Notes
In this book endnotes will be used not to cite every fact but to attribute quotations, certain statistics, and potentially controversial claims, as well as to elaborate on detail beyond that found in the main text.
INTRODUCTION
1
New York Times, January 22, 1981, p. B8.
2
Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Crowded Hours (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), p. 337; H. L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 [1956]), pp. 123—24; Nathanael West, A Cool Million, in Novels and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1997), pp. 127—238. The line about the pickle is often attributed to Longworth, but she wrote that she heard it from her doctor, who heard it from his previous patient.
3
Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), pp. 244, 282 ; New York Times, July 16, 1985, p. A 11; Thomas B. Silver, Coolidge and the Historians (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press for the Claremont Institute, 1982); Kiron Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds., Reagan: A Life in Letters (New York: Free Press, 2003), p. 287. For an excellent discussion of Coolidge’s influence on Reagan, see Colleen Shogan, “Coolidge and Reagan: The Rhetorical Influence of Silent Cal on the Great Communicator,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 2 (Summer 2006), pp. 215—34.
4
Jude Wanniski, The Way the World Works (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1998 [1978]), pp. 131—32, passim; Robert Novak, “Coolidge’s Legacy,” New England Journal of History 55, no. 1 (Fail 1998); “Why I Wear What I Wear,” GQ, June 1988, p. 74.
5
Washington Post, June 7, 1981, p. A3. See also Alan Brinkley, “Calvin Reagan,” New York Times, July 4, 1981, p. A19.
6
Novak, “Coolidge’s Legacy,” p. 13.
7
Calvin Coolidge, “Our Heritage from Hamilton,” address on the anniversary of the birth of Alexander Hamilton, presented at the Hamilton Club, Chicago, January 11, 1922, in The Price of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924), p. 112.
8
Calvin Coolidge, “The Press Under a Free Government,” address before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, January 17, 1925, in Foundations of the Republic: Speeches and Addresses (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), pp. 187, 190.
9
Lynd and Lynd quoted in Nathan Miller, New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America (New York: Scribner, 2003), p. 172; Edmund Starling, Starling of the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), p. 243.
10
On Barton, see Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880—1930,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880—1980, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 31. On Ford, see Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).
11
Fitzgerald quoted in Jay Parini, introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998), p. ix.
12
Walter Lippmann, Men of Destiny (New York: Macmillan, 1927), p. 17.
13
Walter Lippmann, Liberty, and the News (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), pp. 55—56; C. Bascom Slemp, The Mind of the President: As Revealed by Himself in His Own Words (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1926), p. 10; Charles Dawes, Notes as Vice President, 1928—1929 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), p. 30.
14
Coolidge quoted in Donald McCoy, Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President (Newtown, CT: American Political Biography Press, 1998 [1967]), p. 55; McAdoo quoted in John Dean, Warren G. Harding (New York: Times Books, 2004), p. 73; figure of 520 in Elmer Cornwell, “Coolidge and Presidential Leadership,” Public Opinion Quarterly 21, no. 2 (Summer 1957), p. 272.
15
Arthur Fleser, A Rhetorical Study of the Speaking of Calvin Coolidge (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1990), p. 68. The Mencken quote is originally from American Mercury, March 3, 1929, p. 279.
16
Edward Lowry, “Calvin the Silent,” New Republic, September 28, 1921, p. 129.
17
Starling, Starling of the White House, pp. 210—11; Alfred Pearce Dennis, “The Man Who Became President,” in Meet Calvin Coolidge: The Man Behind the Myth, ed. Edward Lathem (Brattleboro, VT: Stephen Greene Press, 1960), p. 16; Douglas quoted in Miller, New World Coming, p. 124.
18
Paul Johnson, “Calvin Coolidge and the Last Arcadia,” in Calvin Coolidge and the Coolidge Era: Essays on the History of the 1920s, ed. John Earl Haynes (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1998), p. 6; Michael Parrish, Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920—1941 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 49; Bruce Bliven, “The Great Coolidge Mystery,” Harper’s Monthly, December 1925, p. 50; Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 210.
19
Calvin Coolidge, The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge (New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, 1929), p. 184; Herbert Hoover, Memoirs, 1920—1933, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 55; Baruch quoted in Robert Sobel, Coolidge: An American Enigma (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1998), p. 237.
20
Hull quoted in McCoy, Quiet President, p. 166; Coolidge quoted in Claude Fuess, Calvin Coolidge: The Man from Vermont (Boston: Little, Brown, 1940), p. 300; Will Rogers, “A Subtle Humorist,” in Lathem, Meet Calvin Coolidge, p. 145.
21
Nicholas Murray Butler, Across the Busy Years (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), p. 413; Oswald Garrison Villard, “Issues and Men,” Nation, January 18, 1933, p. 55; Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 208.
22
Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 212.
23
Irwin Hoover, Forty-two Years in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), p. 25; Coolidge, Autobiography, pp. 196—97.
24
Thomas Silver, “Coolidge and the Historians,” American Scholar 50, no. 4 (Autumn 1981), p. 514.
25
Coolidge, “Our Heritage from Hamilton,” in Price of Freedom, pp. 109, 111; Richard Fenno, “Coolidge: Representative of the People,” Current History 39, no. 230 (October 1960), p. 210; William Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 103.
26
New York Times, August 7, 1927, p. E11; New York Times, August 10, 1927 , p. 2.
1: OUT OF PLYMOUTH NOTCH
1
Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 11.
2
Coolidge, Autobiography, pp. 45, 29.
3
Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 15.
4
Ibid., p. 23; Coolidge, Autobiography, p. 25.
5
Coolidge, Autobiography, p. 13; Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 212.
6
Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 24.
7
Coolidge, Autobiography, pp. 42—43.
8
Ibid., p. 48; Fleser, Rhetorical Study, p. 24.
9
Coolidge, Autobiography, pp. 48—49.
10
Fleser, Rhetorical Study, p. 9; Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (New York: Harper Brothers, 1931), p. 157; Coolidge, Autobiography, p. 66.
11
Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 71.
12
Ibid., p. 73.
13
Coolidge, Autobiography, p. 99.
14
Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 219.
15
Robert Gilbert, The Tormented President: Calvin Coolidge, Death and Clinical Depression (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), p. 52; Grace Coolidge, “The Real Calvin Coolidge,” Good Housekeeping, March 1935, p. 23.
16
Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 351 In. ; Gilbert, Tormented President, pp. 48—55.
17
Coolidge, Autobiography, p. 94.
18
Sobel, American Enigma, p. 112.
19
Coolidge, Autobiography, p. 106.
2 : ON THE BRINK
1
Bliven, “Great Coolidge Mystery,” p. 49.
2
Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 185.
3
The federal Volstead Act of 1920 provided for the enforcement of Prohibition but even before its passage Coolidge considered the Eighteenth Amendment to be in effect.
4
Gilbert, Tormented President, p. 49.
5
Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 216.
6
Ibid., p. 223.
7
Calvin Coolidge, “A Telegram,” September 14, 1919, in Have Faith in Massachusetts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), p. 223; “Calvin Coolidge as Governor of Massachusetts” (film), FAB 888, Theodore Roosevelt Association Collection, MBRS Div., LoC; “The Policeman and Police Power,” New Republic, October 1, 1919, p. 247.
8
Calvin Coolidge, “A Proclamation,” September 24, 1919, in Have Faith in Massachusetts, p. 226.
9
Francis Russell, City in Terror: Calvin Coolidge and the 1919 Boston Police Strike (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), p. 212.
10
Calvin Coolidge, “Plymouth, Labor Day,” address delivered September 1, 1919, in Have Faith in Massachusetts, pp. 200—201. On examples of the progressive use of the “general interest” and similar concepts, see LeRoy Ashby, Spearless Leader: Senator Borah and the Progressive Movement in the 1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 13; Alan Dawley, Changing the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 68.
11
McCoy, Quiet President, p. 102.
12
Richard Fried, The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), p. 117; Bruce Barton, “Concerning Calvin Coolidge,” Collier’s, November 22, 1919, pp. 8ff; Kerry W. Buckley “A President for the Great Silent Majority: Bruce Barton’s Construction of Calvin Coolidge,” New England Quarterly 74, no. 4 (December 2003), p. 600.
13
McCoy, Quiet President, p. 99; William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge (Norwalk, CT: The Easton Press, 1986 [1938]), p. 238; Fried, The Man Everybody Knew, p. 117; Barton, “Concerning Calvin Coolidge,” pp. 8ff.; Bruce Barton, “Calvin Coolidge as Seen Through the Eyes of His Friends,” American Review of Reviews, September 1923, pp. 273—78; Bruce Barton, “The Silent Man on Beacon Hill,” Woman’s Home Companion, March 1920, pp. 15ff
14
Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 197.
15
“President Harding and Calvin Coolidge,” FAB 0716, Theodore Roosevelt Association Collection, MBRS Div., LoC.
16
Coolidge, Autobiography, p. 158; Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, p. 89.
17
Coolidge, Autobiography, p. 147.
18
Ibid., pp. 164—65.
19
Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 300; Longworth, Crowded Hours, p. 326.
20
Fleser, Rhetorical Study, p. 27.
21
McCoy, Quiet President, p. 146.
3: THE NEW PRESIDENT
1
Allegations that Florence Harding poisoned her husband and other conspiracy theories, which have been around since the publication in 1930 of The Strange Death of President Harding, are baseless. See Dean, Warren G. Harding, pp. 164—66.
2
Coolidge, Autobiography, p. 180.
3
Ibid., pp. 174—75; New York Times, August 3, 1923, p. 1.
4
Coolidge, Autobiography, p. 174; White, Puritan in Babylon, p. 241.
5
Coolidge’s sons weren’t present. John was at civilian military training at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and Calvin Jr. was working on a tobacco farm in Hatfield, near Northampton. Carrie Brown, Coolidge’s stepmother, had passed away in 1920.
6
Fuess, The Man from Vermont, p. 314; Everett Alldredge, “Centennial History of First Congregational Church 1865—1965,” available at http://www.fccuccdc.org/history.htm, accessed on May 25, 2006.
7
New York Times, August 15, 1923, p. 15; Coolidge, Autobiography, p. 183; Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 320.
8
Lodge quoted in McCoy, Quiet President, p. 147; Norbeck quoted in Robert Ferrell, “Calvin Coolidge: The Man, the President,” in Haynes, Calvin Coolidge and the Coolidge Era, p. 140; Harold Ickes to Henry Allen, November 24, 1923, Papers of Harold Ickes, box 29, MS Div., LoC.
9
Sobel, American Enigma, p. 236.
10
White, Puritan in Babylon, pp. 251-52.
11
Slemp, Mind of the President, p. 14; Longworth, Crowded Hours, p. 325.
12
Stephen Ponder, Managing the Press: Origins of the Media Presidency, 1897—1933 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 119; Mencken, On Politics, pp. 132—33; John Blair, “Coolidge the Image-Maker: The President and the Press, 1923—1929,” New England Quarterly 46, no. 4 (December 1973), p. 500.
13
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919—1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), p. 51.
14
Allen, Only Yesterday, p. 134.
15
McCoy, Quiet President, p. 208.
16
Ibid., p. 212.
17
White, Puritan in Babylon, pp. 268—69.
18
Ibid., p. 276.
19
Lippmann, Men of Destiny, p. 16.
4: HITTING HIS STRIDE
1
Calvin Coolidge, “Religion and the Republic,” speech delivered at the unveiling of the Equestrian Statue of Bishop Francis Asbury, Washington, DC, October 15, 1924, in Foundations of the Republic, p. 149; Coolidge, Autobiography, pp. 234-35.
2
Calvin Coolidge, “The Spiritual Unification of America,” speech at the laying of the cornerstone of the Jewish Community Center, Washington, DC, May 3, 1925, in Foundations of the Republic, pp. 209—18.
3
Grace Coolidge, “A Wife Remembers,” in Lathem, Meet Calvin Coolidge, pp. 65—66; Jules Abels, In the Time of Silent Cal (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969), p. 39; Gamaliel Bradford, The Quick and the Dead (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), p. 227.
4
Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 80; New York Times, March 1, 1925, p. XXI; Hoover, Forty-two Years in the White House, pp. 262, 268, 323; Appointment books, Calvin Coolidge Papers, boxes 289—92, MS Div., LoC.
5
Coolidge, Autobiography, pp. 201—2; Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 209; McCoy, The Quiet President, p. 159.
6
Hoover, Forty-two Years in the White House, pp. 132, 238; Coolidge, Autobiography, p. 200; Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 207; Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 5; McCoy, Quiet President, p. 177; Stephen Schuker, “American Foreign Policy: The European Dimension,” in Haynes, Calvin Coolidge and the Coolidge Era, p. 291.
7
Abels, Silent Cal, p. 182; Daniel Leab, “Coolidge, Hays, and 1920 Movies: Some Aspects of Image and Reality,” in Haynes, Calvin Coolidge and the Coolidge Era, p. 103.
8
Hoover, Forty-two Years in the White House, p. 13; James Coupal, “Football ‘Medicine,’” Good Housekeeping, March 1935, p. 219; Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 23.
9
Hoover, Forty-two Years in the White House, p. 290; Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 490; Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 79; Gilbert, Tormented President, pp. 46—47, 217.
10
Hoover, Forty-two Years in the White House, pp. 132, 233; Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 255.
11
“People,” Time, May 16, 1955.
12
Quoted in White, Puritan in Babylon, p. 257.
13
Slemp, The Mind of the President, pp. 12—13; Herbert Hoover, Memoirs, pp. 55—56.
14
“The Danger of Too Much Coolidge,” New Republic, December 26, 1923, p. 109.
15
White, Puritan in Babylon, p. 261; Coolidge, Autobiography, p. 229.
16
Fleser, A Rhetorical Study, p. 28; Coolidge, Autobiography, pp. 219—20.
17
Blair, “Coolidge the Image-Maker,” p. 502; Ponder, Managing the Press, p. 109.
18
Cornwell, “Coolidge and Presidential Leadership,” p. 272; New York Times, August 7, 1927, p. XXII.
19
Lindsay Rogers, “The White House ‘Spokesman,’ Virginia Quarterly Review (July 1926), p. 366; Coolidge, Autobiography, p. 184; Cornwell, “Coolidge and Presidential Leadership,” p. 274. For samples of the questions themselves, see Calvin Coolidge Papers, reel 39, case 36, MS Div., LoC.
20
Sobel, American Enigma, p. 240; Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 234.
21
Blair, “Coolidge the Image-Maker,” p. 504; Calvin Coolidge Papers, reel 54, case 72, MS Div., LoC.
22
“President Coolidge: Taken on the White House Grounds,” FEC 4575, AFI/Maurice Zouary Collection, MBRS Div., LoC ; New York Times, April 22, 1925, p. 8; “Visitin’ ’Round at Coolidge Corners” [Patheb4 News], FEB 8580, AFI/Harold Casselton/Ted Larson Collection, MBRS Div., LoC; Abels, Silent Cal, pp. 191—92. On the De Forest exchange, see Calvin Coolidge Papers, reel 54, case 72, MS Div., LoC.
23
Blair, “Coolidge the Image-Maker,” p. 521; Clark quoted in Gil Troy, See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate, 2d ed., rev. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996 [1991]), p. 149; Leab, “Coolidge, Hays, and 1920s Movies,” p. 102.
24
Rogers quoted in Ponder, Managing the Press, p. 123; Denny quoted in John Tebbel and Sarah Miles Watts, The Press and the Presidency: From George Washington to Ronald Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 406.
25
Blair, “Coolidge the Image-Maker,” pp. 500—501.
5 : THE COOLIDGE PROSPERITY
1
George Soule, Prosperity Decade: From War to Depression, 1917—1929 (White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1975 [1947]), pp. 3, 132. Soule notes that some of the burden was shifted to local governments, which in the 1920s cumulatively ran deficits that offset the new federal surplus.
2
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), p. 434.
3
Bryan quoted in Raymond Vickers, Panic in Paradise: Florida’s Banking Crash of 1926 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), p. 19; Allen, Only Yesterday, p. 138.
4
Slemp, The Mind of the President, p. 11.
5
Andrew Mellon, Taxation: The People’s Business (New York: Macmillan, 1924).
6
New York Times, February 13, 1924, p. 1. Historian David Shreve has found that the term “trickle down” came into use in 1932 as a criticism liberals used against the newly created Reconstruction Finance Corporation and, retroactively, Mellon’s economics. Shreve also notes that William Jennings Bryan used a variant of the concept in his 1896 speech at the Democratic National Convention: “There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”
7
Sidney Ratner, Taxation and Democracy in America (New York: John Wiley, 1967 [1942]), pp. 406—12, 417. The major boon to corporations was the 1921 elimination of the World War I—era excess profits tax, a type of burden imposed on companies in war or emergencies.
8
New York Times, December 7, 1927, p. 24. One critic of Mellon’s, Huey Long of Louisiana, would give vent to this outrage in a 1932 Senate speech. “Mr. Mellon,” Long declared, “points out that this is a grave condition; that the law has been miraculously at fault in failing to collect an income tax against a larger percentage of the people … . It is the infernal fact that 98 percent of the people of the United States have nothing, rather than it being the fault of the fact that only 2 percent of them pay any income tax.” Henry Christian, ed., Kingfish to America: Share Our Wealth: Selected Senatorial Papers of Huey P. Long (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), pp. 13—14.
9
Silas Bent, Strange Bedfellows: A Review of Politics, Personalities, and the Press (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), pp. xii—xiii; Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of Jesus (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925); Mencken quoted in Parrish, Anxious Decades, p. 29.
10
Humphrey quoted in Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order, p. 65.
11
Kriste Lindenmeyer, A Right to Childhood: The U.S. Children’s Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912—46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 100; Lela Costin, Two Sisters for Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 147.
12
New York Times, November 24, 1923, p. 12; Harold Ickes to Henry Allen, November 24, 1923, Papers of Harold Ickes, box 29, MS Div., LoC.
13
New York Times, December 7, 1923, p. 3; Jeffrey Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 118.
14
Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 334.
15
S. K. Ratcliffe, “President Coolidge’s Triumph,” Contemporary Review (July 1924), p. 705; Hoover, Forty-two Years in the White House, pp. 127—28.
16
McCoy, Quiet President, p. 202; New York Times, March 8, 1924, p. 1; New York Times, February 15, 1924, p. 1.
17
New York Times, May 4, 1924, p. 1; New York Times, May 16, 1924, p. 1; New York Times, May 20, 1924, p. 1.
18
New York Times, January 5, 1924, p. 1; New York Times, March 28, 1924, p. 19.
19
New York Times, June 6, 1924, p. 1. The top surtaxes affected those earning at least $500,000 ($5.9 million in 2006 dollars) and the threshold for having to pay surtaxes was raised to $10,000 ($118,000 in 2006 dollars).
6: CONTROVERSIES
1
The term “political fundamentalism” comes from Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, pp. 204—24.
2
Marvin Olasky and John Perry, Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial (Nashville: Broadmant Holmar, 2005), p. 16.
3
Calvin Coolidge, “Toleration and Liberalism,” address before the American Legion Convention at Omaha, Nebraska, October 6, 1925, in Foundations of the Republic, p. 298; Calvin Coolidge, “Whose Country Is This?” Good Housekeeping, February 1935, p. 14, cited in John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1865—1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), p. 318.
4
McCoy, Quiet President, p. 230.
5
New York Times, August 17, 1923, p. 2; New York Times, October 12, 1924, p. 2; Dawes, Notes as Vice President, pp. 22—25; Ratcliffe, “President Coolidge’s Triumph,” p. 710; Coolidge, “Toleration and Liberalism, pp. 287—301. Vice-presidential nominee Charles Dawes also criticized the Klan and claimed that Coolidge commended him for his remarks afterward.
6
New York Times, December 7, 1923, p. 4.
7
Barton, “Calvin Coolidge as Seen Through the Eyes of His Friends,” p. 277; Kenneth O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton (New York: Free Press, 1995), pp. 98—99; Matthew Rees, From the Deck to the Sea: Blacks and the Republican Party (Wakefield, NH: Longwood Academic, 1991), p. 125.
8
Howard Quint and Robert Ferrell, eds., The Talkative President: The Off-the-Record Press Conferences of Calvin Coolidge (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1964), p. 176.
9
New York Times, October 17, 1925, p. 1.
10
Frank Kent, “Mr. Coolidge,” American Mercury, August 1924, p. 389, reprinted as “The Press and Mr. Coolidge,” in New Republic, June 13, 1960, p. 14; Dawes quoted in Fleser, Rhetorical Study p. 51.
7. GETTING ELECTED
1
New York Times, August 4, 1923, p. 1.
2
Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 335.
3
New York Times, December 20, 1923, pp. 1,16.
4
Gilbert, Tormented President, pp. 151—52.
5
Ibid, p. 153; Dawes quoted in Sobel, American Enigma, p. 295.
6
White, Puritan in Babylon, p. 308.
7
Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 221.
8
Coolidge, Autobiography, p. 190.
9
New York Times, July 9, 1924, p. 19.
10
Gilbert, Tormented President, pp. 160, 163. Gilbert, from whose monograph The Tormented President (2003) this account draws, broke ground in reconstructing the events surrounding Calvin Jr.’s death by examining the papers of Joel Boone, the White House physician. Gilbert concluded that Coolidge became clinically depressed after his son’s death and that the president’s governance changed starkly after the boy’s death. Valuable as Gilbert’s book is, his diagnosis of clinical depression is speculative. As Gilbert acknowledges, Coolidge’s shyness and laconic style were lifelong traits—making the continuities in his character before and after the boy’s passing seem more salient than any changes.
11
John Lambert, “When the President Wept,” Good Housekeeping, March 1935, pp. 225—26; Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 351; Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 224.
12
Coolidge, Autobiography, pp. 190—91.
13
Bruce Barton to Edward T. Clark, December 12, 1923, Clark Papers, box 1, folder 8, MS Div., LoC; Barton to Frank W. Stearns, December 31, 1923, Clark Papers, box 1, folder 8, MS Div., LoC; Barton, “Calvin Coolidge as Seen Through the Eyes of His Friends,” pp. 273—78; New York Times, October 20, 1962, pp. 1, 15; Terry Hynes, “Media Manipulation and Political Campaigns: Bruce Barton and the Presidential Elections of the Jazz Age,” Journalism History 4, no. 3 (Autumn 1977), p. 94; Fried, Man Everybody Knew, pp. 90, 123.
14
Quint and Ferrell, Talkative President, p. 47; Douglas Craig, Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920—1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 142.
15
Clark quoted in Troy, See How They Ran, p. 148; McCoy Quiet President, pp. 254—55.
16
New York Times, September 2, 1927, p. XXII; Cornwell, “Coolidge and Presidential Leadership,” p. 267; on phonograph records see Calvin Coolidge Papers, reel 90, case 177, MS Div., LoC.
17
Craig, Fireside Politics, p. 142; Slemp, The Mind of the President, p. 10; Cornwell, “Coolidge and Presidential Leadership,” pp. 268—70.
18
Craig, Fireside Politics, p. 145; New York Times, July 18, 1924, p. 3.
19
New York Times, August 15, 1924, p. 2.
20
Buckley, “A President for the ‘Great Silent Majority,’” p. 616.
21
New York Times, August 20, 1924, p. 3; McCoy, Quiet President, pp. 255—56.
22
New York Times, October 18, 1924, p. 1; Edward Bernays, “Manipulating Public Opinion: The Why and the How,” American Journal of Sociology 33, no. 6 (May 1928), p. 967; Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), pp. 78—79.
23
Tye, Father of Spin, pp. 77—78; Buckley, “A President for the ‘Great Silent Majority,’” p. 617.
24
Craig, Fireside Politics, pp. 144—45; Leab, “Coolidge, Hays, and 1920s Movies,” p. 102; McCoy, Quiet President, p. 262; Bliven, “Great Coolidge Mystery,” p. 50.
25
Troy, See How They Ran, pp. 147—48; Bliven, “Great Coolidge Mystery,” p. 50.
26
David Burner, “Election of 1924,” in History of American Presidential Elections, 1789—1968, vol. 6, ed. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Fred Israel (New York: Chelsea House, 1985) p. 2485; McCoy, Quiet President, p. 260.
27
Oswald Garrison Villard, Fighting Years: Memoirs of a Liberal Editor (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), pp. 497—98; Chester Rowell, “Why I Shall Vote for Coolidge,” New Republic, October 29, 1924, pp. 219—21.
28
Kenneth Roberts, “Calvin Coolidge, Politician,” in Lathem, Meet Calvin Coolidge, p. 31.
29
Bliven, “Great Coolidge Mystery” p. 45.
8: BEYOND AMERICA’S SHORES
1
McCoy, Quiet President, p. 264; Hoover, Forty-two Years in the White House, p. 141. The State, War, and Navy Building was later renamed the Old Executive Office Building.
2
Butler, Across the Busy Years, p. 358.
3
McCoy, Quiet President, p. 279; Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 228. The rejected nominee was Andrew Johnson’s choice for attorney general, Henry Stanbery.
4
Quint and Ferrell, Talkative President, p. 96.
5
George Nash, “The ‘Great Enigma’ and the ‘Great Engineer,’” in Haynes, Calvin Coolidge and the Coolidge Era, pp. 149—90; T.R.B., “Washington Notes,” New Republic, September 2, 1925, p. 43.
6
Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 406; Schuker, “American Foreign Policy,” p. 292.
7
Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 405; New York Times, December 7, 1923, p. 4.
8
New York Times, December 7, 1923, p. 4.
9
Quint and Ferrell, Talkative President, p. 157.
10
New York Times, December 4, 1924, p. 8; Michael Dunne, The United States and the World Court, 1920—1935 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 99—101.
11
New York Times, April 26, 1925, p. 1; L. Ethan Ellis, Frank B. Kellogg and American Foreign Relations (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1961), p. 226.
12
McCoy, Quiet President, p. 362; Quint and Ferrell, Talkative President, p. 208; New York Times, January 28, 1926, p. 1.
13
Quint and Ferrell, Talkative President, p. 209.
14
Dunne, United States and World Court, p. 169.
15
Ibid., p. 69.
16
New York Times, September 1, 1923, p. 1; McCoy, Quiet President, pp. 178—79.
17
Ellis, Frank B. Kellogg, pp. 59—60.
18
Quint and Ferrell, Talkative President, pp. 239—40.
19
Bliven, “Great Coolidge Mystery,” p. 49; McCoy, Quiet President, pp. 355—56.
20
Calvin Coolidge, “Message on Nicaragua,” in Calvin Coolidge, 1872—1933: Chronology—Documents—Bibliographical Aids, ed. Philip Moran (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1970), p. 86.
21
Ellis, Frank B. Kellogg, p. 73.
22
Ibid., p. 99.
23
Like many policies of the era, the treaties would later draw fire. By committing the United States to limit the defenses of its Pacific Island holdings, and by surrendering American supremacy, they arguably encouraged Japanese aggression in Asia in the 1930s. At the time, however, the pacts were praised for embodying precisely the kind of bold strides toward peace that Wilson had failed to attain.
24
Quint and Ferrell, Talkative President, p. 215.
25
McCoy, Quiet President, p. 375.
26
New York Times, December 5, 1928, p. 26.
27
Parrish, Anxious Decades, p. 60.
9: HIGH TIDE OF REPUBLICANISM
1
New York Times, June 7, 1927, p. 8.; New York Times, June 11, 1927, p. 3.
2
Merz quoted in Allen, Only Yesterday, p. 189; New York Times, June 12, 1927, p. 2; New York Times, June 3, 1927, p. 1; New York Times, June 13, 1927, p. 8; New York Times, June 19, 1927, p. X3.
3
New York Times, June 12, 1927, p. 8; New York Times, June 13, 1927, p. 2.
4
John Ward, “The Meaning of Lindbergh’s Flight,” American Quarterly 10, no.1 (Spring 1958), p. 7; Mullet quoted in Parrish, Anxious Decades, p. 179; New Republic quoted in Ward, p. 6. Contrary to lore, Lindbergh was not the first man to traverse the Atlantic. A handful of others had done so—traveling from Newfoundland, Canada, to Ireland, or along other routes—though none had gone the full distance of New York to Paris.
5
Ratner, Taxation and Democracy, p. 424; David Burner, The Politics of Provincialism: The Democratic Party in Transition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986 [1967]), p. 165; New York Times, March 7, 1926, p. 14.
6
Quint and Ferrell, Talkative President, p. 98.
7
William MacDonald, “‘Coolidge Prosperity’ a Campaign Issue,” Current History (November 1926), pp. 248—50; New York Times, October 29, 1926, pp. 1, 20.
8
Bruce Barton to Calvin Coolidge, undated, Edward T. Clark Papers, box 1, folder 8, MS Div., LoC; Edward T. Clark to Bruce Barton, October 2, 1926, Edward T. Clark Papers, box 1, folder 8, MS Div., LoC.
9
Calvin Coolidge to Edward T. Clark, October 28, 1932, Clark Papers, box 2, folder “Calvin Coolidge #3,” MS Div., LoC; New York Times, September 23, 1926, p. 4.
10
New York Times, September 28, 1926, p. 27; Fried, The Man Everybody Knew, p. 126; Frank W. Stearns to Edward T. Clark, September 30, 1926, Clark Papers, box 17, folder “Stearns,” MS Div., LoC.
11
McCoy, Quiet President, p. 313.
12
New York Times, December 8, 1926, p 14.
13
Ibid.
14
Craig, Fireside Politics, pp. 66—68.
15
Ibid., p. 57.
16
John Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), pp. 286—87; Matthew Pearcy, “After the Flood: A History of the 1928 Flood Control Act,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (Summer 2002). Online at http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3945/is_200207/ai_n9105154/, viewed on June 4, 2006.
17
Barry, Rising Tide, p. 369.
18
Ibid., pp. 372—73.
19
Pearcy, “After the Flood”; Barry, Rising Tide, pp. 405—6.
20
Quint and Ferrell, Talkative President, pp. 81—82; Pearcy, “After the Flood.”
21
Pearcy, “After the Flood”; Barry, Rising Tide, p. 406.
22
Blair, “Coolidge the Image-Maker,” p. 522; White, Puritan in Babylon, p. 352.
23
New York Times, July 5, 1927, pp. 1, 3; Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 391; New York Times, June 19, 1927, p. 16; Hoover, Forty-two Years in the White House, p. 168.
24
Fuess, Man from Vermont, pp. 392—93.
25
Ibid., pp. 393—94.
26
Ibid., p. 394.
27
White, Puritan in Babylon, p. 360.
28
Ibid., p. 361.
29
Ibid., p. 360.
30
Coolidge, Autobiography, pp. 242, 244; White, Puritan in Babylon, p. 366n; Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 249. One oft-repeated secondhand account has Grace Coolidge stating, “Poppa says a depression is coming,” but the first lady denied ever making the comment.
31
Coolidge, Autobiography, p. 241; Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 249.
32
Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 263.
10: A CONTESTED LEGACY
1
. Hoover, Forty-two Years in the White House, p. 180.
2
New York Times, December 5, 1928, p. 26; Herbert Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 3, p. 16.
3
Bliven, “Great Coolidge Mystery,” p. 51; Al Smith, “A Shining Example,” in Lathem, Meet Calvin Coolidge, p. 220; Holmes quoted in McCoy, Quiet President, pp. 262—63.
4
Allen, Only Yesterday, p. 252; Michael Bernstein, “The Great Depression as a Historical Problem,” in The Economics of the Great Depression, ed. Mark Wheeler (Kalamazoo, MI: W E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1998), p. 66.
5
Soule, Prosperity Decade, pp. 317, 326, 328; John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929 (New York: Mariner Books, 1997 [1954]), pp. 173—74.
6
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936), p. 151.
7
Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order, pp. 134—36; Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), pp. 74—77.
8
Hoover quoted in Allen, Only Yesterday, p. 263; Mellon quoted in Galbraith, Great Crash, p. 15; Frank Kent, “The Democrats Stand by Mellon,” Nation, March 17, 1926, pp. 281—82; Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, p. 242.
9
Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, p. 243; Allen, Only Yesterday, pp. 268—73.
10
Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, p. 246.
11
Galbraith, Great Crash, p. 1.
12
Parrish, Anxious Decades, p. 230.
13
Galbraith, Great Crash, p. 21; New York Times, January 7, 1928, p. 2; New York Times, January 8, 1928, p. 43.
14
Galbraith, Great Crash, p. 34. If the Fed failed to stop the reckless investing early on, it waited until too late to rein it in. In August 1929, after Coolidge left office, the Fed voted to raise interest rates again, to 6 percent. The move contracted the money supply just when the economy was entering recession. The deflationary effects kicked in after the crash, precisely when a more stimulative policy was needed.
15
White, Puritan in Babylon, p. 422; Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 456; Calvin Coolidge to Edward T. Clark, March 26, 1932, Clark Papers, box 2, folder “Calvin Coolidge #3,” MS Div., LoC.
16
Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 455; White, Puritan in Babylon, p. 415; McCoy, Quiet President, pp. 394, 398.
17
New York Times, November 10, 1929, p. BR9.
18
Grace Coolidge to Edward T. Clark, March 16, 1935, Clark Papers, LoC MS Division, box 2, folder “Calvin Coolidge #5,” MS Div., LoC.
19
Edward T. Clark to Bruce Barton, January 26, 1933, Clark Papers, box 1, folder 8, MS Div., LoC.
20
White, Puritan in Babylon, p. 427.
21
Matthew Josephson, “The ‘New Era’: Its Rise and Fall,” New Republic, November 4, 1931, p. 315; Mencken, On Politics, p. 140.
22
Starling, Starling of the White House, p. 302; Clark to Barton, January 26, 1933 Clark Papers, MS Div., LoC.
23
Henry Stoddard, “I No Longer Fit In,” in Lathem, Meet Calvin Coolidge, p. 214.
24
New York Times, May 20, 1928, p. 74.
25
Slemp, The Mind of the President, p. 11; Fenno, “Coolidge Representative,” p. 208; Fuess, Man from Vermont, p. 334.
26
Cather quoted in Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995), p. 3.
27
Mencken, On Politics, p. 140.