Coolidge (54 page)

Coolidge laid out his thoughts at the annual convention of the American Association of Newspaper Editors. Whatever La Follette or Couzens might say, Coolidge wanted to make clear that he did not represent the interest groups on which the editors spilled so much ink; rather he, Coolidge, represented everyone—the whole country. He represented the potential in business for everyone. If business was to thrive, its importance needed to be recognized. “The chief business of the American people is business,” he added. But there was always a counterweight to business—the integrity and idealism of the country that would not allow any interest group to prevail. “The chief ideal of the American people is idealism,” he said. In fact, on balance, Coolidge would go with the newspaperman over the man of finance: “I could not truly criticize the vast importance of the counting room, but my ultimate faith I would place in the high idealism of the editorial room of the American newspaper.” Public service was the business they were all in: newspaperman, businessman, or politician, Republican or Democrat.

If policy were to improve, not only words but also cabinet members, judges, and commissioners were also key. The Congress was in its lame-duck session until inauguration, and Coolidge knew some of his nominees would meet resistance if he put them forward in this period. But by the same token he could build comity if the Senate approved major appointments even in this early period. For an empty Supreme Court slot, Coolidge put forward Harlan Stone, who would move from the attorney general position. Coolidge had already prepped the Senate the month before with a dinner for Stone and senators on the
Mayflower
. Coolidge might have picked a more conservative man than Stone as his nominee, but Stone, his old Amherst peer, was likelier to win confirmation. The attorney general understood how the Senate worked. He had also helped quiet the Daugherty scandal, so the shift was also a reward. Stone boasted impeccable credentials; it would be hard for the Senate to turn down as unqualified a man who had served as the dean of Columbia University’s law school for more than ten years. The unpredictability of senators such as Borah had always plagued Coolidge. “There goes Senator Borah,” Coolidge once was heard to say. “And he and his horse are going in the same direction.” But this time, with Stone, he felt confident. The Senate, still in session, did something provocative upon learning of Stone’s nomination; the senators asked the nominee to testify at a hearing. There they interrogated him not on his qualifications for the job of justice so much as on whether he had in his capacity as attorney general been justified in investigating their colleague Burton Wheeler of Montana.
The Washington Post’s
editorialists were outraged at both the newfangled demand for testimony and the line of questioning: “A Senator, acting in the equivocal capacity of counsel for another Senator under judicial investigation, is virtually saying to the Attorney General: I have the power to prevent you from becoming a member of the Supreme Court.” But the senators duly confirmed Stone on February 5 in a 71–6 vote.

In mid-February, Coolidge gingerly, carefully sneaked a few more names in: William Jardine to succeed Henry Wallace at Agriculture and Frank Kellogg, the ambassador to Great Britain, for the job of secretary of state, since Hughes was departing. Jardine opposed price fixing, specifically the McNary-Haugen plan to drive up prices at home by government management of surplus product. Both Jardine and Kellogg were approved; Coolidge’s homework and strategizing were paying off. Congress generally seemed to be in a good mood. Alice Roosevelt Longworth gave birth to her baby, Paulina Longworth; the House cheered Nick Longworth, who was also the new speaker.

As the inauguration date approached, Coolidge, still apprehensive, intensified his preparations. Dawes was in charge of soothing the Senate, and he certainly seemed to be thinking about the inauguration day. Indeed, the vice president–elect was complaining that the eighteen tickets allotted him for the inauguration would not suffice. In mid-February, Coolidge wrote to Dawes, who was still in Chicago, to ask him to be sure to stop by the White House so that they could review the details of the all-important day. “Whatever is decided on will suit me all right,” Dawes reassured him on February 14. The vice president–elect assured Coolidge that his calendar was clear for the coming work; he had no special dates except one far ahead, to honor the midnight ride of Paul Revere and his ancestor, William Dawes, at the Old North Church tower on April 18.

Coolidge, mollified, decided to overlook Dawes’s decision to stay out of cabinet meetings. Dawes’s cooperation in presenting a modest, unified appearance at the inauguration mattered more. Coolidge was highly conscious of the dignity of the event, and where it might fit in history and, in the short term, fit in with his own plans for legislation that spring. In order to set an example of inaugural economy, the president ordered that much of the $60,000 sent in by private citizens be sent back. That winter, Coolidge sat in Wilson’s pew at the Central Presbyterian Church to honor Wilson, who had been an elder in the church; the next day Coolidge and Mrs. Wilson dedicated a bronze memorial stone and new cornerstone at the church in Wilson’s name. Starling, his Secret Service man, was beginning to see a resemblance between Wilson and Coolidge that others missed: “For both of them, life was largely a mental experience.” But, Starling added, whereas in Wilson “this was obvious, in Coolidge it was not.” Wilson looked like a professor and talked like a professor; Coolidge often brought his talk down to the commonplace as they walked, say, past a store: “If you ever get married, don’t let your wife buy anything in there. My wife goes in there and it costs me a lot of money.” But in Coolidge the simple talk was guile; Coolidge was making complex decisions in his head, just as Wilson had.

A second resemblance to other presidents troubled Starling: Coolidge was running down his health, as Wilson and Harding had. The obsessed chief executive needed a sport. Starling thought the president, who had never fished, might find angling relaxing; hunting also seemed possible. Dwight Morrow and Andrew Mellon had both tried a novel form of exercise: the electric horse. Like a merry-go-round steed, it moved up and down, with buttons to change the pace, supplying exercise when true riding was not possible. Now, with Starling’s encouragement, Morrow and other friends sent Coolidge a steed of his own, 475 pounds and made of mahogany. The horse, called Thunderbolt, arrived and was moved into the presidential dressing room without the president’s knowledge. Coolidge himself discovered the horse when he entered the dressing room and found Starling trotting along. The president was curious about the horse but not eager for the news of its existence to get out in that delicate time. To Coolidge’s chagrin, someone, mostly likely the electricians from the Navy Yard, leaked the news of Thunderbolt’s arrival. This was exactly the kind of story that hurt presidential dignity. “Coolidge Rides an Electric Hobby-Horse,” read
The New York Times
’ headline.

March neared. Coolidge’s father agreed to come after Coolidge carefully ensured that Governor Billings of Vermont was traveling: “The main thing I want is that you should do what you like best.” The Coolidges’ son John too would come down for a single day from Amherst. Mrs. Goodhue was also coming and would stay for a longer period. On March 3, a day before the inauguration, Coolidge met with Dawes at 9:30
A.M.
to confirm final details. First Dawes was to set the stage with a speech to the Senate, as Coolidge himself had done. Coolidge would then give the great inaugural address, the first to be carried nationally by radio. The president planned a measured speech, like Harding’s but milder and more spiritual—fitting given the achievements of budget cutting that were behind them and his desire for conciliation with Congress. More economy, Coolidge wrote, was necessary. Coolidge decided to update Harding’s “no new experiments” with a line of caution: “If we wish to erect new structures, we must have a definite knowledge of the old foundations.”

The Coolidges had never been as comfortable as other first families in their role, but they were warming up to it. On the train down to the inauguration, John encountered John Trumbull, the new governor of Connecticut, and rode with the Trumbulls. Trumbull was an energetic, friendly man, with his own manufacturing company. Trumbull Electric Manufacturing made switches, appliances, and other electrical supplies, demand for all of which was growing. The Trumbulls’ daughter, Florence, attended Mount Holyoke. In his high hat, with Grace by his side, Coolidge rode in an open car to the inauguration. Grace had worn white in summer; now she set the tone with gray, “a shade deeper and warmer than pearl,” as the press described it. It became known as “Coolidge gray.” The important day was proceeding well.

Until Dawes wrecked it. Instead of rising to give the friendly pro forma address to the Senate which he had led Coolidge to expect, Dawes could not resist the opportunity to deliver a 1,300-word rant against the Senate, three times as long as the 434 words Coolidge had delivered four years before. Senators were selfish, he suggested, in their decision to sustain the practice of the filibuster. Senate rules, written by senators, placed “power in the hands of individuals to an extent, at times, subversive of the fundamental principles of free representative government.” Because the Senate had not changed its ways, “the rights of the Nation and of the American people have been overlooked.”

A storm of commentary and anger welled back from the senators. “Dawes showed as little knowledge of the Senate’s rules as he did good taste,” pronounced Democratic Minority Leader Joseph T. Robinson. “It was exactly what should not have been said,” concluded Thaddeus Caraway, a senator from Arkansas. Some senators put their analysis simply and analytically: “There are some features of the rules, no doubt, that should be changed but he defeated any change by the brutal and clownish way in which he went about it.” Senator Ashurst remarked that “it was the most acrobatic, gymnastic speech I have ever heard in the Senate.” “I have an opinion of the spectacle but do not care to express it,” said Senator Norris. The effect was to render the presidential address subordinate; Dawes had stolen the show.

Dawes’s damage that day was compounded by a technical problem with the microphone set up for Coolidge’s speech. An irritating echo interrupted Coolidge’s phrases, so that the content could scarcely be heard. “While he was going it was all right,” commented
The New York Times
of Coolidge, “but whenever he paused for breath it sounded as if somebody over at one side was mocking him.” Then came yet another insult. Unlike Harding, who had so carefully made the Senate feel important on inauguration day, Dawes failed to return to the Senate after the inauguration to adjourn it. Instead he rode back with Coolidge to the White House. James Reed of Missouri later recalled that the Senate never adjourned that day; “it simply broke up.” The senators had looked for a cause to quarrel with the new administration; the vice president had supplied one. Dawes’s decision not to sit in on cabinet meetings was now also drawing attention, yet another bit of evidence of disunity. The White House staff who greeted the Coolidges on their return found them silent.

Coolidge was disturbed because he suspected more trouble for the tax legislation, and it indeed came, but from an unexpected quarter: the Treasury. Mellon, still burning with anger at Couzens after all the battles, was feeling feisty, in part because of Coolidge’s support. On March 9, the Bureau of Internal Revenue released a projectile aimed at Couzens: a retroactive tax bill of $10 million on stock sales back years before. The Treasury announced Couzens’s bill not quietly but in a press release, so that Couzens could read about it in the
Chicago Tribune
. The Internal Revenue Bureau had reversed a Wilson administration ruling on capital gains that Couzens had realized and found the tax basis to be $2,500 a share, not $8,900. The move was especially blatant because of the earlier ruling by Wilson; indeed, the tax courts would later find in Couzens’s favor. Whether upon Mellon, Dawes, or Coolidge, or perhaps all three, the Senate was spoiling for revenge.

The very next day, March 10, the senators got their chance. The confirmation of Charles Beecher Warren, Coolidge’s candidate to replace Stone, was the subject of intense debate. Coolidge could see that the vote would be closer than he had expected and exploded when Starling repeated a rumor that Warren might not be confirmed. “Well, you’re such a great Secret Service man I guess you know more than anybody else. You know everything. Maybe you can tell me just how everyone is going to vote.” Starling saw that Warren, too, was concerned: when he arrived at the Willard to deliver messages for Warren, he always found the man with the “covers pulled over his head.” When the time came to vote, the senators present were indeed divided at 40–40. But the tiebreaker, the vice president, was not there. Dawes, having been assured the vote would not take place in the next few hours, had gone home to the Willard for a nap. By the time Dawes was roused and had raced the fifteen blocks back in a taxicab, the vote count had changed. Warren was defeated, 41–39. President Coolidge thus suffered a humiliation that more than matched anything he had endured in the previous term: Dawes’s error made him the first president since Andrew Johnson to see a cabinet confirmation killed by the Senate.

The progressives were beside themselves with merriment. Senator Norris mocked General Dawes with a spoof of the victorious ride of Philip Sheridan to Cedar Creek:

The great senatorial temple of fame—

There with the great General’s name,

Be it said in letters bold and bright,

“Oh, Hell an’ Maria, he has lost us the fight.”

A sign was put up by someone at the Willard’s entrance:
DAWES SLEPT HERE
. Coolidge, furious, put Warren’s name up again within two days, an unusual and bold gesture that stunned the Senate. Again, Warren was promptly rejected. Coolidge also invited Warren to lunch on Saturday, March 14. Then he swore to give Warren a recess appointment. In response, Senator Joe Robinson, the minority leader, swore to keep the Senate in session for the sole aim of hindering such an event.