Coolidge (9 page)

For the first time in his life, Coolidge now felt the pull of Boston, “the hub,” as the city was known. Some students, he knew, went there for graduate school, like Lewis, the black football star, who was studying law in Cambridge. The law school at Harvard was growing fast. Coolidge luxuriated in the thought he might have some choice about where to live; his college curriculum reinforced that sense of freedom. Having picked his way gingerly through Amherst’s requirements of Greek and algebra, he could now devote himself to topics that interested him. He might take more Italian, which he enjoyed, and drop German, which he didn’t. He could read history, politics, and philosophy.

Two teachers especially helped Coolidge to formulate his ideas in those final years and, more importantly, revealed the principles behind them. The first was Anson Morse. Morse, a scholar of political alignment and particularly the development of modern political parties, offered exactly what Coolidge had longed for: political context. His course started with Europe, marching through the emperors and reforms, and so inspired Calvin that he was moved to come up with some improbable comparisons. Hearing of the attack by the reformer Charles Parkhurst, Amherst class of 1866, upon Tammany Hall, Coolidge wrote his father, “Dr. Parkhurst has done great work in purifying the city and smashing the ring. I look upon him as a modern Savanarola [
sic
]. I am proud of him as an Amherst man.” Morse could not only mention the principle of liberty but trace it for you: “We saw the British Empire rise until it ruled the seas.”

Morse explained Coolidge’s own past to him. George Washington’s greatness, according to Morse, had simultaneously been his weakness: he had not understood the partisan spirit and had been taken aback when new political parties did not side with him. Morse saw that political turnover checked corruption and drew the consequence: “The term of power for every party must therefore be limited.” Morse tracked the Whig decline around the time that Carlos Coolidge, and for that matter William Dickinson, had attended the Whig Convention in 1852 and taught step by step the rise of the Republican Party in the place of the Whigs. “Our course in history is very interesting this term, they say we have the best course of any college in New England,” Calvin wrote his father. Morse admired Andrew Jackson for his success at garnering popular support and strengthening the executive office, yet on balance ranked Jackson lower than other presidents. He, like Sumner at Yale, was beginning to ask whether Jackson’s flamboyant legacy had merely caused turmoil in the future. Morse liked to point out that presidents’ health could affect history as much as any policy. William Harrison’s triumph over Martin Van Buren, he said, had actually been a “fruitless victory,” since Harrison had died soon after inauguration. The vice presidential candidate the party had chosen, John Tyler, who had become president when Harrison died, had, as Morse put it, “shattered their legislative program.”

A second professor to catch his attention was Charles Garman, who had so impressed William James. Garman taught his own private blend of psychology, philosophy, politics, and ethics. A product of strict Congregationalism, Garman too came from up north; he had been born in Limington, Maine, the son of a minister, and had graduated from Amherst in 1872. Still young, dark, and suffering from a mysterious throat condition, Garman was a mystifier, a charmer of young men, with an edge of hocus pocus; a favorite topic of his was automatic writing, a practice in which the writer purported to be transcribing a message from the spiritual realm as a medium. Everything he did was special and different; his course began in spring of junior year and ended only with graduation. His habit was to teach in an overheated room bundled in coats and shawls, concerned about the cold. Unlike other professors, who insisted upon knowledge and memorization, Garman ran a seminar. He talked; then the students talked back and he listened. For most of the students it was a revolutionary experience; Garman’s classroom felt not like a classroom at all but like a debate. Stepping over the threshold, they could feel the calendar move forward half a century. Garman produced pamphlets that were themselves mysteries, bearing a special announcement at the front: “This pamphlet though printed is not published; it is in every respect private property. It has been only loaned to the students in the psychology division on two conditions. First, that it be carefully preserved and promptly returned when called in; Second that the student to whom it is loaned does not in any case let it come into the hands of any person not a member of the psychology division.”

It only boosted Garman’s popularity that he was waging a very public contest with the president of Amherst, the pious, rigid Merrill Gates. Gates and Garman both taught philosophy; Garman, however, was more popular. President Gates asked to sit in on a single Garman class; Garman countered that Gates must attend the whole course if he was to judge it. Garman, another Amherst alumnus, went over the head of Gates to write to the trustees about the future of his employment. Coolidge’s junior year, the spring of 1894, found the professor brashly negotiating with the University of Michigan to teach there instead. The battle was all the more exciting because of the imbalance of credentials: Garman, with only an MA after his name, was the David, locked in combat with a Goliath of a president who was PhD, LLD, and LHD. In June, when Coolidge headed home for his final college summer, Garman flashily tendered his resignation. To Gates’s humiliation, the trustees backed Garman, even going so far as to award him an honorary degree of doctor of divinity. Garman agreed to stay, which meant that Coolidge would be able to study under him senior year.

The boys followed the drama blow by blow. Though earlier he had praised Gates to his father, Coolidge’s notes home now suggested he sided with Garman; Coolidge wrote John that “I understand the trustees are getting unsatisfied with him, I am not looking for his removal very soon but think it will come in time if he does not change his policy.” Partly it was because Garman, unlike Gates, did not preach at him; he, like the other boys, was grateful for that. But there was also the pleasure of the group: to be in Garman’s class was to be admitted to a brotherhood all by itself. He, Morrow, and the others would remember it forever. In Garman’s classroom, Coolidge realized he had made it into at least one fraternity, and an important one, the fraternity of Garman men. He could see that the others, Pratt, Andrews, and Morrow were continuing to reappraise him.

The substance of Garman’s teaching was different from that of other philosophers. Sumner of Yale laid out an elegant algebra to explain the challenge of the progressive impulse. “A,” he said, might want to help “X,” the man at the bottom. And “B” might want to as well. But there might be a problem if “A” and “B” banded together and coerced “C” into funding their project for “X.” “C,” the taxpayer, the man who paid and prayed, was what Sumner called a forgotten man. Garman was murkier than Sumner but offered a version of the same idea: the group was less important than the individual, Garman said, because there was really no such thing as group happiness. It was even a mistake to speak of sacrificing individuals for “the happiness of the community.” The community was composed of individuals.

Garman didn’t see much value in industrialization, either. Like the author Thomas Hardy, whose recent controversial novel,
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
, was popular in Great Britain, Garman deemed industrialization dehumanizing: you could not make a machine of a laborer but made “a devil of him first.” There were many Amherst grads who would have found that last view especially quaint. Arthur Vining Davis, class of 1888, had joined the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, a new company with a patent to use electrolyte reduction to extract aluminum from bauxite. Selling the aluminum was hard; people didn’t know what to do with it. But Davis and the others had found a banker, Thomas Mellon, to help them; the year Coolidge had finished high school, Davis had tried to convince a pot maker in Erie to buy a kettle he had fashioned of aluminum. Next he tried housewives themselves. He had found an angel in Mellon, who could influence both local and national politics. Lawmakers had introduced lines into the 1890 tariff that protected his new aluminum business from foreign competitors. The future of aluminum seemed unlimited; there would be nothing dehumanizing about aluminum if it helped housewives or served other purposes.

Yet the young men, Coolidge among them, found enormous inspiration in Garman. His emphasis on the individual, rather than the group, went against the Europeans, including the Marxists, who cast everything in the context of classes and groups. In April 1894, as Coolidge was just beginning Garman’s class, workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, won a victory over employers who had tried to cut their wages; after a walkout, the employers agreed to keep the wages the same. Garman told the boys that every strike was “hopeless in the long run.”

Also interesting was Garman’s emphasis on property. “The right of property is exactly the doctrine of the state,” Garman’s stenographic notes show him saying in 1893. His definition of property was not, however, a completely free-market one. He drew a distinction between two kinds of jobs: those that represented simply “furnishing employment” and those that represented service, which was higher. “But why should not all employment be in the line of service, of public improvements instead of useless work for some rich man? Is there any excuse for this at all? Not an iota, and I want you to preach this belief when you get out of college.” Indeed, one ought to be willing to work without pay. “The most satisfied men in history are not those who have received the largest pay, but those who have rendered the greatest service to their age, often entirely without pay. What is the financial compensation Christ received?” Property, however, included an obligation to serve others. In other words, Garman, as unusual as he was, was teaching in the Amherst tradition. Ordained or not, his students would serve all their lives just as ministers once had. Service could mean going back to the village. Garman was also echoing Emerson, who had written a summary of the superiority of returning home many years before, and of his contempt for high-society men like those who dominated the fraternities at Amherst:

If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterward in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining for the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls.

Such discussions made explicit the conflict about returning that had been stirring in Calvin for years. On some days, the undergraduate was suddenly drawn again to Plymouth: “I have been thinking what I should do when I get out of College,” he wrote home in tones entirely different from those heard in his plaints of freshman year. “Would you like to have me start in the store and live in Plymouth and live for Plymouth?” Better to dwell in one’s own “citty on a hill” than to be a “city doll.”

But on other days the senior was certain it was better to dwell just about anywhere else than in a village that was miles from nowhere. For the first time Coolidge put the question of staying directly, even sharply, to his father: “Would you prefer to have me enter some profession and go away and leave my community as almost every man of your generation who had ability did
except my father
?” In the old days it had been his father who had reported to him on the world. Now the son reported to his father: “I see [Oliver Wendell] Holmes is dead. . . . The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table on whom the years sat so lightly and who had only just declared that he was 85 years young. No one but Gladstone is left of those great men who were born in 1809. . . . The nineteenth century is slipping away. We are to live in the scientific age of the 20th century and must prepare for it now. There are millions who can only be hands and only a few who can be heads.” Perhaps Calvin could be one of those heads.

The greatest of Garman’s gifts was that he offered the students an image that allayed their concerns about failing, sinking, when they first plunged into the water of postcollege life. They sensed they might graduate into trouble: whether the president was Cleveland or Harrison, men were not always finding work; things seemed to be picking up, but there were many men idle. A career was like a body of water, a river. To prevail in the end, one need not captain the ship at first. All that was required to move a career forward was to stay with events and stay with the mainstream, avoiding crosscurrents. Sometimes the way forward would not be discernible; but the great trend was in the end “perfectly definite.” If one started that way and hung in there, the waters would move one forward; chance would play a role and eventually one could become “a man of power.” Garman believed that the very process of choosing was the crucial first step. To hear such ideas, to get a chance to discuss them, was marvelously comforting to the seniors as graduation approached.

Older and slightly larger—he had gained pounds and a few millimeters of height in college—Coolidge in that last year of college suddenly felt braver. His rooms were better, his friends were better, and he sensed that other men might like him. “I am confident I have gained a power of grappling with problems that will stand by me all my life,” he wrote his grandmother. Morrow, Coolidge, Pratt, Deering, Harlan Stone from the year before, Professor Garman, George Olds, the wonderful math teacher—they were all united by the senior experience of the class of 1895. Buoyed, Coolidge undertook a number of projects as a senior. The first was to set about winning a name for himself in the class by running for class office. At Amherst, there were numerous officers for each class. Herbert Pratt ran for secretary, and Dwight Morrow would win the slot of class orator. Coolidge selected as his target the second orator’s office, Grove Orator; he cast off his shyness and campaigned as if he were his father. “I put more work into that than Alfred did into the Freemen’s Meeting,” he wrote his father, the Alfred being Alfred Moore, a town treasurer in Plymouth. Listening to Coolidge, the other men heard what they had missed before: wisdom passed down from John and Calvin Galusha before him: “One should never trouble about getting a better job. But one should do one’s present job in such a manner as to qualify for a better job when it comes along.” The same autumn, the lucky autumn of his senior year, Coolidge published a short story in the October 1894
Amherst Literary Monthly
that ranged far from both his debating and his humorous styles. The story, “Margaret’s Mist,” told of the maiden Margaret, who, betrayed by her fiancé, leaped to her death in Ausable Chasm, in New York. It was a romantic tale in the style his mother and he had favored: “the black water closing over her buried the sorrowing maiden forever beneath its bosom.”