Coolidge (10 page)

Even the economy that awaited them beyond college might be picking up. In late October 1894, he debated Charles Burnett on the topic of “Do the United States owe more to England or to Holland?” The pro-Dutch side might have advanced the facility of the Dutch in creating markets, their religious tolerance, and their expertise in commerce. The pro-English side argued for the purity of the Pilgrims and assailed the Dutch tendency to glorify and reinforce social class. The case that commerce was more Dutch than Anglo-Saxon was becoming harder to make in any event, as great brands were now being established by Americans descended from Puritans as well as Dutchmen.

The machine of commerce seemed more powerful than any ethnicity. What mattered was how innovative a merchant or manufacturer was, whether he could invent better machinery or improve a market. R. H. Stearns in Boston again provided an example. Stearns was an aggressive advertiser. That same autumn Stearns helped the newspaper that carried his advertising,
The Boston Globe
, with a letter testifying to the power of the
Globe
’s platform. Sunday night the paper carried a Stearns ad for 124 pairs of blankets, marked down to $1.90 owing to imperfections from their usual retail price of $4. By 10:41 the next morning, the company reported: “ALL SOLD.” To console those who came too late, it sold blankets of the next best grade at the same price for the remainder of the day. As proud as Boston was of its commerce, it was also proud of its stock exchange; that year Clarence Barron, a young editor, published an entire volume on the stock market,
The Boston Stock Exchange
, making the case that when it came to finance, the “hub” truly was one.

Coolidge used some of the material from his debates to enter an essay contest sponsored by the Sons of the American Revolution. Coolidge submitted a piece on the concept of liberty as it existed in Great Britain before American independence. His point was a simple one: the American Revolution had not been about moving past Great Britain, it had been about the colonists reminding the corrupt Great Britain under King George III what its own freedoms were about. American liberty was English liberty, an idea popular among English-Americans but not so obvious to the Irish-Americans who were now populating the Bay State. Coolidge singled out important events: the confirmation of the Magna Carta by King Edward I; the Glorious Revolution that had driven out King James II. Of the Revolutionary War, Coolidge wrote, “Nor was it at first so much for gaining new liberties as for preserving the old.”

It would be a long while before he knew the results of the essay contest, but in the meantime came another victory: he won the Grove Orator slot. Taking the job of graduation day speaker seriously, he put effort into the composition of his speech. He was writing more cleanly and less affectedly. In old speeches he had used the word “I” frequently and written long sentences; now he tried to cut himself out and shorten the sentences. Garman’s message of selflessness was already penetrating.

Recognition usually comes when it is no longer necessary, and that was the case in Coolidge’s senior year. It turned out that Phi Gamma Delta, the fraternity that had talked to him years before, might actually establish a chapter at Amherst. This time, Coolidge and Deering were both tapped. Coolidge did not hesitate. In fact, he was proud. “The fraternity, which I joined, rec’d congratulations quite as much as did I,” he wrote to his father. Now he needed a dress suit, which cost $55, as well as a pin: “College men are always proud to wear a society, greek letter pin and are very seldom seen without it.” He promptly leaped into Greek activities, attending dinners.

The fraternity was worth it, just as investing in a suit was; he sensed now that speaking was a great part of his life and that he might eventually earn money through it. Dwight Morrow went to Northampton to see the girls at Smith; Coolidge, however, was drawn there for errands and speeches. Phi Gamma Delta held a regional dinner at the Norwood Hotel there; a Yale senior complimented Coolidge on an impromptu toast he had made. “There is nothing in the world gives me so much pleasure as to feel I have made a good speech and nothing gives me more pain than to feel I have made a poor one,” he wrote, triumphant. “I think I must stand very well in college now.”

So close to graduation, Coolidge sent home letters that were a mix of high and low, private life and politics. One dated February 3, 1895, was typical: Coolidge first made a little joke about his own currency shortage and President Cleveland’s: “I have paid out about $5,00 of the money you sent me before for current expenses so I have some by me though I have lent some which will be returned in a day or so I expect. There! That is my currency bill and I hope you will give it more approval than Congress gives Cleveland’s ideas of currency.” Then he tried out the idea of practicing law: “If I could read and digest the principle [
sic
] works of Burke, Hamilton and Webster, I should get a very strong hold on legal and political ideas, and then if I could add to it some actual experience of my own I should have a wisdom that at least would insure me a living if it did not give me power to direct great measures for the welfare of communities or states.” Finally he appeared to lose heart: “I am only trying to get some discipline now. I never earned any money and I do not know as I ever made any happiness but I hope these may come later. I am almost ready to think of coming home again. . . .”

A trip home for his last spring break to the Vermont mud shifted his mood yet again. He could see his father struggling with his springtime work as road commissioner. “The heavy rains must have cost the Town considerable,” he wrote sympathetically. “I hope you will be able to fix up the roads so every body will not be whining about them. Almost every sluice in Town needs to be repaired.” In Vermont there was always some unexpected disruption: the summer after freshman year, lightning had struck his father’s barns, burning them. Coolidge spelled out his ambivalence yet again for his patient father: “I have not decided yet that I want to leave Plymouth, not because I like the place to live in, I do not, not because I could do more good there, there are larger fields, but because I may owe some debt to the place.”

The ensuing months found him and his father discussing not whether or not his trade would be law but the details of his legal education. There were two ways one could qualify to practice. One was law school. Several members of the class of 1894 attended school; Harlan Stone, a year out already, had enrolled at Columbia University in New York. Dwight Morrow was considering law school too. But there was another possibility, the old way, for country lawyers: to read law while at a law firm, like an apprentice, and then sit the bar exam. That was less expensive. It was also what two lawyers the Coolidges knew, John Garibaldi Sargent and William Stickney, had done. Sargent, an older graduate of Black River Academy, had attended Tufts and then read the law in Ludlow. Now “Garry,” as he was called, practiced law with Stickney, who was climbing in Vermont politics. Sargent was the model of a gentleman—an enormous man, six foot four, who would build a library and a much-admired vegetable garden. To live like Garry or Stickney would be to live closer to what Jefferson, Garman, and Emerson described, closer to Cincinnatus. Coolidge, still eager to spend a few more years on a campus, gruffly informed his father that Stickney and Sargent’s way wasn’t the only one. John might try to educate himself on the merits of law school: “If you want to find something about law schools see French of Woodstock. . . . I do not think you will find the answer in “Men of Vermont” [an old book]. I should like very much to impress upon you that my life will be in the twentieth century.” But again, typically, even as he postured, he vacillated: “But still a law office may be the best place to get discipline.” He was nervous before his Grove Oration.

Yet the speech was a triumph. Calvin summed up the college experience, including its triviality, as a four-year period that “begins with a cane rush where the undergraduates use Anglo-Saxon, and ends with a diploma where the faculty use Latin, if it does not end before by a communication from the President in just plain English.” The speech was also a quiet declaration of victory, a celebration of Calvin’s own ability to make others laugh over a whole speech. “The mantle of truth falls upon the Grove orator on condition he wear it wrong side out,” he declaimed. He promised in the speech to share with them “the only true side of college life on the inside.” The fact that he was the orator proved to himself that he was finally there—at the inside, within college life. Harlan Stone later recalled that he had been “impressed by the humor, quiet dignity and penetrating philosophy.” His grade point average was scarcely stellar at 78.71 but was ten points above where he had started freshman year. His graduation was noted in
The Caledonian
, the newspaper of St. Johnsbury, along with that of another St. Johnsbury alum, William Boardman. Coolidge also caught the attention of the alumni who were present for the graduation days, including John Hammond, the Northampton lawyer.

Students ran an annual survey to profile the seniors, asking them about religion, marriage plans, career plans, and so on. There was also a poll as to who was the brightest in the class; Dwight Morrow won hands down, but “Cooley,” as the others sometimes called him, also received some votes. He was a long way from the oblivion of freshman year. Their responses to such questions were another chance for the seniors to try to demonstrate their wit. Coolidge did not forgo the opportunity. Under the question, “Are you engaged?” he wrote, “Severally.” But he also delivered more serious responses. Under “politics,” he listed himself as Republican. Asked their denominational preference, most other young men identified themselves as Congregational or Presbyterian. There was one Catholic in the class list and there were two Unitarians. “Presbyterian,” Morrow wrote.

For denominational preference, however, Coolidge wrote “None,” as did several others, including Ernest Hardy, his Northampton friend. As primitive as that response may sound, it did not mean that Coolidge was atheist or agnostic; it meant that he was unwilling to cede the independence, however slight that ceding, that affiliating with any denomination would entail. Others, when asked their work plans, listed “Law,” “Business,” “Travel,” or “Undecided.” Morrow wrote “Law”; Coolidge wrote “Undecided.” When it came to the question of his plans for the following year, Coolidge simply replied “Nothing.” This was the puerile dare to the world: don’t ask me too early, or I shan’t tell. It was also a play on “ouden,” his own reminder to his peers of how far the rejected freshman had come. As the days of packing up approached, Coolidge made it clear to his father that the advantages lay with law school: “As a matter of fact the best law offices will not take in a man to do office work, such as the ordinary student does in the country office, unless he has been to a law school.”

But the preference for the academic study of law at Columbia or Harvard was not the main point of the letter. That main point came in the quirky syntax of the final line: “P.s. I have not decided to study law.” This time the ambiguity in a piece of Coolidge correspondence reflected maturity, not weakness. What this line said was that Garman was right: the decision itself mattered most, more than, say, the merits of either reading the law at a firm, attending law school, or working at the counter at the Notch. The quiet Vermonter who had seemed so unlikely to succeed now had good prospect of doing so. Suddenly Coolidge knew that he could undertake, even master, tasks that were unbearably difficult as long as the choice to undertake them was his own.

Three
: Determination

Northampton

THE NEW FORBES LIBRARY
sat up on a hill, more fortress than book house. Its exterior was daunting pink granite taken from the Milford area of New Hampshire, alternating with pieces of red Longmeadow sandstone that had been hauled to Northampton. Each piece of slate on the roof was specially tied to girders that had just been laid a few months before by the Berlin Iron Bridge Company of Berlin, Connecticut; the roof was already renowned for its fireproof aspects. Inside, surrounded by the rock and thousands of books, amid the hissing of the new steam pipes, sat a twenty-three-year-old, Calvin Coolidge. He was reading the law after all.

The decision had been made for the simplest of reasons: economy. Tuition at Harvard Law that year was $150, and the university catalog estimated additional expenses of up to $471. That kind of outlay might have suited the Boston Coolidges, one of whose sons, Archibald Cary Coolidge, was a Harvard history instructor, and another, a renowned mathematician named Julian Coolidge, a Harvard graduate in Calvin’s year, 1895, summa cum laude. But in the end it just hadn’t sat with this Coolidge, necessarily, or with his father, struggling as John did with the cheese factory. Dwight Morrow was already signed up to clerk at a family firm, Scandrett and Barnett, in Pennsylvania. Coolidge had traveled to Saco, Maine, to see Percy Deering. From there the graduate had written to an acquaintance of his father’s in Montpelier, former Vermont governor William P. Dillingham, who had a law office. It had been his last ambivalent letter about the law school choice. “If I could get into a good office, I am thinking of reading there some time,” he wrote to Dillingham. “Is there a vacancy in your firm? . . . I should be pleased to go up to the city to talk with you or you can advise me by mail as to the terms you would take, if you ever bother with students.” But meanwhile, Coolidge’s friend Ernest Hardy had signed up to read law at the office of the attorney Richard Irwin here in Northampton. Thanks to Hardy, Coolidge secured an interview at Hammond and Field, another firm of Amherst men in the county seat. Hammond recalled having heard Coolidge in his Grove Oration. Hammond and Field offered Coolidge and another man, Edward Shaw, desks in their shop.

The task of mastering the law daunted, but a more inspiring symbol than Charles Forbes, the judge who had endowed this great library, would have been hard to find. Forbes had died only fifteen years before and was still a legend around the town, a cautious attorney who had assisted Daniel Webster and structured the will of the founder of Smith College, Sophia Smith. Thrift, above all, had yielded the fortune that paid for the library: an abstainer from alcohol and a bachelor, he had spent little on clothing and had carried the same gingham umbrella decade in, decade out, in order not to waste pennies on raingear. Again to save, he had dwelled in a small apartment above an office, rather than in a proper house. Investing cannily, especially in railroads, he had left a legacy of $252,000, despite the fact that his law practice had not exceeded $2,000 per annum. As Coolidge studied, in the library or at Hammond and Field, he set for himself two goals. One was the career goal: he would do as Garman had recommended and dip into the river of life, into a career, by qualifying as an attorney, a process that normally required three years. Maybe he could qualify in two. He set a second, private, goal as well: to find a wife.