Coolidge (55 page)

Coolidge’s instinctive response to all such setbacks, but especially the debacle of the nomination, was to look homeward. After the defeat of Warren was final, he asked Starling to find John Garibaldi Sargent, his father’s attorney and the former attorney general of Vermont. The startled Sargent, who happened to be at the Pavilion Hotel in Montpelier, found himself ordered down to Washington without knowing why. “Just get that grip packed and don’t tell anybody, even your wife,” Starling said to Sargent. The Senate, in shock at its own lèse-majesté in the case of Warren, confirmed Sargent’s nomination quickly. Sargent was attorney general before he even had time to assemble the appropriate clothing: he had had to black his large brown shoes before his first public appearance. Coolidge, for his part, was well satisfied with it all. Now someone he could count on sat to his right in cabinet meetings. He insisted that Sargent stay at the White House.

Comforted to have a bit of Vermont with him in Washington, Coolidge marched forward, his eye out for possible legislative victories, whatever their size. He had nominated Wallace McCamant, the man who had called out his name at the Chicago convention, for a federal judgeship. Now that confirmation looked iffy as well. So in May, while the Senate was in recess, Coolidge gave McCamant a recess appointment to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. It was enormously gratifying to find McCamant a seat on the federal bench after his support at the convention of 1920, just as it had been to appoint Sargent to an important post. Jardine had been confirmed in mid-February, along with Kellogg. Denby, the gullible navy secretary, was finally gone, and Coolidge had already named Curtis Wilbur in his place. It turned out that a recess appointment was possible for another contentious nominee, Thomas Woodlock. Coolidge placed Woodlock at the Interstate Commerce Commission because he had seen that Woodlock, through his years on Wall Street and as an editor of
The Wall Street Journal
, was the opposite of Joseph Eastman and Louis Brandeis. Woodlock understood that regulation could impede growth as well as facilitate it. With Longworth, Coolidge plotted the tax reform; there was no reason the legislation could not make its way through the Senate in the fall. To the public, meanwhile, he preached savings again: “Economy reaches everywhere. It carries a blessing for everybody.”

Perhaps chagrined at his own contribution to the tension between the administration and the Senate, Mellon, too, was now working hard again to placate both senators and congressmen. At a speech in Richmond, Virginia, in March, Mellon made an effort to remind listeners that secretaries in the past had also supported reduction in taxes: Carter Glass and David Houston, two Democrats who had preceded Mellon at Treasury, were examples. Glass had opposed any increase in the uppermost brackets; Houston was “even more specific.” Then Mellon went back to the only comforting thing in the story, the evidence: “It has been our experience that a reduction in taxation does not mean an equivalent loss in revenue.” As he had in
Taxation: The People’s Business
, here Mellon tried to put his case simply: “If income taxes are so excessive that a man of ability finds he must work more than three days a week for the Government and has but three days a week for himself he will become discouraged and decide that the result is not worth his effort.”

And once more, the Treasury’s revenue reports provided consolation. On April 24, 1925, the Bureau of Internal Revenue reported that the budget surplus would be over $100 million, compared with the earlier forecast of $68 million. Income tax receipts were down, but not by much; Coolidge’s cutting work with Lord more than offset the difference. Lord, Coolidge kept rediscovering, was still working miracles with his “cheeseparing,” as Coolidge called it to the press, cutting the budget back as he had cut back in the sandwich he had prepared for Starling. Mellon too knew how to find money: alcohol seized could be sold as medicine. The next fiscal year, that ending in 1926, the Treasury was willing to predict now, would see a surplus of $375 million, making tax reduction a safe venture. The surplus was much larger than they had expected. Mellon, seemingly recovered from his fit of rage, was making a new and subtle point. The timing of the tax cuts mattered, but so did the direction of Treasury policy. If people were sure cuts were coming, they anticipated them and commerce expanded in anticipation, just as had happened in the stock market after the crash. “In fixing rates, whether they be normal taxes or surtaxes or death taxes,” said Mellon, “the controlling factor should be the effectiveness of the rates in producing revenue, not only for the year in which they are levied but over a long period of years.” Tax changes should be infrequent and permanent when possible.

The rest of the economy was likewise supplying good news. Coal prices were stable and employment was so high that workers were scarce. Wages rose, even though union membership and certainly union strikes were down. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was now inching above 130. And, whatever Vice President Dawes and Senator Norris had yet up their sleeves, the chances of success for Coolidge were good. That June, he and Lord convened the ninth budget meeting since Harding’s quirky law had been passed. Lord had introduced a new gimmick, a “Two Percent Club,” for departments that trimmed their budget that much. Now he could report that the first charter member was the post office in Camden, South Carolina, and many others followed. Somehow or other, by March, $50 million had been shaved off the $62 million that remained to be cut from the budget to get to $3 billion. The director of the Veterans Bureau might take them still closer; the bureau’s annual phone bill for long-distance calls had been $2,946.48 in 1922; now it was $184.65, thanks to cables sent instead.

Even what appeared to be waste could yield savings when an official concentrated, Lord said, citing the example of “seven barrels of spoiled, soused seal shoulders sent from Alaska.” Someone on the General Supply Committee had managed to turn waste into value by selling those shoulders for $20 as crab bait. The continued plea for economy, Lord knew, “gets tiresome and wearisome,” but staffers had to remember that Coolidge wished to save not to save money but “to save people.” He, Mellon, and Lord would be able to report at the semiannual budget meeting that the federal deficit was down again, at $20.5 billion total, compared with $21.25 the year before. Everyone saw that there was a limit to cuts; could the government cut decade in and decade out? Lord would have a One Percent Club after his Two Percent Club. Then, Lord told his captive audience, he would create a Woodpecker Club, for government offices that pecked away at their expenses here or there. To Coolidge and Lord, both from the forests of New England, the name “woodpecker” meant something: they had often heard the distinctive
rat-a-tat
of the bird.

Coolidge’s father, John, was not faring well. That spring he let the limekiln lot to a neighbor, Walter Lynds. Requests for business still came in, and John sought to be helpful. “Walter W Lynds makes nice sugar or syrup and can tell you the price,” he wrote one inquirer from Joliet, Illinois, getting Lynds’s middle initial wrong but making the point about the product well enough. To others, Colonel Coolidge announced, “I have leased my sugar lot. Walter Lynds makes good sirup.” In June, Colonel Coolidge had surgery for prostate trouble, and the Coolidges decided to stay in Massachusetts so they would not be too far away from him. They settled on Swampscott, near Stearns. For years Stearns had longed to situate the Coolidges in a dwelling appropriate to their status. Now, probably because he was paying many of the costs, he finally got his wish. The Coolidges would dwell in White Court, an elegant home beside his. Several times, Coolidge visited his father in Plymouth Notch, hoping to convince him to move to Washington for the winter, but he failed.

Other concerns pressed that summer. The railroads were not making the kind of recovery that had been imagined; perhaps their overregulation had done permanent damage. The new recess appointee at the ICC, Thomas Woodlock, found many of the ICC’s premises questionable, especially the idea that it might act as “an arbiter in economics.” Maybe railroads did not require such strong regulation once consolidated, he felt. He judged the vocabulary of the ICC absurd. “What is a ‘combination rate’ which ‘makes on’ the Ohio River?” he would later write, summing up his challenge upon entering the commission work. “What is a ‘joint through rate’? What is the name of Heaven is ‘fourth section relief’?” Woodlock was especially frustrated at the fact that the ICC’s activities, even under Coolidge, expanded. Coolidge also had to deal with the challenge of military spending. The number of battleships was being cut, but the head of the U.S. Army Air Service, Colonel William Mitchell, was making economy in defense nearly impossible by repeatedly warning that the lack of a giant U.S. force in the air made the country vulnerable to invasion by foreign forces.

It all combined to put Coolidge into one of the worst moods of his life. The staff steered clear. He fussed more about John. He was concerned, he wrote to his father, at John’s frivolity. He hoped John might be drawn out of youth as he had been, and had just written William Newlin, Garman’s former student and now an Amherst professor of philosophy, “I want my son John to have as near as possible the same course in Philosophy that I had. You will know exactly what that was because you were there about that time. He will bring this letter to you.” John, for his part, told Ike Hoover, the usher, that White Court felt like a prison. The president still liked to oversee every aspect of John’s day, Starling and Hoover noticed, and even picked at him. At one point while away from White Court, John wrote to his parents but addressed the letter wrongly so that it did not go directly to Swampscott. Coolidge exploded. “Your letter went to Washington. . . . it is accuracy that counts. Shots that do not make the mark are no good. You had better remember that. The world is full of people that almost succeed, the trouble is they won’t work. Many men are almost President. But only 29 have been chosen. I hope you will not be an ‘almost man.’ ” The Massachusetts State Legislature had commissioned the distinguished painter Edmund Tarbell to make a portrait of Coolidge for $3,500, and Coolidge sat for several hours a day. Stearns noticed and Clarence Barron would notice that Coolidge gave such artists a hard time; he made his face intentionally blank. When it came to family business, Coolidge also tended to the grim. He learned that his grandmother’s brother, M. B. Brewer, had died and that the graves of her parents in Hampden, Wisconsin, were scarcely marked. He ordered grave markers of Vermont stone. In a bid to shed some light on his New England ways, he organized a trip for reporters to the home of John Greenleaf Whittier, the author of the poem “Snow-Bound.”

Even that summer, however, there were times when Coolidge managed to relax. They were with friends: Frank and Emily Stearns finally had the time they longed for with “their” Coolidges; if Stearns could not be Colonel House to Coolidge, the Sherpa who helped him set policy, at least Stearns could be a good host, and share what he knew of the Coolidges with the White House staff. In all things, Stearns instructed Starling, “Mrs. Coolidge came first.” Stearns brought Grace a lace cap from Brittany to protect her from the sun while she gardened. When a singer came to Swampscott, she played the piano so the artist could sing “My Wild Irish Rose.”

If music cheered Grace, Clarence Barron, the jovial press lord, revived the president. Barron kept a home in nearby Cohasset. Coolidge sailed over on the
Mayflower
to Plymouth, a conscious replication of history, and then motored to Cohasset to visit the economic guru. Before they could talk business, Coolidge had to be polite. Barron, himself a large man, displayed a prize bull he owned, insisting Coolidge inspect it and, to Starling’s amusement, “reeled off the frightening number of calves sired by his prize, and told how all of his children who grew to be cows gave such rich milk that it could pass for cream.” Coolidge, who, notwithstanding the cigar habit, still boasted an excellent nose himself, could stand only a few minutes of it before walking away and muttering, “Some bull!”

But the material on commerce, the chance to get Barron’s perspective, was well worth the trip. Wall Street was interested in chain stores and utilities. So were many consumers and shareholders; that summer the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, heretofore a closed corporation, would issue stock and give senior employees shares in its 12,000-odd stores. Other chains, such as J. C. Penney, had seen sales for the first five months of the year move up 19 percent. Barron was a living counterweight to the worriers and progressives. That summer of 1925, tens of thousands of members of the Ku Klux Klan marched in Washington. But Barron was concentrating on the economy. The anthracite men were warning that a coal strike might yet again threaten the country that autumn; Barron reminded Coolidge that nowadays there were plenty of substitutes for anthracite. Coolidge wondered about crime; Barron pooh-poohed it as a local problem. As Barron left his house, reporters jumped the newspaperman: what had he and the president said about the coal strike? “I said we did not discuss the coal strike,” Barron later wrote in his diary. “Wall Street was not interested in the coal strike.”

The perspective of Barron was so welcome because it allowed Coolidge to follow his own instincts and concentrate his mind on the legislation he deemed most important: the tax cut. When Coolidge returned in the fall, he found the House Appropriations Committee chair recommending that the surtax that came on top of the tax base ought to be reduced to 15 percent, which would mean a top income tax rate of something like 20 percent. The idea had been a dream just a few years before. Wages were up even after inflation, especially for skilled and semiskilled workers, after a sharp drop in the early 1920s. The recession of the early 1920s had been rough, but already memories of it were fading.

Back in Washington in September Coolidge had his mind on the future gain, the growth in commerce that would make the government look smaller, the denominator in the crucial fraction of government relative to the general economy. Aviation could not become a public-sector project; it had to stay in the private sector. The best way to ensure that was to prove that those who argued that the United States needed a big navy or an arsenal of airplanes were scaremongers. Coolidge summoned another friend, again without warning. This time the friend was Dwight Morrow, not Sargent. Morrow opened his newspaper one day that month to learn that he had been named to a board to decide what role aircraft had in the U.S. defense. The day after the news appeared in the paper, Morrow received one of Coolidge’s classic peremptory notes: