Coolidge (63 page)

Before leaving I had in mind to call personally and ask you about the big inscription I am going to cut on the west wall of Rushmore. You know from my letters and descriptions there is to be a tablet space provided for an historic record of events founding and covering dates commemorated in the memorial. I am of course shaping this inscription and determining its character.

Borglum went on to list sample dates of years that such texts would cover: 1776, of course, 1787, 1803, and so on. Borglum made much of 1907, as the year Roosevelt had “fulfilled the prophecy of Columbus by cutting the Isthmus of Panama to the world a way for world communication between eastern and western seas.” That could have been predicted; Borglum had long been a very public Roosevelt fan and even wore his mustache like Teddy’s. Finally, Borglum made his request: “My real thought is that the framing of the language of this tablet should be by you. Doane Robinson says you are the ablest master of phrase living. My own thought on this is expressed in my earnest wish that you be the one author of that tablet, it should be simple, brief, biblical in its simplicity.” Borglum let Coolidge know that he would consider it a “colossal blunder” if such a project were
not
directed by the president. After all, Borglum noted, by this trip, Coolidge had become “the first president who has included the real west in his home life.” Borglum completed his plea with a man-to-man tip on fishing, suggesting that Coolidge and Colonel Starling try out Sand Creek, Wyoming. The whole pitch emphasized the aspirational: like Coolidge, even before him, Borglum was an avid Lindbergh fan. Lincoln was Borglum’s hero—Borglum had even named his son Lincoln. The inscription work seemed perfect for Coolidge, modest yet important.

Coolidge did not say he would necessarily accept the work. Indeed, the Coolidges shared frustratingly few specifics about their plans, short- or long-term, with the correspondents in the press pool. Indeed, when reporters pressed Coolidge one too many times on the question of taking a trip to Yellowstone—the reporters liked the idea—Coolidge simply replied, “I like it well enough here.” Grace chimed in, sassily, “If you think you’d like it out in the park, why don’t you go out there?” To the press, the summer White House now truly felt official, and across the country, people were becoming accustomed to the idea of it too.
Black Hills Engineer
, the quarterly of the South Dakota State School of Mines, was preparing an entire “President Coolidge Number,” which would detail the technicalities of the Coolidge visit, right down to the number of direct telephone lines laid from Rapid City to Chicago (three) or the number of planes (three) that could fit in the new hangar at Rapid City Airport built as part of the airmail delivery service for the chief. The Stearnses were not in the Black Hills, and neither was Clarence Barron. But such friends kept up with their various Coolidge projects. Barron was setting the stage for the Coolidge Fund at the Clarke School, dropping hints about the excellence of the institution in the press. Along with his Yellowstone travel literature, Coolidge scrutinized an invitation from President Machado of Cuba to attend the Pan-American Conference in Cuba in 1928; the president thought Cuba might be a trip worth making.

One Sunday the Coolidges hosted Guy and George Brewer, children of Milan Brewer, the brother of Coolidge’s grandmother Sarah. Together the Brewers and the Coolidges attended the little church in Hermosa. After lunch, they sat on the porch at the lodge and exchanged reminiscences. Reporters had recently noticed that Coolidge was focusing on the world arms conference and that his telegraph was manned so that he might snap up news from negotiators in Lucerne. As the Coolidges worked, they thought about their son John, who would visit them in August, and his girlfriend, Florence Trumbull. Her father, John Trumbull, did not come to South Dakota but did travel to a governors’ conference on Michigan’s Mackinac Island; the conference was also attended by Governor John Weeks of Vermont. At the meeting Weeks declared his own decision not to run again, a bow to the old Mountain Rule of Vermont: “I am not a candidate to succeed myself because of the unwritten law of my state that a government official be satisfied with one term.” At some point in this period there was also news of Mount Rushmore; Coolidge had agreed to go up it.

Early August brought yet another visitor to the lodge: Senator Arthur Capper, a member of the Agriculture Committee and a proponent of the Republican alternative to McNary-Haugen, cooperative marketing. On August 2, Coolidge and Capper headed into Rapid City. It was the fourth anniversary of Coolidge’s ascent to the presidency. The press men found Coolidge downright chatty, holding forth on his record, a natural enough topic for an anniversary. The Coolidge years had enjoyed peace. Wages had moved up slightly. There had been a reduction of the national debt when he was in office, about $4 billion, Coolidge noted. In addition to military peace, there had been “a very marked time of peace in the industrial world,” so different from what they’d all encountered back in the turbulence of 1919. The president spoke of past tax cuts. He conceded that the boot and shoe industries weren’t faring well, but perfection was impossible. Closing, Coolidge mentioned casually that the reporters might want to come back later: “I may have a further statement to make.” Anything he said would come too late for the financial markets. But not too late for California.

Coolidge, Capper, and Sanders returned for the second press conference. Capper later recalled that he had attended out of curiosity, just to see what a presidential press conference was like. Sanders, recalling it all later, remembered that at 11:40
A.M.
, Coolidge called in Everett Sanders for a moment. The president handed him a note and asked him to have Erwin Geisser, the confidential stenographer, prepare twenty copies on small slips. The slips were folded. At the conference itself, Coolidge asked a simple question: “Is everybody here?” He then handed the reporters the slips.

On the little papers were twelve words: “I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty eight.” The reporters were aghast. They asked if Coolidge would comment. “No,” came the reply. The newsmen stampeded for the telephones and telegraph; some ran down sidewalks or drove their cars to a faraway office rather than wait. For Coolidge’s twelve, a full 50,000 words moved on the wire from the reporters in Rapid City. Within hours, and across the nation, Republicans likewise got the astonishing report.

The party could not believe what it heard, and moved into a frenzy of confirmation, seeking out sources around the globe. Scouted out in Baden-Baden, Germany, Bascom Slemp, the president’s former secretary, speculated that Coolidge had meant that he would accept a nomination “if such nomination is the free expression of popular will.” “Coolidge’s Withdrawal Takes Whole Nation by Surprise,” wrote
The Boston Globe
. Even Hoover was skeptical: tracked down by reporters at the Bohemian Grove refuge, he released his own statement: “I regret the suggestion in the President’s statement.” Grace’s mother, Lemira Goodhue, repeated a version of a famous line of Will Rogers. “I know nothing of the President’s policies except what I read in the papers.” Rogers himself deemed Coolidge’s statement “the best worded acceptance of a nomination ever uttered by a candidate.”

With each day that passed, the confidence that Coolidge might yet run for a new term grew. The stock market made up its mind that Coolidge was just bluffing, or stalling for tactical reasons, as he had so visibly in 1920. The day after the announcement, August 3, prices of shares dropped wildly in the first moments of trading, and then rose. The
Globe
set its newspaperman semanticists to analyzing the meaning of the verb “choose.” Reached in Newark, former senator Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, who had played golf with Harding in the old days, issued a careful statement: “I hope that the President will not continue in his determination not to run for the nomination in 1928.” Governor Lowden of Illinois, one of Coolidge’s old Republican rivals, was blunt: “I know of no man who has run away from the presidency.” GOP Chairman Butler said he thought that Coolidge would still accept if he were nominated.

After all, Coolidge had often played coy before. It might be his way of timing his campaign. Coolidge was simply saying that if he ran, it would be on the people’s vote, not his own. Others found continued hope for a third-term candidacy in the president’s behavior. Coolidge seemed to have little idea about work after leaving office. “It hadn’t occurred to me that I needed to think what I would be doing after the presidency,” he confessed to reporters on August 5. This frank honesty suggested the announcement might be more feint than commitment to retirement. The first couple traveled to Deadwood to meet the Sioux. A Native American girl, Rosebud Robe, placed a feathered war bonnet on Coolidge’s head; they named Coolidge “Leading Eagle.” Coolidge posed with great solemnity. That itself was evidence of a candidacy: people might mock such photos, but it made the hosts, the constituents, happy. When the Coolidges drove to visit a former governor of South Dakota, the road was rough and Coolidge got out and joined the others in pushing the wagon. Perhaps, the press speculated, Coolidge wasn’t talking elections because his mind was preoccupied with serious tasks. That month Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two men convicted of the murder of two men in Braintree, Massachusetts, were to go to their deaths. Some observers were warning that there would be riots again in Boston if Coolidge did not intervene. Forty-five thousand garment workers threatened to strike over the execution. The committee to defend the men was warning Charles Lindbergh that he would have to appeal to the president or face the consequence that his own achievement would be undone. “All goodwill in Europe for America created by your magnificent flight now destroyed by pending execution two radicals.”

August 10 brought the long-awaited visit to Borglum. As much preparation as the Coolidge visit had demanded, his hosts had not readied the road up the mountain. The first car heading up got stuck, “and stayed stuck all day,” as Howdy Peterson, one of the workmen on the site, later recalled. Coolidge gamely rode up, though not on the Boy Scouts’ Kit, who was proving too feisty; Starling had fixed up a more cooperative horse, Mistletoe. Senator Simeon Fess accompanied him on his own steed. Rolf Lium, the young preacher from the Hermosa church, came up as well. Everyone was in a fine mood, especially Starling, the Secret Service man. Senator Norbeck, who had come to appreciate him, and who had already named a stream after Mrs. Coolidge and a mountain after the president, had told Starling he was naming a valley below the peak of Mount Rushmore “Starling Basin”—“in your honor.” It was a Secret Service man’s job to be unseen. The unexpected kindness overwhelmed Starling.

Borglum assigned to the president the job of handing over the steel bits with which Borglum would drill the first holes. The sculptor, always dramatic, had also arranged a salute to the president of twenty-one blasts, but the blasts came not from guns but rather from the dynamite blasting twenty-one tree stumps. When Coolidge rose to speak, reporters noted, the yellow tops of his cowboy boots and his sandy hair shone in the sunlight.

And now Coolidge did say all the things he had not at the press conference the week before, delivering an address of more than a thousand words. He found it natural, he said, that Borglum’s art should begin with George Washington; Washington had formed people’s aspirations, to make them not greater men but rather “into permanent institutions.” Coolidge praised Jefferson, Lincoln, and also Roosevelt, who had “brought into closer relationship the east and the west.” The monument itself, Coolidge said, ought to be a “national shrine”: “money spent for such a purpose is certain of adequate returns in the nature of increased public welfare.” This last line was what Borglum had been waiting for: Coolidge had confirmed that Rushmore would have federal support.

Over the moon at the assurance, Borglum expanded his vision. “I am getting old,” he told the crowd, “but I may yet live long enough to put the bust of Coolidge alongside those of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt.” He continued, “We want your connection with it shown in some other way than by just your presence! I want the name of Coolidge on that mountain!” Shortly thereafter, he disappeared. The crowd looked up: like a spider, a man was coming down the side of the mountain on a cable. The cable steadied and slowed. The man was Borglum. Suddenly, the sound of the drilling on Washington’s visage was heard.

But the determined line of Coolidge’s back as he quickly moved from Borglum also struck the crowd. There was something about the president’s demeanor, the quick way he backed off and departed, that gave those who had been so curious about his future their answer. The Republican Party might want Coolidge to continue. Stearns might. Morrow might. But he would not. The statement of August 2 was real; he had meant it. It would stand. There would be no third term.

Some reasons for Coolidge’s resolve were evident on that day. Coolidge, who had grown up among horses, had struggled to mount Kit. He had let others attach his spurs rather than lean down himself. This was a different man from what he had been five years before. The allergies and the breathing trouble that were his official complaints might not be his only illnesses. Having watched Harding and Wilson fail, not to mention numerous senators and congressmen, both Coolidges asked themselves whether Calvin might be next; there was little way of knowing whether a man’s chest pains were fatal or even whether they were from the stomach or the heart. Everyone thought back to various bouts of indigestion in the case of Wilson or Harding that had proved to something more serious.

Beyond Coolidge’s health were other concerns. Both Coolidges were tired of Washington. The tensions between them and the time away from Northampton were becoming too great. Starling, when he thought about it all, was coming to understand that. The incident at the lodge with Haley had stayed with them and those around them. Starling especially regretted it, since he had worked with Haley all these years; Haley had been with Starling since the days of the Hardings in Alaska. “Had I been there I might have staved off the president’s wrath,” he later thought. The tough decisions of the presidency were also wearing Coolidge down. Many alleged that he had the authority to intervene in the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Coolidge had long maintained that the federal government could not involve itself in the matter, but demands still poured in from around the world. The day before, a crowd of fifteen thousand had gathered in New York’s Union Square to protest the execution. But, most of all, the decision not to run again was a decision about political power. “He realizes, as did Theodore Roosevelt in 1904,” said Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, “that it is the essence of a matter that counts and not merely the form.” A president was surrounded by yes-men; eventually, a president started to believe them and forget the work of those permanent institutions he had mentioned Washington forming. Even great presidents like the ones Borglum was sculpting forgot that the office mattered more than the man.