Coolidge (32 page)

And law and order alone could not address the great challenge of 1920: missing commerce. Jobs remained scarce, as Herbert Hoover, one of the likely candidates, was pointing out from California. Strikers might be relenting for now, but the problem they pointed to, high prices, was real. The progressives had been correct on that. Until the prices stabilized, the labor unions would surely strike again. Indeed, any solution to the price problem might serve as the basis for larger reform. Echoing Theodore Roosevelt, General Wood was saying that “relations between capital and labor, between those who work and those who direct must be on the basis of a square deal.”

Taxes, both the income tax and an excess-profits tax, were squeezing business, and Wood was making the case against the excess-profits levy. Then there was the challenge of public debt. The federal government and states had borrowed beyond imagination in the war, yet seemed unready to stop: The very week that the Coolidge for President office opened in Washington, the Massachusetts General Court endorsed an act to authorize the towns of Braintree and Belmont to borrow more money than they already had for school buildings, and codified the taxability of retirement allowances of former state employees to make them pay for such expansions. During the war the federal government had controlled food prices, freight rates, rail traffic, and petrol. It had hired and hired some more. Now Washington seemed unwilling to let those workers go. Hiram Johnson, a progressive Republican senator from California, was calling for the abolition of “250,000 useless jobs created at Washington during the war.” Even a federal government that wanted to trim itself down—and the Wilson administration did—found the task hard. A number of the candidates were pointing out that the country lacked a great unifying budget law; instead departments approached Congress individually. An executive, whether Wilson or a Republican, also lacked the staff to evaluate spending plans and enjoyed little oversight over what was spent. Congress was working on a budget law that would give more authority to the president or Treasury when it came to managing the government’s funds, but no one knew how President Wilson, ill as he was, would respond. Senator Harding of Ohio, the one known for his flowing phrases, was campaigning on the promise that he would bring in a budget system.

There were other problems for which a good candidate would have to offer a remedy. The Treasury and Federal Reserve banks had manipulated interest rates, and authorities had also managed gold imports and exports. Now the controls were coming off and the Federal Reserve Banks were doing more, raising interest rates. Coolidge still routinely blamed merchants for price gouging, but here another Harding, William Proctor Gould Harding, the head of the Federal Reserve, had a different view. William Harding was telling the country that the high prices came from another source: too much bank credit, and too much money. The country, he said, had been “living in a fool’s paradise since the close of the war.” Simeon Fess of Ohio, a Republican leader, was saying that the situation now was “as bad as it was in the greenback period following the civil war.”

Coolidge talked the price piece of the economic puzzle over with Bruce Barton, the advertising man, who came to call that winter. The governor pulled out an old document from the selectmen of Belchertown, not far from Northampton. During the Revolutionary War, the selectmen had tried to regulate prices to keep them down. That was similar to all the rules and laws written recently to check prices during the war. But the price rule in Belchertown had not worked in the days of the nation’s founding. People had found another way to charge each other extra for goods. Price controls didn’t work now, either. In addition to respect for the reign of law, by which he meant the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Coolidge was now asking for respect for an older sort of law, the law of markets. “Isn’t it a strange thing,” he asked Barton, “that in every period of social unrest men have the notion that they can pass a law and suspend the operations of economic law?”

It was with Morrow that Coolidge took up another bit of the mystery, trade. The way Coolidge saw it, the way his party saw it, the way Garman had taught, a tariff was the only thing that protected business at home from competition. Under a tariff, a company might charge higher prices and that in turn would enable it to pay higher wages, so there might be at least a chance of industrial peace. You had to support your industries. Each tariff helped factories employ veterans, taking the pressure off employers. Yet men Coolidge respected, not only Morrow but also Clarence Barron, had come back from Europe mad for free trade, and impatient with those who did not share their passion. Indeed, Barron was about to publish a book, which he titled
The Audacious War
, in which he would argue that the Great War had been “caused by tariffs.” Tariffs had put off Germans and made them susceptible to the kaiser’s crazed arguments.

Morrow, not one to let an opportunity go to waste, determined to wage a one-man campaign to educate his friend away from the party’s tariff doctrine. On March 9 Morrow shipped Coolidge four volumes of William Graham Sumner, the philosopher at Yale, to read. “Throughout these volumes, you will notice the strong predilection of Sumner for free trade,” Morrow wrote pointedly to Calvin, hoping that Sumner would be able to pull Coolidge’s blinkers off.

Coolidge wrote back the next day, March 10, mentioning that “I have read most of the four volumes of Sumner,” the governor’s own way of telling his friend he had not only already heard of Sumner, but read him. Coolidge rated Sumner “on the whole sound.” But Coolidge was not ready to sign on to Sumner’s philosophy: “I do not think that human existence is quite so much on the basis of dollars and cents as he puts it. . . . He nowhere enunciates the principle of service.” The conversation was a continuation of their old conversation at school: Morrow had offered Sumner’s approach and Coolidge countered as Garman might have: “If I am poor and need the assistance of a protective tariff, why does not the law of service require others to furnish it for me?” The experienced politician in Coolidge talked back to Morrow. J. P. Morgan might say what it liked, but in the Bay State all those years, he too had studied the tariff. “My observation of protection is that it has been successful in practice,” Coolidge wrote.

What might Sumner say about the struggles of the Massachusetts shoe companies that had to compete with shoes from abroad? The companies needed the protection, given their other troubles. On April 16, the papers reported that the payroll money of those companies, Slater and Morrill, in South Braintree, Massachusetts, had been stolen. In the incident, one man, an Italian American, had been killed, another wounded. The wounded man, paymaster Frederick Parmenter, died in Quincy Hospital.

The country was expecting a revival, but instead the economy worsened before Americans’ eyes. Debt plagued many companies. Even Henry Ford was struggling under a giant burden of debt. Frederick Gillett told Amherst alumni at the Hotel Commodore in New York that February that “the present is one of the most critical times in the whole history of our country.” The federal war debt was $21 billion alone and the entire federal debt more like $25 billion; ten times the debt before the war. State and federal taxes both had escalated in recent years. Senator Borah had once said he could not imagine the top rate on the income tax going over 20 percent; now the top rate was over 70 percent.

As Clarence Barron was noting, when a man bought or sold stock, that sale was taxed as income and taxed at rates that went all the way up into the 70s, if he earned enough. Money was therefore flooding into municipal bonds—news that pleased mayors and governors but might not create the maximum number of jobs possible. The tax-free status of those bonds was just too big a draw relative to what was lost to tax on investments. Jules S. Bache, a Wall Street banker, warned of a “strike of capital” if the income taxes were not reduced and the treatment of capital gains was not altered. Governor William Harding of the Federal Reserve Board put it another way, calling for “the liquifaction of frozen loans.” The insufferable supertax on the top rates of the income tax needed to be removed. Bache also lambasted the excess-profits tax. The railroads were finally released from national control in the spring of 1920 merely to be dumped into the recession. The railroads began to sue the government for damages.

As Coolidge considered these debates, he walked around Boston with his security guard, Edward Horrigan, or smoked cigars in silence with Stearns. Early March found Coolidge still thinking that his candidacy would unfold, if it ever did, near to or before the convention. “The political situation has not changed any,” he wrote his father. “The nomination will be made at the convention and not before it assembles.”

The Massachusetts Republicans tried to gauge the depth of Coolidge’s popularity. Letters by the hundreds still arrived for him each week. Most were from strangers, but others were from people who wanted to reestablish some old connection with him, or were friends of friends. Coolidge found he had a special following among those jurists who had read the law, as he or Ernest Hardy had. One was Wallace McCamant of Oregon, where Hardy had relocated and was now practicing law. McCamant was a graduate of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania who had also moved west and learned the law in an office. States such as Oregon were requiring that law students attend college and placing more emphasis on formal education. McCamant had led a successful campaign in his state to ensure that although the state now required college for law school entry, young students could satisfy the college requirement with proof of equivalent education. Practical education had to fight back.

Young people from all over found inspiration in
Have Faith in Massachusetts
. One fan, a college student named Whittaker Chambers, would later climb a fire escape at Madison Square Garden to hear Coolidge speak after discovering that the doors to the hall had been locked. There was also mail from the mysterious western Coolidges. One letter was from Ada Coolidge Taintor of Minneapolis, Minnesota, a descendant of Oliver, the great-granduncle who had left Plymouth under circumstances Coolidge had not heard much about. “I never knew what became of the descendants of Oliver,” wrote Calvin back to her. “He was an uncle of my grandfather and a son of John, if he was really ‘senior’ as you have designated him.”

Like George Bancroft, Coolidge took comfort in the idea that commerce could bypass all obstacles, fly out of the recession, or fly beyond the trade laws. The automobile, or even the airplane, might replace the railroad and obviate the mistakes policy makers had made in regard to rails. Every day there was some news about airplanes. Major Rudolph Schroeder, who held the national record for flying at the highest altitude, was now talking publicly about testing a new avenue across the country, a ten-hour flight at 30,000 feet from San Francisco to New York. Schroeder explained that the high altitude offered an advantage, for at that height “trade winds blow from 200 to 260 an hour.” A New York hotel owner, Raymond Orteig, was offering a prize of $25,000 to the first aviator who could make a flight from Paris. But optimism about future technology scarcely amounted to a clear program. And Coolidge remained too preoccupied to think farther. Carrie was clearly dying from cancer, and he and Grace had to travel up to Plymouth.

The month of May brought a clarifying event. Two candidates, Senator Harding of Ohio and Senator Irvine Lenroot of Wisconsin, descended on Boston to campaign. The candidates joined Coolidge for an event at the Home Market Club, the official club of protectionism in Boston. Lenroot proved strong: conscious of being in Lodge’s home territory, he detailed the provisions Republicans should attach to any international peace treaty produced by President Wilson or a successor.

Coolidge was tired—he had just returned from Plymouth. When his turn to speak came, he stepped up—and tripped over his own ideas. All the inconsistencies that had bedeviled him that spring came out in this speech. First Coolidge cited George Washington, who had believed in “punishing those who charge excessive prices,” an old GOP line that fitted especially ill with his growing sympathy for free markets. Coolidge also allowed—throwing a bone to free marketeers—that action by government such as price fixing was wrong; “profiteering is not a cause but an effect of high prices.” Production had to be increased, he went on—that was all right, but he did not make clear how. He rehearsed the old law-and-order theme. “I do not object to healthy unrest,” he said, but “when it goes beyond that,” the United States needed to “cure the unrest,” whatever that meant. He told the listeners that tariff laws would need to be changed, but fudged on how, and then again, threw out an unconvincing line or two on markets: “We need to escape as soon as possible from the exercising of arbitrary powers and come back to the sound economic law of supply and demand.”

Harding went at the same matters more deftly. He defended the free market more robustly and assailed “the false economics which lure economic control to utter chaos. The world,” Harding said, “needs to be reminded that all human ills are not curable by legislation.” Rather than shouting or demanding discipline, Harding appealed to common sense. It was daunting to see how Harding’s gracious humor could melt even the stiff Boston crowd. “If I lived in Massachusetts I should be for Governor Coolidge for President,” he jovially allowed. “Coming from Ohio, I am for Harding.” Harding’s rhetorical style was often criticized, but this time the alliteration soothed rather than distracted:

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality. It is one thing to battle successfully against world domination by military autocracy, because the infinite God never intended such a program, but it is quite another thing to revise human nature and suspend the fundamental laws of life and all of life’s acquirements.