by Robert Sobel
Rumors of additional malfeasance, perhaps involving the president himself, swirled around Washington in this period. According to some, Coolidge could not have helped but know of them. Yet there is no evidence Harding had sought his advice regarding any of this, or had informed Coolidge of his suspicions. This was the situation in June 1923, as the Hardings and their party prepared to set out for what he called the “Voyage of Understanding,” a tour of the United States, including Alaska. On their return to Washington, they would presumably deal with the developing scandals.
Through all of this Coolidge remained in the background. He had family problems. His father-in-law, Andrew Goodhue, died on April 25 after a short illness, and the Coolidges attended the funeral. While not as close to Goodhue as he was to members of his own family, Coolidge continued to be deeply affected by the deaths of those close to him.
At this time, Coolidge had to contemplate that he might soon be obliged to retire from politics. In early July Coolidge attended a political conference in Woodstock, Massachusetts, where he conferred with Governor Cox, who raised the matter of Coolidge’s future. Would it make good political sense to prepare for a run against David Walsh for his Senate seat in 1924? Having experienced life in the Senate, Coolidge wasn’t interested. “No, if I don’t run for vice president again, I won’t run for anything.”
It was reasonable. While he had been a political power in Massachusetts, Coolidge was now a cipher in Washington, where he lacked a constituency or even associates. He would lunch in the Senate restaurant, usually by himself, and senators seldom approached him to talk or invited him to join a group at another table. This treatment of a vice president by members of his own party surprised freshman Republican Congressman James Sinclair of North Dakota. Sinclair spoke of this unusual situation with his fellow North Dakotan, freshman Republican Senator Edwin Ladd, with whom he was having lunch. Glancing at Coolidge, who was munching away in a corner by himself, facing the wall, Sinclair asked, “Is this how you treat your presiding officer?” “Nobody has anything to do with him,” replied Ladd. “After this, of course, he is through.”
Ladd held the by-then general belief that Coolidge would be dropped from the ticket. One of Harding’s close advisors, advertising man Albert Lasker, said he would support the reelection bid only if the president pledged to support Hiram Johnson for the presidential nomination in 1928. A Harding biographer, Francis Russell, asserted that in 1923, shortly before Harding’s death, Kansas Senator Charles Curtis lobbied the president to replace Coolidge. According to Russell, the president responded, “We are not worried about that little fellow in Massachusetts. Charlie Dawes is the man!”
It didn’t happen. Ladd died in 1925, by which time Calvin Coolidge was not only still around, but was president, and Charles Dawes was his vice president.
9
President
When I became president it was perfectly apparent that the key by which the way could be opened to national progress was constructive economy. Only by the use of that policy could the high rates of taxation, which were retarding our development and prosperity, be diminished, and the enormous burden of our public debt be reduced.
The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge
THE COOLIDGES WERE NO LONGER in Washington when the Harding party left Washington’s Union Station on June 20 for St. Louis, the first destination on what was planned as a two-month speaking and fact-finding tour. After Congress recessed on March 3, the Coolidges set out for a few days’ vacation in Virginia, and then went to their Northampton home, where Coolidge read, attended to correspondence, visited old friends, and delivered some speeches. Toward the end of the month they packed for a stay with John Coolidge, who had indicated he could use the vice president’s help with some household repairs. The Coolidge boys found work in the area, and so in late July Coolidge was in Plymouth Notch, at his father’s home, taking care of chores, while the president was in Alaska, making speeches, seeing the sights, and doubtless considering what to do about the unraveling scandals that threatened his administration. Harding was asleep when his ship, heading to Washington State, struck another in the fog. One of his aides ran to the presidential cabin and found Harding there, his head in his hands. The president asked what had happened and was told of the collision. “I hope the boat sinks,” he replied.
Harding and his party reached Seattle on July 27. The president was weary and troubled, and reporters wrote of how tired he appeared. His voice was hoarse, his face pallid. There was some thought he might be suffering from ptomaine poisoning. When he arrived in San Francisco two days later, he was met by a heart specialist and a wheelchair. Harding disdained the wheelchair, walking instead to the waiting limousine, which took him to the Palace Hotel. He developed a fever the next day, but soon recovered. Then his situation worsened. He died there on Friday, August 2, at 7:32 PM. While there was some disagreement as to the cause of death, it was given as apoplexy.
What happened next in Plymouth Notch turned out to be the most dramatic moment of the forthcoming Coolidge administration, a near-perfect way for the nation to be introduced to its new president.
August 2 was to have been Coolidge’s last day vacationing in Plymouth Notch. On August 1, Coolidge was photographed attending to a diseased maple. He climbed a bench, hatchet in hand, and chipped away at a cavity in the tree so it could be cemented. The vice president was in a three-piece business suit, minus the jacket. Grace Coolidge was raking some leaves. The picture appeared in the next day’s newspapers.
Only a small detail of newspapermen had been sent to cover the vice president, taking photos of Coolidge in his shirt sleeves, pitching hay, and performing other tasks. Coolidge obligingly permitted photographers to take as many pictures as they wanted; they particularly enjoyed taking pictures of Coolidge wearing a blue woolen frock his father and grandfather had worn when doing chores. He wrote of this in his Autobiography:When I went to visit the old home in later years I liked to wear the one he [his grandfather] left, with some fine calfskin boots about two inches too large for me, which were made for him when he went to the Vermont legislature about 1858. When news pictures began to be taken of me there, I found that among the public this was generally supposed to be a makeup costume, which it was not, so I have been obliged to forego the comfort of wearing it. In public life it is sometimes necessary in order to appear really natural to be actually artificial.
That night the Coolidges retired early, so as to be fresh the next morning.
A Harding secretary sent a telegram to Washington to inform officials of the death. It took several hours to get through. The message was relayed to White River Junction, Vermont, then to Bridgewater, eight miles from Plymouth. In Coolidge’s hometown there was no telegraph station and only one telephone, at the general store.
Wilfred Perkins, the Bridgewater telegrapher, tried to telephone the store, but no one answered, presumably because the proprietor was sleeping. Perkins made two copies of the message, and rushed outside. He roused a stenographer, Erwin Geisser, the vice president’s chauffeur Joseph McInerney, and newspaperman William Crawford, who was at a boardinghouse in Bridgewater. Together they set out in the vice presidential limousine to Plymouth Notch.
Other newspapermen at the Ludlow Hotel received the news, and all of them hastened to the Notch. The Crawford party arrived first, and McInerney knocked on the door. John Coolidge awoke, lit a kerosene lamp, and went to see who was there at that time of night. They told him the news, and John Coolidge called up to his son on the second floor. The vice president came to the top of the stairs. As he recalled in his Autobiography, he noticed that his father’s voice trembled.
As the only times I had ever observed that before were when death had visited our family, I knew that something of the gravest nature had occurred. His emotion was partly due to the knowledge that a man whom he had met and liked was gone, partly to the feeling that must possess all of our citizens when the life of their president is taken from them. But he
must have been moved also by the thought of the many sacrifices he had made to place me where I was, the twenty-five mile drives in storms and in zero weather over our mountain roads to carry me to the academy and all the tenderness and care he had lavished upon me in the thirty-eight years since the death of my mother in the hope that I might sometime rise to a position of importance, which he now saw realized.
According to Senator George Pepper of Pennsylvania, whose source was presidential portrait artist Charles Hopkinson, Coolidge’s first thought on learning of Harding’s death was: “I believe I can swing it.”
Coolidge and his wife returned to the bedroom. They washed, dressed, and knelt by the bed to pray. Then they went downstairs, where Coolidge dictated a message of sympathy to Mrs. Harding. The house was now crowded with reporters and others.
Coolidge received a telegram from Attorney General Daugherty urging him to take the oath of office immediately. He went across the street to the general store and telephoned Secretary of State Hughes, who informed him the oath could be administered by a notary. Coolidge told Hughes his father was a notary, and the secretary replied, “Fine.” Coolidge returned home, and in the downstairs sitting room John Coolidge, using the family Bible, swore his son in as president. The time was 2:47 AM.
It was a small room, fourteen by seventeen feet, with an eight-foot ceiling. It held a worn carpet, a wood stove, a rocking chair, and was lit by an oil lamp. Paintings and drawings of the scene appeared in virtually all the nation’s newspapers, and were replicated and sold in the hundreds of thousands. Some reporters noted that this was the only time a president had taken the oath in his home (or to be precise, his father’s home). It still is. In addition to the Coolidges, there were their sons, Geisser, McInerney, Congressman Porter Dale, and his associate, L.L. Lane, and Crawford.5 It wasn’t Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin, but nothing in John Coolidge’s small home—with its faded furniture, and its lack of electricity, indoor plumbing, a telephone, and central heating—would have surprised Lincoln.
This dramatic ceremony was yet another instance of the uncanny good political fortune Coolidge experienced throughout his career. Had Harding died on August 3 rather than August 2, Coolidge would have been at the Currier mansion, and probably would have taken the oath from a judge in a huge ballroom. Newspapermen seeking symbols surely would have made a commotion about that. As it was, they played up the humble John Coolidge residence. Americans were deeply impressed by the way the transfer of power had occurred.
After the swearing in the Coolidges returned to their rooms and went back to sleep. They were up again at 6:00 AM. Before taking leave of his father, Coolidge noticed that a stone step to the front door had been knocked over. “Better have that fixed,” he said, and went into the waiting limousine. It had not gone far when Coolidge ordered it stopped. He got out of the car, walked to the family cemetery, went to his mother’s grave, and stood silently by it for a short time.
When I started for Washington that morning I turned aside from the main road to make a short devotional visit to the grave of my mother. It had been a comfort to me during my boyhood when I was troubled to be near her last resting place, even in the dead of night. Some way, that morning, she seemed very near to me.
Because Coolidge had such a close relationship with his family, this was undoubtedly a sincere and genuine gesture, but it did add greatly to the humble, devoted image the new president was presenting to the country. In this period virtually all Americans liked what they were learning about him. As the months that followed brought out more and more details of the Harding scandals, his successor remained untouched.
The funeral train arrived in Washington on August 7, and Harding lay in state in the Capitol. The name of Lincoln continued to be heard incessantly during the week between the death and the burial, and afterward as well. Harding and Coolidge were both being compared to Lincoln, and for good reason. Harding was genuinely loved, and even those who lampooned him seemed to bear him some measure of affection. Prior to his elevation to the presidency, Coolidge was known for the Boston police strike and those jokes and stories about Silent Cal. The swearing in immediately changed all of this—at least for a while.
All presidents come to office with a reservoir of good will, especially those who arrive as a result of the death of the incumbent. Coolidge was no exception. What was unusual in his case was that he continued to retain this good will throughout his life. Other vice presidents who succeeded on the deaths of their predecessors did not fare as well. Andrew Johnson was impeached, Lyndon Johnson was driven from office, and Harry Truman’s popularity declined sharply soon after succeeding Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In the introduction to his perceptive Coolidge and the Historians, Thomas Silver wrote:Think back upon a decade of upheaval in American history. The country’s youngest president, having succeeded a conservative Republican and having sounded a clarion call to the progressive forces in the country, is now gone forever from the presidency. An activist Democratic president skillfully shepherds legislation through Congress, but wolfish war follows close upon the heels of domestic reform. Radical protests against the system, and a few bombings, ignite national hysteria. The president retires in bitterness, soon to die. His Republican successor at first holds forth the hope of restoring the national composure; but he is replaced by his vice president after a truncated term marred by economic dislocation and executive scandal unprecedented in American history.
Of course, Silver is referring here to the line of presidents from William McKinley to Theodore Roosevelt to Wilson and on to Harding, but he knows the reader will be thinking of Eisenhower– Kennedy–Johnson–Nixon. He might have added that the next persons in line, Coolidge and Ford, could not have achieved the presidency except in the ways they did.
The mechanical aspects of the presidential transition were familiar enough; McKinley had died within the memory of many in Washington, and those in government knew the drill. Mrs. Harding was invited to remain in the White House as long as she desired, and in fact the Coolidges did not move into the White House until four days after she had left. Coolidge issued a proclamation of national mourning, and the Coolidges went to Marion for the funeral, which took place on August 10. Before then, however, Coolidge took the oath a second time, since Daugherty worried about the legitimacy of having a state official swearing in a national figure. This was done without the public learning of it; Coolidge realized it would take the edge off the drama of that scene in Plymouth Notch.
The nature of the presidency in 1923 was different from what it is today, or even as it evolved under Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Coolidge was the last president to spend hours standing in the White House lobby greeting and shaking hands with casual visitors on their tours. He was the last president to have only one secretary and no other aides. Coolidge still didn’t know how to drive an automobile. He didn’t have a telephone on his desk; there was one in a little booth outside his office, but he never used it. He explained to Bruce Barton, “The president should not talk on the telephone. In the first place, you can’t be sure it is private, and, besides, it isn’t in keeping with the dignity of the office.”
In his first few weeks in office the American people learned more about Coolidge. Of course there had already been stories about him, some apocryphal, others true, and many a blend of the two. During this period the public learned that on the living room wall of Coolidge’s Northampton, Massachusetts, home was a sampler that read:A wise old owl lived in an oak
The more he saw, the less he spoke,
The less he spoke the more he heard,
Why can’t we be like that old bird?
How had the public learned of the poem? Through Coolidge. His image was no accident. Rather, he carefully cultivated it from the moment he entered politics. In his own quiet way, he was a media virtuoso. Coolidge was, quite simply, the master of the self-made myth. He knew his limitations and strengths better than did most of our presidents. His public p
ersona was different from any the country—or even Massachusetts—was accustomed to. In February 1920, when he was being talked of as a presidential possibility, a journalist had written of him:If Coolidge shakes hands, the shake is brief, businesslike; he has none of that conversational small change with which the majority of us endeavor to give value to our casual meetings; he can sit unperturbed in the midst of silence and company; he tells no stories, cracks no jokes; he seldom laughs. Warmth, geniality, good fellowship, all seem alien qualities. And yet he is regarded as the best “vote-getter” in Massachusetts. Old railbirds about the State House in Boston will tell you: “Cal Coolidge has upset all our ideas of how to succeed in politics.”
Cartoonists during the 1920s often portrayed Coolidge as a dour, disgruntled soul who, as Alice Roosevelt Longworth supposedly said, looked as though “he was weaned on a sour pickle.” The Coolidge archives have many pictures of him laughing heartily, but the press rarely used these; newspapers seemed to prefer the photographs in which he looked blandly and blankly out on the world. Of course, that was the image the president had deliberately fixed on reporters who covered him. Yet he possessed a fine, wry, sense of humor, marked by understatement, introduced when the listener least expected it, and delivered with that Vermont twang and solemn face and demeanor.