The Price

In the first week of their retirement Mr. and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge each had an article published in current magazines. Mr. Coolidge's article appeared in the Cosmopolitan after elaborately secret preparation. It was called "On Entering and Leaving the Presidency" and was advertised on the cover, beneath the panting lips of a red-headed girl as "Mr. Coolidge's Own Story . . . The Price in Heartaches of Being President." The article led an issue including articles and stories by Katherine Mayo, Irvin S. Cobb, Beverley Nichols, Robert Hichens, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Theodore Dreiser. For it Mr. Coolidge received handsome remuneration, certainly not less than $10,000.

Mrs. Coolidge's article was called "Opening the Gates of Silence" and appeared in the Pictorial Review. She described the work of the Clarke School for the Deaf in which she once taught and has since been interested. Her remuneration was probably somewhat less than Mr. Coolidge's and. whatever it was, she turned it over to the endowment fund of the Clarke School.

Ray Long, editor of the Cosmopolitan, in a foreword to Mr. Coolidge's article, said.

"You. of course, have heard that Calvin Coolidge was a sphinx. That he had ice-water in his veins. That he never smiled.

"Bosh!

". . . His is the most warmly human document it ever has been my good fortune to publish."

Some highlights of the document were:

Aphorisms. "It is a very old saying that you never can tell what you can do until you try."

"Surprisingly few men are lacking in capacity, but they fail because they are lacking in application."

"Any reward that is worth having only comes to the industrious."

"It has undoubtedly been the lot of every native boy of the United States to be told that he will some day be President."

"It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man."

"Wealth comes from industry and from the hard experience of human toil. To dissipate it in waste and extravagance is disloyalty to humanity. This is by no means a doctrine of parsimony."

On Entering Office. "On the night of August 2, 1923, I was awakened by my father coming up the stairs calling my name. I noticed that his 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."

"My wife and I at once dressed. . . . Before leaving the room I knelt down and, with the same prayer with which I have since approached the altar of the church, asked God to bless the American people and give me power to serve them."

"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. . . . Some way, that morning, she seemed very near to me."

Of the Harding Administration. "It would be difficult to find two years of peacetime history in all the record of our republic that were marked with more important and far-reaching accomplishments. 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. . . ."

Of His Son's Death. "My own participation was delayed by the death of my son Calvin, which occurred on the seventh of July. He was a boy of much promise, proficient in his studies, with a scholarly mind, who had just turned sixteen.

"He had a remarkable insight into things. "The day I became President he had just started to work in a tobacco field. When one of his fellow laborers said to him, 'If my father was President I would not work in a tobacco field,' Calvin replied. 'If my father were your father, you would.' "We do not know what might have happened to him under other circumstances, but if I had not been President he would not have raised a blister on his toe, which resulted in blood poisoning, playing lawn tennis in the South Grounds. "In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not. "When he went the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him. . . . "The ways of Providence are often beyond our understanding. . . . "I do not know why such a price was exacted for occupying the White House." P: In Northampton, Mr. Coolidge relaxed from the cares of the Presidency in the same humor that made him remark to Mrs. Coolidge when Inauguration Day turned out rainy: "Well, Grace, it usually rains on moving day." Receiving reporters in his old law office, bearing the sign of "Coolidge and Hemenway," he held in his hand, and ratified with a grin, a cartoon which showed him lying in a New England bed under a New England comforter, derisively grinning at an alarm clock that was trying to get him up at 7 a.m. He said that he was not going abroad, was not going to become a professional writer. For a few days the spotlight still played about the Coolidges. Their comings and goings were recorded by the press. Omni-snooping reporters went around interviewing Mrs. Coolidge while she dusted up her house. After three days, however, Mr. Coolidge was able to go out on his front porch in shirt sleeves at 7:40 a.m., pick up the morning papers and let out the dog, without being photographed. P: The Coolidge retinue likewise went its way. Major Coupal, the former White House physician, prepared to return to Washington. Everett Sanders, former Secretary to the President, went to Chicago to become a partner in the law firm from which James W. Good retired to become Mr. Hoover's Secretary of War. Edward T. Clark, Mr. Coolidge's other secretary, became Vice President of Drug Inc., a subsidiary of United Drug Co., of which Louis Kroh Liggett, Republican National Committeeman of Massachusetts, is President.