Coolidge (23 page)

The Amherst dinner at the Algonquin in Boston bowled Coolidge over. Suddenly he could see the value of gown along with town. The group assembled honored not only him but also his family, reading aloud, with pleasure, the example of Coolidge brevity supplied by his father in his RSVP: “Gentlemen: Can’t come. Thank you, John Coolidge.” “I am sure you would have been proud of the character of the men who came to honor me,” Coolidge wrote to his father. Morrow attended with Meiklejohn. At Amherst, Meiklejohn was making all sorts of changes, even planning to hire a young poet, Robert Frost. In
North of Boston
, a new collection, Frost grappled with the same issues that had long preoccupied the Coolidges and indeed many New Englanders: the obligation to hired men, the rigidity of property rights. “Good fences make good neighbors,” Frost wrote, as Calvin Galusha might have.

The next step was to ready Coolidge for a run at the lieutenant governor’s office with Samuel McCall, who was already making the case for more defense outlays. Stearns was more than ready to organize it all and became more explicit as the days went by and Coolidge did not signal his readiness to run. “I can shout pretty loud and pretty persistently when I am interested,” he wrote Coolidge pointedly. But Coolidge allowed crucial weeks to pass while he remained uncommitted. The job of raising the Amherst flag was being taken care of by Lansing, whom Wilson was naming secretary of state to replace the departing William Jennings Bryan. After all, as Coolidge wrote Stearns crossly and accurately, declaring himself a candidate during a Senate session would drastically reduce his efficacy as president; he would suddenly become a mere partisan angler for office.

In the lieutenant governor race Coolidge would confront a substantial primary opponent, Guy Ham, a Boston lawyer of the Theodore Roosevelt style. Ham was already on the ground, “talking through the state,” as
The Springfield Union
put it. Even Stearns admitted that Ham as an orator was a “spell-binder.” Coolidge had never campaigned statewide; the Senate president, after all, was chosen by peers. A statewide campaign meant traveling to every county, an exhausting process for someone who had already served in politics well over a decade. “I have been in office about as long as I feel I want,” he wrote to his stepmother, Carrie.

He was still finding it hard to overcome his ambivalence about the policy. Even though the United States was not in the war, war contracts were already generous and the war had put everyone, especially his colleagues, into a spending mood. Some of his important work in the Senate that year had been defensive, blocking legislation by colleagues and the Democratic governor. He could claim success for that year: the legislature of 1915 had enacted 668 acts, down from 796 the year before. There were only 147 resolutions, down from 160 the year before. The lieutenant governor position, though higher, gave Coolidge little of the sway over legislation he had enjoyed as Senate president; in Massachusetts a lieutenant governor operated behind the scenes, on committees, and as the governor’s watchdog. He would have responsibility without authority in a time of spending that he deplored.

At Gallipoli, both the Allies and the Turks were losing men by the thousands. Preparedness was now a national campaign in the United States; its leaders were Leonard Wood, a veteran officer from the Spanish-American War and a natural successor to Roosevelt, and Roosevelt himself. General Wood was building a camp on Lake Champlain in Plattsburg, New York, to train officers. Four Amherst undergraduates had already enrolled. The federal government lacked cash; the Massachusetts militia would have to start the arming, and Coolidge supported that. Late in June, finding writing easier than talking, he handed Stearns a note—“I am a candidate for lieutenant governor”—and headed back to Northampton.

Still grumpy, he thought it all over on Massasoit Street, where he happened to be alone. It was the week of his forty-third birthday. Grace’s Pi Beta Phi sisters had booked ten charter train cars for a transcontinental train trip to Berkeley, California, culminating in a national convention at which Grace would be elected president of Alpha province. She was enjoying herself enormously. Lawmakers and the governor of Massachusetts were also heading west on a trip, to the Panama Pacific Convention; it was important for the state to remind others that it should not be bypassed. The Massachusetts Art Commission had approved, and the state had paid for, the construction of a replica of the Bulfinch State House, not full-size but still large enough, with its own version of the Doric Hall, for visitors to get the feel of the dignity of the commonwealth. There was also a Massachusetts Beacon, overlooking San Francisco Bay. They had talked about Coolidge joining Grace out west. But in the end he didn’t want to be associated with the extravagance. “See Massachusetts first,” he told someone. Those who knew him well recognized that it was Coolidge’s way of saying that he was in the lieutenant governor race for real.

The 1916 campaign itself proved easier than he had imagined, in part because of a change, the availability of automobiles. By early September, he had already been to the other end of the state, speaking in Martha’s Vineyard. Stearns was everywhere. “I don’t know why he has been interested in my success but he has been very much so,” Coolidge wrote to his father of Stearns. “He is a great worker.” Coolidge easily beat Ham in the September primaries, and that cheered him on. “I suppose you have heard of the success of our friend Calvin Coolidge in the Primaries,” Stearns wrote Morrow in jubilation. Incredibly, Coolidge had lost Ham’s town, Boston, by only 300 votes. Coolidge might not know whether the people wanted him, but the people did.

Back in Northampton the Sunday after the primary, Coolidge was still dizzy with victory and preoccupied. He left the church with an umbrella, deep in his own thoughts, and a Ford Runabout hit him as he crossed Main Street. He found he was able to stand; the driver took him home. He was enough of a celebrity to receive inquiries about the accident but refused to disclose the name of the driver. That afternoon, he took the train back to Boston to plot the general election race with the gubernatorial candidate, Samuel McCall, a party veteran and former congressman. Coolidge’s own tactic was simple, and he stuck to it: backing up McCall as he backed up the party. If McCall was for women’s suffrage, Coolidge was for it. If McCall was for preparedness for a war, Coolidge was for it. If McCall was with Roosevelt, so was he. If McCall was for more state spending, he was for that too. They knew it was especially important to showcase McCall, a Bostonian, in western Massachusetts. Coolidge saw to it that Northampton firemen mustered for a display and that 150 of them materialized to hear McCall; in the town of Amherst, McCall spoke to 450 students on the drill grounds of the state agricultural college.

In Turners Falls, Senator John Haigis, the man to whom Coolidge had ceded the San Francisco junket slot, was waiting to welcome them with a band and a crowd of five hundred. Coolidge spared McCall the nitty-gritty defense work of the Massachusetts GOP so that McCall might inspire voters with lofty thoughts and plans. Coolidge and McCall covered ten towns in Middlesex County in one day. He had promised to see Massachusetts first, and he was making good on the promise.

If Coolidge was there for McCall, Stearns was there for him. The Stearns gift began with his help in explaining the taciturn Calvin to those who had not encountered him before. This damage control often had to take the form of apology. On October 15, Stearns wrote to Mrs. Arthur Lowe of Fitchburg, “I hope I did not leave a wrong impression of Mr. Coolidge. I have come to know him intimately. He is very far indeed from being ‘cold.’ He is reserved, but full of enthusiasm.” After the primaries Stearns dictated another set of fund-raising letters, including one to Morrow.

The results lifted the Republican Party like nothing since the days before Roosevelt: McCall and Coolidge won. For the first time since 1909, the Republicans also controlled both chambers of the legislature. At the victory party, Coolidge told the crowd that they had succeeded: once again the party was united and, as the papers put it, “fit to govern.” But the big story was Coolidge’s margin. It was 50,000, ten times that of McCall over the Democratic Walsh. It was evident that Coolidge had carried McCall, or even the whole ticket, and not the other way around.

The result made clear that Stearns had been right: Coolidge was on the path to the governorship and more, if only the others would back him. To prepare, Coolidge found himself a partner, a Northampton lawyer with a profile like his own: Ralph Hemenway had attended Amherst, though he did not graduate, and then read the law like Coolidge. Coolidge offered to create a partnership, the understanding being that Coolidge would use the office but the law work would go to Hemenway. The door on the second floor of the Masonic Building now read in gold letters
CALVIN COOLIDGE—LAW OFFICE
.

The lieutenant governor’s position was a largely ceremonial one, but Coolidge was determined to make the most of it. It was a kind of holding box for the governor’s office, in which he was expected to spend two or three years. His job was to preside over the executive council of eight elected officials. This body was supposed to be a counterweight to the executive; the council oversaw commissions, and the governor’s appointments required its advice and consent. Coolidge did not speak much at all the departments he visited. Observers noticed his ability to hear people out; later he would to be called “an eloquent listener.” One of Coolidge’s jobs, chairman of the Committee on Warrants of the executive council, was to oversee the spending of public money. Watching the rush to spend, he could now see more than ever before that the mechanism was broken. At both levels of government there was a problem: neither the state nor the federal government possessed a real budget plan overseen by executives. The money spent was usually approved in individual legislation so that even a governor, or the U.S. president, did not have much control. The new income tax made the damage worse. A new machine was there to raise the money, but no machine was there to control how it was spent. By the end of fiscal year 1915, the staff at the Bureau of Internal Revenue in Washington had reached over 4,700. Congressmen were having trouble even understanding the new income tax forms. Yet his own party was about to repeat Washington’s error and introduce an income tax of its own in Massachusetts. The constitutional convention was starting soon; George Churchill, a professor at Amherst, would be a delegate. Churchill and others thought the executive ought to have less power, and the legislature more. It was hard to know. While Coolidge did not have much time for some of the issues of the convention, he saw a powerful need for change. One idea lawmakers put forward was a veto of individual items for the governor; that would enable the governor to cut back on spending as a householder might.

Grace joined Calvin at the inauguration and was a guest at a special lunch in the State House Hall of Flags that followed. Governor Stickney of Vermont, Colonel Coolidge, and others came as well. Stearns was there smoothing over, making life easier, as a sort of second father to Calvin. Mrs. Stearns had already firmed up her friendship with Grace and was often a hostess to her. Amherst men were always there to cheer Coolidge on. He found he had time for speeches, and Stearns encouraged him. Stump speaking was well and good, but the best medium for Coolidge was the book. Stearns pulled Coolidge and Houghton Mifflin together, convincing the publisher to produce a volume of Coolidge’s speeches.

The Stearnses also sought to get the Coolidges accustomed to living the life of a leading family in the state. At the fancy restaurant on Tremont Street, La Touraine, where Stearns had long dined, the Coolidges now dined as well. Swampscott, where the Stearnses vacationed, became a destination for the Coolidges, as was Marblehead, where there was another Stearns family home. Even his sons, town boys accustomed to Rahar’s, were stunned at the plenty. At one point the boys were sitting alone in a restaurant and each was served an entire chicken; afterward they could not contain their excitement in reporting the bounty to their parents. An astute reporter would shortly note that the New Englander’s face was changing; he was now “spare but not gaunt: tiny pads of fat upholster his jowls.” The reporter, William Allen White, observed what all were beginning to understand: Coolidge was prospering.

In February 1916, Amherst alumni, triumphant over Coolidge’s victories and prospects, hosted their own giant dinner of more than a thousand in Boston at the Copley Plaza. The entire faculty of Amherst and the Glee Club came by special train. Mrs. McCall; Mrs. Whitman, the wife of New York’s governor, Charles Whitman, class of 1890; and Mrs. Meiklejohn sat in the balcony. Grace was there as well, seated as a guest of Mrs. Stearns in a box. Governor Whitman used the opportunity to make a clear pronouncement: “I am in favor of universal military training.” Coolidge endorsed preparedness too but went on to talk of other topics. He memorialized his party’s progress by quoting from a poem about persistence by Josiah Gilbert Holland, a biographer of Lincoln. His voice was still so nasal that it caught others off guard; others observed Grace containing her laughter. But the words made sense to Coolidge and his fellow alumni, men who had known each other on the day they all arrived at college: “Heaven is not reached at a single bound/But we build the ladder by which we rise/From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies/And we mount to its summit round by round.” Now more removed from the daily horse trading of the Senate, Coolidge could also be frank about his strengthening conviction in regard to business: the measure of success was not merchandise, to be sure. But, he told his peers, those who held that the economic system was fundamentally flawed were wrong. One who built a factory, Coolidge said, was also building a temple, and to him was due “reverence and praise.”

The casualties mounted at Verdun, thousands a day, and Americans trembled internally at the news. On March 2, 1916,
The Amherst Student
, the undergraduates’ newspaper, suggested that it was time for Amherst to form its own battalion; other colleges had already done so. The Alumni Council formed a Committee on Military Training to prepare undergraduates. In April 1916, Coolidge traveled to Amherst’s College Hall to preside over a meeting on preparedness, during which an army captain and a private spoke to the undergraduates. Fifty-five men, Amherst undergrads and alumni, were shortly accepted for summer training camps.