Coolidge (74 page)

It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness.

In the book, curious readers could find more clues to the reasoning behind Coolidge’s actions. His minister, Jason Noble Pierce, had come closest to guessing Coolidge’s intentions. Coolidge believed, like Lord Acton, that power corrupted. As he wrote, “The chances of having wise and faithful public service are increased by a change in the presidential office after a moderate length of time.” Aware of the quality of his prose, he proudly shared the details of his work habits with reporters. Dictation had been recommended to him, but in the end, he told them, he had written “longhand, alone.”

For Coolidge all the writing—autobiography, long articles, and
McClure’s
columns—was also a personal relief. The dignity of the presidency had required of the Coolidges that they restrain themselves in all areas, including the death of their son: they had had to mourn Calvin in a quiet manner. Now Coolidge could tell how the loss of Calvin had changed his life. “When he went, the glory of the presidency went with him,” he wrote in his autobiography. Grace, too, was free to speak about Calvin freely, and she did. That alone made matters better. One night in the summer of 1929, she had woken up to pen a poem of her own:

You, my son,

Have shown me God,

Your kiss upon my cheek

Has made me feel the gentle touch

Of Him who leads us on.

The memory of your smile, when young,

Reveals His face.

With Coolidge’s encouragement, Grace also tried prose. As she waited in a hotel room in Springfield while Coolidge attended an Amherst trustees’ meeting, she began to write about her life, using hotel stationery and interrupting her usual sewing: “I sewed and wrote in turn until I became rather more interested in the paper than in the cloth and by mid-night I had covered a surprising number of sheets.” She showed Coolidge the writing, and “he approved of my efforts in even greater measure than I had thought possible,” she later wrote. In fact, to her astonishment, “he established himself my manager without request and without commission” and got them published, encouraging even more work. The Clarke School had been a $2 million gift—the $2 million that Barron and Coolidge had raised had been money forgone for Coolidge’s own papers. To Grace, this personal encouragement was worth more than $2 million. Coolidge was a different man from the one who had forbidden horseback riding and rotated her Secret Service agent to another post. The Clarke School was there, Grace’s to enjoy and improve. The Coolidges were truly back together.

Yet as 1931 passed, the country flagged and the Coolidges flagged along with it. The increased spending by Washington had not ended the Depression, but strained the budget so that another part of the Coolidge legacy was threatened. At Treasury, Mellon had been willing to endure a deficit for one year or two, but a continued deficit, especially a large deficit, he would deem disastrous. To sustain the United States’ credit and the gold standard, the secretary would balance the budget. If Hoover and Congress did not cut spending, he would raise taxes. Already that spring there was talk of “lowering exemptions”—the word “lowering” sounded benign, but in that instance, the shift represented an effective tax increase. In a February 1931 column, Coolidge, now feeling isolated, made the argument against increases: “A higher tax means real wages are lower. . . . Every home is burdened”—and at a difficult time. Still, Coolidge saw, the tax rates would go up, because spending was rising: “Unless the people resist vigorously and immediately, they will be overwhelmed.” At the end of the year, the estimates of the deficit would be $2 billion. Mellon would abandon the Treasury and head for Great Britain as ambassador, but not before sanctioning an enormous tax increase. In one law, every step forward they had taken with the income tax was reversed. The new top rate would be in the 60s, higher than when Coolidge had become president.

To see his accomplishments so challenged by events and government policy was hard. In the spring of 1931, Coolidge, appalled at the budget demands of the military, mentioned one remaining friend, General Lord. Coolidge wrote in his column that “some years ago careful investigations were made by General Lord in an attempt to stabilize military measures.” But within months, Lord, too, was gone; he died at the Woodley after a nervous breakdown and complications of influenza. As the summer neared, the column drew enormous profits. Coolidge earned $16,659 in syndication money for June alone. But he decided that month would be his last as a columnist; as with the presidency, he wanted his service captured in a round number, quitting column writing a year after he had started. “At times we can be thankful for what is behind us,” he wrote at the end. The flower had wilted as fast as it had bloomed. On June 30, 1931, the day of his last column, the Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at 150, down from the 226 of June 30, 1930, when his column had started.

The House Agriculture Committee would soon begin to assail so-called speculators. Coolidge’s old appointee at the Interstate Commerce Commission, Woodlock, was now back at
The Wall Street Journal
, asserting that speculators were traders and without traders there would be no trading. But with the stock market below 100 that fall of 1931, few were heeding him. Congress passed an amendment to the tax law that required all future presidents to pay income tax; this meant that any president who wanted to go back to the old tradition that Coolidge had honored would have to wage a noisy battle all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. In this period Coolidge still smoked heavily, and Grace noticed his breathing worsening. As so often in the past, she now helped by distracting him; she even bobbed her hair, which, reporters noted, made Coolidge smile.

With the fall of 1931 came another sudden blow. The rush of politics had taxed Dwight Morrow. One evening the new senator went to bed ill in Englewood and died in the night from a heart attack. Coolidge went stiff. To his wife, he wrote with an odd mixture of affection and formality: “My dear Grace, As I am going to the funeral of Senator Morrow I shall not be home before Thursday. With much love.” Another invisible wire of communication, this time not with his father but with his friend, had snapped. A few months later, the Coolidges could tell themselves it was Morrow’s fortune to die when he had. In March, the baby of Anne Morrow and Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped from their estate. The Coolidges felt a kinship with their friends’ daughter and son-in-law. For all the challenges that celebrity imposed on an ex-president, the challenges for a Lindbergh were even greater. In his autobiography Coolidge had made the argument that his son had lost his life because he had been president. It was certain that the Lindbergh baby had lost his life because of his father’s fame.

To their own son, John, anxious at his railroad job, Coolidge now sent reassuring letters. “You are doing very well,” he wrote on March 14, 1932. “A good many families have been raised on much less income than you have. . . . Today was your grandmother’s birthday.” And then, on April 11: “Dear John, you looked so badly when you were here that I feel worried about you. If anything is worrying you you should write me at once to tell me about it. Do not give any thoughts to your investments.” It was hard to halt John’s anxiety, for Coolidge shared it.

The Republican Party was also down. There was no way it could elude responsibility for the current trouble. Hoover would bear the blame for this period, and Democrats could now step in to lead the economic rescue. Franklin Roosevelt’s popularity was becoming harder to ignore, even in Northampton, where a local author, Earle Looker, published a biographical sketch of the New York governor. In April, Roosevelt gave a speech that resonated with Americans across the nation. Over the radio, he spoke of “the Forgotten Man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” a little fellow who was not getting by in the downturn. Roosevelt’s was not the “forgotten man” of the Sumner book that Morrow had sent to Coolidge so long before, the taxpayer Coolidge defended. Roosevelt’s forgotten man was the poor man. Roosevelt believed it was this forgotten man who must be the focus now.

Over the summer of 1932, new events advantaged the Democrats, officially the bigger spending party, and damaged the Republicans, who were not, as Coolidge had predicted to Starling, ready to spend as much. The old soldiers who had come to Washington before came again, along with many more. Hoover eventually sent out troops to remove these forgotten men. As Coolidge noticed, Roosevelt never promised to sign the bonus himself. Instead, he waffled. But more than one in ten men, perhaps two in ten, were now out of work; Roosevelt’s plan, a New Deal for America, sounded better every day.

At first Coolidge refused to be drawn into the election. He was busy making improvements in Plymouth, adding new rooms and electricity to the old homestead. He was particular about the details, and Grace wisely did not intrude. “As I told John, it is his wing, and I am letting him flap it,” she wrote to Maude Trumbull, Florence’s mother. Coolidge was already in correspondence with the agriculture department of the state of Vermont about improving his land. He mentioned to Grace that “the children,” John and Florence, might come for a holiday to Plymouth; that would be economical. Coolidge also received a historian who was interested in writing Coolidge’s biography, Claude Fuess of the boarding school Phillips Andover. The former president relaxed enough to give Fuess a thoughtful interview, to frame history, including an ironic comparison of himself and his old nemesis Lodge. Lodge had been accused of being inconsistent, he reminded Fuess, but it was important to recall that Lodge had served in Washington for decades. Given the duration of his tenure, it was no surprise that his positions had shifted over time. “Now my career was meteoric, and I didn’t have time to alter my views. That was one difference between Senator Lodge and me. There were others.”

But again, humor no longer seemed called for. As support for Franklin Roosevelt grew, the calls from the Republican Party began to come to the Beeches. Hoover the rescuer was bungling the rescue so badly. The party needed a president who was not Hoover to speak up for the party: that meant Coolidge. Fortunately for the Republican National Committee, its chairman was Everett Sanders, whom Coolidge trusted so much; Sanders could make the contact. Opening a letter in Plymouth to find a query about a visit from Sanders, Coolidge sent back a typically gracious response:
DELIGHTED STOP MY CAR WILL MEET YOU IN LUDLOW OR RUTLAND ANY TIME YOU SAY.
Sanders noted that that was Coolidge’s indirect New England way of telling him how to come. Sanders had mentioned Ludlow; Coolidge was telling him that Rutland made more sense.

At the house, Sanders noticed that Coolidge looked pale and thinner than before. He pressed Coolidge nonetheless, and Coolidge wrote a pro-Hoover article for Sanders and the GOP as a favor. That article, in turn, provoked requests for speeches. The thought of it all wearied Coolidge. Had he not said everything there was to say? On the bottom of a letter that he wrote later to Sanders to try to convey his reluctance, he added something: “What subjects can I discuss?” But Sanders and the GOP would not release Coolidge; Roosevelt was charging forward, and if Hoover could not stop him, perhaps Coolidge could. The states were not able to feed the hungry, not this year. Roosevelt talked of a New Deal, of implementing across the land the kind of social programs he had supported in New York. That was attracting more and more voters. The national head of publicity for the party wrote to beg for an appearance by Coolidge: “We are willing to send recording machinery to his house and put it up in his bedroom or anywhere else he will have it and let him speak 15 minutes into it.” Coolidge did not take the publicists up on the bedroom offer. But he did give in and agree to speak, and properly, in New York. “Well, I am a regular Republican,” he had once told Congressman Bertrand Snell, another Amherst man; “I am willing to go up or down with my party.” Now, by volunteering, he was proving that that was still true.

At Madison Square Garden, a crowd of tens of thousands greeted him. Tired but decided, he opened with a lengthy defense of Hoover and warned against switching horses in the middle of a race. But Coolidge also got to a more philosophical point. Roosevelt might mention the forgotten man, but he could not claim to be the only one who would serve him. “The charge is made that the Republican Party and its candidates do not have any solicitude for the general welfare of the common run of people.” But the GOP had done its part for the forgotten man: “Always the end has been to improve the wellbeing of the ordinary run of people.” Roosevelt attacked the rich, but his attack seemed odd, coming as it did from a wealthy man. Coolidge defended Hoover, noting it was important to remember that Hoover came from a common background: “He was not born to the enjoyment of generations of inherited wealth.” Finally, Coolidge tried to provoke Roosevelt a bit. Roosevelt had been silent on whether he supported the soldiers’ bonus; let him take a position, Coolidge said, and not waffle. He closed his speech with a reminder of Grover Cleveland. Cleveland, Americans would remember, had not spent federal money in a depression; on the contrary, he had tightened up. Again he pushed, suggesting that the Democratic Party was no longer the responsible party it had once been. Cleveland had stood on sound and conservative principles. Indeed, “he was so sound on most economic questions that his party deserted him.”

Coolidge’s remarks went over so well that what he had feared indeed happened: the voracious party demanded yet more.
UNABLE TO MAKE SPEECH
, Coolidge telegraphed back, sounding like his father. Yet come November, right before the election, he did address the nation again, that time by radio from Northampton. He tried to articulate his concern that the election had become a spending contest, the sort Republicans always lost.