Coolidge (6 page)

Two
: The Ouden

Amherst

NO FRESHMAN IN THE
history of Amherst College seemed less likely to succeed than John Calvin Coolidge, class of 1895. The thin country redhead did not speak. He boarded at Trott’s on South Pleasant Street, ten minutes from the college, farther away than most students. His roommate was not another freshman, as was common, but an upperclassman, a champion in the hammer throw. The Protestant college in the Connecticut Valley attracted students from all over the country, boys with far more social experience and ambition than he. The others moved along the streets and into and out of the school buildings or chapel fast; they stopped to talk, but not to him. The school newspaper,
The Amherst Student
, spilled the names of undergraduates liberally all over its pages, but not his.

It was only because of a loophole and a recession that Calvin had even made it to Amherst at all. He had botched his first entrance exam, in September 1890, when he had arrived at the college town with a cold and come down sick in the middle of the tests. It had been bronchitis severe enough to scare them all. The same
Vermont Tribune
that had reported his graduation oratory had mentioned now that J. Calvin Coolidge was “gaining slowly.” Eventually, he had returned to Black River Academy for a short period of tutoring and review. From there he wrote to his father, “I have not the training of a man from a school like St. Jonsbury [
sic
], Saxton’s River, or Phillips Exeter, but I hope I have the ability yet to secure it.” His old headmaster, George Sherman, chagrined and aiming to boost the reputation of Black River Academy, pondered how to regroup. Sherman recalled that a school farther north than Plymouth, St. Johnsbury Academy, maintained a special arrangement with Amherst. When students completed satisfactory work at St. Johnsbury, they were automatically admitted to the Massachusetts college. The headmaster at St. Johnsbury, Charles Putney, was operating in the midst of a downturn. The Fairbanks family, which had endowed St. Johnsbury, was dying off; several faculty members had volunteered to return part of their salaries to the school rather than put it farther in the red. Dividends from the railroad stocks that had supported the school had been suspended.

Putney made an exception to precedent and allowed Calvin to come and try to qualify for his certificate in one term. John Coolidge shipped Calvin up to St. Johnsbury for a crash course in Latin, algebra, Greek, and elocution. Perhaps the alacrity with which John had agreed surprised Calvin, but John himself had been preoccupied; over the spring of 1891, he was courting the schoolteacher Carrie Brown, and a neighbor. Calvin, a normally erratic speller who became worse when anxious, had written his father in determination, “I believe I can get a cirtificate.” St. Johnsbury and Putney had indeed given him one.

He had begun to count on going to Amherst and thought not only of the academic but of the social side. “Dick Lane thinks he and I had better go down to Amherst some time this spring to see about getting me into a society there. The societies are a great factor at Amherst and of course I want to join if I can,” Coolidge wrote his father. There were so many fraternities that getting in might not be hard. The year Coolidge entered, 285 out of 352 students enrolled were affiliated with one of nine fraternities, the largest being “Deke,” Delta Kappa Epsilon, the granddaddy fraternity of New England. His father had indeed married Carrie, thus setting to rest any concern his son might have at leaving him alone. Calvin instantly took to Carrie; missing mother and sister so long, he was glad to have Carrie and considered her a new mother.

The college that he encountered in his first few weeks of the fall of 1891 was worthy. Amherst had been founded not in the name of wealth or sport or Greek fraternities but to educate poor students to be ministers. It had been a splinter of a splinter: men who had deemed Harvard University too impious had founded Williams College, safe in the wilderness of western Massachusetts; Williams President Zephaniah Swift Moore, dissatisfied, had moved over to Amherst from North Adams, and students had followed him. From its beginning in the 1820s, Amherst had been small but mighty. “The infant college is an infant Hercules,” an astonished writer named Ralph Waldo Emerson had written in his diary after passing through. “Never was so much striving, outstretching, and advancing in a literary cause as is exhibited here.” The students, he said, “write, speak, and study in a sort of fury, which, I think, promises a harvest of attainments.”

Amherst welcomed all Christians but tended to the Congregationalist, like St. Johnsbury, where Coolidge had worshipped at “the North Congo,” the North Congregational Church. The fervor of the professors also recalled his grandmother Sarah Brewer, a Baptist. Christianity was, one president had said, “top stone and cornerstone” of Amherst, a fitting image in a region known for its granite and marble.

The quality of the education was seen as high enough to create leaders. “Terras irradient” was the Amherst motto: “Let them illuminate the earth.” Amherst men might become senators, preachers, or diplomats. The Amherst campus was its own City upon a Hill, situated to exploit a view of purple mountains. The steeples there were like those of Vermont: steeples of independence. The town itself, like St. Johnsbury and Ludlow before it, was showing Calvin how the world worked; the Fairbanks’ factory in St. Johnsbury had made great scales, purchased the world over, by customers as far away as Russia. In Amherst there were bicycles everywhere, whereas a few years before, there had been only horses.

Here in Amherst were names and achievements to aspire to. Among Amherst graduates was Henry Ward Beecher, who had preached abolition so successfully in Brooklyn. Even junior professors at Amherst were extraordinary: Charles Garman, who taught philosophy, had been described by none other than William James as “the greatest teacher” of all the colleges. Another Amherst star was a young librarian named Melvil Dewey, who had come up with a new classification of knowledge. During one Sunday sermon, staring at the pulpit, Dewey had come up with a way to organize books: “while I lookt stedfastly at [it] without hearing a word,” Dewey later wrote, “my mind absorbd in the vital problem, the solution flasht over so that I jumpt in my seat and came very near shouting ‘Eureka!’ It was to get absolute simplicity by using the simplest known symbols, the arabic numerals as decimals, with ordinary significance of nought, to number a classification of all human knowledge in print.”

Coolidge learned quickly that there were Amherst dynasties, not always wealthy but respected, chains of alumni with names such as Stearns or Dickinson. The bells of Stearns steeple, which chimed in the key of E, had been given by the father of an Amherst man who had died at Williamsburg in the Civil War. A Boston merchant, Frank Stearns, was class of 1878; he had married the daughter of an officer who had brought back a cannon from the Civil War; Stearns was also the name of an Amherst president. Stearns had his own department store in Boston. A Dickinson had founded Amherst, and another Dickinson had ferociously guarded the college’s virtue; Edward Dickinson, the son of the founder, Samuel, and father of Emily, made it clear that Amherst would sacrifice all rather than become impure. Laying the cornerstone of the Barrett Gymnasium in 1859, Dickinson, a Whig politician, had warned that if the structure were “desecrated to any purpose of immorality,” it should be destroyed: “Would that a fire consume it or an earthquake throw it down.”

Austin Dickinson, Edward’s son, was the school treasurer; the poems of his late sister Emily were praised in the press. The Dickinsons were royalty and broke rules, their own or the college’s, with impunity; Austin was an indifferent bookkeeper, and there was gossip about an old affair he was said to have conducted with the wife of the astronomy professor, David Todd, class of 1875. Henry P. Field, class of 1880, was the son of a professor, Thomas P. Field, class of 1834, and a loyal alumnus. He was also the Dickinson family lawyer, based in Northampton, the county seat. Field, a bachelor and secretary to his class, stayed at the Lord Jeffery Inn whenever he visited other alumni. Field’s law partner was John C. Hammond, class of 1865. Both men, Calvin noticed, were Republicans. Herbert Pratt, a member of his class, was from a family that had made a fortune in kerosene and given the school the Pratt Gymnasium and Pratt Field, completed in the spring of 1891, just months before Calvin’s arrival. For such people, doors seemed to fly open.

But for him the doors shut one by one. Fraternity recruitment came. Charles Andrews, a young man he met, pledged Phi Delta Theta. Dwight Morrow, a boy from a family with even fewer resources than his own, found a new home at Beta Theta Pi, which maintained a gaudy house with a prominent porch on the corner of College Street and Boltwood Avenue. “He was master of the situation,” Coolidge would say later of Morrow’s response to it all. Boy after boy found some kind of affiliation. Coolidge looked on, helpless.

Athletics likewise did not seem possible, and that too hurt because physical fitness was a near obsession at Amherst. Coolidge lacked the talent that would win someone a name on the field; he was not an especially fast runner, he was not especially comfortable with a ball, and he was certainly not comfortable dancing. He could not make a team. He experienced the well-known shock of arriving at a school and finding oneself to be not steps but leagues behind the serious athletes. One of the humiliations of college was that students’ physical shortcomings were quantified—and meticulously. Amherst had its own health guru, another dynasty man, Edward Hitchcock, the son of a geologist and Amherst university president. He taught physical culture—what we today would call health studies—to the freshmen. Hitchcock was also a pioneer in anthropometry, the study of the physical measures of men. Not only did “Doc,” as he was known to the students, record the height and weight of each Amherst freshman, he also measured them up and down and tested them for strength of lungs, arms, and legs. He carefully recorded additional physical characteristics of decades of Amherst students and took extra care to study students who stood out.

A fellow freshman in Coolidge’s year, H. W. Lane, held Hitchcock’s attention: “Mr H. W. Lane of this class makes the most remarkable record of strength tests in our books,” Hitchcock wrote. Ernest Hardy of Northampton, the county seat, weighed in the heaviest, at 191 pounds. Coolidge weighed only 119.5 pounds, below the class average, despite a height that was slightly more than average, 68.9 inches. Other physical characteristics were also recorded, such as hair color: Coolidge was one of five “auburns” counted in the class.

If Coolidge could not be Greek, at least he could read Greek, along with Latin. But even in academics the reception was less warm than he had hoped. With newspapers being the only input from the outside world, the professors and clergy were giants at a campus like Amherst. In 1890, professors’ salaries were $2,500, more than twenty times tuition. The step up from laborer to professor was immense, for the average wage earner in 1890 earned $425 a year. When a young Scottish American, Alexander Meiklejohn, just Coolidge’s age, began his first job as an assistant professor teaching philosophy at Brown, in 1897, he would receive a salary almost equivalent to that of his six brothers combined. A “prexy,” or university president, earned even more than the professors. The giants did not seem to pay much attention to Coolidge. They read lectures aloud; the first-year students’ work, just as at the academies, was to memorize, recite, or stay silent. Coolidge found his assignments both unsatisfying and tiring. There was a word, he learned, for a man who was left out without a fraternity: they called such a man an ouden, from the Greek for “nothing.” Some of the oudens at Amherst were oudens on principle: Harlan Stone, a year older, rejected fraternities as “a rather artificial way of forming friendships.” But most in the band of outsiders were never invited, boys too quiet or too much the hayseed to make the cut.

“I am in a pleasant place and like very much,” Calvin wrote to his father, John, on October 15 of his freshman year, in a kind of shorthand. “but suppose I shall like better as become better acquainted, I don’t seem to get acquainted very fast however.”

He was back where he had been at the beginning at Black River Academy: on the margin. There was nothing to do but press on and wait for Christmas. As he trudged around, Coolidge found that he often thought of home. In November, he wrote home to his grandmother, starting out bravely, “This term is almost done it is 11 weeks since I left home; I never was away as long before but to be gone one week is just about the same as 11 only a repetition of the same thing. We get very good advantages here for quite a broad education.” Shortly, though, he segued to that beloved topic of the homesick, food: “I suppose you will have the bed set out in the kitchen for me when I come to stay with you and I can have some coffee with cream in it I have not drunk a cup of coffee as I remember since I came here. . . . I don’t like their potatoes here.” When he went home at Christmas, he had not yet received his first grades. Amherst graded on a scale of 2 to 5. Calvin, perhaps suspecting that his grades would be far worse than 4 or 5, decided he did not want to go back to college. As much as his father would have liked him to stay home, he saw that school was worthwhile in Calvin’s case. There was also the principle of finishing what one started. His father sent him back.

Returning to Amherst in January 1892 was even harder than starting in September, perhaps harder even than sitting down to take the exams while he was sick in 1890. “I hate to think I must stay here 12 weeks before I can go home again,” he wrote to Plymouth Notch. “I think I must be very home-sick my hand trembles so I can’t write so any one can read it. It is just seven o’clock I wonder if you are most home there is some snow here but it has stopped snowing now.” His life seemed to be going in the wrong direction: “Each time I get home I hate to go away worse than before and I don’t feel so well here now.” The grades for the first semester were indeed disappointing 2s, just passing, which “seem pretty low don’t they?” as he wrote to his father January 14.