Coolidge (66 page)

No one—not Starling, Kellogg, Mellon, Hoover, or Coolidge himself—could have been prepared for what came next. On Wednesday, November 2, while Washington considered reports that Senator Norbeck of South Dakota might run for vice president, a rainstorm started in New England. All Thursday the rain continued while in Washington Coolidge saw the secretary of war and discussed Prohibition enforcement with delegates from a national crime conference. Reports came that squalls were tying up shipping.

By Thursday night, flooding had commenced all down the Connecticut Valley. At Pittsfield, the waters rose so fast that men used dynamite to blow up an old bridge and save a town from the flood. The three express trains that ran from Montreal to Boston were all ordered to hang back in Montreal until news came from Vermont. In the next days, more reports from Massachusetts filtered in. Holyoke was just about wiped out; at Springfield, the West Springfield Dike had broken, releasing floodwaters into West Springfield and Agawam and forcing thousands out of their homes. Young women from Smith College, where Morrow’s daughter Anne studied, were performing relief work. Hampshire County had even released its prisoners in Northampton to help strengthen the dike. John Coolidge, the president’s son, had seen the Connecticut River’s waters ride to historic highs at the Holyoke Dam.

But it was from Vermont that the worst shocks came, all over the next forty-eight hours: whole bridges, entire Main Streets, were wiped out; great long stretches of new railroad were washed away. Even paths normally safe from flooding were inundated; the engineer on the
Ambassador
stopped his train after feeling the tracks “soften” under him. At Winooski, an iron bridge across the river was carried up and then down into the waters. At Gaysville, the villagers put their belongings in the church, which was on higher ground. The next day the river pulled the church away. “We never saw it again, except as a mass of kindling,” someone wrote. At Bennington, the water poured down Main Street, knocking out wires and darkening the town. The governor himself spent a restless night in the Pavilion Hotel in the capital; his wife described the waters “rushing and roaring like a big mad ocean.” More dire was the fate of the state’s lieutenant governor. At Barre, he was swept away when he attempted to leave his car and wade; his body was discovered only the next afternoon. The lieutenant governor’s brother was forced to walk fifteen miles to attend the funeral.

The waters had swept away large parts of towns; at Waterbury, where the asylum was, 121 Holstein cows drowned. The damage in the state capital, Montpelier, amounted to $2 million, the equivalent of one-eighth of the annual state budget. At Burlington, the damage was not as bad, but the town was isolated, reachable only by a steamer that traveled on Lake Champlain over to Fort Kent. In Windsor, people had to be saved with boats. Plymouth was spared, but Ludlow was not. The waters rose up the steep banks to the Black River Academy. They swept away a historic steel bridge, the main railway to Rutland. And St. Johnsbury, where Coolidge had spent the brief time preparing for Amherst, saw a loss that would cost more than $10 million; three bridges were wiped out. On the night of Sunday, November 6, Governor John Weeks found a telephone booth to call the president and brief him. As he left the booth, he later recalled, the press men were there; one said, “Vermont has gone to hell! She can never come back.”

Vermont seemed ruined, “smashed,” as
The Boston Globe
put it. A blanket of snow now covered the icy floodwaters, slowing the recovery and rendering many roads treacherous. Though the state had not taken federal aid before, it might need that aid now—not just highway aid, which would probably come, but something greater. Vermont might fail without Coolidge’s help. “This is the story that Vermont won’t tell. But the people of the ruined valleys admit it to those they have seen, and wistfully they watch for those who love Vermont to read it between the lines without being told,” said
The Boston Globe
. “The pitiable $75,000 that is appropriated by the Red Cross is less than Boston raised in the first week for the Mississippi.” Vermont needed not $1 million but $10 million to rebuild the railroads and towns. “Is not Vermont worth as much as France to the United States?” the
Globe
reporter paraphrased a businessman as saying. “Calvin Coolidge is a Vermonter. Perhaps that boast of the state is now its chief liability,” the reporter concluded.

It all amounted to retribution of biblical proportions. Senator Caraway’s challenge had come to life. Coolidge had not gone down to Mississippi when the water had flowed over the levees. He had not called a special session of Congress for the southern floods. If the president was to demonstrate consistency, he could not go up to Vermont or call a special session now. If he went to Vermont now, he could not stand on principle in the great flood-funding debate. Without Coolidge, there would be no obstacle remaining to an enormous new flood program. Even as the president took in news from Vermont, southern states were pressing for a Coolidge endorsement of additional funding from the federal government to cover the cost of spillways in the new dam proposal. Hoover was letting them know that Coolidge might well give in. Only Coolidge could limit the federal flood spending, and only if he was consistent. “He can’t do for his own, you see, more than he did for the others,” one Vermonter explained to reporter Louis Lyons. If ever there was a test of living by example, this was it.

Coolidge stayed in Washington. Just as before, the federal rescue was to come through the supervision of the Red Cross. Coolidge himself would lead a fund-raising drive; a public relations campaign from the chief executive, just as in the case of the spring, seemed within bounds. He launched this modest plan with a group of Vermonters, including Porter Dale, the Vermont senator from Island Pond who had gone to his house when Harding had died. That was his limit, he explained on November 8, to his press conference group. First, he described the damage to the road leading to Plymouth. “A quarter mile stretch of the mountain slipped down into the road and cut off travel temporarily between the Union and where I live.” Then he summarized the administration’s position in a single sentence. “From anything I know about the section that was flooded in Vermont, there would be nothing that could be done there about flood control.”

Vermont labored to right itself. Governor Weeks appointed his own disaster manager, Fred Howland, the president of the National Life Insurance Company. Howland had read law in the office of William Dillingham, the same office where Coolidge had once been offered a clerkship. The damage at some of the mills was enormous. Governor Trumbull, the father of John Coolidge’s friend Florence, wired an offer of assistance, as did Governor Smith of New York. There were more reports of damage. At Winooski, the loss at the American Woolen Company was $1 million; New England Power suffered $1 million in damage at Bellows Falls. The Rutland Railway Light and Power was down $300,000. Governor Weeks created a Flood Survey Committee that carefully cataloged what had been discovered in November: 7,056 acres of farming land had been reported wiped out; 200 barns were gone; 1,704 head of cattle and 7,215 chickens were dead; and 2,535 cords of wood had been destroyed. Surveyors believed they had captured only three-quarters of the loss.

If Coolidge was to follow his spring protocol, he now had to dispatch Hoover. He did, but only after shipping Attorney General Sargent home to write a report of the whole fiasco. No matter the timing, the thought was painful: Hoover, not Coolidge, arrived on his own special train at Essex Junction, Hoover in the little caravan of cars, doing the inspecting. The Vermonters noticed that when Hoover’s car got stuck, Hoover let the others push and sat in the car, an important man. They had Howland, their own relief manager, and turned snidely against Hoover. “Herbert Hoover came, and saw, and suggested, and left,” as one Vermonter summed up the commerce secretary. An additional misfortune came out of the Hoover visit: Hoover’s aide, Reuben Sleight, died in a plane crash near Montpelier.

The critics didn’t let up. “Vermont villagers do not agree with the reported opinion of their distinguished neighbor, President Coolidge, that nothing much can be done about flood control in the valleys among the Green Mountains,” wrote a columnist in the
St. Albans Daily Messenger
. “At Waterbury they don’t hesitate to blame the force of their disaster to the power plant dam just below the river ‘that plugged up the gorge,’ they say. The power companies are looked at by the flooded villagers as very largely responsible for the horrors of last Thursday night.” Armistice Day came, and Vermont dedicated the day to reconstruction, a move that won admiration across the country. “Every able-bodied man in President Coolidge’s home state turned out for a day of toil, broken only by a two-minute pause at 11 a.m. for a silent tribute to the World war dead,” the
Rockford Daily Republic
of Illinois wrote.

Coolidge made a personal contribution to the Red Cross Fund for Vermont but stopped at that and watched Vermont struggle from a distance. The state legislature determined that it had to have its own special session, a rarity in the history of Vermont, to enact emergency funding. But even getting to Montpelier was difficult.

Coolidge worked through Thanksgiving on the State of the Union address, retreating to the
Mayflower
to write and entertain Senator Curtis, who was running for president. Word came after Thanksgiving that the Vermont state legislature was ready to hold its extra session. After weeks of repair and the building of temporary bridges, the Vermont state government sent its own train, a legislative special, by Montpelier and Wells River Railway to Montpelier. Weeks opened with a reading from the Forty-sixth Psalm, “God is our refuge and our strength.” The governor sought $8.5 million for repair, or half the state budget, and the lawmakers passed the bill. Grimly, the legislature also approved a $300,000 loan to the railroad. Some in Vermont deemed the spending enslavement. Whole generations would be paying back this money. But Vermont was also proud. In size, the bond issue was “the greatest work ever done in a single day by the Vermont legislature,” the
St. Albans Daily Messenger
announced.

Hoover had turned his attention back to the South and the construction of flood legislation; he was traveling, phoning, and wiring, not always with Coolidge in the know. He was quietly telling southerners that there would be funding for spillways and other costs. Kansas City was selected as the city for the Republican convention the next year; Coolidge could read in the papers that the fight boiled down to Hoover and Dawes. Beating Coolidge to the punch, on December 6, just before the State of the Union, Hoover published the Commerce Department’s general economic report, blaring prosperity: though the country’s population had grown only 55 percent since the turn of the century, key fields such as mining were up 248 percent in dollars; railway service was up 199 percent.

Coolidge finally finished his State of the Union address. It mirrored his indecision over foreign policy. The United States had been unable to come to agreement with Great Britain, and the naval treaty of the past year had to be recognized as a casualty of that. On the Kellogg and Briand peace treaty question, he punted, carefully positioning the administration so as to be not far from and not close to endorsing a compact. The United States did not need a treaty, he wrote in the message, even if it was considering one: “Proposals for promoting the peace of the world will have careful consideration. But we are not a people who are always seeking for a sign. We know that peace comes from honesty and fair dealing, from moderation, and a generous regard for the rights of others. The heart of the Nation is more important than treaties.” In other areas, he was his old clear, brief self. Farmers sought more help, but he signaled that he would block farm legislation: “It is impossible to provide by law an assured success for those who engage in farming.” On the merchant marine and government entry into the ship business, he was equally frank: “Public operation is not a success.” American Indians were seeking additional funding beyond what they had received; the most important thing Coolidge could do had already been done: the government had granted the Indians full citizenship in 1924.

The part that the entire South and Vermont were waiting for came toward the end, published in the paper under “Flood Control.” Coolidge acknowledged the gravity of the Mississippi flood: “It is necessary to look upon this emergency as a national disaster.” The federal government had carried some costs; the owners of land adjacent to dikes had paid only one-third of the costs necessary. Further federal assistance should be “confined” to the true flood area of the lower Mississippi. Last in the flood section came New England. Coolidge allowed that “a considerable sum of money will be available through the regular channels in the Department of Agriculture for reconstruction of highways.” It might be necessary to grant special aid “for this purpose.” But that was all.

It was the South that voiced its fury: “President Coolidge has demanded an impossibility of the Lower Mississippi Valley. These states cannot make any substantial contribution toward the adequate works for the control of floods,” correspondent George Coad wrote in
The New York Times
of December 11. Because Hoover had hinted that more was promised, especially regarding the contentious spillways, the rage against Coolidge burned hot. The most one could do to excuse Coolidge was to presume ignorance: “A few persons entertain the hope that agitation might even win the President to the valley’s view. These men think that Mr. Coolidge has been inadequately informed. If he understood the problem, he would see the flaws in his present reasoning.”

As the holiday neared, disappointments mounted. Morrow had hosted Lindbergh in Mexico with great success, but the Coolidge combination of aviation and arms shipments was not always working as foreign policy. Stimson, operating in Nicaragua, had demonstrated great talent, but he and General Hilario Moncado, who was leading the Nicaraguan government, had not stopped General Sandino and his rebels; on the contrary, Sandino’s men were refusing to turn in their guns for any price; their refusal to be bought by the Americans looked like character. After a visit from Stimson, it was clear that Coolidge might once again have to dispatch the marines; at the end of the year five marines would be killed and twenty-three wounded at Quilali with matériel stolen from a U.S.-owned gold mine by General Sandino. Dispatching Lindbergh, the plan for January, might not be enough to prevent civil war in Nicaragua. The idea of shipping arms through proxies to one party or the other in a national conflict was merely making the United States look sinister. That winter, in his funny spelling, Will Rogers would write a column that skewered the administration for the policy: