Coolidge (56 page)

My Dear Mr. Morrow;

Enclosed is a copy of a communication which you may have seen in the press. I request that you serve in the capacity indicated and I would like you to meet me at the White House on Thursday September 17, at 11:00 o’clock in the forenoon and lunch with me at 1:00. . . .

Very truly yours

Morrow took a suite at the Wardman Hotel and sat down for eight weeks with eight others to sort out whether the army, the navy, or a new agency should defend the United States’ skies, and to what extent. Morrow’s commission summoned Orville Wright himself to testify, and Wright’s modest demeanor did much to pour cold water on Colonel William Mitchell’s flames. Morrow held hearings and produced a report noting that for a century the Great Lakes had been unguarded by the navy, yet Canada had not occupied the Midwest. Morrow’s conclusion was classic Dwight and classic Coolidge: defense might well be necessary, but “to create a defense system based upon a hypothetical attack from Canada, Mexico, or another of our near neighbors would be wholly unreasonable.” Morrow’s coup de grâce was that he managed to so construct the report that his board endorsed it unanimously; even General Pershing was impressed.

In October 1925, Coolidge and Grace boarded the Presidential Special for a two-day trip, journeying all the way out to Omaha to explain the Coolidge perspective on the world to the American Legion. Here was a group of tens of thousands, leaders in the veterans’ movement for bonuses. Coolidge now gave the response to the Ku Klux Klan that people had awaited since the Klan’s summer marches. He called for tolerance, which he defined as “respect for different kinds of good.” He also made it clear that while he might have signed legislation restricting immigration, he did not mean there ought to be discrimination against immigrants. Grappling for an image, he found himself, like Garman, speaking of ships, and perhaps thinking of his own family history and even the previous summer’s trip to Plymouth Rock on the presidential yacht: “Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the
Mayflower
or three years to the steerage is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.” As it happened, the trip coincided with their twentieth anniversary; the papers noted that the trip must be different from the one they had made to Montreal so long before. The response to the speech, including that among blacks, was friendly. “Particularly do we want to thank you for that great word you spoke at Omaha, the bravest word spoken by any Executive in three score years. It sounds like Lincoln,” said Henry Proctor, a spokesman for black Congregationalists. Other black leaders berated Coolidge for not speaking so frankly against intolerance during the election of 1924. Still, as the Baltimore
Afro-American
noted, the speech was a clear blow to the Klan: “Two years afterward [after the presidential election] and without apparent new cause, he whales the Ku Klux Klan between the eyes.”

The Omaha trip behind him, Coolidge turned back, yet again, to taxes. In November, he went up to New York to deliver a speech he hoped would highlight the philosophy behind the tax drive. There was a perpetual tension between Washington and the rest of the country. That tension showed up in tax battles or debt discussion, but also in other ways, between states and Washington, or even cities and Washington. New York knew it was rich, but it did not always understand that its value was political. Taxpayers, indeed all citizens, also benefited from every check on Washington’s power, including the presence of a separate financial capital to compete with the political capital. When the framers of the Constitution “made Washington the political center of the country and left New York to develop into its business center,” Coolidge said, “they wrought mightily for freedom.” A tax cut was a reduction in tax on capital; in other words, a blow struck for every place that was not Washington.

That same month, the time finally came for Mellon and Coolidge to launch their law. Coolidge pounded away on the new tax legislation, planning for a vote early in 1926. The president and his cabinet secretary laid out the outlines in November: income tax cuts, especially reduction of surtaxes, worth $193.5 million. Mellon was about to announce proud news: the federal debt was down to $20 billion; he had managed the refinancing with a skill worthy of Hamilton.

The pair therefore felt comfortable in offering not just their great top cuts but small cuts, like so many Christmas tree ornaments for the coming season: estate taxes and gift taxes, as well as taxes on cars, mahjongg sets, yacht use, and brokers were all coming down, as well as taxes on both cigars and cigar holders. Christmas itself offered a brief interlude from the tax campaign. The living Christmas tree, the Norway spruce, was in its second year in Washington; thousands of Washingtonians came downtown to see it and walk the White House grounds. Mellon and Hoover both went to Sherman Square to watch Coolidge flick the switch to light the tree beside the statues of General Sherman and Alexander Hamilton.

After the holiday, Coolidge aimed to turn back to work. But as so often happened when a project demanded all of Coolidge’s attention, trouble intruded. Coolidge’s father, John, was weakening. An invalid now, he remained in bed much of the time and, despite Coolidge’s invitations, would not come to Washington. Like Sargent, John Coolidge took a dim view of mosquito-ridden Washington, especially after the death of Calvin. Coolidge had shipped his father cakes, candy, nuts, fruit, and books. But that did not seem enough, and Coolidge also sent his son John up to keep him company in Plymouth. A stroke had deprived his father of the use of a leg. On the morning of January 1, readying himself for the overwhelming New Year’s reception, Coolidge momentarily sank to a low again: “I am the most powerful man in the world but great power does not mean much except great limitations. I cannot have any freedom. . . . Thousands are waiting to shake my hand today.” Shortly thereafter, Coolidge wrote his father with another idea:

I would like to have a private telephone put in your house. It can go in the sitting room and have a long cord on it that will permit it to be taken to your bed, so that I can talk with you some times. The number will not be given out and no one can call you up, so you will not be annoyed with it and I will be glad to pay whatever expense is incurred.

To that, at least, the Colonel acquiesced, and in a local paper, there was a report that John McManama, a New England Telephone employee, was now the recipient of a Havana cigar “stamped with the chief executive’s name and presented to him by the father of the president.” The Coolidge father and son spoke now once or twice a day.

The president was also placing other calls, some directly. The administration and the lawmakers were now nearing the end of the tax siege, the victor haggling with the defeated. This was a period of furious back-and-forth for the tax legislation; Coolidge and Mellon would not relent until their bill was law, safe from the fate of 1924. The haggling continued. Coolidge wanted corporate taxes low. The lawmakers wanted to raise them slightly. The Republicans sought that cut in the cigar tax. Senator Smoot wanted to strike the cigar tax reduction. Mellon wanted everyone to pay a little tax. The Treasury secretary found it uncivic to remove too many from the tax rolls. The Democrats mocked him; there were so many other taxes the little man still paid. Mellon wanted to keep or shorten the maturity of public debt; the Democrats wanted to increase the number of years the public debt was paid down to more than thirty. Mellon fought back. “Pay your debts while you can,” he admonished. In desperation, the opponents of the legislation began to quantify the share of the tax break that the wealthy would claim. This, they were discovering, was an easy way to frame an opponent. General, across-the-board cuts of any progressive structure always favored the rich, since they had been paying more under progressivity to begin with. Senator George Norris pointed out, “Mr. Mellon himself gets a larger personal reduction than the aggregate of practically all the taxpayers in the state of Nebraska.” So he did. But Mellon paid more tax than the citizens of that state as well.

Still, scientific taxation did prevail. The new tax schedule Mellon’s men drew up was a beauty to behold, with its surtax rate topping out at 20 percent. The top rate, surtax plus base, was 25 percent. The hated publicity requirement in the tax code was stripped out, so that tax returns were again private. Estate taxes came down. And about one in three of those who had paid taxes before paid no taxes now. Revenues had increased after rates had been cut before. “We have paid back more money than we ever paid in,” Will Rogers joked. Perhaps even more would come now. The tax law was the very kind of action Calvin, Jr., had described in his letter about “the first boy of the land” back in August 1923. If Coolidge was a loner, he was a loner who had forged a historic partnership, that with Mellon. If grief could yield a gift, the grief over Calvin had yielded one for Mellon and, perhaps, the country.

Content with his work, Coolidge in this period finally indulged in two purchases, one for himself, one for the country. He hired a sculptor, Bryant Baker, to go to Plymouth and make a bust of Colonel John. Baker was a distinguished artist and had sculpted both Norwegian King Olaf as a child and Great Britain’s King Edward VII. Coolidge took the bust to his study, so that he could see John and not merely hear his voice on the phone. Coolidge’s second move was to allow the federal government to buy up the great collection of Abraham Lincoln material, the Oldroyd Collection, for the $50,000 the ancient and distinguished owner, Captain Osborn Oldroyd, demanded. That debit was one the federal government could handle.

At 2:25
P.M.
on February 25, 1926, the president of the Senate, Dawes, transmitted the legislation to the White House. On the morning of February 26, the moment finally came to sign the tax bill. By 10:10
A.M.
, the president was waiting, but some who were invited had not shown up yet: General Lord, ranking Democrats such as John Nance Garner of Texas, Secretary Mellon. Reporters noticed that Mellon, when he arrived, was beaming. When Senator Furnifold Simmons of North Carolina, the last to arrive, finally made it to the signing, he was in such a hurry that he failed to put out his cigar and held it in his hand as Coolidge signed. Cameras clicked and flashed. In an effort to be friendly, Reed Smoot, the legendary Republican Finance Committee chairman, reached over to grasp the hand of a Democrat, Senator Simmons, and grabbed the cigar itself. The stogie, by that time, was fortunately no longer lit, but was demolished in the course of the upheaval and interaction. That was kind of an inside joke in itself, since Senator Smoot had contested the cigar tax reduction.

“I note you are still doing those clear, grim, silent miracles; making Congress eat out of your hand, lie down and roll over and play dead dog, and also jump through hoops,” William Allen White wrote to Coolidge that spring after the tax victory.

The other press men did not view it so broadly. But they found themselves reflecting on other details of the great signing. On that day Coolidge had seemed preoccupied, not so much with taxes as with debt negotiations and the Italians. On paper, at least, the tax cut cost the government $388 million, or, potentially, a year’s surplus. Though Coolidge was now a Mellon convert, it would always make him nervous to forgo that much revenue, if only on paper. The U.S. flag by the president’s desk obscured the politicians present from some angles. Cameramen asked the president for permission to remove the flag. But Coolidge, who normally obliged the press men, this time denied permission. The Stars and Stripes had to be part of the scene; they came before individual politicians.

The happiest person present at the scene of the signing had proved to be the normally dour Mellon. “He smiled continually,” wrote a
New York Times
reporter in wonder. Mellon’s smile was not that of a politician. It was the anticipatory smile of a scholar. The Treasury secretary was enjoying the unexpected opportunity to complete an experiment he had feared aborted. For so long Mellon had told everyone, including Coolidge, that the Mellon Plan could allow the national economy to move to greater heights. Now, finally, and on the greatest field of all, scientific taxation would see its test.

Twelve
: The Flood and the Flier

Washington, D.C.

ONE OF THE FIRST
visitors Coolidge received in Washington after his vacation in the summer of 1926 was the president of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, P. W. Litchfield. Litchfield arrived, chief aeronautics engineer in tow, to seek Coolidge’s support for Goodyear’s new airship fleet. The company planned to build a dirigible of 6 million cubic feet, larger than past airships. Aviation, whether by dirigible or airplane, was now common in the Midwest. In fact, the damage done by flooding across the Midwest was being captured that month in arresting panorama shots of submerged houses taken from airplanes. Litchfield and his engineer, however, set their sights beyond the heartland: their dirigible would cross the Atlantic between New York and London. The New York–London Line, Litchfield told reporters, “should prove a successful commercial venture in oceanic travel.” The 1925 accident of a navy airship, the
Shenandoah
, would not deter Goodyear. The new airship would complete its voyage in “two and one-half days, or not more than three,” the rubber company reported. That was half the time of the old ocean liners from before the war. But planes might yet make it in two days.

The faster, the better, as far as Coolidge was concerned. The scientific taxation experiment of Mellon was under way, but the plan did not have forever to prove it could deliver. Any unpredicted event could stall the experiment in its crucial demonstration year. The growth and results from the tax experiment had to come fast, if the experiment were to see completion and prove it could benefit all. In a key way, aviation had the potential to help Coolidge and Mellon out. For one thing, flight fired the national imagination, and distracted people from their sorrows. “Well after I finish a long siege,” Will Rogers would write, “I sorter begin to look up in the sky and see what is flying over.” Second, aviation contributed to commerce itself, by enabling companies to work faster, mail to be delivered sooner, and connections to be made where there had been none before. Growth in turn helped the tax revenues flow.