Coolidge (30 page)

Coolidge found that he was becoming a symbol in this wider debate. The more trouble elsewhere, the more the letters of support and charitable donations to help the replacement officers flowed into Boston. Coolidge wrote to his father, noting that the interest in the Boston strike and his response had been indeed “quite remarkable.” In its first few days the public safety defenders’ fund created by Coolidge to help pay the state guardsmen raised more than $200,000. “I feel fairly sure we can protect the government,” Coolidge allowed in a note to his father, but only “fairly.” Boston might be calm now, but the telephone ladies and the trolley men might yet mount a general strike. “There is a possibility of the stopping of transportation,” the governor wrote to one company, Walworth Manufacturing, on September 18; companies like Walworth were being asked to form a committee to prepare for the possibility that Boston might need to supply itself with food. Replacement policemen like the one who rode Duffy were all over the city; the Boston Public Library announced a special campaign to deliver books to them in their barracks. Across the nation, other vendors were betting that men would now go back to work, and business found that September was proving to be a good month. Coolidge began to have some time for family again. Grace came to Boston.

The safest thing to do was focus on the work that remained in his term, especially the state government reorganization he had agonized over with Field. Alone in his office, Coolidge crossed out names and departments; each time he did so, he knew, he was crossing out constituencies and voters. No opponent was challenging Coolidge in the Republican gubernatorial primary, but that did not mean there was no contest: to prove he had a mandate poststrike, Coolidge had to perform better than he had the year before. Murray Crane had often made the 200-mile-plus round-trip home to vote in state elections. Coolidge, though unopposed, also made his own trip of 214 miles to vote at home on September 23. Coolidge therefore missed a call from a national eminence, Bryan, who called at the State House to find the governor departed.

Coolidge beat himself, and by a healthy margin. Even in Boston, Coolidge gained 3,000 votes over the year before. This was the first sign that Coolidge might be something more than a politician who could stare down a union. He might be an electable politician who could do so. Even after the primary, the letters poured in to thank him for the strike management. In total they would number tens of thousands, nothing like what the state government had seen before.

Suddenly, everyone Coolidge knew was rallying in support of him, right down to the neighbors in Northampton or Plymouth Notch. The Vermonters, naturally suspicious of adulation, grudgingly acknowledged Coolidge’s fame: papers now carried reports from those who had known him as a boy, such as Judge Wendell Stafford, who had been at St. Johnsbury with him.
Have Faith in Massachusetts
, complete with the now-famous telegram, was finally published to respectful reviews; Stearns made sure it was distributed as a campaign document. Newspapers praised Coolidge’s spare style.
The Wall Street Journal
told the nation in its most direct language that Coolidge was their man. “Governor Coolidge has shown the fibre of which presidents ought to be made,” the paper wrote in an October 29 editorial about the labor situation. Dwight Morrow felt his blood warm as the prospects of an Amherst man on a national stage became more real. Coolidge was almost there, he believed.

To Stearns, Morrow summed up the good in Calvin: “For the last year I have been abroad dealing with all sort of government officials. Some of them have been Socialists like Thomas, the great socialist leader in France. Some of them have been from old conservative families. . . . I have about come to the conclusion that the division of the people in the world is not really between conservative and radical, but people that are real people and people that are not. Calvin is one of the fellows who is real. He really wants to make things better not to pretend to make them better.” Bruce Barton set about writing a puff piece about Coolidge for November, timed, hopefully, to launch Coolidge as not only a governor but also a candidate for president.

Word was that the president’s nonstop exertions had caused Wilson to fall ill; the reports came that he was heading back to Washington. Coolidge too felt himself going under: just after the primary he took to his bed with acute bronchitis. He was not even sure he could make a party convention. On September 26, Coolidge wrote to his father in his typical unpunctuated style, “There is no change in the situation here, my soldiers still on guard a new police force organizing.” With each day that passed it became clearer that his government reorganization would hurt the very people who were crucial to his gubernatorial election. Charles Baxter of Medford, for example, was campaigning hard for Coolidge; he was planning the speaking drive for the GOP in the state that fall. Baxter was expecting to be rewarded with sinecures and places for himself and other men, and Coolidge did not know if his reorganization could accommodate that. “People applaud me a great deal but I am not sure they will vote for me,” he added in his note to his father. “This was a service that had to be done and I have been glad to do it. The result won’t matter to me but it will matter a great deal to the rest of America.” He was warning John that the battles were not all over. More negative press would come.

Oswald Garrison Villard, the owner and editor of
The Nation
, was now targeting Coolidge’s performance during the strike, making the case that Coolidge had been AWOL for much of it. Coolidge, still defensive, asked his attorney general to prepare an entire brief to prove that he was on alert during the whole course of the strike. Coolidge’s opponent was Richard Long, the businessman who had eaten into the Republican vote in the gubernatorial election of the preceding year. Long’s principal argument was that Coolidge had been unprepared for the disaster of the strike. Long fired off his own telegram assailing Coolidge as Coolidge had assailed Gompers. “You are to blame for failure to consider settlement with them,” Long wrote to Coolidge. “A broad-minded governor,” wrote the Democratic candidate, “would have been able to satisfy them and at the same time protect the dignity and honor of Boston and Massachusetts.”

Later in October, Richard Long grew bolder, traveling to Greenfield, the very town where Coolidge had talked to the AFL before the strike, to allege his incompetence: “Where was Gov. Coolidge on the night of the police strike? He was in seclusion far from the scene of the trouble, safely beyond the reach of those interested in the serious situation, hiding away on the western side of the Connecticut River. If he had been any part of a man he would have stayed in Boston, this great hero, and protected the people of the city.” That hurt, because Coolidge did wonder if he should have acted sooner.

Coolidge did not know who would vote for him in the general election. He thought about the Irish Americans, many of whom were registering to vote for the first time. They might not only turn against Coolidge but take other immigrants with them as well. The Massachusetts Democrats offered the additional lure of promises of spending and a prounion law for Massachusetts; Long promised voters a five-day week with six days’ pay, a proposal that had credibility, coming as it did from a shoe manufacturer and not a mere politician. Long also backed a neat plan to raise the rate on the graduated income tax and use the extra revenue to give servicemen a $360 bonus.

Over the course of October, several unexpected events, however, gave further advantage to Coolidge and his Republicans. One was an emerging tragedy: Wilson, who had fallen ill around the same time as Coolidge, was not recovering easily. The nervous exhaustion announced on the western trip was now clearly something far more serious; the president was still in seclusion in Washington. The conference that Gompers had so looked forward to and that Wilson had promised would resolve all was also bogging down, and over the same point. Employers would give a lot, but they refused to deal with outside representatives of workers. Coolidge could see that the vice president, Thomas Marshall of Indiana, was stuck in an awkward position. Marshall was permitted no access to the president but could sense the trouble; the secretary of state, Robert Lansing, actually visited the president’s secretary to remind him that the Constitution said that in the case of a president’s “Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve to the Vice President.” The gossips said that Mrs. Wilson was running the executive office while Wilson lay stricken. Republican Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico told others, “We have a petticoat government!” Lansing began to call cabinet meetings in Wilson’s absence.

Another factor turning out to benefit Republicans, especially conservative Republicans, was the coal strike. It looked as if there would be a great coal strike along with the steel action, and that during the elections, hearths and grates would be cold. John L. Lewis planned to take hundreds of thousands of workers out that fall. The unions had misjudged the situation; instead of sympathizing with the coal men, voters sided against them. All governors and senators who were taking a stand against such broad actions or radical groups were rising in stature. Illinois Governor Frank Lowden, who called a threatened coal strike “a strike against the American public,” was being mentioned as a presidential candidate. Lowden, like Coolidge, had bypassed his mayor; in Lowden’s instance he had ordered out state troops to halt a meeting of the People’s Council, a left-wing group accused of being pro-German. Recently the Seventeenth Amendment had become law, meaning that voters instead of state legislatures would pick senators. This was the nation’s blow to the boys’ club of the Senate. Now many Americans also wanted a governor, rather than a senator, as their president. But some of the names put forward were not governors’, Herbert Hoover’s, for example. From his impromptu rescue effort at the Savoy, Hoover had gone on to feed starving Belgium and then after that to serve as U.S. food administrator at the war’s end; in other words, he was the world’s most successful rescuer. Yet another name the Republicans mentioned was that of General Leonard Wood. Wood was the Theodore Roosevelt proxy, having led the preparedness campaign.

As the Massachusetts election date neared, yet another good omen for Coolidge emerged:
The Boston Post
, a Democratic paper, criticized Coolidge’s opponent Long for basing his campaign on “prejudice, selfishness and disorder.” Coolidge immediately wrote home to his father in satisfaction, “It is a great event to come down here and make a great Democratic paper support me, greater than being chosen Governor.” On October 27, the birthday of President Roosevelt, Coolidge refined his argument for law: “We are facing an issue that knows no party. It is not new. That issue is the supremacy of the Law. On this issue America has never made but one decision.” Even some of the Irish vote might go for the governor. The Catholic Irish were furious at President Wilson for his failure to include a free Ireland in his case for determination; this to them was more important than the hurt to their fellow Irish Americans in the strike. The next day, October 28, the Wilson administration’s weakness was again revealed when Congress overrode Wilson’s Volstead Act veto, providing enforcement power for Prohibition. It was now generally well known that Wilson was physically incapacitated; Vice President Marshall was in an agony of indecision. If he tried to enforce the Constitution, he might end up disrupting the country more and make himself look like a usurper in the process.

In the last hours before the gubernatorial election, Democratic leaders told an audience at a Democratic rally that “Calvin Coolidge is morally responsible for the loss of life in Boston in the early days of the police strike.” Coolidge confined himself to one counterblow, delivered at his own rally: “When this campaign is over it will be a rash man who will again attempt to further his selfish interests by dragging a great party name in the mire and seeking to gain the honor of office by trafficking with disorder.” Otherwise he remained calm. “Campaign looks all right,” he wrote in a letter to his stepmother. “Am just going home to vote.” It had been relatively warm in the daytime in Hampshire County that October, as high as 70 degrees on November 1. But in the period before the election, just as hundreds of thousands of coal men really did go out on strike, daytime temperature dropped into the 40s. Suddenly, the importance of a coal shortage seemed real. Republicans decided that Democrats had made this election a referendum on the steel and coal strikes, but that their own party might win the referendum. The conservatives in the Grand Old Party told themselves that progressives were becoming desperate because Coolidge, the antistrike candidate, was going to trounce them.

He did. Coolidge took the state by 125,000 votes over Richard Long, a landslide compared with his slim 17,000 margin of the year before. Holyoke, Lowell, Fall River, and New Bedford, all towns with significant blue-collar populations, went for Coolidge. The news was not merely that Coolidge had won but also that the kind of victory that he had achieved was a template for the Republican Party in the 1920 election. The fact that Coolidge fared well in places like Wards 4 and 5 of Holyoke, an area that was home to many Poles and Irish, showed he could still win support from immigrants or their children. Many in the Italian community in Springfield voted for Coolidge, while the Irish of Ward 2 went for Long. Long took the labor hotbed, Lawrence, but only barely. Coolidge increased his share in Lynn, the city divided over the police union. Every county but Suffolk, which contained Boston, voted for Coolidge, and even in Suffolk County Coolidge narrowed the margin by which he was defeated. Only 5,000 votes separated Coolidge from victory in Boston.

If the applause had pealed after the strike statement, now it thundered. For not only had Coolidge shown you could stand up against the radical workmen, he had confirmed that you could do so and still win an election. He had demonstrated that even with many new immigrants in the country, Republicans could still win, and even take votes from the opposition. “Coolidge Helped by Angry Democrats,” crooned
The New York Times
, now smitten, on the day after the election. “You have upheld American ideals,” wrote Governor Milliken of Maine. Even President Wilson from his sickbed wired congratulations for a “victory for law and order.” Such congratulations from a president to a candidate of the opposite party were unprecedented, the pundits said. It made Coolidge like Herbert Hoover, the great administrator, a candidate who clearly might appeal to both parties.