Coolidge Page 2
Our ignorance of Coolidge hurts more than our understanding of the presidency; it diminishes our understanding of his era, and our past. The education in rhetoric, religion, classics, and geometry Coolidge received at his quirky independent school, Black River Academy, and at Amherst College reminds us how our schools have changed since then. Coolidge and the poet Robert Frost never knew much about each other; Coolidge was a Republican, Frost a Grover Cleveland Democrat. But the lives of the pair crossed in odd ways, including at Coolidge’s college, Amherst. And Frost’s themes—independence, responsibility, character, property rights—also preoccupied Coolidge. There was some of Coolidge as well in the work of Will Rogers, the superstar columnist of the era. Rogers liked the president so much he wrote a column to help Coolidge find work after the presidency. Without knowing Coolidge, Americans cannot know the 1920s.
To be sure, there were areas where Coolidge fell short, as a man or president. He was not always patient. His intuitive sympathy for free markets notwithstanding, Coolidge never fully grasped the damage of his party’s pro-tariff plank. He spoke out against intolerance and bigotry, but did too little to stop them. He thought so well of other statesmen that he never foresaw the extent to which Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, or Japanese leaders would take advantage of international disarmament agreements and use those agreements as cover to arm for war. He likewise never entirely foresaw the extent to which succeeding presidents and Congress would diverge from precedent when it came to economic policy. The thirtieth president therefore never imagined the consequences of such a divergence: a depression as lengthy and severe as the one the United States experienced over the ensuing decade.
But there are many fields in which Coolidge surpassed other men and other presidents and set a standard. Most presidents place faith in action; the modern presidency is perpetual motion. Coolidge made virtue of inaction. “Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation,” he told his colleagues in the Massachusetts Senate. “It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones,” he wrote to his father as early as 1910. Congress always says, “Do.” Coolidge replied, “Do not do,” or, at least, “Do less.” Whereas other presidents made themselves omnipresent, Coolidge held back. At the time, and subsequently, many have deemed the Coolidge method laziness. Upon examination, however, the inaction reflects strength. In politics as in business, it is often harder, after all, not to do, to delegate, than to do. Coolidge is our great refrainer.
What compelled Coolidge to persevere and enabled him to succeed? The traditions of Vermont and its “hardy self-contained people,” as he described them, always inspired him. Respect for the written law animated him, but he also cherished the spiritual and what we call natural law: “Men do not make laws. They do but discover them,” he told Massachusetts state senators in 1914. His wife, Grace, one of the most beautiful first ladies, gave him the confidence to move forward. A ferocious discipline in work proved crucial as well. As documented in White House appointment books, whereas other presidents met sporadically with budget advisers, Coolidge met faithfully and weekly with his Budget Bureau director, General Herbert Mayhew Lord. An intuitive understanding of the struggles of small business aided Coolidge. Though he was not, like Margaret Thatcher, born over a storefront, Coolidge was born beside one. A keen sense of timing also helped him: Coolidge, a shrewd politician, knew when to fight and when to wait. A thorough understanding of the devices of government, and a willingness to use them, also proved key. Also crucial was the Coolidge willingness to be unpopular, which he displayed while still governor of Massachusetts, when he stared down the striking Boston police, or when, as president, he turned down his own people, farmers, by repeatedly vetoing subsidies for them.
Always, a philosophy of service inspired Coolidge. He served his family, to whom he was intensely loyal; he served the law and the people. He was among the most selfless of presidents, ranking individual above political constituency and office above individual. Once, on a walk with the president, Senator Selden Spencer of Missouri tried to cheer Coolidge by pointing to the White House and asking, in a joking tone, who might live there. “Nobody,” Coolidge replied, “they just come and go.”
Much later, in 1969, Richard Nixon spoke of a “silent majority” of Americans who thought progressives went too far; that phrase came not from Nixon but from the past. The advertising executive Bruce Barton wrote in 1919 that “it sometimes seems as if this great silent majority had no spokesman. But Coolidge belongs with that crowd, he lives like them, he works like them, and understands.” The teacher who identified the primacy of service for Coolidge was a professor who instructed him in his final years at Amherst College, Charles Edward Garman. Garman, a philosopher, also inspired Coolidge’s friend and ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow. Garman spoke of life as a great river journey. The professor told his students that, as Coolidge paraphrased it, “if they would go along with events and have the courage and industry to hold to the main stream without being washed ashore they would some day be men of power.” Garman’s image of the river, of water, and of his own task as pilot navigating amid the waves defined Coolidge’s life.
There is little evidence that Coolidge ever learned much about Oliver Coolidge beyond the name, or that he was aware that the limekiln lot property itself he inherited, along with a mare colt and a heifer calf, had once been part of a family squabble. “I never knew what had become of the descendants of Oliver,” Coolidge wrote a cousin, Ada Taintor, who inquired from Minnesota in January 1920. But genealogy always preoccupied Coolidge. Late December 1925, for example, a period crucial for his proposed tax legislation, found Coolidge distractedly writing to the town clerk of Wallingford, Vermont, to inquire about the precise birth and death dates of another ancestor, his great-grandfather Israel Brewer, Calvin Galusha’s father-in-law, and the dates when Brewer had paid taxes. The old limekiln lot itself, hardly good for farming and of value mostly only for wood and maple sugar, remained present all through the life of the thirtieth president. As a boy he worked the plot with his father. From his boardinghouse at college, he wrote home to ask if it was throwing off any revenue he might use for necessary expenses. Yet later, the president’s sons, John and Calvin, played on the land; Calvin, Jr., liked to collect spruce gum. After the death of Calvin, Jr., at age sixteen, it was up the road to the old limekiln lot that his mother, Grace, went to dig up a young spruce as a memorial to him. She replanted the spruce on the White House grounds so that the president might see it from the windows.
When Henry Ford visited Plymouth, his hosts, the president and his father, gave the automaker a sap bucket from their sugar equipment. In his final days, Coolidge’s father leased the lot to a tenant and wrote friendly copy to describe “nice sugar” made by the tenant from the sap collected there. The Coolidge sympathy for tariffs, including tariffs on Canadian maple sugar, grew out of experience; the Canadian product competed with the small harvest of his lot. Toward the end of his presidency, Coolidge journeyed west, partly to call on regions crucial to the Republican Party but also to trace the trail that his forebears, men like Oliver, had blazed. He shipped headstones from Vermont to Wisconsin for the graves of the parents of his grandmother Sarah Almeda Brewer Coolidge, Israel Brewer, and Israel’s wife, Sally. Vermont, Coolidge believed, should honor those who had left her and try to understand why they had done so.
Indeed, all his life, and at every station on the great figurative river, Coolidge never ceased to probe the same questions of debt, money, commerce, growth, and prosperity that had so affected Oliver, puzzling over in his mind what might be the right balance. Coolidge’s inquiries into political economy were so intense and so fruitful that it is, again, hard to understand why they are not better known. From time to time historians—more than economists—try to blame Coolidge for the Great Depression and therefore downgrade his policies. A market correction was due in 1929. Coolidge himself anticipated that drop. In fact, he fretted over its possible consequences. The country would endure trouble, he knew, yet he remained convinced that arbitrary interventions, experiments, would only prolong the downturn. But the contention that Coolidge can be blamed for the extended double-digit unemployment of the 1930s is a stretch. Many of the events that converted the 1929 break in the Dow Jones Industrial Average from a serious market crash into the decade-long Great Depression took place after Coolidge’s presidency or in places far away.
Perhaps the deepest reason for Coolidge’s recent obscurity is that the thirtieth president spoke a different economic language from ours. He did not say “money supply”; he said “credit.” He did not say “the federal government”; he said “the national government.” He did not say “private sector”; he said “commerce.” He did not say “savings”; he said “thrift” or “economy.” Indeed, he especially cherished the word “economy” because it came from the Greek for “household.” To Coolidge the national household resembled the family household, and to her displeasure he monitored the White House housekeeper with the same vigilance that he monitored the departments of the federal government. Our modern economic lexicon and the theories behind it cannot capture Coolidge’s achievements or those of his predecessor, Warren Harding.
It is hard for modern students of economics to know what to make of a government that treated economic weakness by raising interest rates 300 basis points, cutting tax rates, and halving the federal government, so much at odds is that prescription with the antidotes to recession our own experts tend to recommend. It is harder still for modern economists to concede that that recipe, the policy recipe for the early 1920s advocated by Coolidge and Harding, yielded growth on a scale to which we can aspire today. As early as the 1930s, Coolidge’s reputation and way of thinking began their decline. Collectives and not individuals became fashionable. Sensing such shifts, Coolidge at the end of his life spoke anxiously about the “importance of the obvious.” Perseverance, property rights, contracts, civility to one’s opponents, silence, smaller government, trust, certainty, restraint, respect for faith, federalism, economy, and thrift: these Coolidge ideals intrigue us today as well. After all, many citizens today do feel cursed by debt, their own or their government’s. Knowing the details of his life may well help Americans now turn a curse to a blessing or, at the very least, find the heart to continue their own persevering.
One: Snowbound
Plymouth
THEY WERE THE ONES who stayed.
They told themselves this as they trudged past the houses up the road to the old lot in the spring snow. The lot itself was a challenge. Farming there was especially difficult because the soil was too rocky; the hill curved up too steeply. For a period the family had burned lime there, but the railroad had not chosen to come to Plymouth and no one could get the lime out. Now, in the 1870s, they found themselves returning to the limekiln lot for humbler, simpler harvests: wood or sugar. The logs could be sold by the cord. The lot lay above their farm, to the west, and sugar maples were plentiful there. In April, they tapped the trees. Their family fashioned the wooden buckets themselves, sometimes branding the bottom with their name in capital letters. They carried the buckets of sap to a sugarhouse, where it was heated and made into syrup. Each year eight hundred to two thousand pounds of maple syrup and hard sugar were produced this way. They liked the trees, which grew up with them, like siblings or children. Others, even relatives, had deemed such harvests paltry. Those others had headed west to the Great Plains, where your prosperity unfurled before you, flat and vast, like a yellow carpet.
But not John and Victoria Coolidge. If the land tested them, they liked that about it. The spring sugaring was only one part of an annual cycle of ingenuity, well established by the time John, of the fourth generation of Coolidges in Plymouth, became an adult, in the 1860s. After the sugaring came other challenges, which one could lay out in a list beside the names of the months: Mend fences. Shear sheep. Weave. Raise horses or puppies. Get the cows to pasture. Plant hay. Get hay in. Even the level fields below the lot were tough to cultivate. Later, in fact, a study would show that not one acre of the land in Plymouth, a town of farmers, was truly arable. Still, the rhythm of the cycle kept them going. By autumn, they were slaughtering animals. The last to be slaughtered was a cow. There was always milking, summer or winter. But without a railroad, milk was like lime: hard to turn into money. Milk spoiled. To sell a calf or a peacock, they had to take it twelve miles by cart to Ludlow, where the depot was.
Because nothing was ever quite sure, it was best to have a hand in everything. John Coolidge kept the small store at the center of the village. He also served as insurance agent, sheriff, tax collector, notary, everything a man could be in a town. John’s wife—her full name was Victoria Josephine Moor Coolidge—gardened and sewed. His mother, Sarah, taught Sunday school, delivered babies, and did the weaving. His father, Calvin Galusha, had experimented with peacocks and horses. In 1863, Galusha put out to stud Young Arabian, a fifteen-hand bay with “all the action and command of limb that a cat or greyhound is master of,” for a fee of $10. Through his mother Calvin Galusha claimed a trace of Indian blood, and in him there seemed to be the ingenuity of the Native Americans and the Puritans combined.
The stage on which they lived their lives was small: their house, five rooms behind the store; the 1842 church, with a pew for which Calvin Coolidge, John Coolidge’s grandfather, had paid $31; a stone schoolhouse; and a few other farms. Beyond the store, a few dozen rods away, about two or three hundred feet, lay the house of Calvin Galusha and his wife. Beyond that were the lakes, the river, and the twelve-mile trip down the steep hill to Ludlow. In the old days there had been cabins; now the houses in Plymouth, Plymouth Union, and other hamlets in the area were mostly white clapboard, with red barns. While the weather was still warm, John Coolidge and Calvin Galusha traveled about the county or the state, often on official business but always keeping an eye out for new ways to gain a livelihood. There had been a gold rush in the area back in 1859, with several hundred miners converging on the town that June, claiming to find four to eight dollars’ worth a day. Disappointment had followed excitement. “Gold is found upon the farm of Mr. Amos Pollard near Plymouth Pond,” the paper in Ludlow, Massachusetts, had written. “The metal is so diffused that it costs more to get it than it comes to.” Granite too had been found here in Plymouth, enough for fence posts but nowhere near the amounts that could be mined in other parts of the state, such as Barre, Vermont, which called itself the “Granite Center of the World.” Windsor County had always suffered bad luck: long ago the state capital had started out in the town of Windsor but had relocated to Montpelier, depriving the area of much commerce. Death came too often, so often that there were two hearses stored in the town, one on wheels for summer and one on blades for winter. John Coolidge’s brother, Julius Caesar Coolidge, had died around the time he had married. Others had wasted away from tuberculosis, or consumption; the cold long winters there seemed particularly hospitable to the illness, which was known as the “New England disease.” Victoria also seemed susceptible.
To explain their life to themselves, villagers like the Coolidges turned to the classics: the plays of William Shakespeare, other old English texts, and the Greeks and Romans. They saw analogies in the stories of rebels after whom they were named: Oliver Cromwell, John Calvin, or Julius Caesar. It was to Julius Caesar that Mark Antony had “thrice presented . . . a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse.” In Plymouth at town meetings citizens also invoked Cincinnatus, who left his plow to serve in Rome as dictator, settled a dispute among warring tribes, then returned to his plow once the crisis was past rather than settling into dictatorship. There were also, of course, analogies to the American Revolution; it was a matter of lively debate in Vermont whether Brutus had been justified in his assassination of Caesar, or whether Ethan Allen had been right in playing off New York, the new Congress, and Canada against one another.
Church and church meetings filled any time that remained in their days. And the Bible was the villagers’ basic text; it reached everywhere, even into their cooking. The Coolidge family recipe collection contained instructions for “Scripture Cake”:
One cup of butter. Judges 5:25
Three and one half cups flour. I Kings 4:22
Two cups sugar. Jeremiah 6:20
Two cups raisins. I Samuel 30:12
One cup of water. Genesis 24:17
Two cups figs. I Samuel 30:12
Two cups almonds. Genesis 43:11
Six eggs. Isaiah 10:14
One tablespoonful honey. Exodus 16:31
A pinch of salt. Leviticus 2:13.
Spices to taste. I Kings 10:2
Two tablespoonfuls baking pow. I Cor. 5:6
Follow Solomon’s advice for making good boys (Proverb 23:14), and you will have good cake.
Bake in a loaf and ice.
The autumn made town meetings, churchgoing, even socializing, harder. And snowfall could shut Plymouth Notch off suddenly and entirely, making the steep hill road impassible. Such isolation could come in a matter of hours, as in a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, “Snow-Bound.” “A fenceless drift what once was road,” as Whittier had put it. The only way out was to build a new road, an ice road, laboriously, by packing snow over so that a sleigh might slide across the hard surface. Keeping the house warm was another challenge. In the bedroom there was soapstone to be heated on the stove; it warmed the bed for hours at night in the winter. In Whittier’s own New England village, Haverhill, Massachusetts, the sun was so weak it gave off, at noon, “a sadder light than waning moon.” In such a place, “ere the early bedtime came,”
The white drift piled the window frame
And through the glass the clothes line posts
Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.
There was a kind of comfort in the snowbound period; it was the only time the Coolidges had a moment to take stock of their accomplishments. They belonged to no one else; they succeeded because they lived economically. John Coolidge wrote down everything in small notebooks: the taxes to be paid, the taxes to be levied, what might be collected, what might be spent on a trip to Ludlow or Boston. The Coolidges believed that others might succeed as well if they managed similar thrift. The terrifying price of not living within one’s means had long been evident, both to them and to others, and could be heard in the family lore they repeated to one another when they told the old stories. The second name of John’s father, Galusha, could be heard in some of those stories. Jonas Galusha had been a famous Vermonter who had come to prominence as a captain fighting against General John Burgoyne during the Revolutionary War. When Daniel Shays, the farmer rebelling against debt, had fled north, Galusha had been charged with repulsing the refugees and driving them back south. From 1781, Galusha had served as sheriff of Bennington County, a job where he had come to know the consequences of debt as few know them. Debt collection and cruel laws made enforcement “onerous and perplexing to the last degree,” as a later historian put it.