Coolidge

by Robert Sobel

  The Daugherty affair was to be one of the earliest tests of the Coolidge mettle.

  Coolidge remained steadfast in early 1924. On the evening of February 18 Borah urged the president to ask for Daugherty’s resignation. While they were talking, Daugherty entered the room, as arranged by Coolidge. He wanted to witness a verbal trial by combat between the two to clarify his own thinking.

  The next day Democratic Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana introduced a resolution calling for an investigation of the Justice Department, charging that it had been Daugherty’s duty to prosecute Fall, Denby, Sinclair, Doheny, and Forbes and had failed to do so. Much of this was sheer innuendo. Wheeler, who was Walsh’s first term stablemate, was young, brash, and ambitious, and he utilized the kinds of words that had been heard during the Red Scare. According to him:Recently when the oil scandal first developed it appears the attorney general’s name was mixed in it. It appeared, if you please, that he was a friend of Ned McLean. Everybody knows that he was a friend of Doheny. Everybody knows that these three men met in the apartment of the attorney general from time to time. Everybody knows that Jess Smith, who was brought from the state of Ohio and had an office in the Department of Justice, and who was not on the payroll, was accepting cases that arose in the Department of Justice.

  Coolidge conferred with Lodge, Borah, Pepper, Hughes, and Hoover, all of whom wanted Daugherty out of the cabinet. Coolidge clearly was troubled on this score. Just what was it that Daugherty had done to merit dismissal? This wasn’t akin to the case of Fall, who clearly was a transgressor. Even Denby appeared more culpable.

  Daugherty’s memoir, Inside the Harding Tragedy, is of little help in the matter. It is a bitter, slanted, and self-serving document, yet it is difficult to escape the conclusion that there was much smoke and little fire in the Daugherty situation, and also that the real target was Coolidge himself. The president clearly was very popular with the public, although the GOP professional politicians did not care for him, and they were willing to cooperate with the Democrats if there was a way. It would be their excuse to find another nominee.

  Thus it was with some trepidation that Slemp appeared as a witness on February 25. The committee questioned Slemp about telegrams he had sent and received in this period, and Caraway suggested that there was something sinister in that some of them had been coded. When Lodge rose to defend Coolidge and attack the Democrats who were attempting to smear him, some Democrats replied that Lodge, who had vilified Wilson mercilessly, was the last person to talk about such matters. In the end, the attacks backfired. Nothing was introduced that remotely tied Coolidge to the scandals, and he emerged stronger than ever.

  On February 29 the Democrats sponsored Senate Resolution 180, asking Coolidge to direct the Secretary of the Treasury to turn over to the Public Lands Committee the income tax records of Doheny, Fall, and Sinclair. Coolidge refused to do so, stating this would be a violation of the Revenue Act of 1921.

  The next assault came from Senator Wheeler of Montana, who charged Daugherty with criminal activities. Daugherty countered by charging Wheeler was a “leader of the International Workers of the World” and had once been indicted on bribery charges. Wheeler called two chief witnesses: Roxie Smith, Jess Smith’s widow, who hated Daugherty, and Gaston Means, a former Treasury Department employee, who later boasted he had been accused of every crime in the book and convicted of none. In July 1924, however, Means’s luck ran out. He was convicted of accepting bribes in a Prohibition-related charge, and was sentenced to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Means achieved some notoriety later by charging that Harding had been murdered. Little material came out of the hearings, but in the process of the investigation Daugherty refused the committee access to some Justice Department files, and refused to testify. The committee turned up innuendoes, charges, and circumstantial evidence, but nothing that merited an indictment.

  Nevertheless, the president by then had decided that Daugherty had to go. Borah was twisting the screws, threatening to ask for Daugherty’s impeachment. Coolidge had already decided on a replacement, an old friend from Amherst, Harlan Fiske Stone, the former dean of Columbia Law School and a distinguished jurist. Stone had been recommended to Coolidge by Congressman Bertrand Snell, another Amherst man. To replace Denby, Borah suggested Curtis Wilbur, an Annapolis graduate who was serving as chief justice of the California Supreme Court. Both nominations were deemed outstanding, quite a change from Fall and Denby, or even Daugherty.

  In the end, Coolidge prevailed upon Chief Justice William Howard Taft, with whom he had formed a strong relationship, to urge Daugherty to resign. But Daugherty would not give in without a fight. When learning on February 27 that Coolidge intended to ask for his resignation, he wrote to the president, arguing that he had “as much at stake as you have and you must do me the justice of assuring yourself on that point.”

  The refusal to turn over the Justice Department files provided Coolidge with the excuse to ask for his resignation on March 27. In his letter, Coolidge said:I am not questioning your fairness or integrity. I am merely reciting the fact that you are placed in two positions, one your personal interest, the other your office of attorney general, which may be in conflict. How can I satisfy a request for action in matters of this nature on the grounds that you, as attorney general, advise against it, when you are the individual against whom the inquiry is directed necessarily have a personal interest in it?

  Daugherty’s reply was immediate and forceful: Your suggestion that an attack upon a cabinet officer disqualifies him from further official service is a dangerous doctrine. Mr. President, all the pretended charges against me are false. But, whether true or false, if a member of the cabinet is to be incapacitated or disqualified by the preferment of charges against him, no matter how malicious and groundless, and he is compelled to give up his responsible position and sacrifice his honor for the time being because of such attacks, no man in any official position is safe, and the most honorable, upright, and efficient public servants could be swept from office and stable government by clamor.

  Nevertheless, Daugherty resigned the next day. The press approved. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, an administration newspaper, wrote, “It is with regret and relief that we view the resignation—regret that it was forced by unfair and outrageous methods, relief that the government has been relieved of an embarrassment that was a great burden.”

  Daugherty intended to resume his law practice in Columbus, Ohio, but he couldn’t escape censure. With the Republican convention about to begin, the Senate condemned the former attorney general by a vote of 70 to 2. From Columbus, Daugherty said that Wheeler was a dupe of the communists, and that the files he refused to surrender contained “abundant proof of the plans, purposes, and hellish designs of the Communist International.”

  Harlan Stone was appointed attorney general on April 2, and had no difficulty being confirmed. By then the country had wearied of the Harding scandals. The Wheeler hearings continued, but the committee was unable to demonstrate additional scandals or sensational revelations. Then, on April 8, Wheeler himself was indicted on a charge of unlawfully receiving a retainer from businessmen trying to obtain prospecting permits from Secretary Fall. The senator denied the allegations, and in time would be exonerated, but the tide of public opinion had turned against the committee. News of the hearings disappeared from the front pages and soon disappeared altogether. By late May, some sessions had not a single onlooker. By June, when the hearings ended, there were no indicted individuals besides Fall, Sinclair, and Doheny.

  Coolidge emerged unscathed, and even treated the events with his trademark wit. Senator Wheeler later wrote of how he and Senator Walsh went to see the president about obtaining his support for a road in Montana:So when we went to the White House to discuss the matter, Coolidge didn’t pay much attention to Walsh as he talked earnestly about the merits of a new road. The president gazed thoughtfully out the window into the rose garden. When Walsh finished, all Coolidge said,
in his extra-dry manner, was: “Well, I don’t want to see any scandal about it.”

  Of all Coolidge’s actions during the trying period, his abandonment of Daugherty should have been the most bothersome. True, in two trials in 1927 and 1928 involving the American Metal Company, Daugherty appeared guilty of wrongdoing and possibly criminal action. It now appears he was intimately connected with bootleggers, and was on the take, but in 1924 nothing had been proved. In any case, the lack of an indictment by itself was no reason to retain a cabinet member who had become a liability. An election was coming up, and Coolidge was sweeping away the embarrassments before the convention. The generation that remembered the Red Scare might have reflected on the simple unfairness of the surrender. A generation that recalls the witch hunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s should do so as well. It was not one of Coolidge’s finest moments.

  Furthermore, it would not help him politically. The party leaders in the Senate may have wanted Coolidge to dispose of Daugherty, but not because they wanted to assist him to win election in his own right. Rather, they were thinking of congressional, state, and local races that might be lost had this not been done. Half a year after assuming the presidency, Coolidge still was extremely popular in the countryside, but not in Washington, where he remained the man the party leaders didn’t want for second place in 1920 and were dubious about for 1924. This was a recipe for electoral success but political failure. It showed in the way Congress treated his legislative proposals. In his first State of the Union message, Coolidge had asked for more than thirty pieces of legislation. Only one of them, the Rogers Bill reorganizing the diplomatic service, was enacted as he wished. On the other hand, the Insurance Plan, known as the Soldier’s Bonus Bill, passed both houses, was vetoed by Coolidge, and then passed over his veto, giving veterans a twenty-year paid-up insurance policy, for a cost to the government of $2 billion.

  There was a solid majority in both parties for immigration restriction, and a bill—strongly supported by organized labor—to reduce immigration from 350,000 annually to 150,000 and to create a border patrol passed without much trouble. Coolidge signed the bill, but with some reluctance, because it singled out Japanese nationals as people who should be excluded from coming to America. In his State of the Union message he said:I regret the impossibility of severing from it the exclusion provision, which, in the light of existing law, affects especially the Japanese. I gladly recognize that the enactment of this provision does not imply any change in our sentiment of admiration and cordial friendship for the Japanese people, a sentiment which has had and will continue to have abundant manifestation. The bill rather expresses the determination of the Congress to exercise its prerogatives in defining by legislation the control of immigration instead of leaving it to international arrangements.

  This did nothing to ease the situation. A less studied president might have vetoed the measure, but that was not the Coolidge style. Relations with the Japanese deteriorated. It was another step on the road to war.

  Coolidge clearly had no real control over the Republican Congress. The Kansas City Star, generally considered independent, wrote about the poor Republican record in Congress, and wondered “how those Republican senators and representatives who have opposed the Coolidge policies and have voted to override his vetoes can say anything for the party candidate without condemning themselves.” Other newspapers remarked that it wasn’t only the progressives and the farm bloc that opposed Coolidge. An independent newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal, put the matter bluntly: “To the blindest of partisans it should now be evident that President Coolidge has no control over his party.” The paper noted, “The captains on his staff listen to his commands and then do as they please.” It resembled a war, thought the St. Joseph News-Press: “The GOP must take sides one way or another—either with the president and against Congress, or with Congress and against the president. There is no half-way ground.” The Democratic New York Post ran a column with Coolidge quotes on legislation to one side and the Republican congressional action in opposition on the other.

  Yet most of the newspapers—Republican, Democratic, and independent—also agreed that the public was behind Coolidge. Polls showed that Coolidge enjoyed support from all parts of the nation. The independent St. Louis Globe-Democrat wrote:The people are sick of congressional inefficiency and turmoil, they are sick of the lack of cohesion and purpose, they are sick of the Senate’s usurpation of the control of foreign affairs, sick of the domination by blocs and cliques, sick of its mistakes and its failures; and whether they elect a Republican or Democrat to the presidency they are going to demand that there be a leadership in the White House, and that that leadership shall have the support of the majority in Congress, so that constructive legislation can be deliberately and wisely planned and carried through, and that the administration of government be placed again upon the basis contemplated by the Constitution.

  Coolidge, of course, was not that sort of leader. He lacked the stomach for daring battles that marked the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The Massachusetts politician who in his “Have Faith in Massachusetts” speech had recommended, “Don’t hurry to legislate. Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation,” had for a brief instant been superseded by the president who made those requests in the State of the Union speech. Which was the true Coolidge? For the remainder of his presidency, the former proved itself to be the dominant style of Calvin Coolidge.

  10

  In His Own Right

  With the exception of the occasion of my notification, I did not attend any partisan meetings or make any purely political speeches during the campaign. I spoke several times at the dedication of a monument, the observance of the anniversary of an historic event, at a meeting of some commercial body, or before some religious gathering. The campaign was magnificently managed by William M. Butler and as it progressed the final result became more and more apparent.

  The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge

  COOLIDGE CONCENTRATED MORE on domestic than on foreign problems while president—not because he was an isolationist, but because he knew there was little he could do about affairs in Europe and Asia, and there were positive things he might accomplish in the United States. The two domestic proposals Coolidge had hoped Congress would approve were the sale of government facilities at Muscle Shoals to private interests, and tax reform, both of which he had inherited from Harding. The one he wanted defeated was the McNary–Haugen bill, which dealt with farm surpluses. It was the measure of America’s unclouded vista that such matters, important only to local and special interests, could be priorities to the president of the United States.

  In March 1924 the House approved the sale of the Muscle Shoals complex to Henry Ford by a vote of 227 to 142. A series of hearings before the Senate Agriculture Committee followed. Chairman George Norris opposed the sale, and the Agriculture Committee voted against the Ford offer. In disgust, the industrialist withdrew his bid, and no other bidder appeared—Ford’s offer was apparently not too low, as Norris and his supporters had argued.

  The Muscle Shoals situation distressed Coolidge more than most of his legislative defeats, and he said, “If anything were needed to demonstrate the almost utter incapacity of the national government to deal with an industrial and commercial property, it has been provided by this experience.”

  In time Muscle Shoals would develop along the lines Norris had wanted, but only when approved by a different kind of president with a different approach in startlingly different times—when President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted the Tennessee Valley Authority during his first Hundred Days. But this was not the kind of project a president of the Harding–Coolidge stripe could have been expected to accept.

  For the short run, the affair intensified progressive Republican opposition to Coolidge, and made a challenge to his nomination or a third party candidacy more likely, but Coolidge’s stance in the matter helped him dispose of a potential rival in the upco
ming presidential race. For a while there had been talk of a Henry Ford candidacy in 1924. The Wall Street Journal even ran an editorial asking, “Why Not Ford For President?” Ford, a Democrat, appealed to certain segments of the population. Farmers appreciated his distrust of urban America, his production of the Model T, and his pledge to provide inexpensive fertilizers had he taken over at Muscle Shoals. His anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic proclivities, combined with more than a touch of xenophobia, appealed to Klan members. Nevertheless, Ford appreciated Coolidge’s support of the Muscle Shoals sale, and in December 1923 he endorsed the president: “I would never for a moment think of running against Calvin Coolidge for president on any ticket whatever.”

  Throughout his presidency Coolidge would oppose several versions of the McNary–Haugen bill. This measure had its origins in agricultural despair following World War I. High food prices had encouraged farmers to expand their holdings and invest in machinery. Wheat acreage rose from forty-eight million acres to more than seventy-five million between 1914 and 1919. Iowa farmland that sold for $82 an acre in 1910 went for $200 in 1920. Then, as a result of the European recovery, American farm exports slumped from $4.1 billion in 1919 to $1.9 billion in 1922. Commodity prices collapsed in the face of oversupply, with corn and wheat leading the way. Land prices declined sharply, especially in the Midwest. There was some recovery after 1922, but the circumstances in the nation’s agricultural heartland remained serious, and farmers there called for government assistance.