Coolidge, page 17
Five: War
Boston
ONE EVENING IN AUGUST 1914, the passengers dancing on the luxury ship Kronprinzessin Cecilie noticed something strange. The moon had been on the starboard side of the ship when their evening, one of the last before reaching Plymouth, England, began. But now, suddenly, the moon stood at port. The evening star too had somehow moved from window to window. It was only when the guests reached the smoking room of the North German Lloyd liner and heard from the captain that they understood: the ship had turned around and was racing back to North America. War was breaking out in Europe. The Kronprinzessin flew under a German flag; she carried $13 million in gold bullion and silver in her cargo.
A better target for French or British cruisers could scarcely be imagined. Alarmed, the passengers, a mix that included English, American, and German, watched as the crew covered the ship’s lights, shut down her radio, and headed full speed into the dark North Atlantic. Just two years before, after all, the same black North Atlantic waters had brought disaster to another ship, the Titanic. They beseeched the captain, Charles Polack, to blow the horn, but he would not heed them. After a few hours, the reality sank in: the threat of torpedoes was far greater than that of running into an iceberg. Soon afterward, the inhabitants of Mount Desert Island, Maine, woke to a strange sight: the great liner Kronprinzessin anchored like a giantess near the smaller yachts in the resort harbor.
Nor was the Kronprinzessin alone. Up and down the New England coast, ships were arriving unscheduled, like great birds migrating in the wrong season. In Boston, which Coolidge visited that week for the mundane purpose of dedicating a new wing to the Bulfinch State House, the Arabic of the White Star Line suddenly materialized. No one knew if French or German battleships would follow the fleeing liners. Boston received reports that in Portland, Maine, an employee at the observatory had heard the boom of heavy guns, perhaps the sound of the German cruiser Dresden and the French cruiser Descartes engaging in battle right there in the Gulf of Maine. This last rumor proved to be unfounded, but other disconcerting stories were true.
Coolidge had expected to pilot, but not in the waters of war. The price and provenance of marble were what he and other officials had had on their minds at the dedication of the State House; the owners of quarries in western Massachusetts, his own area, were furious because the contract for white marble had gone to a company in Vermont. The State House addition cost $750,000, a disconcerting amount at a time when Massachusetts appeared to be slowing down; the spending would be hard to justify in Northampton, when the Nonotuck Silk Company in the Leeds section, short of orders, was cutting its workers back to a three-day week.
Such details mattered less than the disruption that a European war might bring to a port city like Boston, to a state like Massachusetts. No one knew what to make of it all. Back home in western Massachusetts, Coolidge also found confusion. Just a mile and a half from Massasoit Street, a radio hobbyist named Deane Lewis was puzzling over hundreds of messages he was now intercepting as European ships called out to one another in the early hours of war. Business owners were going to newspapers to warn that the sea war would damage already slowing production. “The production of our plant is naturally dependent upon the supply of crude rubber,” the proprietor of a rubber company in Chicopee Falls wrote, warning that “as this supply comes almost wholly from London and as shipping is necessarily going to be, for a while at least, seriously hindered the supply of crude rubber will necessarily become short.” As one country after another declared war, the extent of it shocked.
Over the course of the coming weeks, more news came in, much of it also hard to believe. The sense of dislocation in the Connecticut River Valley was no match for what was reported on Wall Street, where Dwight Morrow at J. P. Morgan was observing something he too had never expected: government authorities were shutting down the stock market. After a run on gold had caused a run on stocks, panic set in as Europeans withdrew holdings to take them to Europe. Now Morrow was sending even more gold to Europe: the USS Tennessee, a battleship, had received papers of immunity from Germany and Great Britain and was now carrying $8 million in gold to Americans in England who needed to buy their way home.
President Woodrow Wilson for his part did not know what to say. Wilson had not campaigned on war in 1912, but now he had to take the lead on U.S. policy in Europe’s conflict. The disruption also caught Republican leaders off guard. Theodore Roosevelt was deeply mired in a libel lawsuit involving New York State politics. The senior statesman from Massachusetts, Senator Lodge, was himself caught in Europe and had to think first not of policy but of family. Lodge’s grandchildren were stranded in Dieppe, France; the senator dispatched his son-in-law, Massachusetts Congressman Augustus Gardner, to collect them before the advance of the Germans. Gardner, the papers were reporting, took his own petrol in cans for the drive and escaped with the children and their mother onto a ship at Le Havre. In the tumult Lodge had missed the opportunity to personally make a final stand against legislation he deeply opposed: on September 2, the Senate endorsed a new antitrust law, creating a new entity to manage business nationally: the Federal Trade Commission. The Republican Party was already dangerously off balance from the torpedo blow of Roosevelt’s third-party candidacy; the word of real torpedoes made the political situation even more unpredictable.
Coolidge found himself torn. The crowning achievement of his first term as Massachusetts Senate president had been killing a tax on stocks at the last minute by masterfully exercising the Senate president’s privilege to create a tie vote. War might mean he would have to set aside his concerns about progressivism. His party leaders assigned him the job of Resolutions Committee chair, which meant he would be an author of the party platform for the autumn of 1914. The platform mattered not only because of the war news, but because the state would soon hold a convention to review the commonwealth’s constitution; the platform document could set the tone and direction.
Upon reflection, Coolidge concluded that the Republican Party of the state of Massachusetts was itself like a ship, unbalanced by war news and before that the blow of the bull moose. The ship had to be centered, it needed a new keel, and at all costs. That meant first pulling in the progressives, so that they were on deck instead of outside taking shots. It meant pulling all factions of the party together. Balance was all: wherever there was dispute, or costs, he must nonetheless seek the islands of agreement, the middle ground. If there was to be a war, then finding that middle ground, sacrificing principles for the duration, would be even more important. Spending would be especially important, however much Coolidge personally deplored it. In wars, Washington took the lead, but it was the job of Massachusetts to make a contribution, to show that the state could lead too, and even to get out in front of President Wilson. Two competing forces had to be weighed: the need to help the state and the need to protect individuals from an overreaching government, whether state or federal. Reading the reports of the trenches that France was digging, of Paul von Hindenburg’s first great success at the Battle of Tannenberg, Coolidge and his fellow Republicans thought back to the Civil War. They all recalled how Copperhead Democrats had nearly destroyed the Union when they had failed to side with the president, Abraham Lincoln. In a time of war, unity among all governing parties would be crucial. Coolidge’s Republican Party would aid Wilson in the war as the Democrats ought to have aided Lincoln.
Since Coolidge’s boyhood he had been drawn to Lincoln. The Great Emancipator had become a country lawyer, just as Coolidge would. Lincoln had moved slowly, as Coolidge and the Republicans had to. Lincoln had unified. No one had matched his ability to deal with practical affairs of his time. Lincoln had often found the middle ground; he had easily sacrificed the limelight to the cause. Coolidge had been present earlier that year in Boston, when William Lewis of Amherst, the assistant attorney general, had warned Republicans at an evening smoker that they were forgetting the principles upon which the Republican Party had been founded. Lewis had identified the right hero. Other Republicans agreed. It seemed symbolic that the one innovation Lincoln had registered for patent had been a design to stabilize boats by lifting them over shoals, the result of his trips on flatboats down the Ohio and Mississippi. To reorient, especially in a time of war, Coolidge and other Republicans had to look past Taft or Roosevelt, maybe all the way past, to their own evening star. To succeed now, the Republicans had to show they were still the Party of Lincoln. The only problem was that Coolidge himself did not know whether he personally could manage all these compromises, whether he was the right leader for this period.
For now, though, Coolidge would go along. After all, in any case, these thoughts were still theory; the United States was not yet even fighting a war. On August 20, President Wilson made a formal and stiff case for U.S. neutrality. He even suggested that it was unpatriotic to oppose neutrality: “Every man who really loves America will act and speak in the true spirit of neutrality, which is the spirit of impartiality and fairness and friendliness to all concerned.” In Wilson’s view, the best role for the United States to assume was that of the city on a hill. But within days of Wilson’s careful speech, news came to contradict him. The Germans were not merely marching through neutral Belgium; they were killing and destroying whole towns as they went.
On one day, August 22, tens of thousands of Frenchmen died trying to fend off the Germans east of Paris. Belgians were surveying the ashes of the 300,000 books burned by the Germans at the library of the University of Louvain. In London, a businessman, Herbert Hoover, was setting up a station at the Savoy with five hundred volunteers and was planning a great relief action for Belgium. Samuel Untermyer, the same progressive firebrand who had challenged J. P. Morgan in the Washington hearings, was not busting trusts that week; he was in London, running a rescue operation in his hotel and trying to hail down ships leaving the continent in the hope that they would stop and pick up U.S. citizens before they crossed the Atlantic. Congressman Gardner was calling for a new movement of preparedness: that U.S. youths be ready and trained to fight. It was only a matter of time before Colonel Roosevelt weighed in.
Coolidge began his stabilizing work immediately. On August 13, he addressed a crowd of three hundred farmers in agricultural Hatfield, informing them of a rather large appropriation he had gained for the agricultural college in the town of Amherst. When a Republican congressman, the Berkshires’ Allen Towner Treadway, hosted a giant meeting for the statewide party at his Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Coolidge was there to speak of funding for road construction that the party had secured. He sounded the familiar themes, such as the necessity of tariffs, and pointed out that the General Court had increased appropriations for highway construction for Berkshire, Hampshire, and Hampden counties. In that period the party platform was completed; Coolidge and his colleagues threw in just about every progressive item they could think of, except the vote for women, which, Coolidge had discovered, didn’t seem to have much support that year among the party’s constituents. The senator also, however, included some lines that gave a first inkling of the state party’s position on war. The Republican platform called for “the defense of those two citadels of freedom, representative democracy and independent courts.” It demanded “justice everywhere.” Then Coolidge was off to campaign for reelection.
Coolidge was by now a veteran campaigner; voters knew and liked his style. His silence was now established lore, part of the campaign. In her living room, Grace hung a sampler with an epigraph to remind visitors:
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?
That October, Coolidge appeared as much as he could, talking to voters directly. He always fought for what was important for his constituents; that fall, it was trolley connections and lines to link more people. Though he was attacking Democratic tariff levels now, he still did not attack individual Democrats, in the Senate or in western Massachusetts. The muddle of policy actually mattered less than a sense of calm and evidence that he was willing to serve. Across the state and across the Republican Party, his followers counted on him.
Coolidge did not disappoint. On November 3, the Democratic candidate for governor, David Walsh, won reelection, but only narrowly. The lieutenant governor slot went Democratic as well. Coolidge, however, trounced his opponent, the Progressive Ralph Staab. With the Grand Old Party’s platform so progressive itself, Staab had no case. “I was elected by about 2800,” Coolidge wrote to his stepmother. In his exhaustion, though, the senator-elect reversed his digits: he had beaten Staab by a margin of 8,200; Coolidge’s 15,326 votes were more than double what Staab had won. Forgetting the bull moose episode would be easier with numbers like those. “Senator Coolidge is the best vote getter in the state,” commented the Hampshire Gazette smugly, “and he will be heard from later.” The gratitude toward him was outsize: the strategists concluded that he had helped the GOP gain votes where it otherwise might not have. Other Republicans noticed that Democrats also liked him. All seven of the Democrats in the Senate voted for him as Senate president. In choosing Coolidge, they ignored James Timilty, who was Democratic Party city chairman. Coolidge had unified again. Meanwhile, the war news poured in. The Edwards Church, Grace’s church, hosted a Belgian, Lalla Vandervelde, who detailed the hardships of the German occupation. The conditions the Belgian described horrified the Northamptonites. German Zeppelins had raided England. Germany had announced a submarine blockade of Great Britain in early February.
The supposition of the cruise line North German Lloyd was still that the neutral United States was the best place to keep its ships during wartime. But in the United States, as the reports of German aggression mounted, people were not so sure. Around election time two navy torpedo destroyers had carefully escorted the Kronprinzessin down from Maine to President Roads, the Boston Harbor; a court had determined that it was not safe to keep her in Maine because of the ice. Though her captain, Charles Polack, had not wanted her to cross the three-mile line into international waters for a moment, she had needed to travel as far as ten miles out to find water deep enough for the passage to Boston. The Kronprinzessin was now in custody of the U.S. marshal for Massachusetts; the Guaranty Trust Company of New York was suing her for damages alleged by her failure to deliver the gold that had been shipped on her.
Not far from Boston’s harbors, at the State House, Coolidge prepared an opening address for the 1915 Senate, the second such address. He had to treat war, remind his colleagues of the concept of service, deliver his message about overlegislating, and do all of it in a new way, for to repeat his “Have Faith in Massachusetts” exhortation of 1914 would have been to serve up dull fare. As much as he sought unity, Coolidge could not help himself: he wanted to warn against unwarranted spending. The State House itself, with the new additions going up, reminded everyone of the government’s extravagance. In Boston and Northampton, he pondered and came up with a new kind of speech: one whose length made his point. The remarks he delivered that day contained only forty-four words, powerful in their combination of form and message:
Honorable Senators: My sincerest thanks I offer you. Conserve the firm foundations of our institutions. Do your work with the spirit of a soldier in the public service. Be loyal to the Commonwealth and to yourselves. And be brief; above all things, be brief.
“In brief, Calvin Coolidge approximates our idea of the ideal orator,” applauded the Globe. Coolidge’s skills as a legislator were also winning appreciation. Coolidge, people noticed, always undersold and usually delivered more than he had promised. Though they could see that he was becoming more conservative, his colleagues also saw that he reasoned out every issue and made his own decision. Edward Filene, the merchant, and Louis Brandeis had pushed for the ability of savings banks to sell insurance policies. The pair saw the private insurance companies as price gougers. There was a small state appropriation in support of such policies; the private insurance companies pushed to kill it, viewing government aid as unfair competition. It was not clear that Coolidge knew what he thought about state subsidy of insurance. But it was clear that he believed that insurance was important, that his mastery of Senate procedure was only growing, and that he was not above playing a few tricks, especially in the case of voice votes.
One day when the future of that subsidy was to be decided, Judd Dewey, the unpaid lawyer for the savings bank life insurance project, called on Coolidge to lay out its value. Coolidge, typically, said nothing, except, at the end: “What you say sounds reasonable.” Dewey left the office concerned; it was already late, and if action for his side was to be taken, it would have to be soon.
“What did Mr. Coolidge say?” asked a senator who saw Dewey leaving the office. “He didn’t say anything,” answered Dewey, “except ‘it sounds reasonable.’ ” “My God,” said the senator, “did he say that? Then you’re all right.” Within half an hour, the vote came, and the president of the Senate uttered his usual line: “Those in favor say ‘Aye.’ ” There was no response. A loud outburst of “nays” went up when Coolidge asked for those opposed. His response was remembered forever by those who supported the new legislation. With no change in facial expression, he announced, “The yeas have it, and the bill is ordered to a third hearing.”
Over the winter, the country struggled to form an opinion about the war. At Amherst, President Meiklejohn thought it best simply to air the issue and staged lectures for representatives of both sides. Thomas Hall of Union Theological Seminary made the case for Germany; for Great Britain, Maurice Low, a newspaperman. Much of what transpired on the financial level left Americans baffled. Forces like laws of physics were at work—they could see but could not always discern which laws or why. The gold that had fled the United States to pay for the European war suddenly poured back in, and the stock market reopened—at a higher level than many expected. European money was following the Kronprinzessin and making the United States its haven. The recession was quickly turning into a boom as Europeans placed orders for the war. The Aluminum Company of America, for example, received stunningly large orders from Great Britain: 72 million pounds total over two years, starting in 1915. The Aluminum Company was the sole U.S. producer; suddenly Arthur Davis, the Amherst man, was a true titan.
