Coolidge (47 page)

Each day taken up with scandals was a day lost for taxes. In early February, Coolidge made a crucial decision; he would hire external investigators and separate himself as much as possible. Atlee Pomerene of Ohio, a former lieutenant governor and U.S. senator, and a Democrat, was Coolidge’s choice for special prosecutor. In addition, Coolidge named Owen Roberts, an eminent Philadelphia lawyer and Republican, to the case. Fall, who had seemed fit in the autumn, was now reported too ill to testify. It was becoming clear now that the interior secretary had accepted cash via an intermediary. “Not in my time has the country been so startled by the act of a public servant as it has been by the disclosure that Secretary Fall actually took money in a satchel,” wrote Morrow. “It has quite demoralized men’s thinking.”

The next disappointment was Nick Longworth. Instead of holding to the prescripts of the Mellon Bill, Longworth was already crafting a compromise; Coolidge and Mellon feared that the new bill veered too far away from their original plan. On the floor of the Senate, Couzens of Michigan, now sensing victory, remained on the offensive, calling for investigations of the Treasury Bureau of Internal Revenue and also of Mellon. Lawmakers were already drafting their bonus legislation. Slemp was dispatched as an emissary to the Hill to make the case, again, for the administration’s rate structure. Coolidge made his own version of a pitch with a February 22 radio speech on George Washington and sacrifice.

Longworth’s compromise was worse than the White House feared. Republicans teamed up with Democrats, 408–8, to pass a bill that diverged sharply from the Mellon Plan. The reduction for top earners would be smaller and for lower earners greater. The top rate would be 43.5 percent, a significant drop but nowhere near the 25 percent or 30 percent Mellon dreamed of. Under the House plan, there was enough left over, the lawmakers assured, for a bonus.

Coolidge and Mellon still hoped. There was good news to savor. The House of Representatives gave Coolidge a victory when it approved the sale of Muscle Shoals to Henry Ford. The plant had been so mismanaged in the war and after that it seemed obvious to Coolidge that selling it to Ford was a good idea. But there once again, despite the special prosecutors and the recent resignation of Navy Secretary Denby, the shadow of Teapot Dome was still long. If leasing Teapot Dome to Harry Sinclair had been a corrupt mockery of privatization, then was not the sale of Muscle Shoals to Ford the same? Governor Gifford Pinchot, who had negotiated the coal situation the prior autumn, opposed the sale. Progressives in the Senate found endless reasons to block it.

Coolidge held on by focusing on the tax project. He crammed February with Lord appointments, fitting in five for the short month. For March he scheduled a record number of meetings with Lord: seven. “Calvin is having a hard time but he has a wonderful composure,” wrote Taft about the Harding scandals. Morrow thought perhaps Daugherty should resign and Coolidge should move Hughes over to take Daugherty’s place. Atlee Pomerene and Owen Roberts won an injunction to stop further tapping of the naval reserves by Edward Doheny; their cleanup effort was proceeding fast enough that Teapot Dome might indeed eventually recede. Coolidge’s advisers pointed out that commerce was picking up without prices doing the same. The jobs that had been absent for so long were back. Only one in twenty men lacked employment, not one in ten, or even one in five, as had been the case in some cities during the recession. The real danger now was a shortage of hands. From Mercersburg that spring, Calvin, Jr., would write to his grandfather with an offer to help with the hay crop, “as labor is scarce.” The automaker Ford was powering ahead. March 1924 would see a record number of trucks and cars delivered, 206,000. The policy of tight money at the Fed and budget cuts had forced a severe downturn, they could see, but the policy had also made the downturn short.

Both Coolidges looked forward eagerly to the arrival of their sons for spring break in March. Anticipating their arrival, Grace planned four musicales. The boys liked tennis, and the White House announced it would host the drawing for international teams for the Davis Cup on March 17. Calvin, about to turn sixteen, was growing fast that year. John would graduate and was heading to Amherst. The pair had become more sophisticated. Each issue of the
Congressional Record
, complete with all of their father’s failures and triumphs, was sent out to Mercersburg, and now the boys talked politics. The school trained the boys to debate, and Calvin was elected to the Mercersburg 15, a leadership group among the students. John showed Grace’s ability to appreciate life hour to hour; he danced well and Grace danced him off his feet when he was at home.

Like his father, Calvin had a quick tongue; like his mother, the boy knew how to render awkward situations easier. When the boys’ headmaster, Dr. Irvine, visited, he played pool with Grace, the boys, and Dr. Boone. That was a bit of a risk on the Coolidge side, since the Coolidges knew that Irvine, pious, might not approve of such an activity. To make things even more difficult, Irvine played poorly that day. It was Calvin who cheered them all by making a joke of it. “Well, Doctor,” he said, “you give splendid evidence of not wasting your youth.”

Coolidge himself did not hear the quip; indeed, he was away so much that the White House now had two entourages: his own and Grace’s. In Mrs. Coolidge’s case that crowd was Mary Randolph, the first lady’s secretary, Jim Haley; the Secret Service man; and Dr. Boone. The white collie, Rob Roy, was attaching himself to the president, following him into the office when he disappeared to work. All the other animals followed Grace, who made a life of animals, music, and children when possible.

In April, after her boys left, Grace entertained again: the Pi Beta Phi sisterhood came to Washington to see the White House and praise and serenade their now eminent sister. The portrait by Christy was complete—perhaps too risqué for the president but nonetheless among the most beautiful paintings of a first lady ever made. All the staff noticed that Coolidge could behave oddly at times. Once, in a strange mood, he could not resist placing a foot on the immaculate train of his wife’s dress. But everyone also noticed his affection: “She was his queen,” remarked Maggie Rogers, a maid, later. With the help of Coolidge himself, Mr. Stearns, and many Washington vendors, Mrs. Coolidge went from one sartorial victory to another. At Easter, the Coolidges hosted Sarah Pollard of Proctorsville, Vermont, Coolidge’s aunt, aboard the
Mayflower
; Grace wore what the paper described as a “sand-colored Poiret twill wrap with a dark brown fur collar,” matching sand-colored shoes, and a soft gray scarf of tulle and matching gloves.

The pair did come together on the
Mayflower
, which was becoming a true refuge for the family. It touched the staff to see that the president found ways to relax, even to play, while out on the water. Grace knitted; Coolidge donned a special navy cap with a black visor. A navy officer detailed to the ship had purchased it for him at Brooks Brothers, a vendor whose prices Coolidge considered extravagant. Coolidge loved the cap. The navy men who manned the ship, especially Dr. Boone, saw that Coolidge was unfamiliar with nautical routine; to everyone and at every query the president replied, “Aye, aye, sir.” They all laughed with their captain.

As the days passed, the scandals and investigations narrowed the prospects for the Mellon Plan. On March 28, Coolidge finally asked for Daugherty’s resignation. Coolidge knew that Daugherty would not go quietly, and he didn’t. Daugherty warned, legitimately, that by firing him simply because he was under attack, rather than after a conviction, Coolidge was setting a dangerous precedent. Coolidge now faced the problem of replacing Daugherty as well. “I haven’t been able to reach any decision about appointing an attorney general,” he told the press at his conference on April 1. “Of course, what I am trying to do there necessarily is to get a $75,000 or $100,000 man for a salary of $12,000.” Who that $100,000 man might be the reporters already had a good idea: Harlan Stone, who was now making something like that figure of $100,000 on Wall Street. Stone was quickly confirmed; the White House broadcast his appointment widely. Finally, Coolidge was moving past “continuity.”

What unified Coolidge’s nominations, the reporters could see, was his emphasis on integrity and honor in the nominee. Generally, Coolidge went out of his way to avoid giving office to personal friends. Stearns was often present, and very welcome, in the White House. But Coolidge never sought serious advice from Stearns, the way Wilson had with his Colonel House. Coolidge clearly valued Amherst, but handed out few spots to Amherst men. At 23 Wall Street, the telephone did not ring for Morrow, though he was, by now, one of the senior investment bankers in the world. Stearns sometimes had trouble containing his frustration at Coolidge’s resistance to advice. When Coolidge did choose a man he knew, he did not always consult that man. And once appointed, a Coolidge acquaintance operated alone.

The secretary of labor, James Davis, was angling to find out what the president thought of something. Coolidge said to Starling, “You tell ol’ man Davis I hired him as Secretary of Labor and if he can’t do the job I’ll get a new Secretary of Labor.” Stone, likewise, made his own calls at the Justice Department. He shifted personnel around; removed William Burns, the head of the Bureau of Investigation; and curtailed wiretapping, one of Burns’s favored tools. Stone replaced him with a name Herbert Hoover’s staff had recommended, that of Burns’s old lieutenant: the (unrelated) John Edgar Hoover.

Even with Daugherty gone, the tax campaign was not going well. The irony was that the more Coolidge saw of the evidence, the more he saw the logic of what Mellon proposed. “If the tax bill had been passed as it was introduced,” he told reporters on May 1, “the country would have seen a large increase in business.” Coolidge pointed out at his press conference that “just at the present time there is a good deal of money piling up in banks,” money that was frozen, unused. It was personally painful to see Mellon, whom Coolidge was coming to admire so much, become the scapegoat of congressmen. On April 10, the normally stoic Treasury secretary emitted an uncharacteristic bleat of concern. Couzens was not merely firing at him but waging outright war. Mellon wrote to Coolidge that “all companies in which I have been interested have been sought out” by Couzens’s investigators. Couzens had even gone so far as to hire a private investigator to look into Mellon’s affairs, paid for by the senator himself. In the same letter, Mellon complained to Coolidge that “if the interposition of private resources be permitted to interfere with the Executive administration of government, the machinery of Government will cease to function.” Coolidge defended his friend, issuing a public rebuke to the Senate, warning that it had to be held responsible for the disorder it caused with such an investigation.

The assaults on Mellon achieved their desired effect; they distracted the executive branch while the bonus legislation marched forward, indeed so quickly it caught Coolidge off guard. “My Dear Mr. Secretary,” wrote Coolidge on April 24, the day after a version of the legislation passed the Senate by a vote of 67–17. “Please have an analysis made for me of the bonus bill with a statement of the effect it will have on the Treasury, and such criticism of it as may occur to your Department. This is urgent.” Many lawmakers sought to frame as inhumane those who rejected the bonus plan. The papers reproduced reports that some firms were requiring employees to publicly oppose the bonus. This, Coolidge quickly clarified for the press, was “utterly un-American.” There were veterans who felt entitled to a bonus, but there were others who felt such a payment was wrong and jeopardized the future. The Ex-Service Men’s Anti-Bonus League argued that the American Legion had “committed the organization unequivocally in favor of a program that the conscience of the thousands of its members rejected.”

The only conceivable way to win the tax battle now, Coolidge guessed, was to pour all his time into making political trades. One concession was to go along with the version of the immigration bill that contained the Japanese exclusion language he so detested. On April 19, he told reporters that he hoped for a compromise: “I am attempting to see if there is any way that that question can be solved so as to satisfy those that want to have restriction and at the same time prevent giving any affront to the Japanese Government.”

The time given to these battles, however, represented even more time away from his family. John’s graduation was coming up. Coolidge badly wanted to pull the family together to attend. In several letters, he tried to get his father to come down and join him in Washington or at the graduation in Mercersburg. Again, his father resisted travel. In late April, just as Coolidge had feared, the Bursum Bonus legislation was passed by both houses, well before the tax legislation was through. This version of the bonus sounded modest—it granted pensions to soldiers of old wars, going back to the war of 1812, but left room for expansion under a trick clause that offered pensions to “certain named soldiers.” Coolidge vetoed the bill on May 3, the day after his twenty-fourth meeting of the year with Lord.

Reporters noticed that the president was now forgoing his morning walks to concentrate on work. Sometimes, when Coolidge worked, he could not help thinking of his sons. On May 9, he wrote a letter to his Amherst friend Frederick Allis about John’s upcoming time at Amherst: “I need to find him a place to room. I think it would be a little better if he could have a room in a private house. If he is in the dormitory he will have no protection from anyone that wants to come into his room day or night.” Coolidge knew Stephen Brown of Northampton through his parents; Brown was going to Amherst as well. Perhaps Allis could find a room for the boys, “a bedroom and study, with running water in the room.” Maybe the boys might have the room Coolidge once had at Dr. Page’s. Coolidge wrote to Dr. Brown, Stephen’s father, to ask about the possibility of the boys’ rooming together. On May 13, Grace took Coolidge to the circus to distract him from his concerns. The same day, and with the tax bill not yet law, the Senate sustained Coolidge’s veto of that first bonus bill.