The Coolidge Era

With Herbert Hoover already in Washington, the Coolidge era seemed to hurry to its close.

Who but the historian recalls an August night among the Vermont hills less than six years ago--reporters in automobiles rushing over country roads; a knock on the door of a white farmhouse in the hamlet of Plymouth; oil lamps lit dispelling the darkness; telegrams read by their glow; a brief statement of mourning; an oath of office administered at 2:30 a. m. by a country notary public to his son, the thirtieth President of the U. S.

The new President's first worry was railroad accommodations; he wired ahead for three parlor car seats and was amazed to find a special train awaiting him. With him and his wife on that strained journey to the capital rode the Boston businessman named Stearns whose ancient dream of a Northampton mayor in the White House was coming true.

There followed a few days in the Vice-Presidential suite at the New Willard Hotel and the wholesale resignation of the Cabinet -- Hughes and Mellon, Hoover and Davis, New and Wallace, Work, Weeks, Daugherty and Denby -- and every resignation rejected as it came. There followed the entrance into the White House with eight trunks, and the appearance of astute C. Bascom Slemp, Virginia politician-Secretary, at the Presidential elbow. Came William Morgan Butler, manufacturer and campaign manager, not yet dreaming of the Senate.

Followed threats of a great hard-coal strike, and Gifford Pinchot, Governor of Pennsylvania, rushed to the breach.

Followed Secretary Mellon's proposal of a second great post-War reduction, which sent the country ringing with applause.

Came the first Congress under the new President -- that Congress which first brought the Scandinavian glassblower and dirt farmer, Magnus Johnson, to Washington. Then, Mr. Coolidge's first message to the Congress, the message which dealt with everything in a few blunt monosyllables and proved that he was "safe."

Can that 68th Congress have been forgotten? It fought three mighty fights. It passed a soldier bonus bill over Mr. Coolidge's veto. It passed the Mellon tax plan, much retailored to the Democratic figure. It stirred up the greatest hornet nest of a political generation, the Harding scandals --Oil, Veterans' Bureau, Department of Justice, Prohibition Enforcement--which, inch by inch, forced Denby, then Daugherty out of the Coolidge Cabinet.

Can citizens have forgotten the great three-cornered battle front of 1924, the Cleveland convention where the old guard in revolt named Frank O. Lowden for Vice-President and, when he proudly turned them down, revolted again and named Charles Gates Dawes, with whom afterwards they quarreled? Or that eleven-day wonder, the convention in the old Madison Square Garden where McAdoo fought Smith, and Smith fought McAdoo and Alabama 103 times cast 24 votes for Oscar W. Underwood, till John William Davis and Bryan the Lesser were boosted to the limelight? Or that second convention in Cleveland to which the Senator from Wisconsin, who in Jo Davidson's mass marble will soon adorn the Capitol's hall of fame, sent his ready-made platform and took Burton K. Wheeler for his running mate?

Surely no one can have forgotten the slogan that carried the day, "Keep cool with Coolidge."

Calvin Coolidge will forget neither these things, nor many more -- that hot summer when his younger son, Calvin Coolidge Jr., overcome by a deadly infection, passed away; the cold winter when his father, Col. John Calvin Coolidge, was laid to rest beneath New England snows.

For convenience, the four Coolidge vacations may be taken as milestones from which to look back and forward:

Swampscott, Mass., 1925. The man who went to Swampscott had stepped into the Presidency as a silent, cautious, rather wry myth. He had proved himself safe. He suffered himself to be photographed pitching hay for the 1924 campaign and on March 4, 1925, the people let him put his hand on the Bible from which he had learned to read at the age of four, and swear to "Preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

In the Swampscott year he was very, very touchy. To this period belong the electric hobbyhorse and Alice Roosevelt Longworth's remark about being weaned on a dill pickle. Paul Smith's, N. Y., 1926. The 1926 vacation was the one of the great confession. Sitting in an old green wicker rocking-chair on an-- Adirondack porch, Calvin Coolidge told Bruce Barton of his early life, his later thoughts. "As I now recall it," he said, "I had always rather hoped that I might keep store when I grew up. ... I have never been able to think that fate was guiding my destiny. I have rather felt that I was obliged to look after it myself.

"I have found, however, that when I was doing the right thing a great many unforeseen elements would come in and turn to my advantage. Presidents are broken down by outside enterprises. . . . I try to remember that there is only one ex-President living. ..." This was also the year of that strange luncheon of President & Mrs. Coolidge and Governor & Mrs. Alfred E. Smith.

The Black Hills. 1927 started off with President Coolidge's vehement veto and denunciation of the McNary-Haugen farm relief bill.

Going to the Black Hills, probably not because he-- wanted to, his petulance in creased. He was called on to be an In dian, a cowboy. The fishing, which he had rediscovered the summer before, was some compensation, but there were several incidents that caused him, frayed as he was, to speak sharply to Mrs. Coolidge. She was glad when he made up his mind ("I do not choose . . ." etc.) about a question on which she had stitched her opinion six months earlier, in the famed bedspread inscribed: "Abraham Lincoln 1861-1865" "Calvin Coolidge 1923-1929.''

Brule. The vacation at Brule, Wis., was the happiest of all. The choose had finally been accepted. Hoover was nominated. There were fish, lots of them, to be caught. President Coolidge could and did say to news-cameramen: "Mr. Hoover won't carry on his end of the conversation."

Quail-shooting in Virginia . . . Turkey-shooting in Georgia . . . and then one day he pressed a White House button and scampered away, chuckling boyishly at the seriousness of secret service men. It is not impossible that Calvin Coolidge gave the electric hobbyhorse a tickle in the ribs just before it was packed up and shipped to Northampton, Mass.

Work Done. The Coolidge era has seen three great reductions in taxes, about five and a quarter billion dollars lopped off the public debt, the war debts refunded, adoption of the multilateral treaty renouncing war, the appropriation of 325 million dollars for Mississippi flood control, the 275-million dollar Federal buildings' program, the civil air program, the implanting of a tradition of economy in government.

Work Not Done. The World Court has not been joined; the farmer has not been '"relieved"; railroads are still unconsolidated; the coal industry is still bogged; there has been no extension of naval disarmament agreements; prohibition remains a mess. All these were Coolidge projects.

Vetoes. Already President Coolidge's occasional troubles with Congress are fast fading from the public memory. His vetoes were not many but they were notable. Most of them were vetoes of minor bills, for the sake of dear economy, and were not overridden. The soldier bonus bill of 1924 was passed over his veto. He twice appointed Charles Beecher Warner to be Attorney-General and the Senate twice rejected the appointment. But he twice vetoed farm relief bills which called for large governmental expenditures, and Congress did not override him. An increase of pay for postal employes he vetoed and later accepted when higher postal rates were provided to meet the cost. The Bursum Spanish War pension bill he vetoed and by one vote his veto was sustained. A bill for government operation of Muscle Shoals he pocket-vetoed. By firm persuasion he saved the Treasury from "the most extortionate proposal . . . ever made upon the nation's revenues"-- the flood control bill as originally conceived by Congress. This business also saved his party from a veto embarrassment that might well have been disastrous.

No-Man. In a great day of yes-men, Calvin Coolidge was a great noman. Psychologically as well as financially he sought to be an astringent to his prosperity-swollen country. He took credit for Coolidge prosperity because it was politically expedient to do so, but he kept repeating that Coolidge economy was the priceless ingredient. He carried this thought to the picayune extreme of giving away only the pen nib, and not the pen holder, after signing important bills. The other, philosophical extreme was reached in his curt closing message to Congress and the country last December:

". . . Peace and prosperity are not finalities; they are only methods. It is too easy under their influence for a nation to become selfish and degenerate. This test has come to the United States. . . ."