Coolidge, page 38
The Wall Street Journal made matters difficult for the president by making this an issue of pride. Coolidge had to veto or be humiliated. This Senate was not making law; it was “hazing the president” through his Treasury secretary, it alleged. And there was more humiliation in other bills before him, such as the immigration law.
On May 26, he sat down at a little desk on the White House lawn, bit his lip, and signed the immigration law, appending his own special criticism of the Japanese exclusion component. For years, the gentleman’s agreement under which Japan herself had monitored and restricted emigration had allowed the Japanese to save face when it came to immigration, to pretend at least that migration policy was a decision of the Japanese sovereign. Tokyo was withdrawing its ambassador from Washington; the U.S. ambassador to Japan, Cyrus Woods, was likewise retreating, though he claimed his resignation was in part due to the illness of his mother-in-law, who had been injured in the recent earthquake. Coolidge warned that the historic relationship with Japan was now disturbed, and unnecessarily so; instead of avoiding “new ground for misapprehension,” Congress had created it.
The same day he signed the immigration law, Coolidge escaped the White House and took a long walk through Washington, betting that citizens would not recognize him. He wanted to try to shake off his cold through exercise. Secret Service men trailing, he crossed through business and commercial districts and even window-shopped, thinking about prices and what he had accomplished. It took a few hours for the papers to catch up with the story.
The greatest shame, he considered, was the tax bill. On Saturday, May 31, he met with both Mellon and Lord. Was the tax cut worth what it might cost the budget? Earlier they had defined “scientific taxation” as tax law that promoted growth by cutting at the top. If the bill was not sufficiently scientific—and by Mellon’s terms it wasn’t—wouldn’t the bill cause the government to forgo revenue? Then government debts in turn could not be paid off. Interest rates would go up. Growth would be more sluggish. The people might get used to larger government. All these possibilities in turn made it likely the administration would never get the budget down to that $3 billion goal. General Lord, whose images ran to the classical, would later talk of feeling like the mythical Greek figure Tantalus, who was immobilized beneath a bunch of tempting grapes; though the grapes hung close, he was never able to reach them. The $3 billion mark was that tempting bunch of grapes for this administration. Each time Lord thought he could get there, something like the bonus bill happened and the government had to spend more, not less.
What’s more, when it came to timing, Coolidge and Mellon were trapped. Coolidge had made a point of rejecting special sessions of Congress, on the simple principle that they provided opportunity for more legislation. Activists tended to like such sessions for the same reason; indeed, La Follette of Wisconsin was seeking one now. To repair the bill, however, would require such a session. Even if he did not sign this tax bill, the bonus bill would set them all back. The details of the outlays that the bonus would require were just beginning to come out; $132 million was needed for the first year. Major General Robert Davis of the War Department was estimating that 2,517 clerks would have to be hired to deliver the bonuses to the veterans. A “deficiency bill,” a new law, would have to be passed to pay for the costs of the veterans’ bonus. That would reduce the surplus for which he, Lord, and Mellon had worked so hard. Mellon was alleging that signature of this tax bill would send them into deficit. Everything was now moving in the wrong direction.
The president took a final weekend on the Mayflower to consider it all. With him came a copy of the as yet unsigned tax bill, comments by General Lord and Secretary Mellon, and planks of the Republican platform. Not only was the tax bill unsatisfying; Coolidge’s demand that the platform be 2,000 words, like Lincoln’s, was also going unheeded. The 1924 GOP platform, at 5,200 words, was not much shorter than the 1920 platform, and several times the length of Lincoln’s platform. The president walked the deck for several hours and had the Sunday New York Times delivered to him by naval airplane at 10:30 on Sunday. From the Mayflower, no word came, but reporters heard that Coolidge had dictated something.
When Coolidge considered the tax bill, though, he saw that disappointment obscured some strong advantages. The tax bill did cut tax rates for many taxpayers. Middle earners saw their base rates come down. Higher earners paid less income tax in total. That was, to Coolidge, a good thing. It was always good for the government to take less. Most important of all was the future: If he went along with this bill and withstood the humiliation, he and Mellon might get another shot at tax legislation. In Mellon he had found the partner that Harding could not be: the partner with whom he could finish a job.
There was something familiar about the feeling of spring in Washington to him. Over the years, the Senate had beaten him down, indeed, humiliated him in ways it had never humiliated Harding. Yet the country did not see the failure of the tax law: it saw his industry, that Coolidge had tried. It appreciated the budget sessions. Senator Lodge had gone against him yet again in the override of the pension bill, but the Boston Herald poll had yielded an astounding result: by a ratio of 250 to 1, Boston voters had endorsed Coolidge on the bonus. Boston understood how much the spending of the war had disrupted, and they appreciated his effort. They appreciated normalcy.
The big powers like Hearst and Ford liked the Mellon Plan, but Coolidge’s popularity went beyond taxes. It was the devotion to service that struck people. His ideas and the culture were in harmony. Columbia University’s Pulitzer Prizes were awarded during the veto debacles in May. One prize had gone to an autobiography that was largely about the possibilities America offered to immigrants if they assimilated, From Immigrant to Inventor by Michael Pupin. Assimilation was also Coolidge’s emphasis. Another Pulitzer had gone to Robert Frost, the instructor at Coolidge’s own Amherst, for New Hampshire, a collection of poems about the virtues of New England. The book included “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Though Coolidge was not friendly with Frost and preferred the poetry of precursors such as John Greenleaf Whittier, “Stopping by Woods” and other poems by Coolidge’s fellow New Englander kept touching the themes that Coolidge himself probed: honoring commitments, even at the tired end of a day. Yet another prize went to the editorial “Who Made Coolidge?” All his life, Coolidge had found favor by delivering more than others expected; now, in a more profound way that went beyond his law-and-order popularity after the strike, the American people gave him their favor. Coolidge had not won the tax battle, but he had won the battle for more time, even another term as president. The tax idea, if not the execution, had gone farther than it had under Harding, and many important forces appreciated that. The great newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst let Clarence Barron know that he was especially impressed by the tax plan. Ford approved. Barron’s support at The Wall Street Journal meant something, too.
On June 2, Coolidge made his great wager: if he stayed around, and ran again, he could yet prevail on taxes. He signed the stopgap tax bill for now, but accompanied it with a strong letter, a declaration of war. The bill, the letter acknowledged, would bring significant relief to voters, especially the 25 percent credit the bill gave taxpayers on the payment for the prior year’s tax return. This was a relief, especially because the economy could not forever grow straight up as it had that year. But such credits, Coolidge warned, did not represent true tax reform; they were only temporary measures. It was perverse to raise estate taxes to 40 percent as the law did, to sustain the income tax with a top rate in the 40s and to sustain the tax-exempt status of municipal bonds. Money would continue to flow into tax-favored state projects but not to inventors or entrepreneurs. The publication of tax returns constituted a violation of privacy, sacrificing “without reasons the rights of the taxpayer.” Much of the bill was so destructive, he said, as to jeopardize the future of the country. Coolidge channeled Mellon’s memos in his statement, in places adding bits of his own: “A correction of its defects may be left to the next session of the Congress. I trust a bill less political and more economic may be passed at that time. To that end I shall bend all my energies.”
“All my energies,” though, meant that at that very moment, he needed to show he was not giving up. Family would have to wait again. Congress might override his veto, but that would not stop him from vetoing—within days, to make clear he meant it, he vetoed a postal salary increase bill. The sale of Muscle Shoals had stalled, and Ford was not even sure he wanted the plant on the river anymore. But the principle of making the federal budget smaller by separating parts of it to run on their own was still worthy; the post office took in so much revenue that independence was possible. “The postal service rendered the public is good,” he acknowledged. He warned, however, that the precedent of an increase for the post office staff was itself troubling: “an organized effort by a great body of public employees to secure an indiscriminate increase in compensation should have the most searching scrutiny.” Congress could override some vetoes, but in the future, Coolidge might emulate Grover Cleveland and use the pocket veto, which was technically more difficult but impossible to reverse.
In addition to the postal veto, another waterpower project awaited evaluation: Congress had authorized a dam across the Gila River in Arizona as part of the San Carlos Irrigation Project; the public effort was in part justified in that the dam served Indian lands. Coolidge was inclined to sign the authorization, but only if it was not a breach of federalism; study required days. The day after Coolidge signed it, Grace headed to Mercersburg to attend John’s graduation. Mrs. Stearns and Dr. Boone also went. A portrait of Dr. Boone was unveiled during the celebrations, and John received a prize for his essays. Coolidge was not there.
Coolidge and colleagues were mired in the final planning for the GOP convention, which fell early, in June. La Follette of Wisconsin was making noises about a third-party run. Coolidge’s only true opponent for the presidential nomination within the Grand Old Party was Hiram Johnson, a California progressive. Hoover, however, fought down Johnson on Coolidge’s behalf, and Coolidge won the California primary, securing the nomination.
Still, the convention, so different from that of 1920, constituted a tribute. The president again absented himself, but this time the GOP leadership would run the event on his behalf. Lodge, who had ruled in Chicago, would be scarcely in evidence in Cleveland. The Hampshire Gazette was practically gleeful at the victory of western Massachusetts over Boston: “The plan is to keep Lodge out of positions of power at Cleveland. The reason is obvious. The Senate leader, representing Coolidge’s home state in the Senate, has been opposing the President.” In Cleveland, western Massachusetts men and Vermonters were everywhere. Mr. Lucey, the cobbler, attended, as did dozens of Vermonters wearing brown farm smocks, a tribute to the Coolidge garb, and carrying walking canes made of wood from the Coolidge farm.
In Vermont, Colonel Coolidge was able to hear his son’s nomination by radio. It was a convention so confident and confident in Coolidge that it at first seemed sleepy, the result a foregone conclusion; the crowds did not show up. The boys were still at school taking some tutoring though graduation was over. Calvin, Jr., suddenly wished himself home, as his father had so often when he was at boarding school. Dr. Irvine, as strict a disciplinarian as General Lord, did not approve of homesickness. Calvin took a different view: “Some boys leave because they get homesick when they come here. Doctor Irvine says that kind of boys will run all the rest of their lives, but I think he is somewhat too broad in this statement.”
Picking Coolidge was easy, but the Republicans were having a hard time settling on a vice presidential candidate. The party first offered the vice presidential slot to Frank Lowden of Illinois. Lowden turned it down, as did Senator Borah, who was woken up in the middle of the night to be felt out in regard to his interest in the Republican ticket. “For which position?” was all Borah would ask. His “no” was another way the Senate was talking back to Coolidge. Finally the party settled on Charles Dawes. The Illinois man was a strong choice, an action man to pair with the reserved Coolidge. Dawes had made his first fortune in utilities in the Midwest; he was a gifted musician and had composed a tune, “Melody in A Major,” that would later be heard in a popular song. Dawes also boasted a distinguished career as a banker. It was Dawes’s brother Henry, the comptroller of the currency, who was showing why the little western banks were so vulnerable; isolated in their towns, prevented from having branches by states’ law, they rose and fell with the price of wheat or corn. In the war Dawes, like Hoover, had distinguished himself by rationalizing supply and distribution. Dawes, the first budget director, was the human symbol of the budgeting program; he had even published a book about the budget. As if this were not enough, Dawes had also worked in Europe on a plan to help Germany repay its debts. For a tax-and-budget candidate, Dawes made a good partner.
It was also gratifying to Coolidge that Dawes appreciated the invitation. Dawes heard the news while in his birthplace of Marietta, Ohio; the next day a crowd surrounded his house and the church rang its bells. Other people might have mocked the vice presidency, but Dawes was overjoyed; he saw this as a chance for leadership: “Just then it seemed to me the greatest office in the world.” On June 7, even as the Republican Party was selecting its vice president, came the news that the German Reichstag had voted to support the Dawes Plan; it was another coup for Dawes and sealed Dawes’s candidacy. Mellon had a plan to give the vice president greater powers, including supervision of some bureaus and agencies, so that the executive need cover less. This appealed to Dawes.
To find resolve, Coolidge now turned to his family. Toward the end of June, when the boys were finally coming to the White House, Coolidge tried again with his father, inviting him down for his own birthday, July 4. The Central Vermont had a new train he wanted to try that ran from Montreal to Washington: the Washingtonian. If his father could get to White River Junction, he could take the train direct to Washington, bypassing the onerous transfer in New York. His father would have to leave in the middle of the night but would arrive in Washington at 2:15 P.M. As for clothing, Coolidge promised he would take care of that when his father arrived. From Mercersburg, the boys came, after spending some days studying. Calvin was thin—he had grown again and was taller than them all. John was heading to Amherst in the fall.
The week the boys arrived, the Democratic National Convention began in Madison Square Garden in New York City. The Republicans’ convention of 1920 looked tame by comparison. The great glooming presence that overshadowed the conference was the Ku Klux Klan: some Democrats wanted condemnation of the murderous group written into the party platform, but others were blocking it; in New Jersey, across the river, Democratic Klansmen held a rival rally. The Klan hung like a cancer on the party’s future. That year, the convention and its shadow were nicknamed a “Klanbake.” On the floor of the convention itself, there were fistfights over the Klan. Senator Walsh, the leader of the Teapot Dome Investigation, served as the convention chairman, and the challenge was proving tougher than investigations of Harding’s cronies. Walsh “whacked vigorously and consistently” with his gavel, the reporters noted admiringly, but his delegates still raged wild. Governor Al Smith enjoyed the home field advantage. Smith’s fellow New Yorker, Franklin Roosevelt, joined Smith under the lights, bravely reentering politics after his bout with polio. This was Roosevelt’s perseverance. Roosevelt came forward to the podium and nominated Smith as the party’s “Happy Warrior.” The Smith supporters howled with joy, calling out so loudly that the papers wrote headlines such as “Pandemonium Breaks Loose.” At one point Walsh pounded so hard that the head of his gavel flew off the base into the air; the projectile hit a man and gave him a concussion. At first McAdoo, Wilson’s son-in-law, whom the Klansmen supported, seemed the most likely winner. John W. Davis, one of Dwight Morrow’s partners at J. P. Morgan, was considered likely for the second spot.
On June 28, the Coolidge family marked the progress of the past year with yet another short sail on the Mayflower; a new radio installed on the craft would enable them to listen to the Democrats’ convention. Coolidge had a speech to write for the National Education Association, and, more important, the semiannual budget meeting of the government was coming up. The Teapot Dome investigations continued: the federal grand jury indicted Albert Fall, Sinclair, and Doheny. The Coolidges now seemed removed from the investigations in both their own minds and those of the people. On June 30, John and Calvin played tennis with Dr. Boone and Dr. James Coupal. The boys played several sets. The family donned business clothes for photographers; they posed with Charles Dawes, the new vice presidential nominee, and then alone, as a family. The photos showed John, now a high school graduate, looking straight into the camera, or frowning; Calvin, Jr., smiled or peered into the distance past the camera.
Later that day came Coolidge’s last chance before the summer to frame his achievements and plans, the semiannual budget meeting of the government at Memorial Continental Hall. Grace had a box there; Calvin, Jr., sat behind her. By now the president and his budget director had become an act; they marched through a show before two thousand government employees, an event that was a mixture of sermon, circus, and pep rally.
“We are often told that we are a rich country, and we are,” Coolidge told the crowd. But as in the Gospel of Luke, “where more is given, more is required.” The president laid down the law for those departments that would not cut. “I regret that there are still some officials who apparently feel that the estimates transmitted to the Bureau of the Budget are the estimates which they are authorized to advocate before the committees.” The only lawful estimates were the president’s. Finally Coolidge again stressed his theme: “I am for economy. After that I am for more economy. At this time, and under present circumstances, that is my conception of serving the people.’’
