by Robert Sobel
William Allen White, who interviewed Coolidge in 1924 for a series of articles in Collier’s Weekly, recalled that Coolidge told him, “A lot of people in Plymouth can’t understand how I got to be president, least of all my father.” He then added, “Now a lot of those people remember some interesting things that never happened.” To this, White observed, “I noticed that President Coolidge never grinned after his jokes to punctuate them. This misled people. They sometimes thought his remarks were dumb. Whatever may be said of Calvin Coolidge, he was not dumb. And many a dumb remark of his afterwards recounted merely reflects the dullness of the narrator.”
That was the way some rural Vermonters cracked jokes; they could appreciate the Coolidge wit, while outsiders sometimes had trouble fathoming it. The humor was rarely displayed publicly, in part because when it was, many of his listeners, unattuned to it, would be puzzled rather than delighted. Coolidge understood this. “Whenever I do indulge my sense of humor, it always gets me into trouble,” he said plaintively. So he often remained silent.
There was another, more plausible reason for the silence. Coolidge did not suffer fools gladly, wanted to save time, and he found silence was the best way to accomplish this. Once he was quite talkative in a meeting with Bernard Baruch, and after a while Coolidge asked why the financier was smiling. Baruch replied, “Mr. President, you are so different from what people say you are. Your smile indicates both amusement at that and interest—and I hope, friendliness.” Coolidge seemed genuinely pleased at this, so Baruch added, “Everybody said you never say anything.” “Well, Baruch,” Coolidge replied, “many times I say only ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to people. Even that is too much. It winds them up for twenty minutes more.”
While in the Coolidge cabinet, Secretary of Commerce Hoover had the same experience. After Hoover’s election to the presidency in 1928, Coolidge gave him some advice: “You have to stand every day three or four hours of visitors. Nine-tenths of them want something they ought not have. If you keep dead-still they will run down in three or four minutes. If you even cough or smile they will start up all over again.”
In 1933, when the country had supposedly soured on Coolidge and all he represented, a friendly book appeared entitled Coolidge Wit and Wisdom: 125 Short Stories about “Cal.” Most of the Coolidge stories that survive do indeed deal with his sense of humor. It was said that at one of his well-known breakfasts for politicians, the president poured his coffee and cream into his saucer. Seeing this, some of his guests did the same, and waited for Coolidge to start slurping it up. Instead, he bent down and placed the saucer on the floor for his dog.
Once he invited White House Secret Service agent Edmund Starling to a late night snack. They went to the butler’s pantry, and the president sliced the bread and cheese for sandwiches. “I’ll bet no other president ever made cheese sandwiches for you,” he said to Starling, who quite properly replied, “No indeed, it is a great honor.” Coolidge then added glumly, “And I have to furnish the cheese, too.” Starling didn’t know whether the president was joking.
Will Rogers, the leading humorist of the time, appreciated Coolidge wit, and wrote:Mr. Coolidge had more subtle humor than almost any public man I ever met. I have often said I would like to have been hidden in his desk somewhere and just heard the little sly “digs” that he pulled on various people that never got ’em at all. I bet he wasted more humor on folks than almost anybody.
Rogers noted that Coolidge was the master at short quips. Coolidge’s humor was not of the kind that causes belly laughs. Rather, it was light and often appeared mean to those who did not understand it. There was that famous tale about his wife asking about the preacher’s sermon on a Sunday morning. “What did he talk about?” she wanted to know. “Sin,” was the concise reply. When asked to expand upon this, Coolidge said, “He’s against it.” When he heard the story, Coolidge looked ahead blankly and remarked, “It would be better if it were true.” But the joke itself indicates the teller understood Coolidge rhetoric—short, to the point, and epigrammatic. Moreover, it illustrates the affection in which the tellers of such stories held Coolidge; he was not the butt of stories, but rather the protagonist.
The dry wit was a Coolidge family trait. In 1920, when Calvin was considered a presidential possibility, his father, John, was asked about his son. He replied with a straight face, “It always seemed to be that Calvin could get more sap out of a maple tree than any of the other boys around here.” To those who couldn’t understand what John Coolidge meant by that, Calvin’s similarly oblique statements would be incomprehensible. Calvin Coolidge’s younger son, also named Calvin, flashed the family wit while he was working as a laborer in the Hatfield, Massachusetts, tobacco fields. Calvin mentioned who he was, to which one of the boys said, “Gee, if the president was my father, I wouldn’t be working here.” Calvin replied, “You would, if your father were my father.”
Coolidge took steps in those early days in the White House geared to ensure himself the nomination of a political party that hadn’t wanted him as vice president in 1920. He joined a church, the First Congregational, whose pastor was an Amherst man whom Coolidge liked. He met with the press, telling the reporters he intended to continue Harding’s practice of twice weekly press conferences. Coolidge was good with the press. “I want you to know the executive offices will be open as far as possible, so that you may get any information your readers will be interested to have. This is your government. You can be very helpful in the administration of it.” He was as good as his word. Coolidge was to hold 520 press conferences, an average of nearly 8 a month, and according to Sheldon Stern of the John F. Kennedy Library, he delivered more speeches than any of his predecessors. For the press conferences, he adhered to the format Harding had used. All questions were written and gone through by his secretary beforehand. Then Coolidge would answer those he wished to, and discard the others. No direct quotations would be allowed; instead, the reporter could attribute the statement to a “White House spokesman.”
Coolidge handled reporters with skill, tact, and imagination, and they genuinely liked him. He certainly knew how to massage reporters’ egos. In his Autobiography, Coolidge noted, “One of my most pleasant memories will be the friendly relations which I always had with the representatives of the press in Washington. I shall always remember that at the conclusion of the first regular conference I held with them at the White House office they broke into hearty applause.” And things got even better. In a 1926 press conference, he told the Washington press corps, which contained fewer than twenty reporters at the time, “I wish to take this opportunity to express my amazement at the constant correctness of my views as you report them to the country. It is very seldom that any error creeps in. I don’t know how that could be done.”
The press not only was courteous to and respectful of Coolidge—that was to have been expected of their attitudes toward all presidents in this period—but most of the reporters genuinely liked him. Frank Kent, who was highly critical of Coolidge, wrote in the Nation, one of the leading anti-Coolidge publications, of this in the March 16, 1927, edition, when Coolidge had been dealing with the Washington press for almost four years:Since Mr. Coolidge entered the White House he has had more solid press support than any other president. Frequently he has through the spokesman expressed his appreciation. It would be strange indeed if he did not feel it.
One of the reporters, Lyle Wilson, later wrote, “Calvin Coolidge was the contriver of the most persistent and transparent political hoax of twentieth century America,” referring to the press conferences. “The president would be completely relaxed. I always had the impression he had not peeked at the questions before we arrived. The briefings and skull sessions which preceded the Eisenhower and Kennedy press conferences were not for Mr. Coolidge.”
Coolidge summoned House Speaker Gillett and Senate Whip Charles Curtis, who did most of the work for Republican leader Lodge, and asked for recommendations for a private secretary. According to one accou
nt, Coolidge told them, “I recognize that a large part of the work of the presidency is political. I want a secretary who understands that phase of the work. I ask you to recommend to me a man who knows the House and Senate and their membership. Particularly, he must know the House, for I know something about the Senate myself.”
They helped him select C. Bascom Slemp, a fifty-three-year-old political veteran, who at the age of eleven had served as a page in the Virginia House of Delegates, obtaining the post at the behest of his father, a member of the legislature who later went on to the U.S. House of Representatives. Slemp filled his father’s post on his death, and served in the House for eleven years, ending in early 1923. Slemp was considered a master political manipulator who knew his way around the Capitol. He was a private man who spoke sparingly, whose personality would fit in well with that of Coolidge. Clinton Gilbert, a veteran Washington correspondent, described Slemp as having “a slim, rather elegant-looking figure, his movements are cat-like, his fingers slender and rather deft.”
The new president was well aware of the need to win the respect and support of the congressional Republicans, and this was one of Slemp’s most important assignments. His selection was the first clear indication that Coolidge intended to contest for the nomination in 1924.
Some familiar faces were on hand to lend assistance. Harding had his “Ohio Gang.” Coolidge brought with him a group of Massachusetts confidants. Frank Stearns was there, of course. Coolidge called on him for company and to take care of delicate errands. He thought better with Stearns in the room. There were times Coolidge would call him to his office and the two men would simply look out the window in silence. Once, after an hour or so of this, without a comment from either man, Stearns rose to leave, and Coolidge said, “Stay a while longer.”
Dwight Morrow, now a partner at J.P. Morgan, had known Coolidge since they were classmates at Amherst. He remained a close friend. William Butler, who had been Murray Crane’s right-hand man, now worked with Coolidge. Butler was on the Republican National Committee. With Coolidge’s support he became chairman in 1924. When Henry Cabot Lodge died in November that year, Butler took his place in the Senate. Coolidge remained intimate with Gillett. These four constituted the “Massachusetts Gang.” Senator Weeks of Massachusetts, who had never been close with Coolidge, was not included in the inner circle, and of course, even before his death, Senator Lodge and Coolidge were at odds with one another. Aside from the “gang,” Coolidge had few friends in Washington.
Coolidge retained Harding’s cabinet, but by the end of his presidency all but four members had been replaced. The last to go was Hoover, who resigned to run for president in 1928. Coolidge respected but disliked Hoover, whom he called the “Wonder Boy,” because he always seemed to want to change things. Coolidge said of Hoover, “That man has given me nothing but advice, and all of it bad.” When Hoover persisted in warning against some problem or other, Coolidge said, “Mr. Hoover, if you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you and you have to battle with only one of them.” In recounting this story, Hoover added that he agreed, but “when the tenth trouble reached him he was wholly unprepared, and it had by that time acquired such momentum that it spelled disaster.” Hoover’s replacement was William Whiting, a Massachusetts paper manufacturer who had never held political office—but who had graduated from Amherst in 1886, one year after Coolidge, and Coolidge tended to favor Amherst men in his appointments.
Treasury Secretary Mellon was Coolidge’s most trusted advisor in the cabinet. After their first meeting on Coolidge’s becoming president—a meeting that centered on financial issues—Mellon said, “Mr. President, I neglected to tell you that I had come to resign,” to which Coolidge replied, “Forget it.”
Coolidge had a somewhat unusual style. He delegated a great deal of authority, and once told Bruce Barton, “The president shouldn’t do too much, and he shouldn’t know too much.” It was a sentiment he often repeated, leading some to believe him lazy and uncaring, which was not the case; Coolidge worked harder than most presidents of his time. He explained himself this way:The president can’t resign. If a member of the cabinet makes a mistake and destroys his standing with the country, he can get out, or the president can ask him to get out. But if he has involved the president in the mistake, the president has to stay there to the end of his term, and to that extent the people’s faith in their government has been diminished. So I constantly said to my cabinet: “There are many things you gentlemen must not tell me. If you blunder, you can leave, or I can invite you to leave. But if you draw me into all your department decisions and something goes wrong, I must stay here. And by involving me you have lowered the faith of the people in their government.”
One can only wonder whether presidents in the 1970s and afterward have considered this matter.
In his first weeks and even months in office, Coolidge did little that differed from the Harding agenda. Coolidge was a careful president. In his Autobiography he wrote, “The words of the president have an enormous weight and ought not to be used indiscriminately.” He was as good as his word, adding to his reputation as Silent Cal.
Bruce Barton wrote in the American Review of Reviews that the best way to understand the new president would be to read his speeches in Have Faith in Massachusetts. “They will find in it evidence of all the qualities which have been touched upon in this brief article—his straight thinking, his courage, his familiar knowledge of history, his utter freedom from pretense.”
Coolidge was the last president to compose almost all of his speeches. True, some of them were polished by assistants, and others, until 1925, were the handiwork of speechwriters, the most important of whom was a newspaperman, Judson Welliver. According to Fuess, “President Coolidge took notes on yellow paper, dictated his speech, revised it then in longhand, and then had the final clean copy made.” Grace Coolidge later recalled:Up to the time that he became president, Mr. Coolidge wrote his speeches on sheets of foolscap paper in pencil, going over them again and again, changing a word here, transposing and rewriting with infinite pains. When he had finished a speech, it was given to his secretary to be typewritten. None was ever wholly satisfactory to him at the time. Afterwards, he would read one and say, “That was a pretty good speech, after all.”
When he became president, he began dictating his speeches to his stenographer, a quiet young man of inexhaustible patience, devoted to his chief.
Mrs. Coolidge went on to cite an exception to this practice. While governor of Massachusetts, Coolidge delivered a speech that dealt with composers and musical compositions, subjects about which he knew next to nothing. “When he joined us at the conclusion of the ceremony, I burst into laughter in which he quietly joined, a little shamefacedly, as I asked him where he obtained all that information. He did not commit himself.”
When one of his devoted admirers collected Coolidge’s speeches into a volume entitled Have Faith in Massachusetts, to be used in an attempt to win the 1920 GOP presidential nomination, Coolidge refused to permit this speech to be included. It wouldn’t have been right to have done so.
A writer in the Outlook thought, “Few, if any, public men of national reputation in our history have been so little known as Calvin Coolidge is and yet so much trusted.” Before he became president, the American people outside of Massachusetts knew him only for his actions in the police strike, but this would now change. Scores of magazine and newspaper articles sketched his upbringing and career, and some speculated about his possible agenda and political philosophy.
In 1923 the Literary Digest discerned the theme of the new administration:Monroe had his era of “good feeling”; Jackson, as one of our editors recalls, his shibboleth of “local self-government”; we associate “Union” with Lincoln, the “square deal” and the “strenuous life” with Roosevelt, the “New Freedom” and “making the world safe for democracy” with Wilson; and, as Harding was consecrated to t
he restoration of “normalcy,” so the correspondents tell us, President Coolidge is pledged to the preservation of “stability.”
Coolidge supposedly told reporters that he stood for “stability, confidence, and reassurance.” He added that his administration did not intend to “surrender to every emotional movement seeking remedies for economic conditions by legislation.” The New York Times took this to mean that Coolidge wanted to assure the business community that it could make plans without worrying about sudden shifts from Washington; the New York World thought Coolidge would not alter tariff rates unless absolutely necessary, and would not “rush to the front with proposals to Congress that would tend to undermine stability.” This, reflected the Philadelphia Inquirer, “is the kind of assurance that will be appreciated.” The Philadelphia Public Ledger called the policy of stability “good hard sense.”
This country has come to a considerable degree of “normalcy.” What it needs now is a stabilization of its favorable situation and confidence that this will continue. Wages are very high and unemployment is negligible. Labor is, indeed, very well off. Business is good and industry is humming. The farm hysteria is hardly as vocal now as it was thirty days ago. Outside the wheat states, the farmer is going along very well. He had ample credit—too much in fact, according to his best friends. The all-around condition of the country is sound and warrants much optimism. Far-reaching changes, such as are constantly sought by the political dare-devil doctors, are the last thing this country needs.
In large part, the country had calmed down from the turbulent postwar period and was growing economically. Many of the heated debates of that time had also either ended or muted. Given his temperament and inclination, Coolidge was a near-perfect person to preside over a period of stability. Once again, he was fortunate in coming to office when he did.