Coolidge, page 27
Coolidge understood his job as vice presidential candidate as supporting Harding; it was a replay of the years he had backed up Governor McCall. But the more he thought Harding’s plan over, the more comfortable he was with it. In normalcy, Harding had come up with a concept that made sense for the party and the country. And the crowds now gathering around him seemed in their turn to support his own endorsements. At Northampton, a sea of boater hats greeted Coolidge the day he formally received his nomination; photographers that summer followed Coolidge and his family around, demanding photo poses almost nonstop. He and his son Calvin, both in white shirts, arranged themselves carefully in the Massasoit Street yard before a soapbox car so that reporters could snap an image of the Coolidges at home. Images of Coolidge wearing his grandfather’s old blue wool haying smock also proliferated.
Coolidge and Grace traveled out to Marion with other Republicans to call on the candidate at his home. The Hardings’ lifestyle differed so much from the Coolidges’. Mrs. Harding had run the newspaper in Marion with Harding, and now she ran his preparations for office with him; she referred to “Warren Harding” when she spoke to third parties as if her husband were a brand, not a man. The Hardings hung close to their friends and advisers, who were in turn more talkative than a candidate’s advisers would be in New England. They spoke often and on the record, and moved the campaign focus away from the League of Nations and the wartime bitterness. The Harding advisers had understood early that even “law and order” was too bitter a motto to emphasize exclusively. “I find the underlying thing in the minds of the people is the demand for a change in the Administration,” Harry Daugherty, the attorney who was close to Harding, told the people around the porch.
Even in the good mood of the general campaign, however, the muttering about the Harding crowd continued. People wondered whether Harding was hiring too many friends—not just near allies, such as Daugherty, but old acquaintances, such as Colonel Charles Forbes, a recipient of the Croix de Guerre in France who had served state governments and Wilson and ran a construction firm in Tacoma, Washington. Forbes had helped ensure that the Washington State delegation went for Harding.
But on balance, the Coolidges were pleased with their visit. The Hardings received them warmly. To share his luck with Coolidge, Harding hunted for a four-leaf clover on his well-trodden lawn, found one, and pinned it onto Coolidge’s lapel. They could feel the comfort of being part of something larger. Now the authorities at the Federal Reserve banks were raising interest rates, so that those rates, like the prices, were higher than what adults had known before: the discount rate, the rate banks charged other banks, was 7 percent at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Many prices were coming down: “Women’s ingrain silk stockings at prices unprecedented this year,” read a Boston Herald advertisement for R. H. Stearns. Wall Streeters believed that this tightening would reduce prices permanently. But others were uncertain. Symptomatic of the general confusion was an editorial in a Lincoln, Nebraska, paper The Daily Star. The paper roasted Harding for failing to tighten interest rates enough: “Through Senator Harding’s action, wild speculation was permitted to continue while production was retarded,” commented the editors. “The youngest follower of economics will see this action merely aggravates the situation.” Farm prices were dropping in 1920, suggesting deflation, so this allegation, that interest rates might yet be too low, was an odd one for a paper to make. It was even odder when the reader realized that the Lincoln paper had mistaken the head of the Federal Reserve, W. P. G. Harding, for the presidential candidate.
The first great test of the Harding-Coolidge ticket came in September, when Maine held its early vote. Coolidge went to Portland and gave a speech emphasizing that to oppose Wilson’s League was not necessarily to be isolationist: “Ever since this nation was established, it has never been isolated. Not isolated but independent, free, rendering service to all mankind.” Franklin Roosevelt, the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate, pointedly vacationed in Eastport and not at the family place in Campobello, New Brunswick, over the border, in the days before the Maine ballot. On September 11, a Saturday, during the anniversary of the strike, Coolidge gave a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire. Coolidge stressed the necessity of withdrawing the special powers Congress had given government before the war. “The independence of the Congress” too, he said, “must be preserved.” Under Wilson, the executive branch had grown too large. The navy secretary, Josephus Daniels, snapped back that Coolidge was inconsistent or worse. “The first half of his speech was to declare for American participation in world affairs and it was essentially sound,” Daniels noted, “but he made a lame and impotent conclusion by approving Harding’s toothless Hague tribunal.” He went on to say, “But by reason of the straddle policy of his party Governor Coolidge had to repudiate his splendid recital of American duty to the world, as well as to itself.” Roosevelt was sharper than Daniels even, countering on the day of the Maine election. Republicans like Coolidge, Roosevelt said, backed a Congress that would “have the president’s office a chief clerkship for the carrying out of its policies.”
In New England, Coolidge knew, the best way to come back after such a putdown was to prove oneself even humbler than the opponent suggested. Coolidge therefore lectured on thrift. Speaking to the National Association of Life Underwriters, he announced that he had not bought a suit of clothes in eighteen months or a pair of shoes in two years. Once supply and demand could function freely again, Coolidge said, industries such as the woolen industry of Massachusetts would also function. At home, as well, the Coolidges struggled with finance. Someone had given them a police dog. Coolidge wanted his father to take it but John demurred. “A dog is no joke,” Coolidge wrote. “They cost money.”
Whether because of thrift or pride, the Republican victory that year in Maine proved historic; Harding carried more than 65,000 votes. The Republicans made gains even in cities such as Portland relative to their performance in 1916. The GOP women had come out in force. “All records broken in size of total vote and plurality,” commented The Boston Globe. Coolidge was even blunter in the telegram he sent Harding on September 14: “Judge nothing can prevent your election.” After Maine, Coolidge and Harding went back to their lecture circuit. Yet again, Coolidge found Harding’s themes easy to support: less injurious meddling from abroad, less meddling in business. Wilson had indeed vetoed the federal budget system legislation put forward by Republicans, but that just meant the Grand Old Party would put through a second version. Indeed, on the budget, the habitually jovial Harding hit hard. Washington was conducting a “financial orgy” that only a budget could halt, Harding said in Wheeling, West Virginia. A budget was worthy because then “there would be set up in Washington an establishment”—reporting to the president—“which would have full and complete knowledge of every activity.” There had to be a way to reduce the national debt without “undue taxation.” Government had drawn “the very life blood from the channels of business to keep itself alive.” In this bloviating, one could hear the common sense. Harding was placing faith in the restorative power of commerce.
Just a few days after the Maine vote came an event that tested such faith. As the bells of New York’s Trinity Church rang for the lunch break, an anarchist’s bomb in a horse-drawn cart exploded, hitting the epicenter of capitalism, J. P. Morgan headquarters. Just three minutes before, circulars signed “Fighting Anarchists of America” had been found by a letter carrier at Cedar Street and Broadway. The explosion was caused by a powerful “TNT bomb, reinforced with iron slugs,” as the police reported the next day. The impact was so great that one slug landed on the eighteenth floor of 61 Broadway. It was a far greater explosion than any of the individual bombs that had gone off in 1920 or the year before. Morrow, inside, sustained cuts to his head and hand as the windows blew out. The dome on the structure, the pride of J. P. Morgan, shattered. The walls were pockmarked from the stones that had hit them. Fifteen people were killed instantly. Others lay dying on the street. Every window at Bankers Trust across the street was also damaged. The precious tickers, machines that spit out the stock prices were hit, in both their glass tops and their wooden frames. It all seemed a horrible setback. Everyone knew that Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer would now have a pretext to launch a campaign to renew the deportation raids and revive his hateful sedition law. Officers were called in to guard the million dollars in gold that the Federal Reserve kept under the ground.
But those present in the Morgan office at the bombing noticed something else. One ticker, Clarence Barron’s ticker from Dow Jones, still clattered. The glass bell over the machine was smashed, and shards had embedded themselves in its slender wood frame, but the apparatus continued to spew news of the explosion and then, all afternoon, the details of its consequences. The sputtering little machine sent a signal that the whole nation heard. Commerce would not be stopped.
In October, Coolidge could feel himself growing into his new role; he looked forward to Washington. The same Wall Street that was recovering from the bombing was now betting seven to one that Harding would prevail over Cox. “We will carry all of the West,” Elmer Dover, a Republican national committeeman, wrote to Harding. Looking over the northwest, Charles Forbes, who was seeking a spot on the shipping board, sent an equally confident message to Marion: “You will make a sweeping victory.”
Toward the end of the campaign, as if to mark the finality of Coolidge’s departure from Massachusetts, his great mentor, Murray Crane, died. A crowd came together at Crane’s house on Sugar Hill in Dalton to pay its respects; Coolidge sat with Lodge in Crane’s drawing room. The death confirmed what Coolidge already knew: that Crane had failed at the convention because he was sick. “Had he been his old self at Chicago I feel the result there would have been different. . . . He was a great man,” Coolidge wrote his father. At the funeral there were no cross words, but when Lodge commenced posing for pictures, Coolidge found himself unwilling to join him and finally snapped, “I came to bury my friend. It’s no time for photographs.”
On November 1, Coolidge wrote his father a preelection report. It featured the usual mixture of relief, concern, and sharp Coolidge humor about the economy. The difficult inflation puzzle still plagued him, but he was cheerier now. “Came home yesterday. Boys are well. Your dog is growing well. She has bitten the ice man, the milk man, and the grocer man. It is good to have some way to get even with them for the high prices they charge for everything. In the morning Mr. Stearns will try to find out how to telephone returns to you.”
The return numbers were so strong that not even Lodge could sniff at them. On Harding’s fifty-fifth birthday, Harding, Coolidge, and normalcy took more than 60 percent of the vote. James Cox’s Democrats won only 34 percent. In the electoral college, the GOP collected 404 votes to 127 for the Democrats. Not everyone understood the extent to which Coolidge deserved credit for the outcome. The Germans, for example, remained steadfast in their fealty to the idea of Archibald Coolidge as victor, with the Berliner Tageblatt, still confused, writing that “through the victory of the Republican ticket Archibald Cary Coolidge has been elected vice president of the United States.”
In fact Calvin Coolidge had made a difference. Tennessee, where Coolidge had briefly traveled, rewarded him and voted for a Republican over a Democrat in the presidential election for the first time since 1868. Coolidge’s actions during the police strike were often cited as the reason for the GOP success. “The people not only beat Gompers and Cox. They were at particular pains to rub it in,” gloated The Wall Street Journal. When it came to the Senate, the Democrats had prevailed in the South but nowhere else. The Republicans picked up ten seats; crucially, they gained in western states such as Nevada, Idaho, and California. The Republican majority in the upper chamber was now 59 to 37, which meant that from his seat as president of the Senate, the new vice president, Coolidge, would be likely to see the passage of many laws he endorsed. The tariff proved an especially big seller in places such as Utah, where tariff advocate Reed Smoot had won 56.6 percent of the vote. As for the House of Representatives, the Grand Old Party now held nine out of ten seats outside the South. With a total of 302 seats, it had almost 70 percent of the House, a historic record. The result was a shift in the official policy of the Grand Old Party. It was not so much the progressive party as the party of low taxes, tariffs, less central government, and stability.
In December, the Coolidges traveled out to Ohio a second time, this time in snow, to visit the Hardings. They found there were still crowds of hundreds bidding for the president-elect’s attention; William Jennings Bryan was set to arrive shortly. Someone mentioned a plan for a vice presidential residence in Washington; Coolidge promptly nixed it—as “inappropriate” in a time of budget cutting. The Coolidges found the Hardings marvelously receptive. Harding invited Coolidge to sit in on cabinet meetings, marking a shift for a president-elect. Harding was a unifier, Coolidge said. The vice president–elect did not find himself favoring the word “normalcy,” but he described their shared agenda another way. It was time to end the confusion, to recognize the cost of operating “in this time of uncertainty,” as he told The New York Times.
Back east in Plymouth, Massachusetts, just before Christmas, Coolidge made another try at expressing where the country might go. Excavators there had been digging up the original rock where the pilgrims landed, in time for the tercentenary of the year of the landing, 1620. A crowd of hundreds assembled there, among whom were local children and mill hand immigrants, “still faulty in their English,” as the papers reported. The vice president–elect, Mrs. Coolidge, and Senator Lodge stood before the citizens. Coolidge pointed out to the crowd that there was nothing noble about the pilgrims’ blood at the time they voyaged. It was their deeds that distinguished them for later Americans. They had been “oblivious to rank, yet men trace to them their lineage as to a royal house.” It would be futile, Coolidge said, “to search among recorded maps an history for their origin. They sailed up out of the infinite.” The way the pilgrims had lived, by example, provided value for others; in fact, “no like body ever cast so great an influence on human history.” Preserving that tradition, Coolidge was saying, seemed a primary endeavor, if only because it benefited so many others, regardless of background. Coolidge’s second point was made by the ring of the telephone: the Rock’s anniversary was being celebrated with a connection from Massachusetts to the West Coast and the governor of California. Daniel Webster had prophesied, a century before, that Plymouth would be heard “to the murmurs of the Pacific seas.” Now Coolidge used the public phone call to make good on that promise. Governor Stephens did not pick up, but his secretary and Coolidge conversed before the crowd. “I wish you to say to Governor Stephens that Massachusetts and Plymouth greet California and the Golden Gate.”
As he thought about the prospects for change, Coolidge felt his hopes lift again. The party platform suited Harding’s intentions, and his own. On the need for the new budget system, the document was especially clear: “The universal demand for an executive budget is a recognition of the incontrovertible fact that leadership and sincere assistance on the part of the executive departments are essential to effective economy and constructive retrenchment.” Harding was already thinking about how to win party support for tax changes. Coolidge could see that Harding was selecting friends from Ohio for key cabinet jobs: Daugherty for attorney general, for example. But the president-elect was also naming great powerhouses to advise him: Herbert Hoover, who was universally respected, went to the Commerce Department, Charles Evans Hughes to the post of secretary of state. Also notable was the appointment of Andrew Mellon, the Pittsburgh magnate, as Treasury secretary. After the convention, the limits on giving had come off; Mellon had raised $400,000 in Allegheny County. Interviewed, Barron told the press that “the finance success associated with the name of Mellon in Pittsburgh is a good augury.”
Coolidge had been accustomed to the citizens of Massachusetts, who had respected him by keeping their distance; now huge crowds came to see him wherever he went. In Atlanta, where thousands greeted him, someone stole his overcoat while he was inspecting a YMCA building. Fending off the praise and the flattery was also a challenge. Theodore Roosevelt’s sister Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, still grieving over TR’s death, invited Coolidge to speak at the Women’s Roosevelt Memorial Foundation, telling Coolidge, “I would rather have you as the speaker of this meeting than anyone else for your works seem to me to be a reincarnation of both Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.” Coolidge did not know how to respond and asked Morrow whether he should accept. The new administration needed to move quickly in all areas. As soon as the election returns were in, Coolidge embarked on a crash course in every area of administration, turning to anyone, regardless of status, to gain the most accurate and succinct information. His distant cousin Archibald, a Harvard professor and leading expert on treaties and international law relating to war, knew better than almost anyone else the legal background regarding the neutrality of Belgium. But the same cousin, Coolidge also suspected, might exploit the opportunity of an informational query to trap the vice president–elect into listening to hours of lectures. To gain the benefit of Archibald’s knowledge without paying a prohibitive cost in time, Coolidge crafted his own single-paragraph summary of the law as it had been before the war and sent it over to Cambridge: “The great powers of Europe made a treaty for the neutralization of Belgium under which they agreed not to violate Belgian territory by invasion.” But the vice president–elect also helpfully advised his cousin as to the form of the response he expected: “You are familiar with European subjects which I am not so that I wish to ask you if the following statement would be correct. Perhaps you can indicate by writing ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on it and returning it to me.” Even so, the Harvard cousin could not resist shipping back a response of several paragraphs to the State House.
