Coolidge (8 page)

Now that the terms of the gold standard had been fiddled with, the market sensed more fiddling to come. Later, in a book, Sumner would codify his analysis: “The constant apprehension was, so long as then-existing legislation remained in force, that the unit of existing monetary relations would be changed. Such an apprehension is the surest ground for panic which can be offered. The panic which resulted when this fear became more specific was not a bank panic, nor a crisis in which the banks had any responsibility.” President Cleveland, of the same view as Sumner, recommended repeal of the Silver Act, thereby sending a signal that the United States would stick to the gold standard. Some perceived repeal as the salvation of the economy, others as a blow to commerce; in the farmland the Silver Act repeal was considered a disaster.

That year Calvin became eligible to vote; in the late summer of 1893, he took an oath of citizenship in Plymouth; his interest in politics grew yet more. as did his loyalty to the Republicans. He noticed that, while out of the presidency and in the midst of a sharp downturn, Republicans were winning gubernatorial contests in Iowa and New York. “Republicans are wearing a smile this morning,” he wrote his father after the elections that autumn of 1893. Coolidge was also beginning to take an interest in the Republican parties of Massachusetts and the state of Maine, where Hardy and Deering were active.

Politics inspired Coolidge to begin to speak publicly. The boardinghouse meals were his start. The ready audience at table afforded him an opportunity to perfect his delivery of jokes. He found he could hold a room’s attention, if only for a minute. A story from that period that Deering later told about Coolidge stands out. One of the places he and Coolidge boarded was the house of a dog fancier, who gave them twenty-one meals a week—too often potato salad, Deering later remembered. One morning their host served sausages for breakfast. Coolidge pounded his table with fork and knife. The diners fell silent as he called the head of the house into the room. He demanded that the owner produce every dog he owned in the dining room before he would eat.

Coolidge’s new boardinghouse skills gave him the confidence to test himself in more formal debates. That same autumn of 1893, he couched his usual request for money in terms of recent accomplishments: “In view of the fact that yesterday I put a debate said to be the best heard on the floor of the chapel this term, in view of the fact that my name was read as one of the first ten in French, in view of the fact that I passed in Natural philosophy with a fair mark whereas many failed, and lastly in view of the fact that the purchase clause of Sherman Bill has been repealed thus relieved the cause of financial panic, can you send me $25. the forepart of next week?”

By the second half of junior year, he was even getting good enough to go up against the big names of the college. In January 1894, he reported one of his first opportunities to debate more formally, and against none other than Herbert Pratt, the fraternity favorite and child of the Pratt dynasty. Pratt was a great football player; he had joined the toniest fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi. Yet it was Calvin who prevailed. To his father Calvin wrote, “I had a debate yesterday as to whether a Presidential or a Parliamentary form of government is the better; I had the parliamentary side which is not particularly popular in as much as it is really to show England’s government is better than ours, and I spoke against Pratt of Brooklyn who is a very good debater and a general favorite being captain of our foot ball team. But the parliamentary side won by a large majority when the question was decided.” In this period Coolidge also followed, through
The Amherst Student
, the progress of other debaters. The spring of 1894 also brought the annual Hardy Prize debate, one of the big Amherst contests. The question in 1894 was “Should the State of New York extend the suffrage to woman?” The debaters drew sides, according to
The Amherst Student.
On the negative side was a senior just about to graduate, Harlan Fiske Stone, who took second place.

In February 1894, there came startling news from Boston: Morrison Swift, an angry veteran, had marshaled hundreds of the unemployed to demonstrate at the State House for a public works program, a new idea. At Amherst young people were also hearing about the tariff and a new federal levy of a sort that had not been seen since the Civil War period, the income tax. The two revenue vehicles had been paired in legislation, the former being the Republicans’ preferred device for collecting federal revenue. Democrats opposed the tariff, reasonably enough, on grounds that it tended to work by hurting the poor and consumers—a sound assessment, since consumption of goods subject to tariffs such as sugar and coffee took up a greater portion of the little man’s budget. The second vehicle, the income tax, was put forward by a new voice, William Jennings Bryan, a lawmaker from Nebraska who edited the
Omaha World-Herald
. William L. Wilson, a Democratic congressman from West Virginia, was among those shepherding the legislation through. The new income tax, a 2 percent levy, was designed to fall on those who earned over $4,000 a year, far more than, for example, the earnings of Coolidge’s father. Wilson argued that it was not a class tax but rather “an effort, an honest effort to balance the weight of taxation in this country.” Republicans and classical liberals and even New Englanders certainly ought to be for the tax, Wilson said, for another reason: it was simple. One of the great New Englanders, William Graham Sumner, had described an income tax as a “simple form of taxation” that was preferable to other kinds of taxes. Said Wilson: “New England taught that doctrine to the South and West and therefore has no right to come up today and complain because her own teaching has been used against her.”

But Coolidge saw that others would not concede William Wilson’s points. Justin Morrill, a senator from Coolidge’s own Vermont, thought Wilson had it backward on the question of budgets and the faith in the U.S. fiscal house. Income taxes were to be avoided because they were a symptom of fiscal weakness, “the resort only of nations which are always wrestling with financial deficits.” “Surely,” Morrill went on, “we cannot afford to decorate the annals of our Republic with a vile copy of this foreign excrescence.” He sought to reveal the income tax for what it was: an unapologetic blow against the rich of New England, whose citizens would bear a full two-thirds of the burden. Yet a third group of income tax opponents made a more fundamental case: that the income tax was unconstitutional. The Constitution stated that Congress had the power to tax, but only “without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” Many lawmakers took this to mean that states must be taxed evenly, regardless of their population.

Young Coolidge was not sold on the income tax either. In tones softer than Morrill’s but still definite, he objected in a February 1894 letter to his father, “I do not like an income tax, it taxes the land and the crops at the same time, it is too expensive to collect.” The college junior theorized that “no man’s income is permanent enough to admit of taxation, it will easily be a source of corruption.”

Coolidge’s political awakening took place at a time when the United States was first waking up to new questions itself. One was the income tax, which would indeed become law in 1894; but another was the question of whether a factory worker as contrasted with, say, a farmer was due something different from government. Before industrialization, there had been no one unemployed in the modern sense: a farmer could be underemployed, and he could be broke, but he was not out of work in the definitive way that a factory hand is when the gates of a factory close. But now people were not finding work.

In March 1894, Coxey’s Army, a band led by an Ohio man named Jacob Coxey, started as five hundred unemployed and then grew, headed toward Washington, D.C., passing through Homestead, Pennsylvania, at one point. In the spring of 1894, as well, employees of the Palace Car Company went on strike in Illinois after Pullman reduced their wages. But it was hard to compare past and present; there were not even always good numbers. In 1893 and 1894, quantifying joblessness was still a young science. Charles Dow, the editor of a new paper,
The Wall Street Journal
, had begun to compile yet another product, his first market average; the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In the same years Dow Jones made and marketed the ticker, an electric machine that spat out stock prices for banks and offices. The Dow data that moved on the ticker were originally made up of nine railroads and two industrial stocks.

The Pullman Palace cars, private cars for rail lines, represented all Americans’ dreams. They were the mode of travel to which everyone aspired, but now the prospect that workers would ever get near to riding one was dimming. Pullman workers were especially outraged because Pullman, also their landlord, did not cut rents in his company town or prices in the company store commensurately with the wage cuts. The strike spread throughout the industry so that hundreds of thousands of workers and dozens of states were involved; transport ground to a stop. In the summer of 1894, before Coolidge’s senior year, President Grover Cleveland called in U.S. marshals and 12,000 U.S. troops on the argument that the strike was interrupting the U.S. mails, a federal responsibility. In the case of Pullman, the violence was worse than at Homestead. The strikers’ opponents cited the new Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibited restraint of trade. They argued, successfully, that the workers themselves were a combination restraining trade. Progressives who believed in both organized labor and trust busting found the use of the latter to hurt the former perverse. Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the strikers, went to jail for six months; Judge William Woods sent Debs to jail in Woodstock—not Woodstock, Vermont, but Woodstock, Illinois, far out in McHenry County, near the Wisconsin border.

The price to both sides in lost hours, lost dignity, and lost profits was enormous. Many smaller companies, including one called American Steel and Wire Company, saw their workers go on strike. American Steel and Wire fired its workers for striking, among them a young man just Coolidge’s age named Leon Frank Czolgosz. So did many other companies. Others did not fire their workers but instead cut their wages. At Fairbanks Scales in St. Johnsbury, where Coolidge had crammed, directors had ordered a 10 percent reduction in wages for some workers; others were working shortened hours. But the international market stabilized business at Fairbanks; when the economy was slow at home, sometimes overseas orders made up for the shortage. But there were no strikes in St. Johnsbury. The lessons of Pullman, Homestead, and Fairbanks were hard to absorb or clarify. Could a company never cut wages in a downturn? Was cutting wages wrong?

The missing jobs had something to do with the missing money, and everyone had his own idea about what had gone awry, or how to fix it. Jacob Coxey himself made money the center of the story; he even named his infant son, who was along on the trip, “Legal Tender Coxey.” Those were the same years when William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska was warning that capital was exploiting the worker and that hard money—the gold standard—would strangle farming. The undergraduate Coolidge kept his own books rigidly and noticed when others were lax. The loose management of Amherst’s treasurer, Austin Dickinson, did not escape him, though he saw that it allowed students some flexibility. “My tuition is due first of March and can be paid any time,” he wrote home in spring 1894. Nonetheless, Coolidge still found himself coming up perpetually short. As at Black River Academy, his college letters home were peppered with requests for money. He himself was tiring of that and on the lookout for a way to reverse the flow.

He was in fact already finding a professional skill that might one day earn him a living: speaking. When the outside world matters, students turn to peers who know how to talk about that world. The men at Amherst could see that Coolidge was such a peer. The experience of living politics in the town meeting meant he knew more than men who had only heard about it secondhand, from the papers. That esteem in turn gave him the confidence to speak on nonpolitical topics, or even mix politics with humor. Coolidge’s fellows suddenly saw in him something like what they saw in Dwight Morrow—that rare ability to turn potential humiliation into good cheer. The junior class at Amherst celebrated each year by donning plug hats (big top hats), grabbing canes, and then racing one another down Pratt Field. The last seven to make it across the line were obliged to buy the other seventy-odd dinner at Hitchcock Hall. Coolidge came in among those last, mired in dirt. Perhaps he stayed behind intentionally, for the losers got to give a speech.

Coolidge entitled his talk “Why I Got Stuck.” Turning his pockets inside out for his classmates to demonstrate the effect of the dinner price on his resources, he hammed it up as if he were horsing around with Wilders, Coolidges, and Browns back in Plymouth. The material of the speech is no longer available, but later those who attended remembered phrases. “You wouldn’t expect a plow horse to make time on the race track or a follower of the plow to be a Mercury.” He also quoted the Bible: “The Good Book says that the first shall be last and the last shall be first.” A classmate, Jay Stocking, later said the others had not expected much: “Opinion was divided as to whether he would rise and say he was unprepared or whether he would content himself with saying that he stood for the affirmative.” Instead, when Coolidge spoke, “The class had the surprise of its life. He spoke cogently, fluently and with a good sense of humor and won his case hands down. It was as if a new and gifted man had joined the class.”

Arriving back at college for his final year in September 1894, he made an effort to decorate his rooms and enlisted Carrie in Plymouth to help him and make, as he wrote in a detailed note, “five pillows, two 20 × 20, two 16 × 16, and one 12 × 12.” The ruffles, he noticed precisely, were to be “4, 3½ and 3 inches,” according to size. She sent them. His grades were improving. E. B. Andrews, the president of Brown, came to Amherst for a meeting of college presidents and took the opportunity to lecture undergraduates on the merits of the bimetallism Cleveland was abandoning. All that made an impression on Coolidge, who ordered a copy of Andrews’s two-volume
History of the United States
from Charles Scribner’s Sons; the bill for the book was $2.67.