One Summer: America, 1927 Page 21

  Despite their blunderings, the reception the Byrd team received in Paris when they finally got there (by train, the following day) was no less rapturous than that accorded Lindbergh. “Never have I seen anything like the wild hysteria of Paris,” Balchen wrote in his memoirs. “Around the railroad station when we arrived the streets were blocked with crowds and they swarmed over the car and broke the windows and almost tipped it over.” Women bruised them with kisses. Such was the crush that Acosta’s collarbone may in fact have been broken by the jostling crowds. It was then in any case that he first noticed pain. The car that was supposed to take them to the Hôtel Continental wouldn’t start, so the mob pushed them there, shouting joyously as they went. “Women jumped on the running board and threw their arms around us and kissed us until our faces were daubed with red,” Balchen went on. “Gendarmes flung up their arms in despair at controlling the traffic, and elbowed their way through the crowds to the car and begged for autographs themselves.”

  In America, the excitement was almost as great as it had been for Lindbergh and much more than for Chamberlin and Levine. Newspapers persisted in putting a positive spin on every aspect of the flight. The fact that Byrd’s plane was in the air for forty-three hours—almost 25 percent more air time than Lindbergh required—was treated as heroic in itself and not a reflection of their failure to reach their destination by a more direct route. Byrd told the New York Times: “We are nearly as all right as four men could be who went through such a strain as we did through those forty hours.” He admitted frankly that for much of the flight they did not know where they were—a confession that would be eliminated from his book on the trip the following year.

  Because of his superior rank, Byrd was given an official reception even grander than Lindbergh’s had been. On his second day, Byrd visited Invalides. There a paralyzed aviator named Captain Legendre was so inspired by Byrd’s presence that he rose from his chair and, for the first time in nine years, walked. Hand in hand, he and Byrd moved toward the tomb of Napoleon, a sight that made grown men weep.

  America, it seemed, had become a land of gods.

  • JULY •

  THE PRESIDENT

  I’ve never liked that man from the day Grace married him, and the fact he’s become President of the United States makes no difference.

  —LEMIRA BARRETT GOODHUE,

  mother-in-law of Calvin Coolidge

  14

  For Warren G. Harding, the summer of 1927 was not a good one, which was perhaps a little surprising since he had been dead for nearly four years by then. Few people have undergone a more rapid and comprehensively negative reappraisal than America’s twenty-ninth president. When he died suddenly in San Francisco on August 2, 1923, of an apparent cerebral hemorrhage (though some said it was heart failure and others ptomaine poisoning), he was widely liked and admired. He had been elected in 1920 with the largest plurality in modern times. An estimated three million people turned out to watch the funeral train that carried him back to Washington. The New York Times called it “the most remarkable demonstration in American history of affection, respect, and reverence.” In fact, at the time of his death President Harding was on the brink of being exposed as a scoundrel and a fool.

  Three years earlier hardly anyone outside Congress had even heard of him. He was simply the junior senator from Ohio. By background and temperament he was a small-town newspaper proprietor, and that was about as far as his talents should have carried him. His nomination as a presidential candidate was one of the great astonishments of the age. It came about only because delegates to the 1920 Republican Party convention in Chicago grew hopelessly deadlocked over a slate of poor candidates and, after four days of indecision in the midst of a merciless heat wave, settled on the worst one on offer. Harding’s only obvious qualification for higher office was his handsome bearing. “He looked,” one contemporary observed, “like a President ought to look.” In nearly every other respect—intelligence, character, enterprise—he fell considerably short of mediocre. His crassness in private could be startling. The New York Times reporter Richards Vidmer confided to a friend that he once saw Harding rise from his chair in the middle of a conversation and casually urinate into a White House fireplace. For his running mate, the party selected a person nearly as obscure and even more unpromising (though at least rather more refined): Calvin Coolidge.

  Harding’s administration was the most breezily slack in modern times. Although he made a few irreproachable appointments—Herbert Hoover at the Commerce Department, Henry C. Wallace at the Department of Agriculture, Charles Evans Hughes at the State Department—for many posts he selected people he simply liked without considering whether they were qualified or not. His choice for head of the Federal Reserve Board was Daniel R. Crissinger, a friend and neighbor from Marion, Ohio, whose previous highest professional achievement was to be a director of the Marion Steam Shovel Company. For chief military adviser, Harding chose Ora Baldinger, who had formerly been the family newsboy. Harding gave his sister a senior position in the U.S. Public Health Service and made her husband superintendent of federal prisons; previously the couple had been Seventh Day Adventist missionaries in Burma.

  The most extraordinary appointee of all was Charles Forbes, whom Harding had befriended on a trip to Hawaii and about whom he knew almost nothing. Appointed to the role of head of the Veterans Bureau, Forbes managed in two years to lose, steal, or misappropriate $200 million. Other Harding appointees wrought similar financial havoc at the Justice, Interior, and Naval Departments and at a relict department from World War I called the Office of the Alien Property Custodian. The Interior Secretary, Albert Fall, corruptly sold oil leases to two slick (as it were) oilmen in return for $400,000 in “loans.” One of the leases was at a place near Casper, Wyoming, formally called U.S. Naval Oil Reserve Number Three but popularly known as Teapot Dome, and that became the name of the scandal. The total cost to the country of all the various acts of incompetence and malfeasance in the Harding administration has been put at $2 billion—a sum that goes some way beyond stupendous, particularly bearing in mind that Harding’s presidency lasted just twenty-nine months.

  Harding’s death was so well timed, in terms of escaping scandals, that it was widely rumored that his wife had poisoned him for the sake of his reputation. Her behavior following his death was certainly curious: she immediately began destroying all his papers and wouldn’t allow a death mask to be made. In addition, she stoutly refused to give permission for an autopsy, which is why the cause of his death has always been uncertain. All that can be said is that the president had been unwell ever since arriving in California from Alaska, where he had been on vacation. He seemed, however, to be rallying when at 7:35 p.m. on August 2, while in conversation with his wife in their room in the Palace Hotel, he shuddered and stopped talking. A moment later he was dead.

  On the night he became president, Calvin Coolidge was at his boyhood home in Vermont visiting his father. It was after midnight, and he and his wife were fast asleep when news of Harding’s passing was brought to the Coolidge home from the nearby general store, the only place in town with a telephone.

  By the light of a kerosene lamp—the Coolidge house did not have electricity or plumbing; rural homes still very often didn’t—Coolidge’s father, a notary public, swore his son in as president. As presidents go, Calvin Coolidge was not a magnificent specimen. He was slight of build and terse of manner. His face was pinched and inclined to scowl; he looked, in the well-chosen words of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, as if he had been “weaned on a pickle.” Whereas Warren G. Harding had charm but no brains, Coolidge had brains but little charm. He was the least affable, gregarious, metaphorically embraceable president of modern times. Yet America came to adore him. Though he would spend the 1920s doing as little as possible—that was essentially his declared policy as president—he set the mood in the nation in a way few other presidents have. If the 1920s was the age of anyone, it was the Age of Coolidge.


  Calvin Coolidge was born on the Fourth of July, 1872, in Plymouth Notch, a scattered hamlet of two dozen or so people in a lofty cleft of the Green Mountains of central Vermont. The Notch, as it was known, commanded a lonely valley about a dozen miles from Ludlow, the nearest outlet to the wider world. “The scene was one of much natural beauty, of which I think the inhabitants had little realization,” Coolidge wrote in later life. His birthplace was the general store and post office that his father ran, though the family later moved to a larger house across the road—the house where Coolidge was sleeping on the night he learned he was president.

  The Coolidges were reasonably well-off. Calvin’s father also owned the blacksmith shop and a small farm, from which he produced maple syrup and cheese. But the family had its share of suffering. Calvin’s mother died from tuberculosis when Calvin was just twelve, an event that touched him deeply. He recorded the event simply but rather movingly in his autobiography:

  When she knew that her end was near she called us children to her bedside, where we knelt down to receive her final parting blessing. In an hour she was gone. It was her thirty-ninth birthday. I was twelve years old. We laid her away in the blustering snows of March. The greatest grief that can come to a boy came to me. Life was never to be the same again.

  That was no exaggeration. Forty years later in the White House, according to Coolidge’s Secret Service agent Colonel E. W. Starling, Coolidge “communed with her, talked with her, and took every problem to her.” Coolidge also lost his only sibling, his beloved sister, Abbie, early. Five years after his mother’s death, almost to the day, Abbie died from a ruptured appendix.

  In the fall of 1891, Coolidge entered Amherst College, then an institution of 350 or so students, in central Massachusetts. He was a conspicuous oddity. His hair was iron red and his face a splodge of freckles. Painfully shy, he failed to find a single fraternity that wished to have him as a member—a level of rejection that was more or less without precedent. Only the kindly Dwight Morrow befriended him. With all others he was almost completely silent. “Often hardly a word would pass his lips for days at a time, except such as were absolutely necessary to keep him supplied with food and to report his presence in the classroom,” the writer and advertising man Bruce Barton, also an Amherst alumnus, wrote years later in a recollection.

  Coolidge did eventually warm up a little and even gained admission to a fraternity, but socializing was never his strong suit. Instead he worked hard and graduated with honors. After Amherst, he crossed the Connecticut River to nearby Northampton and there studied law in the offices of Hammond and Field, whose partners were also Amherst men. In 1899, he impetuously ran for a seat on the city council and was elected. It was the beginning of a long political career. In 1905, over the strident objections of the bride’s mother, who thought him weedy, Coolidge married a teacher of the deaf, Grace Goodhue, a fellow Vermonter whom he’d met in Northampton and who was as outgoing as he was retiring. Grace was a great support and did all the talking for both of them in social situations. He doted on her and called her “Mamma.”

  With Grace at his side, Coolidge began his long climb up the political ladder. He became first mayor of Northampton; then a member of the Massachusetts legislature, the General Court; then lieutenant governor; and finally, in 1918, governor. In all positions, he distinguished himself by his diligence, his thrift, and his parsimony of speech, attributes that endeared him to New Englanders. His personal frugality was legendary. In 1906, he moved with Grace into a modest rented duplex on Massasoit Street in Northampton and remained in modest rented premises for the rest of his life.

  In 1919, Boston had a celebrated police strike. The city’s policemen were paid barely $20 a week, and from that they had to buy their own uniforms, so their grievances were real, but their actions alienated public opinion and left Boston at the mercy of lawless elements. For two days, mobs roamed the streets, robbing and intimidating innocent citizens, and looters had a field day. When city authorities failed to assert control, Coolidge, as governor, stepped in. With an unwonted show of forcefulness he called out the State Guard, dismissed the strikers, and hired a new force. “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time,” he declared—the only occasion in his life, as far as can be told, that he uttered a ringing statement. His action made him a national figure and propelled him on to the nomination for vice president on the Harding ticket the following year.

  As vice president, it is fair to say, he made little impression on anyone, even within the administration. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., assistant secretary of the navy, said he sat through innumerable cabinet meetings that Coolidge attended and couldn’t remember him ever once uttering a word.

  When the nation awoke in August 1923 to find that Harding was dead and the obscure Coolidge was president, most were dumbfounded. Some had stronger feelings. Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of The Nation, wrote: “I doubt if it [the presidency] has ever fallen into the hands of a man so cold, so narrow, so reactionary, so uninspiring, so unenlightened, or who has done less to earn it than Calvin Coolidge.” Yet most people found themselves quickly warming to Coolidge, almost in spite of himself. The nation grew fond of his peculiarities and often exaggerated them in anecdote. His most celebrated trait was his taciturnity. An oft-told story, which has never been verified, is that a woman sitting next to him at dinner gushed, “Mr. President, my friend bet me that I wouldn’t be able to get you to say three words tonight.”

  “You lose,” the president supposedly responded.

  Beyond doubt, however, is that the president and Mrs. Coolidge once sat through nine innings of a Washington Senators baseball game without speaking except for once when he asked her the time and she replied, “Four twenty-four.” Another time while sitting through an official dinner, the woman beside him, hoping to spark a conversation, asked if he didn’t get tired of having to endure so many official dinners. Coolidge shrugged and said, “Gotta eat somewhere,” and returned to his meal. He was known, not surprisingly, as “Silent Cal.”

  In some settings, however, Coolidge could be much more forthcoming—“almost garrulous,” in the words of one biographer. Twice a week he held private press conferences in which he met with correspondents and spoke freely and even sometimes animatedly, though his comments were off the record and all questions had to be submitted in advance to his private secretary, a man with a name that sounded like a W. C. Fields snake-oil salesman: C. Bascom Slemp.

  His private eccentricities were even greater than his public ones. While having breakfast, he liked to have his valet rub his head with Vaseline. He was so hypochondriacal that he often stopped in his work to take his own pulse. He had the White House physician examine him every day whether he felt unwell or not. Those who worked closely with him learned to be wary of a streak of “pure cussedness,” to quote his long-suffering aide Wilson Brown, with which he rather joyously made many people’s lives hell. Once, on a trip to Florida, the secretary of state, Frank B. Kellogg, asked Brown to find out what clothes he should wear for a parade through Palm Beach later that day. Kellogg was too frightened of Coolidge’s temper to ask the president himself, so Brown went to the executive quarters for him. Brown later wrote:

  I found Mrs. Coolidge knitting tranquilly while the President hid behind a newspaper. When I told him that Mr. Kellogg had asked whether the delegates should wear top hats and tail coats for the drive through the city, or straw hats and summer clothes, he answered without looking up from his paper, “That’s his hunt.”

  “Now, Calvin,” Mrs. Coolidge said, “that’s no message to send to the Secretary of State.”

  Mr. Coolidge angrily lowered his paper, glared at me and said, “What do you think I should wear?”

  I advised straw hat and summer clothes.

  He snapped, “Tell Kellogg to wear a top hat.”

  No one has ever more successfully made a virtue out of doing little than Calvin Coolidge as president. He did nothing he
didn’t absolutely have to do, but rather engaged in a “grim, determined, alert inactivity,” as the journalist Walter Lippmann put it. He declined even to endorse National Education Week in 1927 on the grounds that it wasn’t necessary for the president to do so. In recent years a revisionist view has emerged that Coolidge was in reality cannier and livelier than history has portrayed him. Well, perhaps. What can certainly be said is that he presided over a booming economy and did nothing at all to get in the way of it.

  Calculated indolence could not be called a good policy exactly, but for most of his term it wasn’t a bad one either. With the markets constantly on the rise, he didn’t need to do anything except keep out of the way. Under Coolidge’s benign watch, Wall Street rose by more than two and a half times in value. Not surprisingly, the success of the economy did wonders for Coolidge’s popularity. As the newspaperman Henry L. Stoddard wrote in 1927, “He inspires a deep, nation-wide confidence that all will go well with the country while he is in the White House.” It became known as “Coolidge prosperity,” as if it were his personal gift to the nation.

  Coolidge was also morally impeccable and honest down to his bootlaces—qualities that came to seem all the more valiant and noble as the scandals of the Harding administration spilled out. Teapot Dome and the other Harding transgressions occupied great amounts of congressional and court time throughout the rest of the decade and were still rattling on in the summer of 1927. On July 6, Albert Fall and one of the two slick oilmen, Edward L. Doheny, were finally ordered to stand trial in Washington, D.C., on bribery charges—charges that both had been fighting since just after Harding expired.