Coolidge (20 page)

It turned out that someone else was thinking along the same lines: President Taft himself. Tiring of the progressive onslaught, he spoke out. Law could not make growth, he said. “Votes are not bread, constitutional amendments are not work, referendums do not pay rent or furnish houses, recalls do not furnish clothing, initiatives do not supply employment or relieve inequalities of condition or of opportunity.” Roosevelt might favor redistribution, but he, Taft, did not. If Roosevelt was marching back onto the political stage, that was all right. Taft told interviewers that there is “no part left but that of a conservative, which I am going to play.” The Republicans duly nominated the conservative, Taft.

To the shock of Coolidge’s party, Roosevelt did not give up. Instead, on August 7, at a convention of a new Progressive Party in Chicago, TR, the great bull moose, allowed himself to be nominated as a candidate for a third party. The premier flyer produced by the new Progressives was called “A Contract with the People” and called for women’s suffrage and limits on campaign contributions, which were dear to the railroad-oriented Massachusetts men. Roosevelt also sought farm relief, direct election of senators, referenda at the state level, and other reforms to move the country over the spectrum from republic to democracy. If Roosevelt’s reforms could be summed up, they amounted to more power for the president and the people and less for the intermediaries, the politicians in between. Most Republicans could not believe their ears. They had suspected Roosevelt might run, but hearing that suspicion confirmed, they were shocked anew. The Roosevelt campaign represented not merely a betrayal of Roosevelt’s friend Taft but also a threat to the Republican chance of victory.

Resigned to it all, late that August, Taft headed up to Massachusetts to golf at the Myopia Hunt Club course. The rest of the party, however, decided it was not resigned; it was furious. Defeat would come, either at the hands of Roosevelt or, more likely, because the split would give the victory to Wilson. Lawrence, despite Coolidge’s earlier settlement, was far from peaceful. Joseph Ettor, accused of being an accessory to murder, was in prison without an indictment, and Lawrence rumbled with rage. The contrast between the golfing president and the angry workers, only a few miles apart, stunned observers. On October 15, 1912, came news that shook the country: a mad gunman had shot Roosevelt, the Progressive Party candidate, in Milwaukee, a bullet passing through the fifty pages of a speech in TR’s pocket and lodging in his chest. Roosevelt, true to his “bull moose” reputation, spoke anyhow. “Bull Moose” was his party’s nickname now, too.

Against such a hero’s challenge, the only thing the rest of the Republicans could do was make their best showing. The Progressive Party was no threat to Coolidge personally. “They started to run a Bull Moose against me,” Coolidge wrote his father, “but something must have happened to him—he did not run. But this is a most uncertain election.” Still, the lawmaker from Northampton poured days and nights into helping his party. At an October 18 Republican rally in the Masonic Hall in Northampton, Coolidge argued that Roosevelt’s concept of judicial recall pushed democracy too far; when it came to senior judges, no influence should weigh on them. Professionalism mattered over party. Governor Eugene Foss, a Democrat, had made many judicial appointments, including naming Richard Irwin, Coolidge’s friend, Hardy’s old boss, and a Republican, to the bench. That was an example of how judges should be chosen. Stopping Roosevelt was imperative, Coolidge told the voters; it was the most important election since the Civil War. Even Murray Crane broke his silence and delivered a speech in defense of the embattled Taft; observers counted it as his third speech ever. At a gathering for young Republicans that October, Crane stood up to say, “I am glad to be here. I want to tell you we can carry Massachusetts for Mr. Taft and Mr. Joseph Walker. I thank you.”

But Republicans did not carry Massachusetts in 1912, or the nation either. The presidential victory went to Wilson, who duly prevailed over the split Republicans. Coolidge, who had taken all seven wards of Northampton, could not help wondering at Roosevelt’s actions and whether they demonstrated the qualities that had first drawn him and others to Roosevelt. In a letter, he sketched out his analysis for his father: “I was sorry Taft could not win but am glad TR made so poor a showing.” Just a few days later, the question of character came up. Days before Christmas, Charles Mellen, the head of the New Haven Railroad, was indicted by a federal jury on charges that the company had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. The New Haven was now viewed as a fraud for shareholders. J. P. Morgan, who had been so grand in the U.S. constellation in 1907, was brought down into the dark, cornered by his challengers in a congressional hearing. Samuel Untermyer, the counsel to the investigating Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, wanted to know what Morgan had sought out in a borrower to whom he gave credit. The first thing in life, Morgan told the room, was character. To destroy someone’s reputation for character was to destroy his credit, which in turn hurt commerce. Character, he said, was “the fundamental basis of business.” Character was all.

M
R.
U
NTERMYER
:
Before money or property?

M
R.
M
ORGAN
:
Before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it.

That left Coolidge and others to wonder whose character was the true kind, that of the honest businessman or of the righteous reformer. Both could not be true character. Coolidge had another chance to consider it all when he won the coveted chairmanship of the state Senate’s railroad committee. That winter of 1912–1913, the New Haven’s great rival, the New York Central, was within a whisker of finishing a splendid upgrade of Grand Central Terminal, all equipped for electrified trains; its ceiling would have 2,500 stars, sixty-three of which would twinkle with electricity, a heavenly reminder of the station’s modernity and the primacy of the New York Central line. How could New England come back? The mayor of Boston, John F. Fitzgerald, known as “Honey Fitz,” warned that in a new world, the one of ocean traffic and travel, Boston was slipping behind. Whereas 25 million tons of cargo left the piers of New York in a year, only 5 million now left Boston in the same period.

The seriousness of his task as railroad committee chair forced Coolidge, for the first time, to systematically trace the arc of federal and state policy back to the hopeful days early in the century. The premise of Brandeis’s undertaking back then, the reason for it all, had been that railroads were so strong they required checking. Now they really did seem weak. Brandeis had gone after Morgan as a titan. The titan had been felled, not by Brandeis but by his own health; Morgan died that spring in Rome, leaving his son, Jack Morgan, to fend off the attackers. In the old days, the railroads had subsidized passenger ticket prices by making their profits in freight haulage. Now that the ICC was putting downward pressure on freight prices, the railroads could not marshal the resources they needed to make capital investments. Trolleys and trains needed the cash that fare increases would give, yet even the mention of a possible fare rise gave groups like Joseph Eastman’s Public Franchise League a fresh pretext to assail the railroads again.

Consolidation seemed the only way to help the trolley lines in western Massachusetts, which ran chronically short of cash. Coolidge, from Plymouth, Vermont, knew all too well the tax of isolation that small towns suffered when circumstances left them outside a network. Northampton, even now, had a population of only 10,000; it might yet become another Ludlow, shut out, sidetracked. He knew too that a sanctimonious defense of independence was sometimes self-destructive. Hill town lawmakers such as Coolidge were therefore pushing hard for a merger of local lines with the New Haven; in fact, that might be the only salvation for the electric roads. Worcester, Springfield, and Berkshire street railways would help the western counties keep up if they could only join the New Haven. Brandeis’s protégé, Joseph Eastman, was coming to the Senate chamber to argue the opposite: that the little lines needed independence to survive.

But Eastman had never known what it was like to be twelve miles from nowhere.

Coolidge battled for his western trolleys and also for the great railroads; sometimes he advocated that Massachusetts spend to help the railroads, so embattled had they become. Suddenly he felt that the cause was urgent. After all, in the period when Brandeis had distracted the railroads and idled them, other means of transport had been taking the railroads’ place. The Panama Canal would soon be ready to open. And Henry Ford was perfecting a new kind of assembly, along a line, so that even more cars could be produced faster at his plants. A Tin Lizzie, as the Model T Ford was now nicknamed, could be assembled every ninety-three minutes. For the first time it seemed that the car might really compete with rails. “Real Economy: Brought About by the Use of Trucks,” read one
Boston Globe
headline that spring; it quoted one auto man, P. C. Chrysler of the Garford Agency, who promised that “the driver of a horse truck may be eligible for a position at the wheel of a motor vehicle” and that “within a very few days.”

The energy the young legislator poured into the railroads won notice. “Senator Calvin Coolidge, the Senate chairman for the railroad committee, went home last night with the first unfurrowed brow he has worn for a long time,”
The Boston Journal
commented in May after Coolidge had completed a draft of another railroad bill that consolidated not the rails so much as their regulation. Fellow lawmakers began to talk about Coolidge’s future. Like a good poker player, he knew more and was moving faster. The others saw too what Coolidge himself did not yet see: that he was becoming more conservative. Conservatives needed young politicians to fight their battles more than ever. For progressive principles were no longer mere talk or state law; they were becoming permanent law. That year in Washington would see passage of both a law to establish a national income tax and a law creating a new central bank system, the Federal Reserve System.

There was another group waiting to support him: Amherst alumni. Men of Coolidge’s generation were now just coming into their own, and the older men were there in the background to help whenever possible. Joseph Eastman was winning praise for his muckraking and exposing the financial weakness of the New Haven Railroad. Harlan Stone was now not just professor but dean at Columbia Law School. Arthur Vining Davis, the president of the Aluminum Company of America, was holding up well under grilling by the House Ways and Means Committee over the extent of his company’s holdings. Dwight Morrow was finding himself being courted by the House of Morgan itself. The Amherst men sorted through them all to discern who was worthy.

The Amherst men tested Coolidge with a question on regulation. Alumni and officials in the town of Amherst were concerned that a bill pending in the General Court regarding sewage systems for the town would place unduly heavy financial burdens on the college. The college treasurer asked Coolidge to monitor the bill’s progress; he also alerted Frank Stearns, the alumnus who headed the Boston department store, that he had put a query in with Senator Coolidge. Stearns was a Boston eminence; his nickname, because of his store’s fame with lady shoppers, was “Lord Lingerie.” He was also a reliable Amherst alumnus; he hired Amherst men and helped them. An emissary from Stearns, another Amherst man, Arthur Wellman, went to see Coolidge and transmitted an annoying report: “I have interviewed Senator Coolidge, who seemed to have entirely forgotten the matter and apparently had never read the bill.” Rather than leap on the project apologetically, Coolidge told Wellman briefly that when the bill got to the Senate, he could probably do little for him. A prominent man like Stearns was not accustomed to short replies. But Coolidge’s distance, instead of putting him off, somehow piqued his interest. And Stearns soon saw that the bill, when it became law, did not contain the kind of language that would hurt Amherst. Stearns got behind Coolidge.

That fall of 1913, Levi Greenwood, the Senate president, announced his retirement. The others busied themselves with winning their elections. Coolidge won his and looked up: the Senate president job was open. Before the other lawmakers could regroup, he canceled a family trip to Plymouth and by phone and in person collected enough votes from colleagues to win the president’s seat for himself.

“Coolidge came to town last Wednesday and showed his fellow Republicans that while some were talking through their hats he could lay down 16 of the 22 Republican votes in the upper branch of the legislature, and the other candidates and near candidates stumbled all over themselves to get out of the way of the steam roller,” commented
The Boston Sunday Globe
on November 16, 1913. “It was nothing short of wonderful the way he walked right into the ring and took the prize almost before the public could realize that there was a contest,” wrote the editors of his own
Springfield Republican
. He alerted his father in great pride: “I shall be the next president of the Senate. This office has been held by some great men and never by a fool. Looking after this kept me from going to Plymouth.” After all those years of watching Senate presidents operate, he was eager for a chance to try his hand at the job; he too might break ties or create them, killing legislation under Massachusetts rules. For a moment he succumbed to the luxury of recalling those who had mocked his ambitions back in the day, especially a cousin, Warren Taylor, who had made fun of him in his father’s time as tax collector. “I suppose it would have not looked so foolish to Warren Taylor when he saw us go by in the buckboard to the Academy if he had seen you were carrying me to the president’s chair of the Massachusetts senate.” The inauguration was in January. Coolidge insisted that his father come.

It buoyed the Coolidges and everyone else that business seemed to be picking up. Enough growth meant that whatever the Progressives did, productive or not, would matter less. It seemed Bancroft had been right about commerce prevailing after all, even over the “tempest” of the progressive movement. If a company figured out how to make a product better, industrial unions’ demands, especially, might not matter; the workers would get the raises they sought automatically because they produced more goods. That winter Henry Ford came east to New York to announce a plan that amazed everyone. Ford’s car company was succeeding so well that he intended to give $10 million back to workers. The plan was to double their wages to $5 a day. Workers who earned more could spend more; that in turn would move the economy forward. Dwight Morrow in those weeks was thinking over whether he should join J. P. Morgan, the most controversial and exciting institution in the world of finance. Like Coolidge, he knew his next step was a momentous one, and, like Coolidge, he now hesitated. After all, the magazines he read and liked routinely targeted Morgan. He would become a target himself. Yet there was much about Morgan that he admired; he knew the men, some of whom rode with him on the train in the morning from Englewood. Clearly the House of Morgan thought he had character.