The American Vice Presidency (46 page)

Lansing, by the nature of his responsibilities in foreign policy, was brought into the small inner circle who knew Wilson’s true condition and was the first to raise the question of presidential disability and succession. Lansing handed Tumulty a copy of the Constitution, from which he read the pertinent language. Tumulty, shaken, was said to have replied, “Mr. Lansing, the Constitution is not a dead letter with the White House. I have read the Constitution and do not find myself in need of any tutoring at your hands of the provision that you have just read. You may rest assured that while Woodrow Wilson is lying in the White House on the broad of his back I will not be a party to ousting him.” At that, Grayson entered the room. Tumulty turned to him and added, “And I am sure that Dr. Grayson would never certify to his disability.”
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Grayson agreed. Tumulty wrote later, “It is unnecessary to say that no further attempt was made by Mr. Lansing to institute ouster proceedings against his chief.”
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Lansing, as the ranking member of the cabinet, nevertheless called a meeting of the other members to discuss Wilson’s condition with Grayson,
but after hearing the doctor they seemed satisfied that no action was necessary. When Wilson later learned that Lansing had done so without Wilson’s knowledge and authorization, he demanded and got the resignation of the secretary of state.
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With the rumors of Wilson’s health intensifying in Washington, Tumulty decided that Vice President Marshall should be alerted in an unofficial manner of the president’s condition. Tumulty informed Secretary of Agriculture David Houston, who was to have lunch with Marshall the next day, to so advise him. Houston wrote later that Marshall “was evidently much disturbed and expressed regret that he was being kept in the dark about the president’s condition.… [He said] that it would be a tragedy for him to assume the duties of the President, at best … that he knew many men who knew more about the affairs of government than he did; and that it would be especially trying for him if he had to assume the duties without warning.”
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Two weeks after the previous stroke, Wilson developed a serious prostate blockage that doctors said would require surgery, which could be fatal, but Mrs. Wilson rejected it. After a few hours the blockage resolved itself, but the crisis convinced Tumulty, Grayson, and Lansing that Marshall had to be told all. But would such notification constitute the triggering of the presidential disability language in the Constitution? It was decided, probably by Tumulty, that the best way would be to enlist a trusted and dependable White House reporter, J. Fred Essary, of the
Baltimore Sun
, to so advise the vice president. Essary reported later that when he did so, Marshall was stunned and speechless, staring at his folded hands on his desk.

Marshall decided to go to the White House to discuss the situation directly with Wilson, but the president’s wife refused to admit him to the sickroom. Marshall vowed that nothing would persuade him to take any action short of a resolution of Congress or a written direction from Mrs. Wilson. He firmly told his secretary, Mark Thistlethwaite, “I am not going to seize the place and then have Wilson, recovered, come around and say, ‘Get off, you usurper!’ ”
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And he told his wife, “I could throw this country into civil war, but I won’t.”
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Meanwhile, official papers requiring Wilson’s attention or signature were shuttled to Edith Wilson for her own decision on whether they should be seen or signed by the president. Some signed documents bore a shaky
handwriting that led to speculation and doubt as to whether it was Wilson’s hand that signed them. A Republican senator, Albert Fall, gushed, “We have a petticoat government! Mrs. Wilson is president!”
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All this while, Marshall was presiding over the Senate debate on the peace treaty and ratification of Wilson’s dream of a league of nations, with the United States as a member. Senators of both parties approached him to assume the presidency or at least its duties; aware that Marshall supported Wilson on the treaty but believing he might accept some modifications that Wilson had rejected, they hoped he might be the vehicle for a breakthrough. But Marshall stood firm.

Years later, he wrote, “Those were not pleasant months for me. The standing joke of the country is that the only business of the vice-president is to ring the White House bell every morning and ask what is the state of health of the president. If there were a soul so lost to humanity to have desired his death, I was not that soul. I hoped that he might acquire his wonted health. I was afraid to ask about it, for fear some censorious soul would accuse me to a longing for his place. I never have wanted his shoes. Peace, friendship and good will have ever been more to me than place or pomp or power.”
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Beyond that, Marshall knew that the daunting Edith Wilson held a low opinion of this witty and unaffected man, and he had no intention of getting on cross purposes with her. He told columnist Arthur Krock of the
New York Times
, “No politician ever exposes himself to the hatred of a woman, particularly if she’s the wife of the President of the United States.”
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Mrs. Wilson’s own judgment of her husband’s ability to function as president during this time, dealing with matters of state, was severely questioned later. The chief usher in the White House, Irwin “Ike” Hoover, who saw Wilson immediately after Mrs. Wilson found him collapsed and in the days thereafter, wrote later that there “never was deception so universally practiced in the White House as it was in those statements given out from time to time.”
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Eventually, Wilson’s health stabilized sufficiently for Marshall to undertake some speech engagements outside Washington. On November 23, 1919, he was addressing a convention in Atlanta when he was called to the telephone. Told that the vice president was in the middle of his speech, the caller replied, “Well, I guess he’ll come now. President Wilson has just died
in Washington.” When the message was conveyed, Marshall passed it on to the audience, saying, with head bowed, “I cannot continue my speech. I must leave at once to take up my duties as Chief Executive of this great nation. I cannot bear the great burdens of our beloved chieftain unless I receive the assistance of everybody in this country.” As he and wife Lois left the stage and the auditorium organist started playing “Nearer My God to Thee,” Marshall phoned the White House and was told the call was a hoax; Wilson still lived.
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In 1920, Marshall threw his hat into the ring, but beyond Indiana there was little support for him. When the rival Republicans nominated Governor Warren G. Harding of Ohio for president and Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts for vice president, Marshall sent Coolidge a telegram: “Please accept my sincere sympathy.”
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Wilson, to the surprise of many, finished out his term in 1921, and Marshall with him. Soon after, President Harding appointed Marshall to the Lincoln Memorial Commission. On June 1, 1825, Marshall died of a heart attack at the Willard Hotel in Washington, where, not well-off enough to buy a home in the area, he had spent some of his eight years as vice president.

Along with being a small man in stature, Thomas Marshall of Indiana was perhaps also, as Woodrow Wilson once said, “a small caliber man” in terms of intellect and erudition. But in the restraint and grace he displayed in those dark days when Wilson seemed at death’s door and the presidency might well have passed to him, he demonstrated qualities that earned him distinction in the vice presidency that few other occupants, past or present, have ever achieved.

CALVIN COOLIDGE

OF MASSACHUSETTS

O
ver the fireplace in the home of Calvin Coolidge in Northampton, Massachusetts, hung a placard that read, “A wise old owl lived in an oak; the more he saw the less he spoke. The less he spoke the more he heard; why can’t we be like that old bird?”
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Some years later, when he had become the leader of his country, a prominent society lady sitting next to Coolidge at a Washington dinner party said to him, “Oh, Mr. President, you are so silent. I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you.” He replied, “You lose.”
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The man known as “Silent Cal” also attributed his political climb from his position in the state legislature, then as mayor of Northampton, lieutenant governor and governor of Massachusetts, and finally as vice president and president of the United States to his reticence. “I have never been hurt by what I have not said,” he declared.
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Indeed, his elevation from local and state politics to the national stage as the nation’s twenty-ninth vice president did not come out of self-promotion by Coolidge. The genesis was the Republican governors’ irate reaction at their party’s 1920 national convention in Chicago to the smoke-filled cabal, where U.S. senators chose one of their own, the affable and moderate Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio, for the presidential nomination.

When the “Senatorial Soviet,” as one critic later called it, sought also to
anoint another colleague, Senator Irvine L. Lenroot of Wisconsin, as the vice presidential nominee, a rebellion broke out. As Senator Medill McCormick of Illinois was placing Lenroot’s name in nomination, a delegate from Oregon, the former state supreme court justice Wallace McCamant, interrupted with a cry of “Coolidge! Coolidge!” that rang through the hall.

Earlier, with Coolidge’s acquiescence, the Massachusetts delegation had entered his name for president, even though, characteristically, as he wrote later in his autobiography, he “did not wish to use the office of governor in an attempt to prosecute a campaign for nomination for some other office.”
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He therefore did not permit his name to be entered in any state primaries, and the former newspaperman Harding was nominated.
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Prior to the nominations for vice president, Coolidge had informed the Massachusetts delegation that he did not want his name offered for that position either. The political boss of the state’s western portion, W. Murray Crane, had passed the word: “Don’t put the governor up. He’s been beaten once, and he doesn’t want a second defeat.”
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The Oregon delegation meanwhile had come to Chicago instructed to vote for Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, but Lodge too had asked that his name not be put forward. Consequently, McCamant demanded the floor, saying, “But there is another son of Massachusetts who has been much in the public eye during the past year,” referring to Coolidge’s celebrated firmness in putting down a Boston police strike in 1919.
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When McCamant offered him as Harding’s running mate, the convention exploded in approval, and Coolidge was overwhelmingly nominated over Lenroot, the choice of the senatorial cabal.

Calvin Coolidge’s typically terse remarks in snuffing out that police strike—“There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime”—had brought him instant national acclaim.
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At a time when the country had grown weary of conflict, including the labor unrest following the Great War, Coolidge’s words insisting on the maintenance of law and order at home resonated widely, as did his personal placid demeanor.

The choice, however, was not quite the spontaneous action suggested by the popular narrative. Crane and Frank W. Stearns, a Boston businessman who had attended Amherst College with Coolidge, had circulated a seventy-thousand-copy printing of Coolidge’s inspirational speeches called
Have Faith in Massachusetts
to all prospective convention delegates.
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So Coolidge’s name was on their minds well before the Oregonian’s call to his colors on the convention floor.

Although Coolidge gained his first fame and political fortune as governor of Massachusetts, his roots and general outlook on life came more from neighboring Vermont, where he was born in Plymouth Notch on the Fourth of July, 1872, to the proprietor of the local post office and general store and his wife. They named him John after his father, but he always was called Calvin. A sister, Abby, was born three years later. Their father also ran the family farm and later opened a blacksmith shop. Their mother was a gentle woman of fair complexion who died from injuries suffered in a carriage accident caused by a runaway horse when Calvin was only twelve years old.
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His sister died a few years later. His grandfather left him forty acres of Vermont farmland, with the intent that he work it for the rest of his life.

When Calvin was only two months old, his father was elected to the Vermont legislature. Calvin’s own frugality in mercenary matters and his temperate behavior were an inheritance from his Vermont beginnings. Of his neighbors, he wrote later, “Their speech was clean and their lives were above reproach. They had no mortgages on their farms. If any debts were contracted they were promptly paid. Credit was good and there was money in the savings bank.”
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The town of Plymouth Notch was grounded in democratic principles, and young Calvin followed its early political meetings and discussions with great interest. His father at times also served as a local constable, sheriff, justice of the peace, and tax collector and often took him to court hearings.