First Ladies (37 page)

The Coolidge sons, John (born 1906) and Calvin, Jr. (born 1908), absorbed some of Grace's view that politicians' families should remain in the background. When Calvin, Jr., received a letter addressed to “First Boy of the Land,” he responded: “You are mistaken in calling me the First Boy of the Land since I have done nothing. It is my father who is President. Rather the First Boy of the Land would be some boy who had distinguished himself through his own actions.”
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This particular anecdote was recalled by Grace Coolidge after Calvin, Jr.'s death. In the summer of 1924 when his father was about to be nominated to run for a term of his own, Calvin, Jr., got a blister on his toe. He left it unattended, developed blood poisoning, and died within days. Whatever ideas the Coolidges had about preserving privacy in the White House, this tragedy thrust them even more into the national spotlight, and hundreds of thousands of messages poured into Washington. The president's wife wore black and tempered her usual gaiety, but she resumed a full schedule within weeks.

A woman with Grace's spirit might have brought a new dimension to the job of president's wife but she chose to accede to the wishes of her husband and limit her activities to those her predecessors had made traditional—working with the Girl Scouts and giving receptions. When prevailed upon to give a speech, she injected a note of humor by using sign language which she had learned in her work with the deaf, a language which no one else in the room understood. She remained the most uncontrolling of individuals, never seeming to mind how many guests showed up unannounced for lunch or when she would learn what Calvin expected of her next. When White House staff inquired about her travel plans, she frequently replied that they should inform her as soon as they learned the answer from the president.

If observers perceived her as mysterious, they were mistaken—she simply waited until she left the White House to “come back to myself.”
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In 1930, the year after Calvin's term in Washington ended, she published a poem, “Watch Fires” which began:
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Love was not given the human heart

for careless dealing.

Its spark was lit that man might know

Divine revealing.

After her husband's death in 1933, Grace gave interviews and published an article, “The Real Calvin Coolidge” in which she revealed a great deal about herself. In the nearly quarter of a century that she survived her husband, she matured beyond the childlike woman who had been First Lady and began to speak out on such issues as early intervention in World War II. She sold the house she had shared with Calvin (and the furniture in it), toured Europe, and then went to live with a friend in Northampton. When the WAVES came to train at Smith College, she offered them the use of her house.
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Her work to win better education for the deaf continued until her death in July 1957.

Calvin's choice of a political career almost certainly limited his wife's actions. Her writing and other activities after his death indicate that she might have thought more than people gave her credit for, but she kept well within the traditional boundaries that Calvin had set. What she might have done in other circumstances, without the constraints imposed by marriage to the president, remains unknowable, but she herself related an anecdote which lends interest to the question. A painter came to the White House to do her portrait, in which he rendered her uncharacteristically solemn. When Grace's son asked why, the painter replied: “Because I once saw in your mother's face a look of resignation.”
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That kind of acceptance is not apparent in portraits of Lou Henry Hoover, who replaced Grace Coolidge in the White House in 1929; and in other ways, the two women differed. Rather than reflect the comic-serious split of Grace Coolidge, Lou Hoover showed many of the same contradictions that marked interpretations of Herbert Hoover's record.
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Historians have continued to debate whether President Hoover remained stubbornly tied to the past in evaluating possible solutions for the Great Depression or anticipated many of Franklin Roosevelt's answers. Did those four years under Herbert Hoover show excessive reliance on volunteerism to end hardship or did they introduce a steady increase in the role of centralized government? Was Herbert Hoover efficiently hardnosed or was he deeply involved in and responsive to people's suffering? Lou Hoover's record remains just as paradoxical, because in many ways she helped make way for an activist and modern First Lady while remaining, herself, very much a retiring gentlewoman of the nineteenth century.

Undoubtedly, the Hoover presidency suffered from the economic problems well advanced (but little recognized) before he took office. Descent into serious depression came rapidly. Although the Hoovers moved into the White House in March 1929, confident and optimistic about their chances for success, the president lost his halo within months. The stock market crash in October 1929, multiple business failures, and rising unemployment all added to his problems. Before his term ended, the Bureau of Labor Statistics would report that one in four Americans was jobless, lending credence to the judgment that this was the most devastating depression in the country's history. While its causes were numerous, its solution appeared unclear, and the president reluctantly reexamined his own views about the role of government.

“It is not the function of government,” he liked to say, “to relieve individuals of their responsibilities to their neighbors or relieve institutions of their responsibilities to the public,”
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but in his first year in office he set up the Federal Farm Board with half a billion dollars at its disposal to assist farmers with their surpluses. Later he approved creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend money to banks and businesses. When asked about her own interests and accomplishments, Lou's pronouncements were just as puzzling and incomplete: “My chief hobbies are my husband and my children,” she explained in 1921,
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failing to note that she had given speeches on two continents in behalf of a long list of causes and that her translation into English of a Latin mining text had won an important professional award.

The remarkably parallel lives of Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover began the same year (1874) in small Iowa towns less than one hundred miles apart but did not intersect until twenty years later when they met in California. Lou's youthful interests had run closer to those of boys than of most girls. With only one sister, eight years younger than she, and a sickly mother, Lou's energy drew her to her father who introduced her to the pleasures of camping, horseback riding, and hiking. When time came for college, she chose first a normal school that boasted “the best gymnasium west of the Mississippi”
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and then switched to a teacher's college from which she earned a certificate in 1893. Neither of those schools nor a clerking job in her father's bank satisfied Lou, and not until she had a chance encounter with geology did she find her direction. A public lecture by a Stanford professor led her to enroll in the university as the only woman majoring in geology.

Herbert Hoover's route to the same department in the same university had been more direct, and during Lou's freshman term, he was already
a senior. Shy and awkward, he had a reputation as a minor campus leader—a reputation resulting more from diligence than from charisma. That tenacity paid off when he looked for employment. He started out at the Reward Mine Company in Nevada City, California, pushing a cart for $2.00 a day, ten hours a day, seven days a week, but never felt, he later wrote, “like a downtrodden wage slave.”
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Perhaps he understood, even at twenty-one, that his Stanford degree would soon separate him from his co-workers who were mostly unschooled foreigners. Carefully saving some of his earnings, he returned to San Francisco and took an office job where he surprised his employers by demonstrating modest typing skills. When an offer came to supervise an Australian mine for $600 a month, he took it, and by the time he was twenty-four, he was earning, by his own calculation, about $40,000 a year.
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Lou Henry learned that a Stanford degree in geology, when earned by a woman, got fewer job offers, and she taught school for a few months before Herbert wired his proposal from Australia. He wanted to accept an invitation to head China's mine program if she would go along as his wife. Almost from their first meeting, the Hoover partnership had a particularly international and ecumenical quality. In order to catch a ship for China the next day, they rushed their marriage ceremony, and because they could locate neither a Quaker minister (Herbert's religion) nor an Episcopalian (Lou's faith), they settled for a civil ceremony performed by a family friend who happened to be a Catholic priest.
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With little time to pack for their honeymoon, they filled their suitcases with books on Chinese history and culture, so that they had plenty to read on the long trip to Tientsin.

Within months of arriving in China, the Hoovers found themselves in the middle of an attack, supported by the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, to rid the country of all foreigners. In late 1899, a secret society, called I Ho Chuan [literally, The Harmonious Fists but always referred to by Westerners as the “Boxers”], began to launch violent attacks on the parts of the international community that had an influence on the local economy and culture, such as railroad construction, missionary work, and mining. The Hoovers quickly decided that expeditions into the country's interior were too perilous for Lou, although she had originally intended to go, and by June 1900, Herbert called in all his workers.

To protect themselves, Tientsin's foreigners barricaded themselves in their homes along the edge of the city behind a wall fashioned out of bags of sugar and grain. Then they watched their numbers multiply as Chinese nationals, who had aligned with outsiders by converting to
Christianity or taking jobs with international companies, asked for refuge. Supplies became scarce as days stretched into weeks. A herd of dairy cattle furnished milk and meat, but the closest water source lay outside the barricade and residents had to sneak out at night with buckets. With only two physicians to tend the wounded, Lou Hoover volunteered to help, even though that required dodging bullets to ride her bicycle to the makeshift hospital.
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Because their own house at the edge of the settlement seemed particularly vulnerable, the Hoovers moved to a friend's residence at the center of the compound but then returned just before their area came under attack. An American journalist, who had taken refuge in the Hoovers' house, told how Lou had run to the door at the first shelling to see where it had hit. A big hole in the backyard told her the answer. Expecting other shellings to follow, she sat down in the living room and dealt herself a game of solitaire. Even though a Japanese soldier in front of her house was blown to bits and the post of the stairway behind her splintered, she continued turning over the cards.
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Although she lived in Tientsin for less than two years, Lou developed a lifelong interest in China, particularly in porcelains of the Ming and K'ang Hsi periods. She added Mandarin to the other languages she spoke fluently—an achievement her husband never matched—and after they left China she kept his very limited Chinese vocabulary usable by relying on Mandarin whenever she needed to communicate privately with him in the presence of others.

With their usefulness in China ended, the Hoovers moved to London, the world's mining capital during what Herbert called “the golden age of mining.” Herbert became a partner in Bewick, Moreing and Company and until 1908, when the partnership ended, their “Red Roof” house served as home base for their family and as a gathering place for London's foreign community. Herbert had undergone no social metamorphosis since college. Conversational awkwardness still marked him in all discussions but those of mining—one woman described him as “the rudest man in London”
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—but his wife's charm compensated and drew guests to their table.

Lou's balancing of household management and travel in the first decade of her marriage invites comparison with Louisa Adams a century earlier. When two sons were born to the Hoovers (1903 and 1907), Lou took them on the road almost immediately: Herbert, Jr., left London to go to Australia when he was five weeks old and his brother, Allan, began his first trip to Burma at the same young age. The parents, after circling the globe more than once with their sons,
insisted that infants traveled more easily than adults. After 1908, the family moved less, but Herbert still ran mining consulting offices around the world from San Francisco to Petrograd. In one year (1910) his wife and sons joined him in the British Isles, France, Russia, Burma, Korea, and Japan.
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While her children were still toddlers, Lou Hoover undertook her one enduring intellectual achievement—the translation into English of a sixteenth-century text on metals.
Agricola's De Re Metallica
offered a significant challenge because its German author, George Bauer, had coined some of the terms when he published the work in Latin in 1556. Finding English equivalents required extensive knowledge of both science and language—an unlikely combination in one person, as reviewers pointed out when the Hoovers finally finished the task after five years.
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When the work was privately printed in 1912, with both Hoovers sharing equal billing in its translation, it won the Mining and Metallurgical Society's gold award and considerable attention from the scholarly community.
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When war broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914, the Hoovers were in London preparing to return to California, but Herbert delayed his trip to assist stranded Americans find sailings home.
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Just a week before he was finally scheduled to leave, he undertook the job of overseeing food distribution to Belgium and northern France. Under German occupation, most Belgian cities were near starvation, and farmers, who made up only about one-fifth of the population, fared almost as poorly. Herbert Hoover accepted the job without pay, a generosity he could well afford, because, as he later wrote, “My aggregate income from professional activities in various countries probably exceeded that of any other American engineer.”
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In any case, he did not expect the job to last long. The knowledge that it would extend to “four years … a billion dollars, [and] five million tons of concentrated food … was mercifully hidden from us,” he wrote after the war was over.
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