by Robert Sobel
A week after the Republicans adjourned in Cleveland, the Farmer–Labor Party met in St. Paul and nominated Duncan MacDonald for the presidency and William Bouck for the vice presidency. This regional party drew little attention; the Farmer–Laborites did not come out for La Follette as Republicans feared.
Republican hopes were given their greatest boost when the Democratic Party proceeded to commit political suicide at its New York convention, which opened on June 24 in the midst of a heat wave and lasted until July 10. Like the Republicans, the Democrats had strong positions on agriculture, taxes, and the other economic issues, but the GOP had been able to finesse the Prohibition and Klan issues, while the Democrats were divided on both—and more.
During the primary season the odds-on favorite was McAdoo, who had been a front-runner four years earlier. No one in the party could claim a closer relationship with Wilsonian progressivism, which, if La Follette made a run, might appeal to liberal Republicans disgruntled with Coolidge yet not prepared to bolt their party for the seemingly radical La Follette. Like the other Democrats, however, McAdoo was tainted by the two issues. Though he did not seek Klan support, he had it. He was also a dry, which hurt him with the urban minority groups, the key to the Democratic vote in the eastern and midwestern cities.
McAdoo, however, had an impressive organization, and was expected to do well in the primaries, where his major opponent was Senator Oscar Underwood of Alabama. Underwood, who had entered Congress in 1895 and was the Democratic floor leader, also claimed progressive credentials, and was strongly in favor of the League of Nations. He was pro-business, unusual for politicians from his region. Underwood supported low tariffs because he believed the higher ones favored northern and midwestern business, and low tariffs would lead to business expansion and industrialization in the South. Privately Underwood deplored racism, believing it was one of the prime reasons for the poverty of southern whites. But he had opposed women’s suffrage and Prohibition, at a time when the country voted dry and drank wet.
In the background was Governor Al Smith of New York, who represented a new kind of urban reformism. Smith seemed uninterested in the prewar progressive campaigns, concentrating instead on the rights of labor, environmental issues, and wages and unemployment insurance. He did not enter the primaries, conceding the Midwest, South, and Far West to McAdoo, who would have to battle favorite sons there and so earn their enmity. For the Smith supporters, who included Franklin D. Roosevelt, the real battleground would be the convention itself. All knew the key to the Smith campaign was the cities, and the candidacy would revolve around the issues of the Klan, Prohibition (Smith was a wet), and especially the candidate’s Catholic religion.
McAdoo entered the Madison Square Garden Convention with an impressive delegate count, having done well in the primaries and winning support in state houses. But the Democratic Party still had the two-thirds rule, and McAdoo was far from that level. Alliances were needed, but none was possible with Smith. Perhaps there was some way to win the Underwood delegates.
Senator Walsh was the chairman, with the unenviable task of ruling this fractious convention. Since the platform committee was not ready to make its report, attention turned to the nominations. McAdoo’s hope of an alliance was shattered when on the first day Forney Johnson nominated Underwood, noted that in 1856 the party had condemned the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, and suggested that the 1924 Democrats do the same with the Klan.
This brought the issue to the fore, and fistfights broke out; the eastern delegates clashed with the southerners, and the Midwest was divided. The convention never recovered, and the whole country learned what was happening from live radio coverage.
The high point of the nominations was Franklin Roosevelt’s speech praising Al Smith as “the Happy Warrior.” Although the McAdoo delegates did not receive the speech well, it marked Roosevelt’s return to the national scene after his bout with polio.
The convention entertained a motion to condemn the Klan, but it failed to pass by a single vote, showing how divided the delegates were. William Jennings Bryan, attending his last convention, tried to push through a compromise resolution condemning violence, but the delegates rejected it. The McAdoo people spoke of Smith’s religion and his opposition to Prohibition; the Smith delegates screamed “Oil! Oil! Oil!” in reference to McAdoo’s connections with Teapot Dome. The balloting began, with McAdoo ahead, with 431 votes to Smith’s 241, and Underwood’s 42, trailed by six other nominees, and continued on, seemingly endlessly. By the fiftieth ballot some delegates talked of adjourning without a candidate. The party seemed doomed to the kind of irreconcilable differences that had destroyed the Whig Party before the Civil War.
The Smith forces outnumbered the McAdoo element in the galleries, and hooted down the McAdoo people, who demanded the convention relocate to neutral ground, perhaps Kansas City. Others wanted the convention closed to the media, and particularly to radio reports—the whole country had been able to listen to the Democratic squabbling.
Meanwhile, Coolidge worked away at the White House. By then he knew that La Follette would become a candidate, but also that he would gain more votes from the shambles the Democrats were making of their convention than he would lose to La Follette. The political outlook was bright.
Then Coolidge was crushed in a wholly unexpected fashion. His sixteen-year-old son, Calvin, Jr., stubbed his toe while playing tennis. He developed a blister on one of his toes which soon became infected. The doctor thought the situation serious, that blood poisoning might have set in. Coolidge dropped everything to tend to his son. Edmund Starling recalled that the president moved in a semitrance. He caught a small rabbit in the White House garden because he knew his son loved animals, and he brought it to the boy’s room, hoping it would cheer him. Coolidge dined with Dawes on July 2. Dawes, whose twenty-one-year-old son had drowned in 1912, was thinking about him that evening:While I did not realize that there was anything serious about Calvin’s illness I think the president must have sensed it from the first. He seemed to lose all interest in the conversation and the dinner soon ended. I was to leave that night to continue my talks with [Owen] Young and [Dwight] Morrow in New York on the preparations for putting the Reparations plan into effect. As I passed the door of Calvin’s room I chanced to look in. He seemed to be in great distress. The president was bending over the bed. I think I have never witnessed such a look of agony and despair that was on the president’s face. From that moment I felt a closeness to Coolidge I never felt before, and have never lost. I had gone through the same great sorrow that he faced.
On July 4 Coolidge wrote to his father about the situation. “The toe looks all right but the poison has spread all over his system.” Young Coolidge was taken to Walter Reed Hospital, where he died on July 7. Newspaperman John Lambert, who was there, later wrote of the president’s reaction.
“I am sorry,” I said to him. “Calvin was a good boy.”
He turned slowly until the back of his chair was against the desk. He faced the wide and beautiful expanse of the south lawn. Beyond it he could see the green eminence which the Washington Monument surmounts. He spoke slowly.
“You know,” he said, “I sit here thinking about it, and I just can’t believe it has happened.” His voice trembled. He repeated, “I can’t believe it has happened.”
According to Lambert, “His eyes were moist. Tears filled them. They ran down his cheeks. He was not the president of the United States. He was the father, overcome by grief and love for his boy. He wept unafraid, unashamed. The brief moments seemed to bear the age of years.”
Coolidge stalked the White House in the days that followed young Calvin’s death, or sat at his desk gazing out the window. He received the undertaker’s bill on July 9, but ignored it for three months, quite out of character for a person who always met his obligations promptly. Grace Coolidge later said that he had “lost his zest for living.” He told one visitor, “When I look out that window, I always see my boy playing
tennis on that court out there,” and asked another, “How are your boys? One of my boys has gone.” To a friend whose son also died young, Coolidge inscribed a book: “To my friend, in recollection of his son, and my son, who by the grace of God have the privilege of being boys throughout eternity.”
Coolidge’s devotion to his sons was complete. In 1935 Edward Brown, the longtime Coolidge family physician, recalled how Coolidge reacted when Calvin, Jr., had to have an operation for empyema—a deposit of pus—when he was six years old, a serious operation at the time; it was 1915, when Coolidge was a state senator. Coolidge questioned Brown about the possibility of retaining the services of specialists. “I am a poor man,” he said, “but I could command considerable money if you need it.” Dr. Brown wrote:He let no one know how deeply worried he was. I doubt if even Mrs. Coolidge knew. I remember that just after the operation it had come time for him and his boy, John, to leave the hospital. Mrs. Coolidge was permitted to remain. I happened to glance out the window, and there below in the street, standing quite still, with John’s hand in his, was Mr. Coolidge, looking up fixedly at his boy’s room. It was a forlorn and touching picture. I think in that moment I knew him best.
After the election, wrote Colonel Starling, something quite typical of Coolidge in this period occurred:Very early one morning when I came to the White House I saw a small boy standing at the fence, his face pressed against the iron railings. I asked him what he was doing up so early. He looked up at me, his eyes large and round and sad. “I thought I might see the president,” he said. “I heard that he gets up early and takes a walk. I wanted to tell him how sorry I am that his little boy died.” “Come with me, I’ll take you to the president,” I said. He took my hand and we walked into the grounds. In a few minutes the president came out and I presented the boy to him. The youngster was overwhelmed with awe and could not deliver his message, so I did it for him. The president had a difficult time controlling his emotions. When the lad had gone and we were walking through Lafayette Park, he said to me: “Colonel, whenever a boy wants to see me, always bring him in. Never turn one away or make him wait.”
The death of Calvin, Jr., was most certainly a watershed event in Coolidge’s life. Imagine how his father, John Coolidge, felt. He, too, had seen one of his two children die at a young age. Now the same thing had happened to his surviving child. Less than two years later, John Coolidge died, and the president took this quite hard, as well. Mrs. Coolidge also suffered after young Calvin’s death, but she said and wrote little at the time. Four years later she published a poem dealing with her son.
“The Open Door”
by
Grace Coolidge
You, my son,
Have shown me God.
Your kiss upon my cheek
Has made me feel the gentle touch
Of Him who leads us on.
The memory of your smile, when young
Reveals His face,
As mellowing years come on apace.
And when you went before,
You left the gate of Heaven ajar
That I might glimpse,
Approaching from afar,
The glories of His grace.
Hold, son, my hand,
Guide me along the path,
That, coming,
I may stumble not
Nor roam,
Nor fail to show the way
Which leads us—Home.
Meanwhile, in New York, where the Democratic balloting droned on, reports of the death reached Walsh, who graveled the convention to order. “News has been reached of the death of Calvin Coolidge, Jr., son of the president of the United States.” For once the convention was stilled. The session was adjourned, and a little after midnight the delegates went out of Madison Square Garden into the sweltering evening heat.
Smith passed McAdoo on the eighty-sixth ballot but was halted. The count on the hundredth ballot was virtually unchanged from the dozen earlier ones. At that point James Cox, the 1920 presidential nominee, suggested John W. Davis of West Virginia as a compromise candidate. Although he had served briefly in the House of Representatives, Davis was better known as a Wall Street lawyer, solicitor general during the Wilson administration, and ambassador to the United Kingdom. Davis had been mentioned as a possible nominee in 1920, and in 1924 was his state’s favorite son candidate. Some of the McAdoo delegates, weary, hot, and tired of paying New York rates for their hotel rooms and meals, drifted into the Davis camp. Then the Smith people followed, with Roosevelt announcing the switch. Davis received the nomination on the 103rd ballot, after 3 AM.
The convention now turned to the matter of the vice presidential nomination. There was a groundswell of support for Walsh, who had conducted the convention in a fair, impartial, and dignified fashion, and who was recognized for his work during the Harding scandals. But Walsh would have nothing to do with it. There was some talk of Smith, but a compromise was unrealistic given how contentious the balloting had been. In the end the convention selected Nebraska Governor Charles W. Bryan, the round-faced younger brother of William Jennings Bryan, an odd looking man with a bald head and a decorative white mustache—a westerner, a progressive Democrat, and a dry.
Davis was an intelligent, thoughtful, handsome, well-spoken attorney, who was known as “the lawyer’s lawyer.” While not exactly politically experienced, he was no novice. But many thought Davis, like James Buchanan in 1856, had been named because he had nothing to do with the controversies of the time—he had been out of the country as ambassador to the United Kingdom. As for Bryan, he added nothing to the ticket. As the Democrats packed to leave, they knew their only hope was for the La Follette candidacy to split the Republican vote to give them a narrow victory or throw the election into the House of Representatives.
La Follette, sixty-nine years old in 1924, had been chasing after the presidency for close to three decades. Unlike Roosevelt in 1912, he was not going to form a political party; he did not want to place progressive Democrats and Republicans in a tight spot, having to choose between joining the new party and almost certain defeat, or remaining in their own parties and alienating progressive supporters. Then, too, if the election were thrown into the House, La Follette wanted to count on their support. Instead, he relied upon the Conference for Progressive Political Action (CPPA), formed in 1922 by labor and farm groups, Socialists, Farmer–Laborites, a scattering of old Populists, and other progressive individuals and organizations who came together in convention. Seeing in La Follette a way to hitch itself to a possible winner, the Socialist Party decided not to nominate a candidate, but instead supported La Follette.
At their convention that July the delegates adopted a platform written by La Follette’s son, which called for aid to the farmers, stronger regulation of railroads, the abolition of injunctions in labor disputes, a constitutional amendment permitting Congress to override court decisions, the direct election of federal judges, and government operation of Muscle Shoals. There was no mention of Prohibition, the Klan, or foreign affairs.
La Follette offered the vice presidential nomination to Justice Louis Brandeis, who wasn’t tempted, after which he selected Senator Burton Wheeler, who had won notoriety with his investigation of the Justice Department. At this convention, completely dominated by La Follette, there was much talk of “taking government from the bosses,” and the need for popular control of the parties. The platform was short and to the point. “The great issue,” La Follette asserted, was “the control of government and industry by private monopoly.”
Coolidge’s campaign was both unusual and dull. Americans had been, and still are, accustomed to campaigns in which the presidential candidate occupies center stage, talks about the issues, and criticizes his opponents. Coolidge would have none of this. As in the Massachusetts elections, he didn’t mention his opponents by name. Indeed, he didn’t deliver traditional campaign speeches, limiting himself instead to the kinds of addresses he had been giving as vice president and presiden
t. He spoke on such topics as “Education: The Cornerstone of Self-Government,” “What It Means to Be a Boy Scout,” “The High Place of Labor,” “Ordered Liberty and World Peace,” “Authority and Religious Liberty,” “Good Sportsmanship,” and, just before the election, “The Duties of Citizenship,” in which he mentioned the right to vote.
He did the same in his several radio addresses, the first president to use the new medium effectively. It was Coolidge, and not Franklin D. Roosevelt, who truly was the first president of the radio age. Harding had used radio, but he had a resonant voice, as did most politicians of the time, and employed it as an organ, geared to reach those in the back rows of a large hall. Harding boomed into the microphone as though addressing a throng directly. So would Hoover and others of that generation. Coolidge had a small, reedy voice, which, together with precise New England pronunciation, was a drawback on the stump, but advantageous on radio. When Coolidge left office, a representative of the National Broadcasting Company presented him with the microphone over which he delivered his sixteen radio addresses in five years. A New York Times reporter, covering one event, wrote of Coolidge and the radio: “the president was quick to see its possibilities in aiding him to reach the people and readily adapted himself to the new science. Because of his naturally good radio voice and quiet demeanor, the task of the broadcasters in presenting him has been a pleasant one.” More at ease than most politicians of the time, Coolidge, even with his twang, sounded almost conversational and professional on the radio, and he knew it. In a conversation with Congressman James Watson of Indiana, he remarked:I am very fortunate that I came in with the radio. I can’t make an engaging, rousing, or oratorical speech to a crowd as you can, and so all I can do is stand up and talk to them in a matter-of-fact way about the issues of the campaign; but I have a good radio voice, and now I can get my messages across to them without acquainting them with my lack of oratorical ability or without making any rhetorical display in their presence.