by Robert Sobel
Coolidge had campaigned for office without a specific, well-defined legislative agenda, or to be more precise, with the view that the legislature’s job is to legislate, and his to administer. As president of the senate he had proposed measures and blocked others. Now he suggested that he would permit the General Court to make the new rules, should any be needed, and he would either accept or veto them. Nonetheless, he exerted a measure of leadership and spoke out on the issues—on which he was by no means conservative, even by today’s standards.
The programs Coolidge backed reveal a politician who was not the passive conservative—or, worse, the mossback reactionary—that historians portray. Coolidge pushed for—and helped pass—pay raises for teachers, saying, “We compensate liberally the manufacturer and merchant; but we fail to appreciate those who guard the minds of our youth.” The man who was later portrayed as an admirer of materialism also said, “We have lost our reverence for the profession of teaching and bestowed it on the profession of acquiring.” He worked for legislation to ease the housing shortages caused by the war; he also sponsored bills that fought profiteering by landlords (an act that slightly resembled later rent control measures), gave the courts the power to stay eviction proceedings for six months, fined deadbeat landlords, prevented collusion by price fixing, and encouraged managements to raise wages to help employees cope with the rising cost of living. Coolidge remained a consistent leader in the campaign to improve the state services for mentally retarded children, to provide for maternity nursing in rural areas, and to improve public transportation.
The governor also pushed the legislature to provide a $100 bonus to Massachusetts war veterans, and urged that they be given preference in hiring by the state. He approved a law reducing the work week from fifty-four to forty-eight hours for women and children, despite the objections of textile manufacturers who complained that this legislation would prevent them from competing effectively with southern states. “We must humanize industry, or the system will break down,” he replied. Coolidge established a commission to explore the possibility of providing pensions for state employees. He even endorsed a law that stated that “a manufacturing corporation may provide by bylaws for the nomination and election by its employees of one or more of them as members of its board of directors”; although the law had little chance of being passed, he even mentioned it in a speech to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) later in the year. He also accepted a controversial measure increasing maximum weekly workmen’s compensation payments from $14 to $16.
One of his few vetoes was of a measure to increase the salaries of members of the General Court from $1,000 to $1,500 and to provide some modest additions to their expense allowances; despite his objections, the bill passed over his veto. Coolidge later remarked, “I have signed every bill which had the backing of the workers, with the exception of the bill to increase the salaries of members of the legislature.”
In short, Governor Calvin Coolidge was not the tool of big business that he has become in today’s legend. In fact, as a result of his agenda, the remaining devotees of the somnolent Progressive movement viewed Coolidge as one of the more “enlightened” Republicans. He had earned their support by deeds and words. Moreover, he was an activist—within the accorded limits of his role as governor—not a person who merely spoke and let it go at that.
One of Coolidge’s most important tasks that first term was to make appointments to various state posts, a matter that was complicated by the consolidation of offices that required him to make dismissals as well. Of course, according to the new Constitution, Coolidge might have put this off until 1921. Predictably, Coolidge rewarded the party faithful. He made many good appointments, but most were Republicans. “We have a government of parties,” he observed unapologetically. “We must recognize party. A man ought to be loyal to those who have been loyal to him.” But he also named Democrats to commissions, a few women to assistant commissionerships, and took care to make certain the Irish–Americans, Italian–Americans, and members of other ethnic groups got their pieces of the pie. As senate president he had treated the Democrats with respect and consideration; they might have opposed Coolidge, but also considered him fair and even generous. Now he did the same as governor.
Some executives would have taken this as a chance to reward old friends and make new allies, while punishing opponents, but Coolidge did not see it that way. “Every time a man makes an appointment he creates one ingrate and a thousand enemies,” he said. Coolidge later remarked to a friend, “They say [intervening in the Boston] police strike required executive courage; reorganizing 118 departments into 18 required a good deal more.”
Coolidge established a “Commission on the Necessities of Life” to alleviate suffering due to the wartime inflation. He did not oppose price increases as such, but rather those that clearly reflected gouging. As he noted to the commission,[t]he ordinary consumer is interested in and affected by retail prices. Except as these prices reflect prices at wholesale, he is uninterested in wholesale prices. While there is very little constitutional authority for the fixing of prices by law, it is of the utmost consequence that the public know that charges are reasonable. All kinds of wages have been increased, and these, of course, are reflected in the increased cost of materials. The public knows this and is expected to pay for those necessary increases.
When the retailer sought to take advantage of the situation, said Coolidge, government must act: “Government fails as an administrator of justice if it permits to go unchallenged an exorbitant charge upon the public.”
In time Coolidge would be criticized for not pushing for one program or another. But critics fail to take into account the thoughts that governed his political actions. Coolidge was an atypical politician. Even more than Theodore Roosevelt did, he used the political arena as a stage to set forth a political philosophy, from which listeners could draw their own conclusions. His speeches often resembled more closely discourses on ethics and morality than agendas for action. The citizenry was never informed of what he was attempting, but the people of Massachusetts—and later on, the country as a whole—were being treated to a series of lectures on the political and social philosophy of Charles Garman, again not unlike what the legislators had heard in his “Have Faith in Massachusetts” speech. What else explains such statements as these?
Work is not a curse, it is the prerogative of intelligence, the only means to manhood, and the measure of civilization. Savages do not work. The growth of a sentiment that despises work is an appeal from civilization to barbarism.
It is conceived that there can be a horizontal elevation of the standards of the nation, immediate and perceptible, by the simple device of new laws. This has never been the case in human experience. Progress is slow and the result of a long and arduous process of self-discipline. Real reform does not begin with a law, it ends with a law. The attempt to dragoon the body when the need is to convince the soul will end only in revolt.
Many remarked that Coolidge was a clever and astute politician, but he was also a teacher of morals and ethics who believed in the innate goodness of mankind, which had been corrupted by government and other external forces. Part of that morality was a denial of materialism, a central component of Garman’s philosophy to which Coolidge adhered for the rest of his life—which might surprise those who consider him a philistine. In a 1919 speech he said:If material rewards be the only measure of success, there is no hope of a peaceful solution of our social questions, for they will never be large enough to satisfy. But such is not the case. Men struggle for material success because that is the path, the process, to the development of character. We ought to demand economic justice, but most of all because it is justice. We must forever realize that material rewards are limited and in a sense they are only incidental, but the development of character is unlimited and is the only essential. The measure of success is not the quantity of merchandise, but the quality of manhood which is produced.
One of the majo
r tasks of the leader was “to set an example,” an idea that was never far from Coolidge’s thoughts, whether he served as city councilman or president of the United States.
The election also did not change other aspects of Coolidge’s life and thoughts. He did not take up Stearns’s offer of financial help in renting a large house in Boston. Instead he exchanged his $1 a day room at the Adams House for two rooms for $2, and sublet his $32 a month Northampton home. Stearns suggested he send greeting cards to some state employees. Coolidge agreed, and wanted them to go out third class for a penny each in postage; Stearns talked him into using first class mail. When Stearns tried to make him a present of $5,000, he sent the check back in a flash of anger. Coolidge told him that he had put aside some savings on his $2,000 salary as lieutenant governor. On $10,000, he could certainly make do nicely.
National issues intruded upon the local scene and affected Coolidge in his first year. First the peace treaty and the League of Nations became major issues. On July 10 Wilson submitted the Versailles Treaty to the Senate and set out to work for it to the exclusion of almost all else. Then there was the growing fear of Bolshevism. Civil war continued to rage in Russia, and everyone seemed to understand that the Bolsheviks meant to spread that doctrine to the rest of Europe, and the United States as well. Finally, the country underwent a wave of strikes, which in some ways were linked in the minds of many to Bolshevism.
Taken together, these forces bred nativism and xenophobia that took many forms, from the revival of the Ku Klux Klan and its fear that a foreign pope would order American Catholics to undertake un-American actions, to race riots in Washington, Chicago, and elsewhere. There was the “Red Scare,” spearheaded by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, known to supporters as “the Fighting Quaker” and to critics as “the Quaking Fighter.” Among other things, Palmer was certain the Communist Party, born on September 1, 1919, had infiltrated the unions. He would later write, “It is my belief that while they have stirred discontent in our midst, while they have caused irritating strikes, and while they have infected our social ideas with the disease of their own minds and their unclean morals, we can get rid of them! And not until we have done so shall we have removed the menace of Bolshevism for good.”
Palmer considered the rapid growth of the AFL and the Railroad Brotherhoods signs of Bolshevism. Between 1914 and 1919 the number of trade unionists rose from 2.7 million to 4.2 million. To Palmerites it looked like an international problem; in the United Kingdom, the Labour Party came out for nationalization of coal and other basic industries. The formation of the Communist Party in America might have given rise to the thought that this was a possibility for the United States as well. Certainly the many strikes of the period had their impact. There had been 3,353 strikes in 1918 and another 3,630 in 1919, as against the 1,204 in 1914, the last peacetime year.
By spring the rash of strikes had become a flood—more than four million workers went on strike or were locked out in 1919—threatening the nation’s industries. Steelworkers were considering closing down the giant U.S. Steel Corporation, and there was some talk of a coalminers’ strike.
These strikes resulted in part from the inflationary economy of the period. The cost of living in late 1919 was more than 80 percent higher than it had been in 1914, with most of this rise taking place after the United States entered the war in 1917. President Wilson initiated several probes into the causes and the inability of wages to keep up with prices. In addition, labor practices a later generation would consider little short of barbaric, a vestige from the early days of industrialization, were coming under sharp criticism.
Consider the situation in steel, where many laborers had a two-shift, swing-shift arrangement. Half the 191,000 U.S. Steel workers had a twelve-hour day, and half of these worked seven days a week every other week, when they swung from one shift to the other. The average work week was sixty-nine hours. There were no vacations or sick time, and of course, fringe benefits were nonexistent. Injured workers were fired. Three out of four steelworkers were paid below the government’s estimated minimums for comfort.
And this wasn’t due to the company’s financial problems. In 1919 the corporation’s retained profits were close to half a billion dollars, up from $135 million when the war began in 1914. Like so many of the companies threatened with strikes, U.S. Steel was in excellent financial shape and easily capable of making wage adjustments.
More disturbing than a possible steel stoppage were strikes and threatened walkouts by unions of transportation workers, which could paralyze their operating areas. The National Association of Letter Carriers asked for a 35 percent pay raise in a “respectful application” to Postmaster General Albert Burleson, but Burleson turned down the request. There was even some talk of strikes by policemen and firemen, who had become increasingly militant and demanded major wage concessions.
Before the war such civil servants hadn’t been organized into unions, but rather joined “benevolent societies,” which engaged in bargaining but did not claim the right to strike. Now this was changing throughout the country. By 1919 thirty-seven American cities, including Washington, D.C., St. Paul, Los Angeles, and Vicksburg, had police unions, most of them affiliated with the AFL.
There had even been some police strikes, usually brief, in which the strikers were replaced by State Guard troops or scabs. Though rare, those sporadic walkouts inspired fear. All of this prompted Senator Henry Myers of Colorado, a Democrat born during the Civil War, to declare that unless Congress found some way to put a stop to the unionization of police forces, the country would collapse. “There will be no need of holding an election in 1920 to select a Republican or Democrat president; a Soviet government will have been organized by that time.”
The most important test of the police unionization effort would come in Calvin Coolidge’s Massachusetts. On July 26, 1919, Governor Coolidge and his family left Boston for a vacation in Plymouth, and remained there until August 18. As he packed for the trip, news about a possible police union and subsequent strike vied with reports about the debate over the League of Nations and over whether Ty Cobb, George Sisler, or “Shoeless Joe” Jackson would capture the American League batting championship. There had already been a strike of woolen workers in March, and afterwards, walkouts by silk, tobacco, marine, and buildings trade workers, with more of the same being threatened. The railroads in California, Arizona, and Nevada had been all but completely halted by unauthorized strikes called by four railroad brotherhoods.
In late January 1919 some twenty-five thousand shipyard workers had gone on strike in Seattle, only weeks after the new mayor, Ole Hansen, took office—some took this as a preview of what was to come throughout the nation. At one time Hansen had been quite progressive, and even pro-labor, but the 1917 Soviet Revolution caused him to rethink his positions. During his 1918 campaign for mayor he had run on an antiradical and anti-union platform. Hansen denounced the strikers, and became apoplectic when a week later the area’s other unions called a general strike, in which forty thousand additional workers left their jobs. It was the first time an American city had been hit by a general strike. Life in Seattle was completely disrupted—the public schools closed; newspapers ceased publication; the city’s transportation system ground to a halt; restaurants were shuttered; and soup kitchens had to be organized.
Mayor Hansen took a strong stand against the action. He branded the strikers as “communists” and “radicals,” and sent telegrams to newspapers throughout the nation:The sympathetic revolution was called in the exact manner as was the revolution in Petrograd. Labor tried to run everything. Janitors and engineers in schools were called out; everything was stopped, except a few things that were exempted.
We refused to ask for exemptions from anyone. The seat of government is at City Hall. We organized 1,000 extra police, armed with rifles and shotguns, and told them to shoot on sight anyone causing disorder. We got ready for business. We had already had trouble on two instances and had comp
letely whipped the Bolsheviki. They knew we meant business and they started no trouble.
“Any man who attempts to take over the control of municipal government functions here will be shot on sight,” Hansen told reporters. He promised to swear in ten thousand additional special policemen if necessary. Meanwhile, Wilson interrupted his campaign for the League to offer federal aid. The state militia set up machine gun emplacements at the major intersections, as though expecting a repeat of the Petrograd revolution. The strikers couldn’t stand this kind of pressure, and they started returning after two days. Three more days, and it was all over.
Washington Governor Ernest Lister, the only Democrat who had been elected statewide, a progressive activist who had a strong pro-labor record, said and did nothing in this situation. For one thing, he was far from the scene, and for another, he was ailing, stricken by Bright’s Disease, and had relinquished his duties to conservative Republican Lieutenant Governor Louis Hart. More important, this was a municipal problem, and governors generally did not interfere in such matters.
So Hart was ignored, while Hansen was hailed as the “Fighting Mayor” and became a national figure and a target for radicals. A bomb was mailed to him two months later but was detected before it went off. Hansen charged the Bolsheviks had marked him for death because he was the symbol of a pure Americanism.
Then, on August 28, Hansen announced his resignation as mayor. Still considered a hero by his fellow Washingtonians, he said, “I am tired out and am going fishing.” But this was half a year after the strike. Why did it take so long for him to resign? And why, instead of relaxing, did he embark on a national lecture tour, in which he warned against Bolsheviks and called for immigration restriction? One reason might have been the $40,000 in lecture fees he earned over a seven-month period, but the talk in Washington was that because of his new fame and the public fear of Bolshevism and unions, Hansen might become a candidate for the Republican nomination for vice president.