The American Vice Presidency (47 page)

Young Coolidge left the farm and a local one-room schoolhouse at age thirteen to attend Black River Academy, in nearby Ludlow, where he first encountered the Constitution and also studied history, Latin, and Greek. From there he attended and graduated from Amherst College, in Massachusetts, where he distinguished himself as a public speaker. Each summer he returned home to help work the farm. He was lean, physically and facially unimpressive, with a tranquility that belied a scholarly intensity. Taken in by a law firm in Northampton, a few miles from Amherst, he passed the bar, then undertook the practice of law there. He was elected to the Northampton City Council in 1898, as city solicitor in 1899, and
became an interim clerk of the county court. He married Grace Goodhue at her home in Burlington, Vermont, in 1905 and later wrote of their marriage, “We thought we were made for each other. For almost a quarter of a century she has borne with my infirmities, and I have rejoiced in her graces.”
¹²

In 1906 Coolidge was elected to the first of two one-year terms in the Massachusetts legislature, going door to door and asking for votes in the old-fashioned way, with his customary brevity.
¹³
In 1910 he was elected as mayor of Northampton, thereafter becoming a member of the Massachusetts Senate and then its president. In 1912, he negotiated settlements in a strike at the Lawrence Duck Mill, which produced a wage increase for the workers and was a forerunner to the most notable such intervention of his career.

He commuted by train to Boston and, when elected as lieutenant governor in 1916, rented a cheap hotel room there and served on the governor’s council, oversaw the state’s penal institutions and the governor’s granting of pardons, and was acting governor in the absence of the Republican governor Samuel W. McCall. In 1918 Coolidge was elected to succeed McCall only a few nights before the armistice was signed ending the Great War in Europe. One of his first acts as governor was to sign an appropriation of ten thousand dollars for a reception for the Yankee Division, and he subsequently pushed through a hundred-dollar bonus for the troops. In a rare burst of personal extravagance, the new governor added to his one-room lodging at the dingy Adams House in Boston, expanding his space to include another room and connecting bath, and shelled out two and a half dollars in monthly rent for it, a dollar more than he had been paying. Meanwhile, Mrs. Coolidge remained in Northampton caring for the well-being of their sons.

As governor, Coolidge took particular interest in the affairs and needs of the state’s military veterans, establishing a state employment commission to help their transition to civilian life. He visited state prisons to inspect living conditions and appointed commissions to consider pensions for state workers and maternity benefits for female employees. He reorganized the state government, reducing its more than one hundred agencies to twenty, giving himself greater control in the process.
¹⁴

Early in his tenure at the State House, on Beacon Hill, as labor unrest broke out in Boston and around the country, the city’s police were up in arms over low wages endured during the war and deplorable living conditions in their station house. As a legislator, Coolidge had been sympathetic to their lot but not to any resort to strike against a public-service entity, a position also held by the city’s police commissioner, Edwin Curtis. To avert trouble, Curtis got the city government to raise policemen’s pay two hundred dollars a year, and Coolidge suggested to the Democratic mayor, Andrew James Peters, that something be done about improving sleeping conditions at the station house.
¹⁵
Otherwise, the governor tried to stay out of the dispute and the gathering storm.

The Boston police, however, were prohibited from joining any outside union, and the breaking point came when many formed the Boston Social Club, which sought affiliation with the American Federation of Labor. When the AFL complied, Commissioner Curtis acted quickly, suspending nineteen members of the force who had led the organizing. They were tried and discharged. Coolidge, for all his sympathy for the police officers’ wage and condition demands, saw the dispute in terms of their duty to protect the public safety and sided with Curtis. He asked, however, “Can you blame the police for feeling as they do when they get less than a street car conductor?”
¹⁶

Even without their organizers, the police officers voted to strike, and nearly all of them walked out, leaving their badges behind. Coolidge said he had no authority to interfere, despite the mayor’s urging him to call out the National Guard.
¹⁷
On the night of September 9, 1919, mobs filled the streets around Scollay Square, and riots and looting broke out elsewhere in the city. Mayor Peters finally called out the Boston State Guard, in effect taking over from Curtis, and President Woodrow Wilson declared, “A strike of the policemen of a great city, leaving that city at the mercy of an army of thugs, is a crime against civilization.”
¹⁸
Only then did Coolidge himself act, calling out the state’s National Guard and restoring Curtis, he said, “for the purpose of assisting me in the performance of my duty,” to bring order to the streets of Boston.
¹⁹

The Boston strike quickly collapsed. If Coolidge was tardy in responding the crisis, the outbreak of violence gave him the opening to reinforce
his basic position that the first duty of a police officer was maintaining the peace, not deserting his post to advance his own well-being. The AFL president Samuel Gompers, disputing the governor’s argument, insisted that whatever disorder had occurred was due to “the assumption of an autocratic and unwarranted position by the commissioner of police” against the right of policemen to strike.
²⁰
Gompers further noted that in Washington, Wilson had not ordered dismissal of District of Columbia police who had affiliated with the AFL and asked why Coolidge could not show the same forbearance.

The governor replied, “The right of the police of Boston to affiliate has always been questioned, never granted, [and] is now prohibited. The suggestion of President Wilson to Washington does not apply to Boston. The police [in the District] remained on duty. Here the Policemen’s Union left their duty, an act which President Wilson described as a crime against civilization. Your assertion that the commissioner [in Boston] was wrong cannot justify the wrong of leaving the city unguarded. That furnished the opportunity [to riot]; the criminal element furnished the action.” Then came the concluding sentence that won Coolidge national acclaim in a time of growing labor unrest and public fears: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”
²¹

Although Coolidge had tread very cautiously in the matter, even seemingly to the point of timidity through the first stages of the crisis, his firm response to Gompers cast him as a hero in defense of the public. Coolidge himself was said to have declared, “I have just committed political suicide.”
²²
But he was overwhelmingly reelected in 1919 and now was a national figure beyond the borders of his native New England, being mentioned for a place on the Republican national ticket in 1920. And in the revolt at the convention in Chicago against the efforts of U.S. senators to make it an all-senatorial slate of Harding and Lenroot, Coolidge was stampeded through for the vice presidential nomination.

In his acceptance speech, he struck a particular note of morality, calling for American blacks “to be relieved from all imposition, to be defended from lynching, and to be freely granted equal opportunity,” a liberal position not often associated with his dominant conservatism.
²³
In the campaign that followed against the Democratic ticket of the Ohio governor
James M. Cox and a young assistant navy secretary from New York named Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harding promised Coolidge a major role. He told reporters in Coolidge’s presence, “I think the Vice President should be more than a mere substitute in waiting. In reestablishing coordination between the Executive Office and the Senate, the vice president can and ought to play a big part, and I have been telling Governor Coolidge how much I wish him to be a helpful part of a Republican administration.”
²⁴

In the campaign, Harding’s strategists resorted to another front-porch candidacy from his home in Marion, with only selected trips to a few major cities, and Coolidge stuck to New England until October. Then the Republican National Committee directed him to make an eight-day swing through the South. After objecting, “I ought not to be away so long from Massachusetts and … my abilities do not lie in that direction,” he dutifully went.

Meanwhile his Democratic counterpart, FDR, stumped energetically and enthusiastically by train, ridiculing the Republican stay-home approach, saying, “We will drag the enemy off the front porch.”
²⁵
The competing vice presidential speech making was a prelude to the future in Coolidge’s mild expositions of the status quo and FDR’s advocacy of further social reform.
²⁶
But the focus of the public that fall was not on any running-mate sideshow.

In July, Cox and Roosevelt had visited the ailing Wilson, and Cox had pledged to him that American participation in the League of Nations would be a paramount objective of the Democratic campaign, but the public was weary of Wilson and his failed fight for the Versailles Treaty. In the end, that weariness, coupled with the postwar recession and the Republican promise of a return to normalcy, produced a landslide GOP victory.

After the election, Harding suggested greater responsibilities for his vice president, noting they both had served as lieutenant governors with active roles in governance. Three days after their inauguration, Harding sent Coolidge a written invitation to join his cabinet meetings. “It has seemed to me that the second official of the Republic could add materially to the fullness of his service in this way,” Harding wrote. “I am quite aware that there is no constitutional or statutory provision for such participation but cabinet councils are wholly of an advisory nature in any event, and I am
sure your presence and your suggestions will be welcome to the members of the Cabinet and I know they will be gratefully received by me.”
²⁷

Coolidge gladly took Harding up on his offer but commented only when asked, though he also took advantage of his association with the cabinet members to inform himself of their activities, requesting additional information from them as he desired. He later observed, “[From] my position as President of the Senate and in my attendance upon the sessions of the Cabinet, I thus came into possession of a very wide knowledge of the details of the government.”
²⁸

The Coolidges, upon moving to Washington, settled into a four-room apartment in the Willard Hotel, on Pennsylvania Avenue two blocks from the White House, taking over the lodgings of the vice president’s predecessor, Thomas Marshall. While Coolidge’s parsimoniousness was legendary, he made a good case for the country to provide an official residence for its vice presidents, who, absent heavy administrative duties, were often obliged to assume social obligations. “It was necessary for me to live within my income,” he wrote later, “which was little more than my salary and was charged with the cost of sending my boys to school.… My experience convinced me that an official residence with suitable maintenance should be provided for the Vice-President.”
²⁹
But Congress brushed aside any efforts to provide one.

One story goes that one night soon after the Coolidges moved in at the Willard, a fire broke out, sending the residents and guests to the lobby in various degrees of undress. When the fire was under control, Coolidge headed up the stairs, only to be stopped by the fire marshal, who asked him, “Who are you?” Coolidge replied, “I’m the vice president.” The marshal told him to go ahead, then suspiciously asked, “What are you vice president of?” Coolidge: “I’m the vice president of the United States.” The marshal further impeded him: “Come right down. I thought you were the vice president of the hotel.”
³⁰

Coolidge unlike many, if not most, other vice presidents professed to enjoy presiding over the Senate and to respect the institution and the performance of its members. He wrote later, “If the Senate is anything it is a great deliberative body and if it is to retain a safeguard of liberty it must remain a deliberative body. I was entertained and instructed by the debates.” At the same time, he observed, “The Senate had but one fixed rule, subject
to exceptions of course, which was to the effect that the Senate would do anything it wanted to do. When I had learned that, I did not waste much time on the other rules, because they were so seldom applied.” As vice president, he was never called upon to break a tie vote, which seemed to satisfy him well enough.
³¹

As for the vice presidency itself, Coolidge easily accommodated himself to its limitations as a man who recognized his own. His close political friend and counselor Frank Stearns reported that Coolidge had once told him, “My conception of my position is that I am vice president. I am a member of the administration. So long as I am in that position it is my duty to uphold the policies and actions of the administration one hundred percent up to the point where I cannot conscientiously agree with them. When I cannot conscientiously agree with them it is my duty to keep silent.”
³²

Silence was a condition that came easily, even constitutionally, to him, and he adhered to it throughout his vice presidency. When the economy turned sour early in the Harding presidency, producing steep Democratic congressional gains in 1922, Coolidge essentially held his tongue. If he did not have the power to bring change, he seemed to prefer being uninvolved.

For all Coolidge’s loyalty to Harding and his efforts to maintain cordial relations with the cabinet and within the Republican Party, some resentments smoldered among Old Guard senators, who would have preferred Lenroot or another of their club as Harding’s vice president. A Boston newspaper speculated that Massachusetts Republicans preferred to have Coolidge run for the U.S. Senate seat in 1924.