Coolidge (68 page)

Kellogg had suggested a second policy to his president. Like Borah, the French would want to haggle, draw matters out, trade secret documents back and forth all year, as had happened during the purgatorial Geneva talks. Perhaps Briand had never intended that his proposal become reality. That was the guess of William Castle, who reported to Borah at the State Department. “It is more and more evident to me that Briand made his first suggestion for political reasons solely and that he has now got a bad case of cold feet,” Castle would write.

Why not, Kellogg asked, go around the French statesman and simply publish the U.S. treaty offer in the next day’s paper? After all, Briand had made his own offer nearly a year before, through the newspapers and through peace activists such as James Shotwell of Columbia University, whose plan featured not “outlawry” but language closer to Briand’s, “denunciation of war as national policy.” A direct approach to Coolidge by Shotwell to discuss denunciation and Shotwell’s own interactions with Briand had elicited a terse rebuff in White House shorthand: “Pres advised no suggestion from French Govt has come to State Dept. Until such suggestion is made by French to Am Govt Pres sees no advantage in conferring with volunteers.” Now the moment had come to give Briand some of his own medicine. “If this is to be carried through, it will need all the power of an informed public opinion,” Kellogg told Coolidge. “Full publicity is the only way.” All right then, Coolidge said. “Go ahead.”

No one had known how Briand would react to Kellogg’s draft, though the State Department staff had nursed its suspicions. Briand had “cold feet,” Castle chuckled, and “they will be positively frozen when we drive him into the open and make him do something, or refuse to do something, which on paper at least is a step toward prevention of war.” Just as Kellogg had predicted, papers the world over had published word of the United States’ offer and Kellogg’s description of it. Briand’s first response was to insist that his Franco-U.S. agreement come early and be completed before any large compact among nations. Some of the French papers had backed Briand up, with the
Journal des Débats
writing, “The State Department, for effect abroad, prefers to appear to be doing something rather than signing a formal document.” Briand left the door open for more talks: progress, but nothing firm. And that was where matters stood when the Coolidges boarded the train with Will Rogers for the first leg of their Cuba trip.

Kellogg and Coolidge both knew that when the president returned to Washington after Cuba, domestic legislation, not international treaties, would command their attention. Indeed, the thought enervated Coolidge; Starling, his bodyguard, noticed his exhaustion in Miami. It was early in the legislative season, but the press was already amusing itself tracing the various Coolidge legislative humiliations. Coolidge had backed a minimalist merchant marine. The Senate passed an expansive outlay and rules that virtually guaranteed that expensive, money-losing ships would remain in government hands. Coolidge had opposed the refitting of German ships, which years back experts had deemed “worse than a waste of good money”; lawmakers wanted to spend at least $12 million to reconstruct the aging craft. Coolidge had asked that the legislature allocate a large share of the spending on floods to the states; in the legislation Congress was passing, the states would pay only one-fifth of the costs. Coolidge had rejected farm subsidy; the farmers were seeking another subsidy law. Moving Muscle Shoals out of government control seemed crucial to Coolidge; Senator Norris had yet more legislation ready to keep the dam and plant in the government’s hands. Coolidge and Mellon had proposed a tax reduction of $225 million and warned anything above that would yield a deficit; the House voted for $289 million. Many thought that for Coolidge, the worst was yet to come.

Hoover was making himself visible everywhere, already boasting that he had 323 votes from convention delegates, though the GOP convention was many months away. Even at the colleges, the sentiment was shifting. Fifty-eight percent of Yale students now endorsed Hoover, despite several years previously having been so faithful to Coolidge that they had copied his smoking habits. Coolidge’s diminished status meant diminished prospects for tax reform. But the weaker status also, Coolidge and Kellogg thought, might even facilitate Kellogg’s maneuvering. To sell the treaty further, the secretary of state needed some kind of public statement of support from the sitting president, a line to cite to foreign ambassadors. But such a statement could not earn too much notice at this stage, or it would be debated, and Kellogg’s pitch to foreign offices undermined. Coolidge dutifully dropped the comment about broadening the Briand treaty at his press conference at the end of January: “Our general position being that we would like to make treaties of that kind, thinking that it would be more advantageous if they were made with several great powers than to undertake such a treaty with one country alone.” That gave Kellogg time to lock in the elusive Briand. Through Paul Claudel and others, Briand was quibbling over phrasing. Instead of opposing “war as an instrument of national policy,” his own original words, the treaty, he now said, should be against “wars of aggression.”

The press obediently ignored the president’s treaty statement and Briand too. Instead the reporters focused on human interest stories. Grace was ill. After shaking hands with a thousand people at a February 1 reception, she collapsed. Again the doctors came; she was also taken to see Dr. Hugh Young of Johns Hopkins, who met her at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Twenty-third and E streets on February 8. Kidney trouble, the same malady that had stricken Florence Harding, now afflicted Grace Coolidge. Dr. Young met with Coolidge in his private study, so that few would notice, and diagrammed a picture of the kidney for the perturbed president. Grace did not improve quickly, and on February 13, the White House staff observed, Coolidge sat with his wife for almost the whole day. Grace’s old friend from Massasoit Street, Therese Hills, also came down to spend time with her.

Coolidge’s friends made his priority, the Clarke School, theirs. Perhaps in an effort to cheer up the first couple, Barron sent a lengthy update of his campaign drive to raise cash for the Clarke Fund. A New York committee that included Herbert Pratt believed it had raised at least $800,000 in the New York area alone before any public announcement. February 16 brought the annual Army-Navy Reception, a trial for Coolidge, since it gave the opportunity for the brass to trumpet the case for more battleships. Grace could not go downstairs; Coolidge determined to set a personal record and managed to shake hands with 2,360 guests in an hour and five minutes. He went back upstairs to report the number, the staff noticed. At least in that small way he might spare her.

By March, Kellogg was growing bolder. Rather than give in to Briand, Kellogg held his frozen feet to the fire, insisting that Briand stick to his own initial language of the year before, denouncing war as policy. Interestingly, Briand was giving in, and miraculously, by February, headlines such as “Briand Elated” could be found in the papers. Peace activists such as Professor Shotwell of Columbia and Salmon Levinson, a prominent lawyer in Chicago, were doing Kellogg’s publicity work for him and getting the idea of an international treaty into the air.

Many erstwhile antagonists were proving similarly enthusiastic. Borah was on the march, publishing a commentary in
The New York Times
: “One Great Treaty to Outlaw All Wars.” In the article, he clarified that in his view a breach by one country would release the other signers from their obligations. He was eager to ensure that the public knew such a treaty was his idea, and spelled that out explicitly for reporters. “Borah Gets Credit for French Treaty,” one headline read. As if Borah were not enough, all the suffrage groups, Jane Addams of Hull-House, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of Coolidge’s 1920 opponent, were busy chatting up the topic. From Cleveland, a convention of ministers preached its approval. Kellogg’s plot was working. Instead of dragging the administration’s treaty back, the administration’s critics were launching the treaty for him. The white-haired Minnesotan whom so many had written off seemed to have shed ten or twenty years; each morning he scurried along Seventeenth Street to the side door of the State, War, and Navy Building. Though his staff did not always understand where Kellogg was going or necessarily agree with him, the staffers enjoyed the advantage they now seemed to hold over Briand. Kellogg was proving limber enough to back Briand into a corner. “I do not think the French will agree,” Castle at the State Department wrote of Kellogg’s proposal of a multilateral treaty, “but I think they will have an awful time not to agree.” Concluded Castle, “We have Monsieur Briand out on a limb and we might as well keep him there.”

In Berlin at the Reichstag, Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann was already attempting to paint Germany as the leader of antiwar projects such as the treaty. After all, Stresemann noted, “We are disarmed.” Naturally enough, Germany was grateful that the United States had not succumbed to Briand and signed his Franco-U.S. pact, leaving Germany out. “It is a cause of satisfaction that the United States in this matter showed active interest in security problems,” he said. The Germans got behind the project.

And just as Kellogg had suspected he would, Coolidge was becoming a treaty booster. The idea suited the old Coolidge rule of completing Harding’s work: Harding had said in his inaugural address so far back, “Mankind needs a world wide benediction of understanding.” The treaty fitted his and Harding’s philosophy: ask much of nations and men, and they would rise to the level of your demand. Most unusually, the treaty also highlighted the value in this attitude. Not only did Kellogg support Coolidge but now Coolidge had another ally for the treaty in Dwight Morrow. When he did not confer with Kellogg, Coolidge was conferring with Morrow. For the first time, watching the men together, others could see a bond that had been heretofore invisible to most eyes. “The main difference between Morrow and Coolidge,” the financier Bernard Baruch noted, “was that Morrow talked and loved to talk and was always charming in conversation.” Coolidge, by contrast, was still true to stereotype on the outside, shy and silent. Yet he “had all the human qualities that Dwight had. This is undoubtedly the bond which held them most strongly.”

One of the few outsiders to get a glimpse of Coolidge’s thinking was the painter Cartotto. Finishing his portrait, Cartotto was coming to know a different Coolidge from what he had expected. The supposedly incurious Coolidge interrogated Cartotto on every aspect of his life. He asked about Cartotto’s citizenship; Cartotto had been born in Italy but had worked long in the United States and was a naturalized citizen. Coolidge asked about government, religious institutions, and the U.S. military; Cartotto had served in the U.S. Army. The portrait work challenged Cartotto, and when Coolidge kept him over a weekend, the Coolidges sent flowers to Mrs. Cartotto. Meanwhile, Grace was recovering and even traveling to Northampton to visit her mother.

It had been less than a year since Coolidge had been attacked for not intervening in the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Progressives had deemed Coolidge as anti-immigrant as Gompers since his signing of the Johnson Act. But to call Coolidge anti-immigrant was wrong, Cartotto saw. The difference between Coolidge and some progressives was that Coolidge believed that immigrants should come only if the United States could absorb them and only if they were prepared to make an effort to assimilate. It was Coolidge’s conviction, dating back to his days in Northampton at the Home Culture Club, that citizens must know their country and learn its language to become good citizens. Cartotto was particularly sensitive because his own English remained imperfect and because in the papers there had been complaints that foreigners were being chosen over Americans to paint official Washington portraits. One day a diplomat showed up during one of their sittings. The president introduced the man, who promptly asked the usual question: “Italian or American?” Coolidge answered for Cartotto: “Both.” That saved Cartotto much embarrassment. Coolidge later explained his defense and his admiration of Cartotto to the artist: “You can serve this land better and more by bringing to it the best you inherited.”

At the State Department, meanwhile, the surprised staff observed Kellogg moving into a frenzy of activity. When he was not negotiating with various countries, Kellogg was engaged in other diplomatic work, mostly emphasizing law over force. Often the president joined him. Coolidge and the State Department had, for instance, considered what might be the best gift of thanks to the Ethiopian prince regent for the gold shield. After conferring with Kellogg, Coolidge sent the Ras Tafari his own token: a leather-bound copy of the first volume of a new reference work,
Moore’s International Law Digest
, part of a series by a foremost international jurist, John Bassett Moore. “To my great and good friend, H.I.H. Ras Taffari Makonen,” wrote Coolidge in the flyleaf.

By April, the writer Sinclair Lewis had finished his book, which he titled
The Man Who Knew Coolidge
. This was an attack on middle-class culture generally, and Coolidge specifically. But Coolidge hardly cared. Kellogg was rounding up further signatories, including Great Britain. Great Britain was objecting that the treaty conflicted with the Locarno Treaty, whose signatories had bound themselves to go to war under certain conditions. Great Britain was insisting that it would sign nothing of which all its dominions were not part. Kellogg and Castle turned bad into good by offering that all Locarno signers, including the British dominions, become signatories as well. If there were conflicts among treaties, at least all nations would be subject to them. There was general agreement. That brought the number of the nations ready to sign to fifteen. Belatedly, the staff at the State Department was realizing that its chief might succeed with the treaty project and might even view it as something more than a diplomatic feint. “The funny thing,” wrote Castle in his diary of the undersecretary of state Robert Olds and Kellogg, “is that Olds and the secretary seem to take it all with profound seriousness.” On April 28, Kellogg, following his policy of speaking to the world through publicity rather than cables, gave a speech at the International Law Association. There was nothing in the treaty, he said, that “restricts or impairs in any way the right to self defense.” Self-defense was a natural right. Kellogg now anticipated he would get many more signatories beyond the fifteen. It was gratifying to see that number, but other numbers in Coolidge’s life were not pretty. Hoover went to Coolidge in May to let him know that he had four hundred delegates out of the possible thousand but would even now give up if Coolidge wanted him to. “If you have 400 delegates, you better keep them,” Coolidge snapped and would not say anything more.