Coolidge, page 12
Coolidge attempted to look at it all practically. The fact that Grace was a talent with a needle did not elude him; he would tease her about darning all those socks. But he did not really require the kind of housekeeper his grandmother was, nor even seek one. He did not even want the abstract wife he had been hoping for in the lonely days at the Lavakes’. What he wanted was this particular girl. He appeared in the Goodhues’ Maple Street parlor in Burlington, and Mr. Goodhue inquired as to why he had come: “Up here on some law business, Mr. Coolidge?”
“Come to see about marrying Grace,” Calvin replied. Captain Goodhue was taken aback, but he warmed to Calvin; he could see that he was somebody real, a professional man. It was evident both to Goodhue and to others that Coolidge was, as Garman might put it, in the swim of life. If there was a paradise for the determined, Coolidge was glimpsing it. He had made the law his trade just as he had planned those days in Forbes. Lemira Goodhue proved harder to charm than her husband. Grace’s mother didn’t like the idea of the marriage and, after finally relenting, still tried to postpone the wedding. She insisted that Grace wait to marry until she taught a year or learned to bake bread. They would buy bread, Calvin snapped back.
For a while, they were back in Northampton, Calvin at work, planning a run for the school committee. It would be a tight race: his Democratic opponent, John J. Kennedy, was someone he liked. “Calvin, I think I’ve got you beaten,” teased Kennedy when they met. “Either way, they’ll get a good man,” Coolidge shot back. There was no point, he was learning, in making enemies. His engagement, now finally seemingly real, distracted him. The schoolchildren at the Clarke School favored Grace; it was hard to find someone who did not. They made a habit of peeping around the door when her beau came to visit at the school. One pupil remembered that Coolidge always placed his hat on the floor upon entering Grace’s classroom. Mrs. Goodhue finally relented and said that the wedding could take place in 1905, but only, at the very earliest, that November.
The wedding took place in October. The Coolidges brought a counterpane knotted by his mother for the couple to take away with them. In the last hours before the ceremony at her parents’ house, Grace had a few doubts and wrote to her friend Ivah Gale about the forthcoming event. She was especially concerned about how the marriage would come between her and others she loved so much. “It isn’t without a great big sigh and a bigger little pain down in my heart that I begin this my last letter before the scene is changed. That might surprise my mother, who claims I have not feelings, because I don’t talk about them. . . . I am sure that you and Calvin are going to like one another very much. . . . Mother isn’t very strong and she feels a little bit hard because I am going so hurriedly and sometimes he says things which strike in pretty deeply. . . . Well it is almost over, anyhow and time will effect a cure, I think.”
Still, when the hour came she was ready in a dress of pearl gray silk etamine. Fifteen guests, including Calvin’s father, Aunt Mede, and his aunt Mrs. Pollard of Proctorsville, assembled on Maple Street. It rained, but Calvin scarcely noticed. Grace’s hair was up in a pompadour, hardly comfortable but certainly the fashion. Calvin wore a Prince Albert, a double-breasted frock coat of the sort he had recommended to his father, and a derby hat, something like what he had worn when she had first espied him through the Round Hill window. The ceremony was performed by a distinguished minister Grace chose, Edward Hungerford of the Congregational Church in Burlington. Coolidge placed a gold chain around his bride’s neck and set out with her. They traveled by train from Burlington to Montreal, but it could have been an automobile or even a glider in the sky, like the Wright Brothers’. For now Coolidge was flying. Miss Goodhue was his.
Four: The Roosevelt Way
Boston
ESCAPE WAS ON THE couple’s mind as they headed north from Burlington to their honeymoon destination of Montreal. There the pair could walk, eat, or take in a show as Mr. and Mrs. Coolidge at last. But after a few days, the Coolidges found themselves restless. Determination alone had sufficed for Coolidge at the start, but it would not propel him all the way up the river of life that Garman had described. Within a few weeks the school committee election would come, and this time the competition looked tight. His opponent, John Kennedy, was Irish American, and if he won, he would be the first Irish American to hold a major office in Northampton, evidence of the new power of the immigrant group. The cross tides that Garman had warned about would sideline Coolidge if he did not understand the party well. Those moving ahead fastest took advantage of the progressive current. He might ride with the progressives, work with them as Murray Crane did. Or, perhaps better still, he might emulate their captain, the U.S. president, Theodore Roosevelt.
There was no escaping Roosevelt in any case, not even on a honeymoon. The presidency was Roosevelt’s, not the other way around: Roosevelt found the office to be a wonderful tool, a “bully pulpit,” as he would call it, and he used the office with energy. In Washington Roosevelt reigned omnipresent. But news of the twenty-sixth president also stretched across and up and down the continent, penetrating bookstands, cafés, and hotel lobbies from Boston to Seattle, from Mexico City to Montreal. Updates on the Roosevelt administration’s Russo-Japanese Treaty made it to Canada; so did the report that the White House thought it was time to change the rules of college football. Then there was Roosevelt’s decision to regulate prices charged by the continent’s most important industry, railroads. Every time the president reiterated his commitment not to run for a third term, telegraph machines clattered. So irritated were the editors of the Montreal Gazette that they penned an ironic note of gratitude that the U.S. president sat a good five hundred miles down from the Canadian border: “Only the fact that the President is unable to leave the United States during his term of office enables the north pole to retain its seclusion.”
There was much to imitate in the man. Roosevelt had overcome childhood illness to become a powerhouse who seemed nearly unearthly in his physical strength and power of recuperation. Coolidge was still hostage to his fragile lungs; even trips to the country laid him low for hours. Roosevelt had served in war, heroically, whereas Coolidge had not. Roosevelt commanded a room’s attention the instant he entered, whereas Coolidge had to earn it. Roosevelt might be a Harvard man, but he lacked the deep snobbery of the old Republicans, like the stuffy Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. His brand of progressivism, too, made good sense to Coolidge. Roosevelt had a record of advancing other principles Coolidge treasured: sound budgeting instead of political waste and patronage; rigorous civil service, health care, and school reform; progressive management to benefit all and make the country more prosperous. Roosevelt understood immigrants and won some of them over—precisely Coolidge’s task in the wards of Northampton for that fall’s school committee contest. Roosevelt managed and placated the trade unions to preclude painful coal strikes. Roosevelt wanted to honor old laws, such as the Sherman Antitrust Act, and use them to pursue offenders. He also understood the importance of the American ideal.
Beneath it all there was the question of character. You might not know if you agreed with every Roosevelt policy, but it was clear Roosevelt had a splendid character. As The New York Times commented while the Coolidges were honeymooning, Roosevelt’s decision not to run “made him free to act as he thought was right.” Coolidge too hoped that in his political career he would always position himself to follow his conscience. It helped Roosevelt to have Edith, his wife, by his side. Now Coolidge had Grace. He was ready to move past party jobs to serious elections.
Coolidge determined that he and Grace could skip Niagara Falls and Quebec City, which had been penciled in on the honeymoon itinerary, and head home to dig in. Grace understood. She too was eager to start their real life. It felt good to return to Northampton. After all, they were coming back to a town that was already theirs. Grace’s good friend Caroline Yale ran one of the city’s great institutions, the Clarke School for the Deaf, which had brought her to Northampton in the first place. After ten years, the Republican Party of Northampton was like family to Coolidge, starting with his old attorney employers and branching out to many town friends and constituents, such as James Lucey. Grace saw that their life would be work but easier because they were a team. She imagined horses in a double harness. Coolidge appreciated her energy; Grace was more like his grandmother Aunt Mede than his melancholy mother. He saw that Grace might be the one to pull him along.
Coolidge turned his attention to the school committee race. The solicitor general’s post was handed out by the city council, but this time, he had to run among the wards. Grace, thinking of her parents, thought she might go up to Burlington for Christmas; her mother was still smarting from her wedding. Only if he won, Coolidge teased her, sensing that he would lose. Within weeks, he did lose to Kennedy, albeit by less than a hundred votes. That was all right. A neighbor told him he had voted for Kennedy for the school post because Kennedy, at least, had children. Coolidge came back with good humor: “Might give me time.”
Financially, the loss was a blessing. Coolidge needed a little extra time too to earn money for his new family. If he were to continue in politics, both Coolidges knew, they needed to save, and they intended to have fun doing so. The white clapboard Norwood Hotel evoked fond memories for Coolidge; it was where his fraternity chapter had celebrated its birth with other chapters in his triumphant senior year. It also had a Clarke connection for Grace. In fact, it had once belonged to the founder of the school for the deaf. Lunch in the enormous dining room was served to boarders and travelers for 50 cents. It was also cheap because the hotel was struggling financially. Calvin and Grace camped out there temporarily, pleased with themselves at finding such a friendly bargain; soon the hotel closed. The proprietor put the linen and silver up for sale. That in turn provided an opportunity to forage for household items. The Coolidges merrily picked up sheets, pillowcases, and even table linen, all labeled in indelible ink, “Norwood Hotel.”
The next move for many couples in their position was the purchase of a house. Homes in western Massachusetts ranged in price from $2,000 to $5,000, about what a young lawyer could earn in a year if he was lucky. National banks did not write mortgages, but local home building associations did, as did builders themselves. The general perception was that buying a home was a good thing to do. “A man is not really a true man until he owns his own home,” preached Russell Conwell, the charismatic founder of Temple University, in a speech he had been delivering across the nation since 1890. The advertising sections of the newspapers of western Massachusetts greeted the honeymoon couple all that fall and winter with offers of credit. “Easily owned—Single and Double Houses,” read one advertisement in the Springfield Republican of October 18, 1905. “It’s like finding money, to buy a home on our easy payment plan,” read the top line of another advertisement for home loans. The forced saving for a mortgage might move them forward, just as the couples described in Ladies’ Home Journal.
They rented. Coolidge did not like to be beholden to bankers or anyone else, for that matter. Independence was his way of protecting his freedom to do what was right. The same impulse caused him to hesitate before joining clubs. Henry Field had a pew in the Edwards Church, and Grace was a member, but Coolidge only went along. His decision infuriated his colleagues in politics; after all, the more clubs one joined, the more friends one had at election time. But Coolidge found another way to connect with fellow citizens: he deposited savings with a variety of institutions. Each additional banker who held some of his money was an additional pair of eyes that would follow him, and likely to be an additional vote.
The first rental by the unbeholden pair was that of a house of a Smith classics professor, J. Everett Brady, who had gone on sick leave. The structure—dark, shingle-style, with a gambrel roof—had several porches, an advantage for Coolidge, who liked to sit outside. Despite their commitment to frugality, the Coolidges enjoyed one luxury: the maid who had served the Bradys stayed with them. Wherever he went Coolidge took a bookshelf with him, a small golden oak with five shelves and a sateen cover to protect the volumes. Among the books were a history of England, Dante, the Bible, Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, Tennyson, Milton, and Longfellow, as well as dictionaries in five languages and grammars to go with them. John Greenleaf Whittier, the author of the poem “Snow-Bound,” was there. So was George Ade, a Hoosier humorist; Ade specialized in capturing the reaction of the farmer new to the city to political life there. Ade’s Fables in Slang was an assembly of short, quirky regional anecdotes, but also a kind of little man’s back talk to great officials.
The mixture of the heavy old ornate writing with straightforward modern prose betrayed a mixture within Coolidge. In politics, he had to be clear, like Ade, understand the region, entertain it, reward it, but not lecture to it. That he could translate Italian meant little to the people he encountered in the shops or at Rahar’s, which he patronized. But in his own time, he appreciated the old authors, especially Dante: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood.” Dante captured the questing of his own first decades and his own “dark woods,” the moments when the familiar landscape suddenly turned strange.
In early 1906, so very soon after the wedding, the old pattern of sorrow accompanying joy repeated. Coolidge’s beloved grandmother, Sarah Almeda Brewer Coolidge, died. From Northampton, Calvin and Grace traveled up into the deep snows to attend her funeral, taking the train to Ludlow and then hiring a horse and sleigh for the ride to Plymouth. Grace, looking around, thought of Sarah Coolidge’s great magnanimity, of all the years she had gone out as a midwife.
Soon Grace would be expecting her own child, and the need to earn a living pushed out thoughts of his grandmother. He busied himself both helping and getting to know clients and new voters and showing that he could deliver for the town even without holding office. The Home Culture Club received a grant of a stupendous amount, $8,500, from Andrew Carnegie, to construct a greenhouse and maintain a model garden for city workers; Coolidge was on the committee that publicly and gratefully accepted the money. He represented not only estates but also people in trouble, among them the workers of Northampton who served Smith College. Among these clients was a twelve-year-old, Mary Whalen, the daughter of a washerwoman, who was accused of stealing gold jewelry from the girls’ rooms in the dormitories.
Such cases were welcome reminders of the needs of voters. Coolidge thought a good deal about campaign style in this period. It was important not only to be clear but also to let people know he valued them, to greet them on the street, to help out when he could. There was nothing wrong with doing an individual voter a service when possible; that was what politics was for. Via his wife and Miss Yale, Coolidge heard that Kennedy was doing a good job. Why not praise him? Coolidge had ladled out his share of mockery, especially in college, but could see now that attack politics yielded poor results. The best way to win was to stick to the issues and forgo any personal attacks or name-calling. Civility would be his rule from now on. He would try it out in his next campaign, for the office of state representative in Boston.
But for now, the couple enjoyed themselves. Their baby was due at the end of summer. It was a magical time for both of them. When the time of the birth grew near, the Coolidges rented, for the longer term, half of a two-family house on Massasoit Street, six houses down from Elm Street. The rent was $27 a month; Coolidge furnished the 2,100 square feet with his savings. There was electricity and a sewer line; trolleys were coming. About two weeks later, their son John was born, on the evening of September 7. The scent of clematis came through the window; to Coolidge and Grace it seemed like a benediction.
To report the news, Calvin sent his father a letter with a typically deadpan opening: “We seem to be getting along well at our house. Grace had an easy time of it and seems well and strong. She had no fever and the baby came after she was in bed about an hour—though she had little pains all day.” As the letter went on, the new father betrayed more of his enthusiasm: “Little John is as strong and smart as can be. He has blue eyes and red eyebrows. Grace calls his hair red. He weighed about eight pounds and measures about 20 inches. They say he looks just like me. His little hands are just like yours. I wish you could see him.” To his stepmother, Carrie, who was traveling back from Michigan, Coolidge was even more enthusiastic: “Can’t you come back here from Albany and see your grandson? He came Sept 7th just as the clocks were striking six. The boy is real white and was born hungry. . . . I told Grace I should call a girl Carrie because you had no little girl.” The baby, the wife, and the stepmother all made his family marvelously whole, whole as it had not been since his own mother’s death.
Within a week, even as the baby’s nurse sat in his kitchen, the Hampshire Gazette was chattering on about the possibility that Calvin would accept the Republican nomination as a candidate for his first statewide office, state representative: “Calvin Coolidge has shed the most light on the situation by saying he would consider the nomination,” commented the paper charitably. The salary would be $750 a year, plus mileage; it was only a half-year job, through June. The Gazette went on to flatter him by announcing, without accuracy, “Mr. Coolidge has acquired considerable real estate since he was came to Northampton and is now one of the large taxpayers.” In late October, Coolidge introduced a Republican speaker with a set of folksy New England remarks. “The frost may be on the pumpkin, but it does not seem to be in City Hall.” He spoke out for bipartisanship and electoral freedom: “It is axiomatic that popular government cannot long exist without a free ballot.” After a point, he digressed to take a stab at Henry Cabot Lodge, who had recently told voters that it was a choice between the Republican Party and the “Cossacks,” his way of assailing progressives in the Democratic Party. Coolidge sought to include where Lodge had excluded, to show that the progressive Republicans were men of democracy. In the Republican Party of western Massachusetts, Coolidge told his fellows, “we call in every kind, ‘barbarian, Scythian, bond or free’ you are welcome one and all, we care not at what shrine you worship or how you eat your pie. That includes what Senator Lodge calls Cossacks.” The language was frothy, but it revealed a feature of Coolidge that others would repeatedly note in the future: he was an independent man who shied away from clubs, but he felt no shame in demonstrating loyalty to a political party, the Republicans. Indeed, he suspected vanity in the Republicans who frequently diverged from the party position in the name of demonstrating their own independence. Loyalty was not always weakness. Sometimes it was efficiency, as in the case when men rowed together on the Connecticut River.
