Coolidge_An American Enigma

by Robert Sobel

  Considering all the possibilities, all the dead ends, blunders, and flux during the duel for the nomination, the thought seemed justified. In the exuberance of the moment, those involved might have paused to consider that the only constituency Coolidge had was the convention delegates, and that they would soon disperse, leaving control of the party to the national committee, the bosses, and the Senate oligarchy, none of whom had any loyalty to Coolidge.

  Theodore Roosevelt had faced something akin to this in 1900, but at least he was nominated for the vice presidency with the grudging acquiescence of Mark Hanna and the other party bosses. Coolidge didn’t even have that. Had McKinley lived to complete his term, TR probably could not have been nominated on his own in 1904. In 1920 Coolidge didn’t seem to have too much of a chance to remain on the ballot in 1924.

  Of course each man had to win the confidence of the party and congressional powers after they assumed office. Roosevelt had managed to carry it off. Coolidge lacked Roosevelt’s charisma and dynamism, but he failed for a much more fundamental reason. Coolidge was a man who had climbed the political ladder with the help of the Massachusetts machine. He had always been a machine politician, and in the age of political machines, a politician did not rise very far without the support of party bosses. Coolidge had achieved his position in Massachusetts with the aid of sponsors. Always pragmatic and deliberate, he had risen slowly, taking one step after the other up the ladder, expanding his constituency as he went. Now he would make the sudden leap to the national scene—without the help of a leader like Crane and the patronage of Crane’s peers.

  Therein lay the source of problems that would plague him in the coming years.

  8

  Vice President

  During these two years I spoke some and lectured some. This took me about the country in travels that reached from Maine to California, from the Twin Cities to Charleston. I was getting acquainted. Aside from speeches I did a little writing, but I read a great deal and listened much. While I little realized it at the time it was for me a period of most important preparation. It enabled me to be ready in August, 1923.

  The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge

  THE NOMINATION THRUST COOLIDGE into a position just off center stage, often the place vice presidential nominees find themselves. He endured the usual rounds of honorary degrees and dinners, and continued to perform his duties as governor. At the end of the month Coolidge took the train to Washington to meet Harding, who said he would conduct a front porch campaign to reinforce the impression he was a reincarnation of sorts of William McKinley. They held a joint press conference, in which Harding told the reporters, “I have been telling Governor Coolidge how much I wish him to be not only a participant in the campaign, but how much I wish him to be a helpful part of the Republican administration.” This was unusual talk about the normally dead-end vice presidency, and the press took note of it. On the whole, the image Coolidge fashioned during the campaign, and which the press generally adopted, was favorable. But little was written about him in the months that followed the convention.

  Instead, interest was understandably focused on the head of the ticket. The general public greeted the Harding nomination with enthusiasm, but not so a significant segment of the press and intellectuals in general. Their impression of Harding was of warmth, friendliness, decency—and monotony, blandness, and ineptitude. In some ways, the opposition to Harding in 1920 was similar to what Eisenhower experienced in 1952; those unfriendly to “Ike” saw him as an amiable simpleton.

  Most historians whose expertise is not in 1920s America now consider Harding a boob, an utter failure as president, who won the nomination only because he was willing to follow the bosses’ orders, and who then presided over one of the most corrupt administrations in history. But Harding was in fact quite typical of the men who served in the Senate in this period. Legislators were expected to take care of constituent interests and work in harmony with state officials, and Harding was good at this. He was also respected and liked by his peers. He was not a cipher; in 1916 he had even been viewed as a dark horse possibility for the presidential nomination, and in 1919 Theodore Roosevelt told Daugherty that he was considering Harding as his running mate. The retrospective view of Harding’s critics overlooks these details.

  There is one other factor to consider before discussing what Harding did and didn’t do while in office. Few presidents in all of American history had as many acolytes among intellectuals as did his predecessor, Woodrow Wilson, whose call for a democratic crusade endeared him to the opinion makers of his time, and who passed the thought down to the next generation through their classes and writings. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., was an ardent admirer of Wilson, whom he saw as the president who played John the Baptist for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Schlesinger was one of those who helped fashion the legend. In The Age of Roosevelt, in which Schlesinger presented this thesis, he discusses the coming of the Republicans as though they were barbarians sacking Rome. In one of his more transparent passages, Schlesinger wrote touchingly of the last day in the life of Franklin K. Lane:The people had made their choice, but not all the people. From the start of the decade, there had been another view of the New Era. In May, 1921, Franklin K. Lane, Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of the Interior, the close friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, lay in his room at the Mayo Clinic, wondering about death. “If I had passed into that other land, whom would I have sought—and what should I have done?” A parade of images passed through his mind. “For my heart’s content in that new land, I think I’d rather loaf with Lincoln along a river bank.” His thoughts drifted to the life he was leaving. “Yes, we would sit down where the bank sloped gently to the quiet stream and glance at the picture of our people, the negroes being lynched, the miner’s civil war, labor’s hold ups, employers’ ruthlessness, the subordination of humanity to industry—”

  His scrawl broke off. The next day they found him dead. The old Wilsonians watched the New Era in indignation and contempt. They were men who had known the exaltation of idealism. They had dared to act greatly and risk greatly. They saw after 1920 a different America moved, as they conceived it, by ignoble motives.

  In his notes Schlesinger indicates his source: Ann Lane and Louis Wall, The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922).

  While Schlesinger does not offer much else on Lane, it should be said that the former secretary was an intelligent and honest public servant, who left office with a record of accomplishment, scrupulously honest, without sufficient funds to purchase train tickets for himself and his family to return home. After these passages, the presentation of a boorish Harding would contrast nicely with the eloquent, sophisticated Wilson. The problem is that Schlesinger egregiously misinterpreted the meaning of Lane’s words, as described in Thomas Silver’s Coolidge and the Historians.

  For starters, whatever Lane’s thoughts were on his deathbed, the idea of the world being altered so drastically during the first two months of the Harding administration hardly seems plausible, which may be why Schlesinger dated the changes to 1920, in that phrase “[t]hey saw after 1920….” That was the year Harding was elected, but he did not take office until March 4, 1921. Schlesinger would like the casual reader to conclude Lane was looking back at more than a year of Harding policy. Given this, it would appear that in actuality those evil things Lane wrote of referred to developments during the Wilson administration, not Harding’s—the opposite of the impression Schlesinger attempts to create in his next paragraph. Schlesinger segues without a paragraph break from Lane’s death to those old Wilsonians watching the Republicans with contempt. To the reader it certainly would appear that in this context he considered Lane one of those old Wilsonians who held this view. You might want to reread the Lane quotation and the Schlesinger comment to appreciate the effect Schlesinger wanted to have on the reader.

  This raises the question of what exactly Lane thought of those first two months of the Harding era. Fortunate
ly he set down his thoughts in a letter to Robert Lansing on May 2, 1921, a little more than two weeks before his death:Really, I think Harding is doing well, or rather that the whole administration is being supported well by the country. Oh, those Republicans have the art of governing, and we do so much better at talking! No one knows just what his foreign policy is, but something will work through that will satisfy a very tired people. There seem to be comparatively few out of work now. We are not out of the woods yet. But the Lord will take care of them. He may even keep [Senator Hiram] Johnson from bolting Harding. They will temporize through; that’s my guess.

  This is not to say that Lane approved of Harding or applauded his election, but these words are not those of a man despairing for the nation because the Republicans had come to power. What is more, Schlesinger had to know this when he wrote those two paragraphs. It is not from an obscure source, but rather a few pages earlier in the book from which Schlesinger had obtained his quotation.

  In Schlesinger’s view, which is quite typical of critics of the Republican 1920s, the period was a dismal valley between the reformist Wilsonian New Freedom and the Rooseveltian New Deal. To him and other New Deal historians, the history of the interwar period is a saga, almost an epic, in which there are heroes and villains. Woodrow Wilson appears on the scene and clearly is a hero, but then he is followed by the foolish and short-sighted trio of Harding–Coolidge–Hoover, and they in turn are succeeded by a reincarnation of Wilson in the form of Franklin D. Roosevelt. This is wholly consistent with Schlesinger’s cyclical interpretation of history, as set forth in his The Cycles of American History (1986), in which he wrote: “One notes finally that the thirty-year cycle accounts both for the eras of public purpose—TR in 1901, FDR in 1933, JFK in 1961—and for the high tides of conservative restoration—the 1920s, the 1950s, the 1980s.” As he wrote, Schlesinger believed the nation was due for another switch to reformism.

  This is drama, not history. To believe the future is preordained is to assume that we can’t control our destinies, that accident and humanity will play no role in history. More often than not we stumble through the present, try to make sense of the past, and wonder what the future will bring. When the future becomes the past, we then try to interpret it, usually through our own prisms, which are informed by ideology and, for some, a belief that patterns truly do exist. We are aware of our shortcomings, and try to overcome them, not to give in to the temptation to demonize and deify. Historians should know better. As Horace Walpole put it, “To be a good historian, it is necessary to be without religion, without country, without profession, and without party.”

  Schlesinger is not alone in presenting his tract as history and distorting the record, painting the 1920s as a terrible period in the national history. In Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager’s A Pocket History of the United States (1976), which went through many editions, we find this:The idealism of the Wilson era was in the past; the Rooseveltian passion for humanitarianism was in the future. The decade of the twenties was dull, bourgeois, and ruthless. “The business of America is business,” said President Coolidge succinctly, and the observation was apt if not profound. Wearied by idealism and disillusioned about the war and its aftermath, Americans dedicated themselves with unabashed enthusiasm to making and spending money. Never before, not even in the McKinley era, had American society been so materialistic, never before so completely dominated by the ideal of the marketplace or the techniques of machinery.

  Nevins, arguably the most celebrated American historian of the pre-Schlesinger generation, had a fixation on this matter. In his history of the Ford Motor Company, Nevins wrote about the coming of the 1920s. “The nation, as Wilson’s towering vision crashed into the dust and Harding, Coolidge, and Mellon opened an era of selfish materialism, grew cynical.” Ignore that nations cannot grow cynical—or idealistic—but that people do. Surely those old Wilsonians remained pure in Nevins’s view. More to the point, what does this have to do with the life of an industrialist or the history of an automobile company? This is difficult to fathom unless one realizes that while a newspaperman, Nevins was an ardent Wilsonian who suspended his customary historical objectivity when it came to the Republican presidents of the 1920s, and then did the same when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president later on.

  Return to one other phrase Nevins used to describe the 1920s. For him, “[t]he decade of the twenties was dull, bourgeois, and ruthless.” How did it appear to average Americans, who lived through the decade that saw a better standard of living for average people than had previously been known? This isn’t to suggest that Harding and Coolidge were responsible for the era’s high standard of living, but rather that to intellectuals, this was a horrid period indeed. In his fair but clearly critical history of the decade, The Perils of Prosperity 1914–1932 (1958), William Leuchtenberg wrote, in his bibliographic essay, of “the bleak intellectual mood of the period.” Was the intellectual mood bleak? How does one judge such matters? It might be argued that some intellectuals, who recalled the Progressive reform era, were dismayed by a population that had elected Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. How about the ordinary citizens? There is a portrait in Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown, a study of Muncie, Indiana, published in 1929, that merits attention. Read this selection from a rather ordinary housewife, and try to imagine what her life had been before that decade—or the lives of her mother and grandmother:I began to work during the war, when everyone else did; we had to meet payments on our house and everything else was getting so high. The mister objected at first, but now he don’t mind. I’d rather keep on working so my boys can play foot ball and basketball and have spending money their father can’t give them. We’ve built our own home, a nice brown and white bungalow, by a building and loan like everyone else does. We have it almost paid off and it’s worth about $6,000. No, I don’t lose out with my neighbors because I work; some of them have jobs and those of them who don’t envy us who do. I have felt better since I work than ever before in my life. I get up at five-thirty. My husband takes his dinner and the boys buy theirs uptown and I cook supper. We have an electric washing machine, electric iron, and vacuum sweeper. I don’t even have to ask my husband any more because I buy these things with my own money. I bought an icebox last year—a big one that holds 125 pounds; most of the time I don’t fill it, but we have our folks visit us from back East and then I do. We own a $1,200 Studebaker with a nice California top, semi-enclosed. Last summer we spent our vacation going back to Pennsylvania—taking in Niagara Falls on the way. The two boys want to go to college, and I want them to. I graduated from high school myself, but feel if I can’t give my boys a little more all my work would have been useless.

  One can easily imagine this woman voted for Harding in 1920. Was the intellectual mood “bleak”? Hers certainly was not. Were there more like her than like Nevins? The 1920 presidential vote would appear to indicate she was in the majority.

  This is not to suggest that Harding lacked his critics in the 1920 election. In the weeks after the Republican convention, the opposition press lit into him. One editorial writer said he was the worst nominee since James Buchanan in 1856, and another dated it back to Franklin Pierce in 1852. The Buffalo Times, a generally Democratic newspaper, offered, “The decision at Chicago is not of the kind that can inspire enthusiasm.” The Ohio State Journal declared, “Senator Harding’s nomination is another great triumph for the Old Guard, which, its leader lying desperately sick a thousand miles away, with popular sentiment recorded against it in state primary after state primary, still proved itself all powerful in the supreme crisis.” Throughout the country, even Republican newspapers called Harding the selection of the inner circle, bemoaned bossism, and in general were not particularly positive about the nomination. Puzzling it out the following week, Walter Lippmann thought that Harding considered the presidency too big a job for a single man, and that the senatorial leaders knew this.

  There is something in it. If you can’t think of any
way to redistribute the functions of government, then all you have to do is to find a president who will be so weak that power will leave him. That is the inner meaning of Mr. Harding’s nomination. He was put there by the senators for the sole purpose of abdicating in their favor. The grand dukes have chosen their weakest tsar in order to increase the power of the grand dukes. And if he is elected the period will be known in our constitutional history as the Regency of the Senate.

  Harding’s Republican senatorial colleagues spoke of his sagacity and shrewdness, but before the nomination reporters had heard them talk of other qualities—his laziness, slowness to grasp ideas, and lack of imagination. Some of the senators kept it up even after the nomination. “Keep Warren at home,” Penrose supposedly told King when planning the campaign. “He might be asked questions if he went out on a speaking tour and Warren’s the kind of damned fool who’d try to answer them.”

  Progressive Republicans were dismayed at the thought of a Harding presidency. A group of them, known as the “Committee of 48,” attended the convention of the new Farmer–Labor Party in Chicago on July 12 in an attempt to revive the spirit of the Progressive Party. Diehard Bull Moosers sat next to members of the Nonpartisan League, Socialists, Single Taxers, and radical labor leaders, trying to come to some kind of agreement. These true believers could not bear to compromise their beliefs, and so the small convention broke up without a nomination. The Committee of 48 withdrew, and then tried to induce La Follette to run. He refused, and they adjourned. There would be no significant third party in 1920. The Socialists nominated Eugene V. Debs, their long-time leader, who then was in a federal prison having been convicted under the wartime Sedition Acts. The Farmer–Labor Party selected Parley Christensen of Utah for their standard bearer. Lucy Gaston, the anticigarette crusader, called a press conference, and told the reporters that she would not run as an independent. Gaston added that Harding clearly was a habitual user of cigarettes, and would come to no good. She predicted that his administration would be laced with corruption, and that Harding would not live out his term.