Coolidge (35 page)

But those present in the Morgan office at the bombing noticed something else. One ticker, Clarence Barron’s ticker from Dow Jones, still clattered. The glass bell over the machine was smashed, and shards had embedded themselves in its slender wood frame, but the apparatus continued to spew news of the explosion and then, all afternoon, the details of its consequences. The sputtering little machine sent a signal that the whole nation heard. Commerce would not be stopped.

In October, Coolidge could feel himself growing into his new role; he looked forward to Washington. The same Wall Street that was recovering from the bombing was now betting seven to one that Harding would prevail over Cox. “We will carry all of the West,” Elmer Dover, a Republican national committeeman, wrote to Harding. Looking over the northwest, Charles Forbes, who was seeking a spot on the shipping board, sent an equally confident message to Marion: “You will make a sweeping victory.”

Toward the end of the campaign, as if to mark the finality of Coolidge’s departure from Massachusetts, his great mentor, Murray Crane, died. A crowd came together at Crane’s house on Sugar Hill in Dalton to pay its respects; Coolidge sat with Lodge in Crane’s drawing room. The death confirmed what Coolidge already knew: that Crane had failed at the convention because he was sick. “Had he been his old self at Chicago I feel the result there would have been different. . . . He was a great man,” Coolidge wrote his father. At the funeral there were no cross words, but when Lodge commenced posing for pictures, Coolidge found himself unwilling to join him and finally snapped, “I came to bury my friend. It’s no time for photographs.”

On November 1, Coolidge wrote his father a preelection report. It featured the usual mixture of relief, concern, and sharp Coolidge humor about the economy. The difficult inflation puzzle still plagued him, but he was cheerier now. “Came home yesterday. Boys are well. Your dog is growing well. She has bitten the ice man, the milk man, and the grocer man. It is good to have some way to get even with them for the high prices they charge for everything. In the morning Mr. Stearns will try to find out how to telephone returns to you.”

The return numbers were so strong that not even Lodge could sniff at them. On Harding’s fifty-fifth birthday, Harding, Coolidge, and normalcy took more than 60 percent of the vote. James Cox’s Democrats won only 34 percent. In the electoral college, the GOP collected 404 votes to 127 for the Democrats. Not everyone understood the extent to which Coolidge deserved credit for the outcome. The Germans, for example, remained steadfast in their fealty to the idea of Archibald Coolidge as victor, with the
Berliner Tageblatt
, still confused, writing that “through the victory of the Republican ticket Archibald Cary Coolidge has been elected vice president of the United States.”

In fact Calvin Coolidge had made a difference. Tennessee, where Coolidge had briefly traveled, rewarded him and voted for a Republican over a Democrat in the presidential election for the first time since 1868. Coolidge’s actions during the police strike were often cited as the reason for the GOP success. “The people not only beat Gompers and Cox. They were at particular pains to rub it in,” gloated
The Wall Street Journal
. When it came to the Senate, the Democrats had prevailed in the South but nowhere else. The Republicans picked up ten seats; crucially, they gained in western states such as Nevada, Idaho, and California. The Republican majority in the upper chamber was now 59 to 37, which meant that from his seat as president of the Senate, the new vice president, Coolidge, would be likely to see the passage of many laws he endorsed. The tariff proved an especially big seller in places such as Utah, where tariff advocate Reed Smoot had won 56.6 percent of the vote. As for the House of Representatives, the Grand Old Party now held nine out of ten seats outside the South. With a total of 302 seats, it had almost 70 percent of the House, a historic record. The result was a shift in the official policy of the Grand Old Party. It was not so much the progressive party as the party of low taxes, tariffs, less central government, and stability.

In December, the Coolidges traveled out to Ohio a second time, this time in snow, to visit the Hardings. They found there were still crowds of hundreds bidding for the president-elect’s attention; William Jennings Bryan was set to arrive shortly. Someone mentioned a plan for a vice presidential residence in Washington; Coolidge promptly nixed it—as “inappropriate” in a time of budget cutting. The Coolidges found the Hardings marvelously receptive. Harding invited Coolidge to sit in on cabinet meetings, marking a shift for a president-elect. Harding was a unifier, Coolidge said. The vice president–elect did not find himself favoring the word “normalcy,” but he described their shared agenda another way. It was time to end the confusion, to recognize the cost of operating “in this time of uncertainty,” as he told
The New York Times
.

Back east in Plymouth, Massachusetts, just before Christmas, Coolidge made another try at expressing where the country might go. Excavators there had been digging up the original rock where the pilgrims landed, in time for the tercentenary of the year of the landing, 1620. A crowd of hundreds assembled there, among whom were local children and mill hand immigrants, “still faulty in their English,” as the papers reported. The vice president–elect, Mrs. Coolidge, and Senator Lodge stood before the citizens. Coolidge pointed out to the crowd that there was nothing noble about the pilgrims’ blood at the time they voyaged. It was their deeds that distinguished them for later Americans. They had been “oblivious to rank, yet men trace to them their lineage as to a royal house.” It would be futile, Coolidge said, “to search among recorded maps an history for their origin. They sailed up out of the infinite.” The way the pilgrims had lived, by example, provided value for others; in fact, “no like body ever cast so great an influence on human history.” Preserving that tradition, Coolidge was saying, seemed a primary endeavor, if only because it benefited so many others, regardless of background. Coolidge’s second point was made by the ring of the telephone: the Rock’s anniversary was being celebrated with a connection from Massachusetts to the West Coast and the governor of California. Daniel Webster had prophesied, a century before, that Plymouth would be heard “to the murmurs of the Pacific seas.” Now Coolidge used the public phone call to make good on that promise. Governor Stephens did not pick up, but his secretary and Coolidge conversed before the crowd. “I wish you to say to Governor Stephens that Massachusetts and Plymouth greet California and the Golden Gate.”

As he thought about the prospects for change, Coolidge felt his hopes lift again. The party platform suited Harding’s intentions, and his own. On the need for the new budget system, the document was especially clear: “The universal demand for an executive budget is a recognition of the incontrovertible fact that leadership and sincere assistance on the part of the executive departments are essential to effective economy and constructive retrenchment.” Harding was already thinking about how to win party support for tax changes. Coolidge could see that Harding was selecting friends from Ohio for key cabinet jobs: Daugherty for attorney general, for example. But the president-elect was also naming great powerhouses to advise him: Herbert Hoover, who was universally respected, went to the Commerce Department, Charles Evans Hughes to the post of secretary of state. Also notable was the appointment of Andrew Mellon, the Pittsburgh magnate, as Treasury secretary. After the convention, the limits on giving had come off; Mellon had raised $400,000 in Allegheny County. Interviewed, Barron told the press that “the finance success associated with the name of Mellon in Pittsburgh is a good augury.”

Coolidge had been accustomed to the citizens of Massachusetts, who had respected him by keeping their distance; now huge crowds came to see him wherever he went. In Atlanta, where thousands greeted him, someone stole his overcoat while he was inspecting a YMCA building. Fending off the praise and the flattery was also a challenge. Theodore Roosevelt’s sister Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, still grieving over TR’s death, invited Coolidge to speak at the Women’s Roosevelt Memorial Foundation, telling Coolidge, “I would rather have you as the speaker of this meeting than anyone else for your works seem to me to be a reincarnation of both Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.” Coolidge did not know how to respond and asked Morrow whether he should accept. The new administration needed to move quickly in all areas. As soon as the election returns were in, Coolidge embarked on a crash course in every area of administration, turning to anyone, regardless of status, to gain the most accurate and succinct information. His distant cousin Archibald, a Harvard professor and leading expert on treaties and international law relating to war, knew better than almost anyone else the legal background regarding the neutrality of Belgium. But the same cousin, Coolidge also suspected, might exploit the opportunity of an informational query to trap the vice president–elect into listening to hours of lectures. To gain the benefit of Archibald’s knowledge without paying a prohibitive cost in time, Coolidge crafted his own single-paragraph summary of the law as it had been before the war and sent it over to Cambridge: “The great powers of Europe made a treaty for the neutralization of Belgium under which they agreed not to violate Belgian territory by invasion.” But the vice president–elect also helpfully advised his cousin as to the form of the response he expected: “You are familiar with European subjects which I am not so that I wish to ask you if the following statement would be correct. Perhaps you can indicate by writing ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on it and returning it to me.” Even so, the Harvard cousin could not resist shipping back a response of several paragraphs to the State House.

In the interregnum, Coolidge and Grace retreated with Frank Stearns and his wife, Emily, to Asheville, North Carolina, for a brief rest, but even there, at the Grove Park Inn, hundreds of people came to greet Coolidge. Nor did the letters, the books, and the advice fail to penetrate. From Morrow there came a biography of Alexander Hamilton, a tariff history of the United States by F. W. Taussig, and other documents on tariffs, mostly skeptical. Morrow had not given up on converting Coolidge.

Beyond briefings and learning, there were other challenges to consider. An austere, budget-cutting administration had to serve as a model of thrift. While the Coolidges were in Asheville, Congress, confronting the greatest national debt in its memory, opted to conduct hearings about whether the outlays for the war had been warranted. The lawmakers were so angry and so insistent in their pressuring of the officer who oversaw the supply management of the American Expeditionary Force, Brigadier General Charles G. Dawes, on the price of French horses that the general exploded, shouting, “Hell and Maria! I will tell you this, that we would have paid horse prices for sheep if they could have hauled artillery.” But Dawes was on the defensive.

Fortunately, the Hardings did seem ready enough to budget, both publicly and privately, as Florence Harding reminded them in her direct way. Grace wrote Florence Harding again to inquire about dressing for the inaugural ball. This gave Mrs. Harding her first opportunity to pull rank. The inaugural ball had been canceled for austerity’s sake, she informed Grace. So they would not need to get fancy dresses. “It does simplify for us, doesn’t it?” she added.

Whatever the dress code, both Coolidges, in fact the whole family, still looked forward to inauguration day. The vice president–elect carefully crafted a train itinerary down to the inauguration for his father, who was staying with the boys in Northampton. Solicitously, he arranged that the Colonel change trains in New Haven rather than in New York, where the transfer was more difficult and the crowds greater. “You will leave here Thurs March 3 am at 8-20, reach New Haven at 10-41.” After switching cars there, Colonel Coolidge was to ride to Washington and arrive at 8:45
P.M.
with the boys.

Service was on Coolidge’s mind as he carefully drafted the vice president’s address. It had to set the stage for Harding and facilitate his legislation. The Hardings and Coolidges rode to the inauguration in matching Packard Twin Sixes, the first time a first and second couple had traveled by car. The crowds noticed the grace with which Harding turned to his partner in the vehicle, Woodrow Wilson, inclining his top hat in kindness toward the frozen face of the retiring president. Coolidge was led into the Senate chamber to be sworn in. For some members, it was their first glimpse of Coolidge. “Mr. Coolidge, a medium-sized man of auburn hair who was escorted to Vice-president Marshall’s right,” Henry Fountain Ashurst, a senator from Arizona, described him in his diary.

At 12:20
P.M.
, Vice President Marshall sent a signal throughout the chamber, and at 12:21
P.M.
Coolidge was sworn in. The “I do” rang clearly in the room. Marshall introduced him, and Coolidge followed with his own speech, 434 words, the length a typical Coolidge signal, like the inaugural address in the Senate back in 1916, that he was committed to cutting back. The Constitution, he said, might be about governments and people, both plural, two groups. But beneath that lay a more important relationship established by the Constitution, without which the former meant nothing: “a new relationship between man and man.” The Constitution was there, but only to back up and express what happened between men in commerce every day, between country lawyers like him or notaries and clients. Unless the trust between the individual men was right, the whole mechanism was off. Coolidge closed with humility. “I take up the duties the people have assigned me,” he told the senators.

The speech did not resonate as Coolidge intended, in part because the crowd rushed off to hear the president. The enormous pressure to do right, to keep up with the crowd without being rude, made the family nervous. A newspaperman from the
Boston Daily Advertiser
asked John Coolidge, the president’s older son, if he would report on the inauguration for the Sunday edition. John, cautious, demurred. Calvin, twelve, agreed, penning an article short on detail and long on goodwill: