Coolidge (77 page)

Most of what has been written about Coolidge has, of course, been devoted to his years as president. In
The Tormented President: Calvin Coolidge, Death, and Clinical Depression
Robert Gilbert offers an idiosyncratic but compelling account of Coolidge’s presidency. Scholars will find Arthur Fleser’s excellent study of Coolidge’s speeches,
A Rhetorical Study of the Speaking of Calvin Coolidge
, of interest. John L. Blair’s essay, “A Time for Parting: The Negro During the Coolidge Years,” published in the December 1962 issue of
Journal of American Studies
, is one of the few pieces of scholarship devoted to the Coolidge administration’s relationship with the African-American community. Jerry Wallace’s
Calvin Coolidge: Our First Radio President
describes a side of Coolidge few biographers address: his early adoption of technology. Wallace’s insightful account of Coolidge’s trips to Kansas City illuminates the complex issue of veterans’ conditions and demands in the interwar period. Those particularly interested in the question of the veterans’ bonus should read “War, Taxes, and Income Redistribution in the Twenties: The 1924 Veterans’ Bonus and the Defeat of the Mellon Plan” by Anne Alstott and Benjamin Novick (Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 109). Although not devoted to Coolidge in particular, John M. Barry’s
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
is an important account of that natural disaster and Coolidge’s reaction to it.
“The Troubled Roar of the Waters”: Vermont in Flood and Recovery, 1927–1931
, by Deborah Pickman Clifford and Nicholas Clifford is a lucid history of the Vermont flood of 1927, a disaster that struck Coolidge’s native state during his presidency. Readers looking for economic data from the Coolidge years should look to
The Historical Statistics of the United States
, which is available in several editions.
The First Measured Century
,
by Theodore Caplow, Louis Hicks, and Ben Wattenberg, is less detailed but also useful.

My friend David Pietrusza has brought Coolidge back to life with his volumes about the president; concurrent to this book will be published a documentary biography of the president by Pietrusza. Donald McCoy’s
Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President
, published in 1967, offers a strong narrative of Coolidge’s life. Among the bibliographies, McCoy’s is the strongest. William Allen White published two biographies of Coolidge:
Calvin Coolidge: The Man Who Is President
in 1925 and a longer work titled
A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge
in 1938. Though the latter volume is very well written and engaging, it is in places unreliable. Two complete biographies of Coolidge published more recently,
Coolidge: An American Enigma
by Robert Sobel and
Calvin Coolidge
by David Greenberg, are also both fine works.
Coolidge
, one of Sobel’s last volumes, was where many encountered the president’s economic side first. It is regrettable that Sobel, a master of that quirky subgenre, the economic biography, did not live on to enjoy the appreciation that greeted this telling volume.

No study of Coolidge would be complete without a review of the writings about his wife, one of the greatest first ladies, Grace Goodhue Coolidge. Her autobiography, edited by Lawrence Wikander and Robert Ferrell, offers perhaps our best window into Coolidge as a husband and father. Grace’s own life story is compelling, and her autobiography tells it well. Ishbel Ross’s
Grace Coolidge and Her Era
and Cynthia Bittinger’s
Grace Coolidge: Sudden Star
are the two most authoritative biographies of the first lady. Robert H. Ferrell’s
Grace Coolidge: The People’s Lady in Silent Cal’s White House
is also a useful source. Ferrell’s work generally is impeccable.

There are also a number of excellent biographies of Coolidge’s friends and associates. Harold Nicolson’s biography of Dwight Morrow, Alpheus Thomas Mason’s biography of Harlan Fiske Stone, and Merlo J. Pusey’s biography of Charles Evans Hughes are particularly useful in their description of that period as a whole. Robert K. Murray’s
The Harding Era: Warren G. Harding and His Administration
is thus far the best volume on Harding’s presidency, but Jim Grant’s forthcoming book promises to usurp that title. George Nash’s monumental multivolume biography of Herbert Hoover, Coolidge’s commerce secretary and successor as president, titled
The Life of Herbert Hoover
, is essential reading for those seeking to understand Coolidge’s cabinet and the Republican Party of that period.
The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover
, particularly the sections devoted to his years in the cabinet, is also of interest. Researchers will find important material from that period of Hoover’s life both at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, and at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Secrets of the White House
, published in 1927 and written by Elizabeth Jaffray, who had been the White House housekeeper since the Taft era, is an unusual but wonderful volume, a rare bottom-up view of the White House household.

The worst consequence of Coolidge’s ambivalence in regard to his legacy is that many Coolidge papers are simply missing, especially correspondence with fellow cabinet members, family letters that came to him, or, for example, notes of employees at key moments in government. Coolidge’s secretary, Edward Clark, reported that Coolidge caused material to be destroyed. In a letter, Clark wrote, “Mr. Coolidge’s desire was to destroy everything in the so-called personal files and there would have been nothing preserved if I had not taken some things out on my responsibility.” His wife, Grace, also told an archivist at the Library of Congress that Coolidge had had many of his White House papers destroyed. Julie Bartlett Nelson, an archivist at the Forbes Library, estimates that those losses, though large, may not have been intentional. My own conclusion, having hunted for Coolidge documents over the years, is that Franklin Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Congress displayed some wisdom when they envisioned the central repositories that are today’s presidential libraries. Government-funded libraries can provide great value, even for those suspicious generally of government funding. The George W. Bush Center, where I work, will house a federally funded presidential library supported by the National Archives in a spectacular building worthy of Judge Forbes and funded by private donors. The Center, like the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library and the George Bush Library and Museum at Texas A&M, proves that public and private can upon occasion work marvelously together.

But knowledge nowadays also comes by other means, some of which Coolidge, a great student of serendipitous innovation, would have much appreciated. As this book was being written, an increasing number of primary sources became easily accessible online. Searchable archives of newspapers and magazines online allow us to read history written as it happened. Where once a researcher encountered four primary sources for a document, now he encounters hundreds. The online archives of
The New York Times
,
The Washington Post
,
The Boston Globe
,
The Wall Street Journal
, and
Time
are therefore invaluable. Online archives of regional papers such as the
Springfield Republican
and
Hampshire Gazette
, although often more difficult to use, are no less important. Other resources, such as Ancestry.com, which are in part user-generated, provide insights impossible to find elsewhere. Families have kindly shared what small information they have in the hunt for Oliver Coolidge. Some readers have supplied information by sending it to SilentCal.com, a website that was funded generously by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Wonderful start-ups such as Kai Verborg’s quirky Coolidge Blog (http://kaiology.wordpress.com) also supply insights into Coolidge. It is somehow not surprising that Coolidge’s most faithful blogger lives outside the United States.

On the website of the Internet Archive (www.archive.org), an independent nonprofit digital library, readers will find videos of Coolidge that were not available just five years ago. On the website of the Library of Congress, one can browse through hundreds of photographs once available only to those who journeyed to Washington. In this uncoordinated fashion, driven by numerous institutions and guided by many hands, Coolidge finds his own way back to us.

Notes

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use your ebook reader’s search tools.

Introduction: The Curse

    1   To no one had this: Details of Oliver Coolidge’s time in Woodstock Common Jail, as well as his correspondence, are in the Oliver Coolidge papers within the Coolidge Family Papers at the Vermont Historical Society in Barre, Vt.

    1   “your promis that you would”: Letter from Oliver Coolidge to Calvin Coolidge, April 29, 1849, Document 215, Folder 10, “Coolidge, Calvin G., Correspondence, 1845–1849,” Coolidge Family Papers, Vermont Historical Society, Barre, Vt. The full sentence in this letter reads, “If you know also that being involved lest I should be destitute of a home for myself & family I deeded you my farm and had your promis that you would redeed at any time when I wished by having pay for what I owed you this promis was made by both you and your wife.” The lengthy letter goes on for pages. It continues, “Calvin, who has led you estray [astray] I have been told by mummy that it is your wife if that is the case I fear you will both fall into the ditch together for we read if the blind lead the blind that will both fall together. There is one thing I will mention hear [here] that I long to say respecting your not letting me have the farm again after you had settled with me you said the reason you did not deed back the farm you wanted to keep it in the family you have got it in your family and there for it appears as if it has been a curse to the family.”

    2   “no more courts, nor collectors”: Marion L. Starkey,
A Little Rebellion
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), 15.

    2   That year spring: Spring came late in 1849, as documented on p. 9 of the 1853 appendix to Zadock Thompson,
History of Vermont: Natural, Civil and Statistical
(Burlington, Vt.: Zadock Thompson, 1853).

    3   “my health is not good”: Oliver Coolidge to Sally Billings, May 10, 1849, Oliver Coolidge Papers, Coolidge Family Papers, Vermont Historical Society, Barre, Vt.

    3   “But if still”: The poem of Oliver Coolidge, stored in the Coolidge Family Papers, Vermont Historical Society, Barre, is written in the idiosyncratic spelling of the period (“an”) and labeled by the author: “April the 28th 1849, Composed & written in woodstock jail by Oliver Coolidge for his brother Calvin.”

    4   Angry veterans roamed: The cost of living in Massachusetts increased by 99 percent between 1910 and 1920, according to the Massachusetts Commission on the Necessaries of Life, cited in
Report of the Special Commission on Teachers’ Salaries, State of Massachusetts
(Boston: Wright & Potter, 1920), 23.

    5   “Nothing in this world”: Although often attributed to Coolidge, that quotation appeared as early as 1910 in the
Locomotive Engineers Journal
, attributed to “anonymous.” “Pearls of Wisdom from Many Lips,”
Locomotive Engineers’ Monthly Journal
44, no. 12 (December 1910): 1030.

    5   The others told Calvin, Jr.: Calvin, Jr.’s, response in the tobacco field to the young men who told him they would quit if their father became president is quoted in various places and with slight variations. “You would if your father were my father” is how E. Whiting cites it in Edward Elwell Whiting,
President Coolidge: A Contemporary Estimate
(Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1923), 10. This author went with Christopher Coolidge Jeter, “Growing Up a Coolidge,” Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation, 1998.

    6   a parody of
A Christmas Carol
: The Coolidge parody appeared in the
London Sunday Chronicle
and was cited in an American paper. “Wilson Call on Coolidge: Dickens Christmas Carol Modernized,”
The Atlanta Constitution
, December 22, 1927.

    6   lynchings themselves became less frequent: Scholars have long relied on lists of lynchings created by the NAACP, the
Chicago
Tribune
, and Tuskegee University. More recent scholarship has used newspaper accounts from southern states to attempt to more accurately estimate the number of lynchings.
Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present
(Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2006) has two series estimating lynchings, Ec254 and Ec251. Both show an overall decline in lynching over the course of the 1920s. Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck,
A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), provides a thorough analysis of lynching rates and the phenomenon itself.

    6   When in 1929 the thirtieth: To chart the size of government, as measured by government spending, this book used HS 47 of the Census Department, Federal Government, Receipts and Outlays, U.S. Census Bureau,
Statistical Abstract, 2003
. In 1923, the spending of the federal government was $3.140 billion; in 1929, it was $3.127 billion. See http://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-47.pdf.

    7   “the most insignificant office”: On December 19, 1793, Adams wrote, “But my country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived. And as I can do neither good nor evil, I must be borne away by others, and meet the common fate.” Quoted in
Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations
, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856), vol. 1.