Coolidge (72 page)

The Coolidges were bent on shutting out such details, and on leaving them behind. From the moment they boarded the train at Union Station, they could feel the pleasure of abandoning their roles as public figures, leaving behind that coat and tails, those formal dresses they had donned back when they arrived in March 1923. The Coolidges’ relief at their changed status was so obvious that it lent itself to a cartoon:
The New Yorker
published a drawing of two middle-aged people walking across the snow toward the steps of the Massasoit Street house. As Grace said, their old house was like an old jacket, a relief after the constraints of Washington—“It fits us like a comfortable well-worn garment which has adjusted itself to our peculiarities.”

Still, as much as he wished, Coolidge could not be deaf to the emanations from the capital city. And the fact remained that the course of the Coolidge retirement was not certain. Coolidge’s health was proving uneven—he coughed or sneezed and had more trouble breathing than he expected, even when he rested. He tired even on days when he did little. His voice was weak. The only other living ex-president was William Howard Taft, now at the Supreme Court, and Taft was also not well. Coolidge felt lucky to have survived that killer, the presidency. Still, others noted he had no great plans. Will Rogers noted that Coolidge seemed underemployed and made a simple suggestion: “Put Cal to Work.”

But what work? The most obvious job for Coolidge, the presidency of Amherst College, had recently been taken. Coolidge wanted to write, but it was not clear that his writings would be welcome. In the last days at the White House, Coolidge had received a letter from his old acquaintance Bruce Barton. Barton had made a suggestion in regard to the period after the presidency. “I should like to express the hope you will not write too much,” he said. Barton told Coolidge that a bit of restraint on the part of former presidents served the office of the presidency best.

In Northampton, the Coolidges encountered small troubles. They might have liked to pull on the old well-worn garment Grace had described. But that garment, like their little house, no longer fitted. The crowds that appeared in the first days did not abate; dozens or even hundreds of people passed by their house when Coolidge sat on the porch. He had pulled himself out of Garman’s river of life and wanted to watch it flow by, but even in Northampton, people would not let him. Coolidge thought he might divert the callers by keeping office hours on Main Street. There the sign invited visitors: “Coolidge and Hemenway, Law Office: Walk In.” Yet the reporters persisted, ignoring protocol and knocking on the door at Massasoit Street on a Sunday.

The assignments Coolidge did take struck others by their modesty. He had sent a clear signal to Wall Street that he would not serve there: he expected a crash, as he had grumbled to Starling on their White House walks, and also knew he would not like the policy changes that followed a crash, either. Coolidge simply was not sure that the federal government ought to regulate financial markets, or that ex-presidents should work in finance. “I have considerable doubt as to whether the national government can interpose to make it so,” he had told the press pool once. After a while, Wall Street had heeded him: Coolidge held no Wall Street job.

The inventor of the flashlight, Conrad Hubert, had died in 1928 and had asked in his will that three-quarters of his fortune be given away by a committee made up of a Catholic, a Protestant, and a Jew. Governor Al Smith was selected as the Catholic; Julius Rosenwald, the founder of Sears, who also sat on a Mount Rushmore board, as the Jew; and Coolidge as the Protestant. The men would give away $4 million to start with and more later. They made the biggest bequests to the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, and hospitals of varying denominations. In addition, Coolidge joined the board of New York Life Insurance Company, a company with which he had had his own policy for thirty-seven years. He liked everything about the board, even the idiosyncrasies of the compensation structure: a gold piece for each board trip and two nights’ stay at the Vanderbilt Hotel on Park Avenue. But insurance seemed small beans for a former president. “It’s really kinder hard to tell just what he is supposed to do,” acknowledged Rogers in another column.

To be sure, there were many pleasant distractions that first year. John had predicted in a letter to Grace that life in Northampton would bring them all together: “I’ll be so glad when you and father get back home. Then everything will seem natural again.” And it was true. When the Coolidges stepped off the train, Grace later recalled, they realized that the office of the presidency was what had separated them. He was no longer “the President,” as she had referred to him so often. He was suddenly Calvin again. And his being Calvin made her Grace. “As we turned and reentered the car I suddenly realized that I had come back to myself,” she wrote later. The double harness of public office, which they had worn so long, from the first year of their marriage, was finally lifting off, as if by magic.

The Coolidges came together also through the pleasure of seeing their young people move forward. Dwight Morrow’s daughter, Anne, married Charles Lindbergh. Florence Trumbull was planning her wedding with John; in a relaxed moment Florence remarked, good-naturedly, that when it came to the wedding date, “Lindy may beat us to it.” Lindy did beat Florence and John to their wedding, marrying in May. But by September, it was time for the Coolidge-Trumbull wedding in Plainfield, Connecticut. Six airplanes decorated the cake, which suited the mood of hope and, especially, the pilot father of the bride, Governor Trumbull. John had always enjoyed the mechanical, and the wedding was filmed with sound, a talkie. That was too much even for radio-friendly Coolidge, who, when he found a mike in the rug near him, ordered it taken away. John’s best man was Stephen Brown, the friend with whom his father had sent him off to Amherst. Coolidge’s doctor, Stephen’s father, was there. Kenneth Welles, the minister from the Edwards Church who had confirmed John and Calvin, Jr., officiated.

Like Calvin and Grace before them, John and Florence started humbly: the rent on their New Haven apartment, the papers reported, was $78 a month, double the now-legendary $32 the Coolidges had paid for the Massasoit Street house, but still modest. Reporters were after Coolidge to know what the Coolidges’ gift to their son would be. Coolidge quipped, “I do not choose to say.” Grace gave her son and Florence a colonial furniture set for their bedroom. Coolidge gave a generous check to the young couple—an amount, the papers reported, in four figures.

But soon after the wedding the cloud of concern returned. Perhaps Coolidge’s tight-lipped presence in the White House had tamed the markets. Since Coolidge had issued his “I do not choose” statement, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had gone wild, rising from around 180 to, currently, over 360. Now, around the time of John’s wedding, came the first great crash. Coolidge issued no public statement. A president’s words—even those of a president in retirement—had a megaphone effect. In the case of his own savings, Coolidge moved to hedge. He purchased shares in Standard Brands, a new company consolidating retail companies such as Fleischmann’s Yeast and Chase & Sanborn, the coffee and tea company. Morrow’s old firm, J. P. Morgan, brought Coolidge in on the initial public offering. Both investment houses and the
Wall Street Journal
editors had long deemed retail food companies “depression-proof.” Food was something people had to buy, the reasoning went. Going long on yeast, a food product used to make beer, was a mischievous way to bet that Prohibition might not always hold.

The little joke soured as the market sank. In November 1929, the Dow dropped below 200, the level at which 1928 had started. Charles Merrill had been correct. There would indeed be a deficit shortly. Coolidge might have predicted Hoover’s reaction to the crash; the president followed the prescriptions he had made as far back as the great labor conference of the early 1920s, from which Coolidge had been absent. Hoover was exhorting businesses to keep wages high so that workers could spend their money and keep the economy going. This was different from past policies. This idea—high wages in a downturn—came straight out of the newer texts but not Coolidge’s. Coolidge believed that for markets to find their level, businesses had to choose their own wages and prices. Yet worse than any specific action Hoover took was the general alarm that Hoover struck, so different from the calming policy of Coolidge, Harding, or Mellon. “The cure for such storms is action,” Hoover told the country in a speech on December 5. These new policies were strange to Coolidge, and his old friends were not there to defend the old ways: not Harding, of course; not the senior senator Philander Knox; not Clarence Barron; not Taft, who would die late that winter.

That fall brought other bad news. After her long illness, Mrs. Goodhue died. The week she was buried in Burlington also brought a large dip in the Dow. General Lord had left office to try to capture a small share of the boom after years of earning an army salary, but his career shift had not come at a propitious time. An unexpected professional challenge arose, this time involving Coolidge’s most promising assignment: the short history to be engraved on the granite at Rushmore. Coolidge and Borglum had now been corresponding about the inditing of the entablature, or granite wall, for years. The letters, Borglum was promising, might be read miles away and would last for millennia. While Coolidge worked, Borglum delivered first-class publicity, dropping tidbits of information here and there to keep the country interested. Borglum let it be known, for example, that Coolidge in his inditing would touch on only eight events: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution’s framing, the Louisiana Purchase, the admission of Texas to the union, the Oregon boundary settlement, the admission of California to the union, the Civil War’s end, and the completion of the Panama Canal, a choice that ought to have rung alarms for its Roosevelt-style emphasis on the frontier. Not all names would appear, perhaps not even Lincoln’s, but Coolidge would be listed as the author. Gratifyingly, Borglum announced the first lines would be ready on July 4, 1930, Coolidge’s birthday.

Such a task represented an opportunity for precision Coolidge relished. Here, Coolidge determined, he might have to forgo plain language for the sake of accuracy. If qualifications, commas, dashes, or other punctuation marks were necessary to get closer to the true meaning of a document, he would use them. The ambiguities of documents he would treat, such as the Declaration of Independence, commanded precious respect. At one point the Declaration’s text suggested that the document’s authority inhered in the states (“we, therefore, the representatives of the united States of America . . .”). But at another point, in the same sentence, the Declaration was put forward as emanating from citizens (“and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies”). So in writing about the Declaration, Coolidge might carefully skip the question of authority and describe the document as “the Declaration of Independence—the eternal right to seek happiness through self government.” Coolidge penned his drafts carefully, intent on delivering language of legal precision, and shipped his words to Borglum.

Then came the shock. The papers were reporting that Coolidge’s text was wrong. The text as printed described the people of the United States as declaring independence, when, some scholars argued, it had been the states that had done so. The second shock, of greater magnitude, came next: the language in the newspaper, attributed to him, was not the language that Coolidge had sent. Coolidge had indeed written, “The Declaration of Independence—the eternal right to happiness through self-government and the divine duty to defend that right at any sacrifice.” Borglum had made the text read, “In the year of our Lord 1776 the people declared the eternal right to seek happiness—self-government—and the divine duty to defend that right at any sacrifice.” Borglum’s prose was clearer. But Borglum had committed the ultimate act of hubris. He had edited a former president, and one renowned for his craftsmanship at that.

Here was the sort of story of which newsmen only dreamed. “Borglum Shows Coolidge How,” crowed one paper. “Every newspaper reporter in the land, smarting from the discipline of unfeeling copy desks, will sympathize with the man who didn’t choose,” cackled the editors of
The Plain Dealer
in Cleveland. And every detail of Mount Rushmore—the task assigned Coolidge, the behavior of Borglum—was now rehearsed in the papers. Across the nation editors printed both versions, line for line, so that readers might compare and judge for themselves. Coolidge had written in his legalistic way, just as he had been thinking. There had been no mention in the Coolidge version of the people writing the Declaration. Coolidge, hyperaware of scholarly debate, had carefully omitted naming “the people” as authors. Borglum had rewritten, mentioning the people, and had also committed another offense: He had rendered Coolidge vulnerable to allegations that the former president and governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was a sloppy constitutionalist.

Borglum, true to form, ignored the silence from Massachusetts and began chiseling the edited Coolidge words into stone. The politicians of South Dakota, chagrined at the result of such a long courtship, tried to make amends: Representative William Williamson told the Associated Press that Coolidge might write a version that Borglum could not edit. But the silent back of New England was now already turned for good. Borglum would proceed, but it would be without the thirtieth president.

Spring came, and the outlook failed to brighten. Though the Dow Jones Industrial Average was recouping some of its losses, the depression-proof stock to which J. P. Morgan had tipped Coolidge off was struggling; in April 1930, Coolidge sold his shares of Standard Brands, taking a $21,570 loss. One might have blamed some features of the downturn on Coolidge’s own administration. Some commentators, including W. C. Durant, the founder of General Motors, accused Mellon of pushing the Fed into making interest rate increases, alleging they in turn caused the crash. Others argued that the Federal Reserve had been too easy. As
The Wall Street Journal
put it, “the board’s fault was in leaning backwards in its desire not to penalize business by high commercial money rates.” Yet other critics were warning that the Grand Old Party’s pro-tariff policy had hurt the world economy and then the United States’ own. Yet the Republicans, led by Senator Reed Smoot of Utah and Representative Willis Hawley of Oregon, were already in the midst of passing yet another tariff. A sugar tariff rate increase was included in the levy; there was even an increase in the tariff on maple syrup, aimed at advantaging New England and Coolidge’s own Vermont over Canada. That year Coolidge’s own former secretary, Everett Sanders, lobbied against protection on behalf of the Canadian maple syrup producers. Mexico and Cuba likewise were expressing distress at the tariff. “Observers say President Hoover committed a fatal mistake in signing the tariff measure, and it is further asserted that the tariff law may go far to undo here the great work of reconciliation effected by Ambassador Morrow,” reported
The New York Times
on June 21, 1930, from Mexico City.