The American Vice Presidency (48 page)

But late on the night of August 2, 1923, after two and a half years in the vice presidency, fate interceded. Coolidge, visiting the family farmhouse in Plymouth Notch, was sleeping in an upstairs bedroom when his father awakened him with word of Harding’s sudden death. By kerosene lamp, John Coolidge, as a notary public, administered the oath of presidential office to his son.
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Years later, when a portrait artist, Charles Hopkinson, trying to encourage some animation in the sober Coolidge’s face, asked him what his first thought was upon learning that Harding had died and he had become president, Silent Cal, without an change of expression, replied, “I thought I could swing it.”
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For the next nineteen months, Coolidge would fill the rest of Harding’s
unexpired term as five previous accidental presidents had done, leaving the vice presidency vacant. And so the secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, would for the time being stand, in the tired phrase, a heartbeat away from the presidency. Coolidge made clear that in inheriting the presidency he accepted the concept that he was to be a “caretaker,” declaring, “It is a sound rule that when the President dies in office it is the duty of his successor for the remainder of that term to maintain the counsellors and policies of the deceased President.”
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But if there was such a rule, it often had been honored in the breach in past transfers of power and would be so again in the future.

The first step by the new president was indeed to ask members of the Harding cabinet to stay in place. But the old poker-playing cronies of Harding knew their time was up under Coolidge, not a man susceptible to the patronizing of such individuals. He did, however, inherit with the presidency a pair of major scandals in the Harding administration in which he was not involved and about which he had little awareness at the time.

The first concerned Colonel Charles R. Forbes, director of the Veterans Bureau and a drinking and poker-playing companion of Harding, who had been put in charge of construction and supervision of new veterans’ hospitals and of a host of warehouses jammed with surplus supplies and equipment from the Great War. Forbes and some associates proceeded to pocket huge amounts of money from building contracts and surplus sales, which financed lavish parties and travel, all under the nose of the casual, fun-loving, and unsuspecting Harding. Forbes finally resigned in February 1923 and left the country about six months before Coolidge assumed the presidency, but the scandal’s odor lingered.

Three weeks after Forbes resigned, his closest associate, Charles F. Cramer, committed suicide, and less than three months after that, Jess Smith, an unscrupulous sidekick of Attorney General Harry Daugherty, Harding’s chief political adviser and fixer, followed suit. Daugherty himself had been charged with corrupt practices and was threatened with impeachment, but his close tie with Harding saved him for a time.

Once Coolidge had moved into the Oval Office, more damaging to the reputation of the Republican Party was the stench of the infamous Teapot Dome scandal of the year before. Unbeknownst to Harding, key members
of his administration had engaged in massive looting of the nation’s oil reserves at a site about fifty miles north of Casper, Wyoming. Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, a former U.S. senator from New Mexico, had conspired with Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby to persuade Harding to sign an executive order in June 1922, transferring the Naval Petroleum Reserve to the Interior Department. Thereupon, lucrative exploitation rights were sold to private interests at great profit to the conspirators. A Senate investigating committee did not undertake a fumigation of the whole mess until late October 1923, two months after Harding’s death, but he did become aware of his cabinet members’ betrayal in his last months.

Coolidge himself had been acquainted with Forbes, Fall, Denby, Daugherty, and Smith in the course of attending Harding cabinet meetings and had recognized their unsavory natures. But in keeping his place, Coolidge said nothing, except for preaching the virtues of clean government, to which he was personally dedicated. Yet he would have to carry the public remembrance of the scandals into his later quest for a presidential term of his own.

The new president’s first serious test was dealing with an approaching strike of anthracite coal miners in Pennsylvania. Two weeks after Harding’s death, he called two inconclusive meetings with the union leader John L. Lewis and mine operators and then summoned Governor Gifford Pinchot to the White House and appointed him a special coal strike mediator, to no avail. The strike of 150,000 strikers began on September 1, and the president announced he was told by legal advisers that he had no power to seize the mines. But a two-year agreement was reached a week later giving the miners a 10 percent wage increase, and the mines reopened.

Meanwhile, William M. Butler, the president’s prospective campaign manager for 1924, got busy lining up the delegates needed for the presidential nomination. Expected challenges from Pinchot and Detroit auto magnate Henry Ford fizzled, and thus the stage was set for the party’s convention, at which the only substantive business would be the selection of Coolidge’s running mate. A story was afoot that Coolidge wanted Senator William E. Borah of Utah on the ticket and that when the president proposed it to him, Borah asked, “Well, at which end?”
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But the second office remained so low in esteem that when the
convention opened in Cleveland in June, it seemed the job once again would have to be shopped around. After other rejections, the party finally decided on a running mate for Coolidge whose brilliance, outgoing nature, and fiery and commanding independence would offer a promise of lifting the much-maligned vice presidency out of the shadows.

CHARLES G. DAWES

OF ILLINOIS

O
ne of the most accomplished of all American vice presidents joined the second presidential term of the accidental president Calvin Coolidge in 1925. But his outspokenness and gruffness in contrast with the mild-mannered Silent Cal produced one of the most unusual odd couples to share the two highest offices in the land up to that time. Charles G. Dawes came to the vice presidency after a heralded career that included his becoming the first director of the Bureau of the Budget, then comptroller of the currency, and supply czar for the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I. Thereafter he was credited with putting Europe’s economy back on its feet and overseeing reparations sought from the defeated Germany, which won him a share of the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize.

Dawes was of aristocratic stock from colonial days, whose family traced its roots back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, when William Dawes arrived from England. Another William Dawes rode with Paul Revere from Charlestown to Lexington on April 18, 1775.
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And another relative was a senior partner in a mercantile firm named Dawes and Coolidge, coincidentally bringing together forebears of men who, nearly three hundred years later, would become in reverse order the Republican president and vice president of the United States.

Charles Gates Dawes was born in Marietta, Ohio, on August 27, 1865. His father, Rufus R. Dawes, ultimately a brigadier general in the Union
army, volunteered in April 1861 upon President Lincoln’s call and recruited a hundred others to serve under him at Antietam and in subsequent Civil War battles. In 1864 during a furlough he married Mary Beman of Marietta, daughter of a railroad builder and banker. Dawes became an official of the Marietta Iron Works and soon branched out into oil and gas exploration in southeastern Ohio, adding to his growing wealth. The panic of 1873 broke him, obliging him to start anew in the wholesale lumber business, where he eventually prospered again and served a single term in Congress.
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Upon his graduation from Marietta College and the Cincinnati Law School, young Charles moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he became a prominent anti-monopoly attorney for the Lincoln Board Trade and other clients. There he met and became close friends of William Jennings Bryan and John J. Pershing, later the commander of American forces in the Great War. Dawes and Bryan were members of an informal discussion group called the Lincoln Round Table, in which they debated key issues of the day, including the currency controversy that Bryan later glamorized with his famous “cross of gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention. Pershing was not a member of the group but joined them in a similar group, dubbed Debates at the Square Table, at a local restaurant.
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Dawes won statewide attention as a witness before a Senate committee on railroad affairs and another before the Nebraska Board of Transportation. In the latter, when the state auditor chided him about his criticisms of a host of discriminatory rates, Dawes responded by accusing the man of “riding in special cars at the expense of the railroads.” When the auditor shot back, “I guess you would ride, too, if you had the chance,” Dawes replied, “Not if I were drawing a salary and was paid by the people to stay home and protect their interest and do my duty.”
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By 1893, as Dawes’s law practice grew, he became a bank director and formed the Dawes Block Company, owning and managing major office buildings in downtown Lincoln. His friend Pershing, also a lawyer, meanwhile was teaching military science and tactics and commanding enrolled cadets at the University of Nebraska as a second lieutenant. When he approached Dawes about joining him as a partner, Dawes advised him, “Better lawyers than either you or I can ever hope to be are starving in Nebraska. I’d try the Army for a while yet. Your pay may be small, but it comes very regularly.”
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So Pershing remained on that fateful course.

Dawes survived the panic of 1893 and afterward acquired a power company in Wisconsin and another in Evanston, Illinois. In 1895 he moved to Chicago, where he made his home for the rest of his life. The previous year, he had met Governor William McKinley of Ohio, and McKinley’s campaign manager, Mark Hanna, enlisted him to oversee the Ohioan’s presidential bid in Illinois. Dawes’s first major political undertaking came at the Republican state convention of 1896, where at the age of thirty he delivered the Illinois delegation to the Ohio governor, who was later nominated by a landside over Speaker Tom Reed of Maine at the national convention in St. Louis.

Sitting in the press gallery not far from where Dawes watched the proceedings was Bryan, his old colleague and debater at the Lincoln Round Table, now a reporter for the
Omaha World Herald
. Two weeks later in Chicago, Bryan unexpectedly set the Democratic convention afire with his memorable harangue against the gold standard. Dawes, in attendance, sent a telegram to McKinley: “Went to the Democratic Convention. Sat on the platform. Heard my old friend, William J. Bryan, make his speech on the platform’s silver plank. His oratory was magnificent, his logic pitifully weak. I could not but have a feeling of pride for the brilliant young man whose life, for so many years, lay parallel to mine, and with whom the future may yet bring me into conflict, as in the past.”
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Six days later Dawes joined Hanna and other Republican leaders at McKinley’s home in Canton, where the presidential nominee declared he would not compete with the silver-tongued and silver-driven Bryan on the stump but would campaign from his front porch. “I am going to stay here and do what campaigning there is to be done,” McKinley told Dawes. “If I took a whole train, Bryan would take a sleeper; if I took a sleeper, Bryan would take a chair car; if I took a chair car, he would ride a freight train. I can’t outdo him, and I am not going to try.”
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In Chicago, Dawes handled the dispensing of campaign funds out of the McKinley national headquarters campaign while Hanna traveled the country raising them, and hordes of McKinley supporters went to Canton as Bryan stumped feverishly across the land. On Election Night, McKinley beat Bryan by more than half a million popular votes and by nearly one hundred in the electoral college.

Dawes immediately became the subject of speculation about a cabinet
post in the McKinley administration but pointedly asked supporters not to address the new president on the matter. After the election, according to Dawes’s diary, McKinley said he often thought he owed his nomination to Dawes in light of Dawes’s vital campaign work in Illinois. Dawes continued, “He … was anxious to know whether his failure to give me a Cabinet appointment would, in any way, alter our intimate and constant friendship.”
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Then McKinley offered Dawes the post of comptroller of the currency, an independent position reporting to Congress, which he cheerfully accepted and carried out without political interference. Dawes often lunched and dined with the president and was a constant confidant as McKinley wrestled with the aftermath of the sinking of the
Maine
in Havana Harbor, which led to the brief war with Spain.