Coolidge (11 page)

Coolidge’s determination resembled that of his father and grandfather, when, as young men, they had plowed or heaved rocks from the hillside in Plymouth. But right away, even in these first nights at the library, he could see that the prospects of reward for hard work here were far greater. By day, Northampton buzzed with energy, a new building going up everywhere one looked. In the dusk, lights made the streets of Northampton bright, so that the day was longer there than in the countryside. His delicate lungs liked the steam heat systems, which warmed rooms without covering them in coal dust. There was commerce here in Northampton, and there was also something more precious: access. The Boston and Maine Railroad had just given Northampton a new connection to the state capital by opening North Station in Boston. Trolley track would soon be laid that connected Northampton to the nearby towns of Holyoke and Amherst.

Along with a node in the network of commerce, Northampton was a node in the network of ideas. Educational ventures of many varieties had been founded there: A well-known author, statesman and philosopher, George Bancroft, had created an experimental school for children on Round Hill. Alexander Graham Bell had helped to establish what had become a nationally known school for the deaf, the Clarke School for the Deaf. There was a young college for women, Smith College. As if that were not enough, there were new institutions for self-education rather than education by teachers, reading rooms, and libraries like the one Forbes had established in the spirit of the great Andrew Carnegie. Towns like this were paradise to a young man from the farm hills. In fact, Northampton was even called “Paradise.” The singer Jenny Lind had given it that nickname years before when she had visited. Lind had liked the trees and the green, but Northampton was also a paradise for commerce. Here a dictum of George Bancroft, the philosopher who had started the school, seemed to hold:

“Commerce defies every wind, outrides every tempest, invades every zone.”

Serving commerce was also the work of Coolidge’s new law office, which stood at the corner of Main and King streets, in a bank building at the heart of Northampton. Reading the law meant what it said, reading, and sitting in the swivel chair at his new black walnut desk, Coolidge plowed through James Kent’s
Commentaries on American Law
. Kent began with international law, limning the advantage of written law among nations: “The most useful and practical part of the law of nations is, no doubt, instituted or positive law, founded on usage, consent, and agreement.” However, one could not exclude, Kent wrote, the importance of “natural jurisprudence,” which came from God. Beyond Kent, Coolidge read William Blackstone’s
Commentaries on the Law of England
. Blackstone had held that the job of the formal law “is to protect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature.” He had published his commentaries before the American Revolution, but in towns like Northampton, they were still the basis for working attorneys. Before Blackstone, Coolidge remembered, there had been Demosthenes, the stutterer, whom he had already studied. The great orator pronounced, “Every law is a discovery, a gift from the gods.” That was a different approach from that being developed at Harvard Law School. It was different from, but not the opposite of, the image of the law put forward by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the son of the “autocrat” whose death Coolidge had noted. In
The Common Law
, a widely regarded treatise published the decade before, Holmes had emphasized cases, experience, and judges, not universal truths. But whether Coolidge sided with Holmes of Harvard or Stickney and Sargent of Windsor County, he could see something clearly already: this material was first-rate. New England’s soil might be wanting, but her legal tradition was rich, something you could mine forever like the granite of the walls around him in the library. This law was not merely worthy of replication; it was worthy of export. When Northampton’s capital and Northampton’s connections combined with New England’s law, there was no limit to what might be achieved.

The senior lawyers here took their share of cases involving the sort of petty battles and small feuds that preoccupied John Coolidge. That summer the Amherst College treasurer, Austin Dickinson, had died suddenly and the firm was representing Austin’s sister, Lavinia Dickinson, in a dispute with his mistress, Mabel Todd, over a small patch of Amherst property. But the growth in Hampshire County meant most of Hammond and Field’s work focused on more important quarrels. The pair represented trolley companies and railroads. Many cases related to larger principles such as property rights. The firm was also representing a man who, in excavating his land, had caused a cave-in on a neighbor’s property; that was the very issue that had been preoccupying lawyers across the country throughout the period of industrialization. The most infamous example of it had been one of the great disasters of the era, the Johnstown Flood, which had taken place the year before Coolidge graduated from Black River Academy. Wealthy men, including Andrew Mellon, Henry Frick, and Andrew Carnegie, had purchased an artificial lake dug near Johnstown. Their workers had shored up its dam, but surveyors in Johnstown, downriver, warned that the engineering was insufficient to prevent a flood. The river flooded in 1889, killing two thousand people. But the fact that the club was incorporated had shielded the members from personal responsibility.

Coolidge would have welcomed an opportunity to chat with his bosses about principle and case, but just as he had feared when deliberating whether to read law, the employers would not look up. So the silent clerk set his own patterns. The court also sat on Main Street, in another new fireproof structure, situated on the same grounds that Daniel Shays’s men had trodden when they came to stop the judges from sanctioning foreclosures. There were three civil and two criminal terms a year, and Coolidge made it his business to attend. Coolidge boarded at 162 King Street, across from the Boston and Maine Railroad yard, with a couple in their seventies, Charles and Rhoda Lavake. The Lavakes’ daughter, who stopped by, noticed that he sometimes spread out and worked in the living room, with insufficient regard for what the others were doing. Soon he had a traffic pattern: the Lavakes’ to Hammond and Field, Hammond and Field to the courthouse or the library. Sometimes he visited with James Lucey, the shoemaker, one street off his path, and got to know Lucey’s friends, who were Irish and mostly Democrats. The issue of alcohol filled the newspapers; Lucey was a member of a temperance society. Lucey talked to him about clients and politics and offered up simple rules: Remember people. Help them. Using your office to help voters was not, in their eyes, always corruption; it could be plain old good service. Calvin also stopped at the barber’s; his college hairstyle, side part and curl, was too long for meetings with clients.

Within days, Coolidge discerned another reason his new bosses passed by his desk without stopping. Both men were seeking political office. Field was running for mayor and was, Coolidge discovered, already an alderman; Hammond was going after the district attorney’s slot. The pair always knew the latest about Amherst College. Field and Hammond, who sat on any number of local boards and committees, knew even more about Northampton. In July, Hammond had been chosen chairman of the board of trustees of a new hospital for consumptives.

Through his employers’ campaigns that fall of 1895, Coolidge came to discern that spectacular growth brought with it its own challenges: crime, police work, and budgeting were three big ones. He also learned more about the exciting national movement starting up in the cities that he had noticed at Amherst: progressivism. Progressives preached reform in all towns, but everyone seemed to have a different idea of what reform was needed. What was it precisely? “Reform is Puritanism,” the mayor of Boston, Edwin Upton Curtis, was telling his colleagues. Curtis’s focus was Boston’s police force, which was ridiculously decentralized. Police work was also the big issue in New York: the city’s population was exploding, and so was its crime rate. A new police commissioner for the city had been appointed at a salary of $5,000 a year, a level Coolidge only dreamed of: he was Theodore Roosevelt, a young man from New York’s Dutch aristocracy. “I want to see a police force here that is the finest in the world,” he said. He was working on making admission to the police force more meritocratic and less subject to the wills of various political powers, whether “American, German or Irish,” as he divided them. Under Roosevelt, policemen were trained, for the first time, to carry a pistol. Like the politicians of Northampton, Roosevelt was contending with the temperance controversy; in New York there were three competing impulses, Roosevelt said: “a strong sentiment in favor of honesty in politics,” “a strong sentiment in favor of opening saloons on Sunday,” and “a strong sentiment of keeping the saloons closed.”

Hammond and Field had their own ideas of how young cities might handle such challenges. Field joined with a reformer named George Washington Cable and fixed up some rooms at the old Methodist church to create a space for the education of immigrants that they called the Home Culture Club. The idea was that the immigrants might there, at meetings, have a chance to learn history, civics, and English. With the immigrant population of Northampton growing fast, it was of course also a way to get to know future voters. In New York, Roosevelt was doing something similar, working with Jacob Riis, a social worker, to improve the spirits of young people so that they did not all become “toughs,” as Roosevelt termed them; one such reform measure was the establishment of boxing clubs in the city. Watching those leaders, Coolidge could also see that Northampton was no poor jumping-off point for politics, either. Indeed, a Northampton man had once been governor of the state; Caleb Strong, who had read law in Northampton and become one of the Constitution’s framers, had served for a total of eleven years at the beginning of the 1800s. As governor, Strong had proved feisty; deeming foreign policy to be the province of the states, not Washington, he had refused to send the Massachusetts militia against the British in the controversial War of 1812.

COOLIDGE’S COLLEGE FRIENDS HAD
also now plunged into Garman’s river, though not always happily. Dwight Morrow was languishing in his clerkship at a family firm, trying to organize his life so that he could attend Columbia Law School. Morrow tried his hand at politics for the first time, canvassing for his brother-in-law Richard, who sought a spot on a school board. But Morrow wrote to Charles Burnett, another classmate, “I have had my first contact with the great unwashed American sovereign and to say that I am discouraged and disgusted with city political methods is putting it mild.” Morrow’s nostalgia for Amherst only grew. “Life,” he wrote that same classmate, “does not have any knight errantry left to it now.” He wondered in his letters whether it might be a better idea to go back to New York. Maybe it was better to be a city doll after all.

Even in well-lit Northampton, there were dark moments for Calvin. In those first months he longed for some affirmation of his industry, some evidence that he would succeed in this endeavor. The Sons and Daughters had awarded him the silver medal for his essay on the principles fought for in the American Revolution. But his father had simply teased him, saying that the medal would “buy no bread and butter.” At Thanksgiving, several months into the law, he teased back by writing to ask about the revenue from the wood on the limekiln lot. What if his father bought it from him? “I think I ought to have about one dollar a cord.” Still, unlike some of his peers, he was not longing for Amherst. He liked both the law office and politics; case work suited his temperament better than school. Even the Berkshires of Massachusetts did not feel as strange as they might have. After all, Coolidges had dwelled in the area before; he did not feel he had migrated but felt he had “reverted” to Massachusetts. Dillingham, the esteemed Vermont lawyer, had finally replied with an offer to Coolidge to read law at his office in Montpelier. Coolidge now wrote him a politic refusal on Hammond and Field letterhead: “I had noted some little delay, but knew you too well to think it came from anything like discourtesy on your part. You see I am settled for the moment. I should perhaps prefer Vermont, but I could not better my place anywhere else out of the shadow of the green hills.”

Thinking of Garman again, he kept studying. He now applied to his own case the advice he had given Dwight Morrow: one should not seek a promotion; one should do the best job in one’s own work until others noticed. That notice finally began to come around Christmas, when Hammond and Field, both of whom had won their election races, began to loosen up and look around. Henry Field was surprised to see his clerk’s name in the
Hampshire Gazette
: “It has been announced that J. Calvin Coolidge, a law student in Hammond & Field’s office, has been awarded both the silver and the gold medal by the organization of the Sons and Daughters of the Revolution.” The gold medal had come on top of the silver, earned earlier in the year. Field took the paper over to the quiet clerk to ask whether it was his name in the news. Yes, he replied, it was. Where was the medal? Coolidge slid open a drawer in the desk. There it lay. Had he told his father? No, Coolidge replied. But his father did find out and apparently even reproached him that he had not heard sooner. Coolidge wrote back and first needled him a bit: “I am quite sure you merely said that it would ‘buy no bread and butter’ at the announcement of the silver medal and so I had no reason from that to suppose you were interested in my winning medals.” Then, however, the son went on to describe his prize in detail: “It is round like a coin weighs about nine ounces and is worth about $150.” He signed the letter “Your affte son, J. Calvin Coolidge.” The medal was embossed “J. Calvin Coolidge.” But the young lawyer was in the process of ridding himself of that “John,” and soon after he would become, simply, Calvin Coolidge. At some point, someone, probably Calvin, would rub out the “John” altogether. He was beginning to show who he was.