Coolidge, page 31
Stearns too was disappointed in Daugherty, and sensed something off about the Justice Department. Prices were down. At R. H. Stearns, silk stockings with lisle tops and feet had sold for $2 in November; by Christmas the firm had dropped the price of the stockings to $1.85. Yet Attorney General Daugherty at the Justice Department was just launching a new campaign against stores for their prices. On December 22, just before Christmas, Daugherty announced a federal investigation of prices for food, fuel, and clothing. Daugherty’s department would do its part to drive down prices by spotlighting “unconscionable” profiteering; it was time the Justice Department set out to “get these smart fellows.” Stearns desperately sought an interview while in Washington, and failed to get one. Denied his interview, Stearns returned to Boston and exploded. Why was the administration not more solicitous of commerce? “I am sorry that I did not have a chance to talk with the Attorney General,” Stearns wrote to Coolidge. “While his Secretary was very courteous and intelligent about the matter, he was buried deep in papers.” Daugherty found time for Debs but not for business.
The point was a larger one, Stearns wrote. What infuriated merchants was that they had hoped for more freedom in peacetime, but here Daugherty was perpetuating wartime price management, and that was itself unbearable. “The Administration should realize that for several years merchants were rasped almost beyond their capacity to stand it.” Seventy-five-cent veiling, a topic that had animated the committee the month before, preoccupied Stearns. “When they were making some of their investigations here two or three years ago, they investigated one of our neighbors and they discovered a piece of veiling which was being sold for 75 cents a yard. The store when asked what it cost, said it cost 10 cents, but it was bought in a miscellaneous lot of goods on which the store had to make desperate efforts to come out even.” Perhaps, wrote Stearns of Daugherty, “he can differentiate between robbers and respectable people a little more carefully.” The cynicism of the Harding crowd also struck Earle Kinsley, the Vermont Republican. A vacancy fell open in the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which covered New York, Vermont, and Connecticut. The Vermont bar wanted to recommend the appointment of John Redmond of Newport, Vermont, and delegated John Sargent, the state attorney general and friend of the Coolidges, to make the case to Daugherty. It was Vermont’s turn, the Vermonters felt: Vermont had never had a judge. But all that Daugherty asked was “What did the Vermont delegation do for us at Chicago?” The Veterans Bureau continued to spend and that year was set to outgrow the navy in size, with a budget of $455 million in 1923.
Grimly, Coolidge determined to focus on service. The economy was finally picking up. For the year 1920–1921, Ford had sold more than 1.25 million touring cars; this was the first twelve-month period in which sales had topped the one million mark. Dawes was moving forward in the same dramatic fashion. On February 3, 1922, Dawes went before a thousand officials, again with several brooms, to dramatize Harding’s original commitment to sweep Washington clean and his own determination to continue rationalizing the still considerable inefficiency of government. This time his emphasis was not on budget numbers but on redundant purchases. With one broom, Dawes pounded the floor of DAR Hall: “There is your broom that meets navy specifications. And”—another broom—“here are brooms that don’t meet those specifications that sweep just as well.” The navy had sinned by buying new brooms rather than taking 350,000 army brooms that would have done fine. Dawes bragged that Mellon handled the intrusions of his inspectors well: “Secretary Mellon is a businessman. His fur didn’t go up or his back arch when my coordinators came in.”
Dawes was claiming that his work would lead to savings of a full $2 billion; the savings in another eighteen months would be $3.5 billion. If enough was spent on help for veterans, and the disabled were taken care of, and the economy continued its recovery, then Dawes’s enterprise might be worth it, for the unrelenting pressure to create a permanent payment system for veterans, a great federal pension, might abate.
If not, the Dawes budget work was in vain: the Congress would only add back in what he cut. Lawmakers from both parties were wildly scrounging about for ways to finance a bonus; a tax increase seemed inevitable. On February 16, Stearns telegraphed his two cents on the bonus from Room 730 of the Hotel Touraine. “From any point of view believe it is a mistake,” he wrote, but “if it must be then sales tax least objectionable.” When Coolidge discussed taxes with Clarence Barron, he did not discuss whether there should be a tax increase; he discussed the difficulties of passing a tax increase: “How we are going to raise the taxes, I don’t know.” There were always other challenges. Grace maintained her rule of no politics in public. That January, however, Mrs. Harding, perhaps inadvertently, managed to position Grace to violate it. Unable to attend a meeting of the National Women’s Republican Club, the first lady asked Grace to substitute. Grace found herself reading a message from Mrs. Harding that called upon women for “party loyalty, conviction and devotion.” This document was, the papers commented, “the first political manifesto by the wife of an American President.” It was an embarrassment for the Coolidges.
Sensing that Coolidge was in a funk, Stearns wrote to him frequently and even, in one letter, unconsciously promoted the vice president to chief executive. Writing on January 20, 1922, to let Coolidge know of some praise Coolidge had received from Wirt Humphrey of Chicago’s Hamilton Club, Stearns reported that the club members “were very much pleased to meet President Coolidge.” In the same letter, Stearns went on to assure Coolidge that Humphrey had heard of Vice President Coolidge and “repeated suggestions that he will be the logical candidate for President after President Harding has served his eight years.” Stearns commiserated with Coolidge for his various setbacks but then reminded him, in case Coolidge had forgotten, that neither of them had sought the vice presidency for him in the first place. Later he chided Coolidge, “I came away from Washington quite a little disturbed by your statement that you were getting suspicious of everybody.” He went on, “It makes me a little sick at heart that you should not get much more comfort out of your success.” The only one who could destroy goodwill toward Coolidge, Stearns wrote, was Coolidge himself. “I cannot imagine any way in which even you can destroy it unless you persistently for years make folks feel that you are not interested in them. I know you are. Let them know it.”
Now it was Coolidge who exploded. If expressing interest where he had none was the price of success, it might not be worth it. “Your letters all received,” Coolidge shot back. “I do not think you have any comprehension of what people do to me. Even small things bother me. But that is no matter. I can’t go to New York for Mr. Mott or anyone else. I have been there eight times.” The senators noticed that he dined alone and with his face to the wall. The ladies’ magazines praised Grace in order to blame Coolidge. “Heaven only knows how much the Coolidge family needs her leavening,” commented the Woman’s Journal, the periodical of the American Woman Suffrage Association, noting that Coolidge presided over the Senate “like a sphinx over Egypt.”
Over the course of the spring, Coolidge’s mood did not improve. That April also brought a Gridiron dinner, a ritual press event at which the newspapermen entertained the government and grilled the politicians. The dinner took place at the Coolidges’ hotel home, the Willard. It was a mark of the recovery that this year the coal strikes were not even a subject at the dinner; the event’s planners found the topic too old to address yet again. The same night, a fire roared through the Willard and the rooms were evacuated. When Coolidge tried, quietly, to reenter, one of the many guards asked him who he was. “The vice president,” Coolidge answered and was allowed to move forward until someone asked, “Vice president of what?” When Coolidge replied that he was the vice president of the United States, the guards sent him back safely behind the barriers. They had mistaken him for the vice president of the hotel.
The price of their status, having it or lacking it, was becoming clear to all the Coolidges. Around this time, the president’s son Calvin wrote a poem that captured the family ambivalence about Washington. The title he gave it used the same word Stearns had used: “Success.”
Success, O magic word, Success!
How much you mean to happiness
Men seek you over e’ery land,
But scanty few have you in hand.
Men slave for you and with life pay
If they can clutch you for one day
You are the subject of their prayers
To you they give their thoughts and cares
Men say untruths for you alone
And by foul means you’re called their own
Yet rest not till their dying day
Because they grasped you in such way.
Grace preserved the poem, typed on the stationery of the Willard.
Still, the spring of 1922 was the Coolidges’ low point. They were now beginning to derive some comfort from the sense Coolidge was not alone in his struggles to promulgate quality policy in Washington. Mellon was struggling with plans for tax simplification and also with the Harding gang’s plants in his own department. The secretary prevailed in a skirmish when a Mellon loyalist, Internal Revenue Commissioner David Blair, squeezed out several Harding supporters. One Harding man was C. C. Childs, a former Yale football star who had competed in the hammer throw at the 1912 Olympic Games. Mellon’s staff suspected that Childs and a colleague had removed privileged documents from the office when they had left. Blair sent the Secret Service after them. Furious at being followed, Childs pushed a Secret Service man against a tree and punched him unconscious. There were rumors that Elmer Dover would back Childs up and bring the fired men back. But Mellon, after calling on Harding at the White House, confirmed that the men would not be reinstated.
Each hour that Mellon spent on politics was an hour away from cleaning up after the war, itself a never-ending struggle. Congress had created a debt commission to collect money it was owed from foreign governments, and put forward a plan for twenty-five-year payment, which foreign governments promptly attacked as selfish. “There once existed a ferocious creditor he was called Shylock,” a French senator from Martinique, Henri Lémery, was quoted in The New York Times as saying. “Has America, which but yesterday we acclaimed for her generosity and idealism, fallen to the role of a Shylock?”
The great domestic legacy of the war, even beyond the debt, remained the size and waste of government. Out west, one of the navy properties was a great oil field that lay under a butte, officially Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 3 but known as Teapot Dome for the butte’s funny shape. Some engineers were arguing that the surrounding private companies were tapping the oil out from under the Dome. The best thing to do might be to grant a concession to drill there; that would both allow commerce to take over the business there and reduce the United States’ dependence on oil drilling in Mexico. (Clarence Barron commented often that though New England did not know it, much of its oil came from Mexico.) Granting oil concessions to private companies was like granting a great company the right to operate Muscle Shoals, the dam that had been constructed to produce nitrates during the war. It was important to do this now, Harding and Coolidge believed. If they did not then these sectors might stay forever in public hands.
But the lawmakers were suddenly querying the way Harding went about his commercialization of Teapot Dome. They were realizing that the interior secretary, Albert Fall, intended to lease the valuable Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 3 without putting the project out for bids. The transfer to Interior from Navy had already taken place with the seeming endorsement of all, including the navy secretary and the navy assistant secretary, Theodore Roosevelt, the president’s son and Alice’s half brother. The early word was that Fall was writing a contract with Standard Oil. By Good Friday, April 14, 1922, The Wall Street Journal was serving up a scoop: the Wyoming reserves, some 200 million barrels of high-grade oil, would be leased to Mammoth Oil Co., a company created by Sinclair Oil, the company of a Harding campaign donor, Harry Sinclair. Fall claimed that Sinclair was a good choice, better than the alternative, which was teaming up with a giant like Standard Oil.
Now the Progressives had the issue they had been longing for. Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin was moving with alacrity to spotlight the transaction and demanded an investigation of the Teapot Dome concession. The administration hoped that La Follette, who was often pooh-poohed as a mere blowhard, would not find a following for this. Yet the Senate unanimously passed La Follette’s resolution while Coolidge watched from the Senate president’s seat. More resolutions followed. As Miles Poindexter of Washington State put it, there were two questions hanging over big oil concessions: “Was it necessary for the government to sink wells or to have wells sunk upon its reserve in order to meet an attack upon the oil underneath its own property by which it was being drained? In the second place, are the means which have been adopted by the Government for doing that the proper ones, the best ones, to the greatest advantage of the Government, which could be obtained?” The gas price at the pump was not up especially, but the prospect of profits from gas was even more enormous than people had guessed in the spring, and the markets knew it. Oil share prices in total had risen by a billion dollars since the beginning of the year as shareholders tried to get their part of the auto boom.
In June, Coolidge took a breather from it all and went up to Amherst, where he had, so long before, speculated as a student about the corruptibility of any larger government created by an income tax. His son John was coming nearer to college age. The vice president even spent an hour at Phi Gamma Delta house. At Amherst, however, a general skepticism about the flamboyant Meiklejohn was sweeping the trustees and alumni. Meiklejohn had just spent yet another year in Europe; the faculty resented his absences, and the trustees resented his failure to raise more funds. In the background was the old war issue. “I have heard from so many sources that there can be no doubt whatever Mr. Meiklejohn threw as many obstacles as he could in the way of military training and participation in the war by undergraduates,” wrote Harold M. Bixby, a St. Louis banker, adding, “He does not understand the Amherst spirit.” Others were concerned with Meiklejohn’s attitude toward religion; he was not against it, but seemed to be pulling the college away from faith and toward philosophy or politics. Meiklejohn was establishing classes for local workers in Holyoke and Springfield; that seemed to be pulling the college into the world in a way some of the faculty disliked. There was something disingenuous about Meiklejohn playing at conciliation with workers when union and management seemed ready to go to war.
That summer, they did go to war. In June, the administration won a key case against violent strikers: United Mine Workers v. Coronado Coal affirmed that strikers were liable for the damage they inflicted on companies’ property. On July 1, 300,000 rail workers walked out, shutting down commerce. The strikes halted the upward trend of business; the strike was taking the recovery hostage. The administration had begun to appoint conservative judges who would be a help in the endless battles between companies and unions. A key judge was James Wilkerson, confirmed recently as a federal judge in Chicago, replacing the progressive Kenesaw Landis, who was doing double duty as a federal judge and baseball commissioner. On September 1, Attorney General Daugherty struck: the administration sought and won a temporary injunction against strikes from Wilkerson, the Harding appointee, in Chicago. It was an example of Harding at his toughest. Gompers was furious; he called the injunction a document that suspended “every constitutional guarantee of free speech, free press, and free assemblage.” As for Wilkerson, he was a mere Daugherty “pet,” Gompers said. But Harding stood firm: the strikers were wrong, as the injunction said, because they represented interference with interstate commerce. Writs were served across the country to union leaders; they could no longer, after eight weeks, halt work. Later in September, Judge Wilkerson handed down a second injunction, of stronger power. There Harding, like Coolidge, saw no middle ground.
The Republican prospects for the midterm did not look good. Harding, Coolidge noted, faced a challenge in another area: the veterans. The senators had finally succumbed to the pressure and passed the bonus bill Harding had persuaded them to reject the year before. They figured, as the police had, that Harding would sign it: the midterm elections were close. His veto would certainly lose the party votes. But Harding vetoed. The least Coolidge could do was campaign loyally, and he did, discovering something surprising in the process. In Washington, Lodge still reigned, but the campaign reminded Coolidge of a funny thing: he was more popular than Lodge, who might even lose his seat. To lose Lodge would mean “a loss to Massachusetts in prestige and influence in Washington that might not be regained in a generation,” the Republican Club of Massachusetts said. During the campaign they all, including Grace and Governor Cox, found themselves back together at Treadway’s Red Lion Inn. At the town hall in Great Barrington, the Republican noted, the enthusiasm for Coolidge was especially strong: “Given Ovation at Rally,” the Springfield Republican reported. Afterward, Lodge bought the papers and saw the headline. Lodge bitterly tore the paper into pieces. “I wish they would accept me as an institution or a monument this one time,” he complained to a friend.
In the end Lodge did hold his seat, but only barely. And Harding’s Republicans did hold on to their majorities. But the Grand Old Party leaders found the party had narrowed its lead in both houses significantly; its fifty-nine-seat majority in the Senate dropped to fifty-three. In Minnesota, the isolationist Lindbergh did not win, but Frank Kellogg, a venerable Republican who had endorsed Wilson’s League of Nations, a member of the old golf cabinet, was also defeated. Emboldened, bonus fans pushed through another bonus bill, daring Harding to veto. Senator Holm Bursum of New Mexico, a fellow Republican who had taken Albert Fall’s seat when Fall went to Interior, led the legislation, which created monthly payments of $72. These payments were not for the veterans of World War I, but rather for veterans of preceding wars and their widows, of whom there were in total about 200,000, all of whom were now able to vote in federal elections. Although this kind of bill did not cover the millions of World War I veterans, it was a wedge; once it passed you could pass another one like it.
