.

In January 1929, Coolidge and Lord arranged their own farewell party: the final budget meeting in Memorial Hall. To commemorate the work of cutting, they added something new to the ritual: a radio hookup so that the entire country could hear their budget meeting, the sixteenth, and know what he had been doing all these years. The budget success was owed not to a man but to a law, the Budget Act of 1921, Coolidge and Lord emphasized. “The results of economy which have meant so much to our own country and indirectly to the world, would not have been successful without the bureau of the budget,” Coolidge said. This budget session was Lord’s swan song, and he intended to sing it: his theme was how his hard work with the president saved the country from Congress’s spending folly. “The pruning knife fell here and there and everywhere in the grim fight for a balanced budget. Proposed expenditures of doubtful immediate necessity went under the guillotine. As a result of this drastic action and an improvement in the revenue outlook, the budget for 1930 as submitted to Congress showed a possible surplus for the current year of $36,990,192.” But, Lord went on, “while the flush of victory still mantled our cheeks unexpected and unheralded demands rudely wiped out our $37 million surplus and put in its place an apparent deficit of about the same amount.” A deficit of that amount infuriated Coolidge and Lord, but not most others, to whom it seemed trivial. What mattered was that Coolidge and Lord were leaving the federal government smaller than they had found it.

Coolidge had prevailed through the sieges after all. Neither his wife nor his son, John, had forgiven him entirely; Grace’s trips to Northampton and John’s distance told him that. But he might win them back yet after the presidency. He could hope because he had already managed to reconcile with Vermont.