The New President
On August 2, 1923, on a summer tour of the West, President Warren Harding was seized by a massive fatal heart attack in his San Francisco hotel room.1 His sudden death unleashed shock and grief as the news spread around the country. Though remembered today as unremarkable or worse, Harding was at the time beloved: good-looking, genial, and well liked, he conveyed a sense of ease and fun that proved a welcome relief from the earnest Woodrow Wilson. What was more, few Americans yet knew about the scandals that would soon tarnish his name; many, including Coolidge, admired his achievements. “It would be difficult to find two years of peacetime history in all of our republic that were marked with more important and far-reaching accomplishments,” Coolidge maintained, citing higher tariffs, lower taxes, the new budget system, and the postwar peace that Harding had struck with the Central Powers.2
While much of the country mourned, in Plymouth Notch the reaction was one of awe. On the night of August 2, Coolidge was visiting his father, still tending his farm at age seventy-eight, who after midnight answered a sharp rap at the front door of the white two-story cottage where he had raised his son. Receiving the news of Harding’s death from the owner of the nearest telephone exchange—the “farmer’s line” at his 250-year-old house wasn’t equipped to handle long-distance calls—John Coolidge climbed the stairs, his voice quavering as he called his son’s name. “As the
only time I had ever observed that before was when death had visited our family,” his son recalled, “I knew that something of the gravest nature had occurred.”3
Emotion flooded the new president. As he recounted it, he remembered the devotion his father had shown toward him over the years—ferrying him over mountain passes to his prep school in winter storms—“in the hope that I might sometime rise to a position of importance.” For his father to be the first to recognize him as the new president invested the moment with special poignancy. Coolidge dressed, knelt, said a prayer, and went downstairs. “I believe I can swing it,” he recalled thinking, betraying his familiar blend of modesty and self-confidence.4
Soon the house was abuzz. From nearby Bridgewater, a stenographer sped over. From Ludlow, the reporters traveling with the vice president hurried up to Plymouth. The cacophony of their sputtering cars on the hilly roads woke the neighbors. Lamplights flecked the Vermont night. Once the newspapermen arrived, the new president issued a statement. He said he would continue Harding’s policies and keep his cabinet. Intuitively, he realized that the tenor of his presidency should stay true to Harding’s theme of normalcy.
The men at the house found a copy of the Constitution in John Coolidge’s library. They typed up the oath of office and gave it to the elder Coolidge, who as a notary public was deemed capable of administering it to his son. Then, in the small downstairs parlor, by the glow of a kerosene lamp, a small group gathered that included the local newspaper editor, Coolidge’s assistant, his chauffeur, and his wife. The new president, his face pale, his mother’s Bible on the table, somberly recited the thirty-five-word oath. The clock on the mantel read 2:47 A.M.5
Had Coolidge planned this chain of events, he could not have devised more propitious atmospherics. The spare rural scene exuded the New England virtues of simplicity, piety, and duty on which he traded. Upon returning to Washington, Coolidge further burnished the image of the common man thrust into the seat of power. He dined with Florence Harding and insisted on staying in the Willard while she vacated the White House. Although Coolidge had been attending Washington’s First Congregational Church, he now saw fit to formally join it. On August 5, he accepted the offer from the Reverend Jason Pierce, the minister and a fellow Amherst man, to take communion. Attendance at Sunday services multiplied as a result, and Edmund Starling would issue a report urging the church to reinforce its rickety balconies to accommodate the swelling congregation.6
Coolidge also ingratiated himself with the White House press corps. At his first full press conference, on August 14, the president pledged to the 150 reporters huddled around him to continue Harding’s twice-weekly sessions and to always be available. The correspondents in turn sized him up, the New York Times wrote, as “frankly spoken, affable, and courteous.” Afterward, he gamely posed with them for the photographers. When one of the motion picture cameramen suggested three cheers for the new president, Coolidge spared the reporters an awkward moment by insisting diplomatically “This [hurrah] also includes the opposition.” A hearty ovation followed, which the president recalled as a highlight of his presidency.7
These moves spoke to the hard work and savvy that Coolidge showed in his first months in office as he sought the legitimacy that every vice president who inherits the top office has to struggle to attain. Initially, there were doubters. When Henry Cabot Lodge heard that Harding had died, he exclaimed, “My God! That means Coolidge is president!” Others took an equally dim view. Coolidge could “no more run this big machine at Washington,” sniped Senator Peter Norbeck of South Dakota, “than could a paralytic.” Added Harold Ickes, a Theodore Roosevelt progressive: “If this country has reached the state where Coolidge is the right sort of a person for president, then any office boy is qualified to be chief executive.”8
Pundits, too, belittled Coolidge. They described him as inveterately lucky, somehow always at the right place at the right time. A popular joke cast him as a baseball player who reached first base on a walk, stole second base, got to third on an error, and reached home because the catcher died. Even people who knew him well and admired him didn’t necessarily think him presidential material. “A lot of people in Plymouth can’t understand how I got to be president,” Coolidge told the journalist William Allen White, “least of all my father.”9
In less than a year, however, Coolidge would silence many of his doubters. Writers and wits still disparaged his abilities and railed against his conservatism. But Coolidge managed several feats soon after taking office. He contained, after initial missteps, the burgeoning scandals that would posthumously tar Harding’s legacy. He set a political agenda that, despite his troubles pushing it through Congress, helped define his era. And, for all his political errors in dealing with Capitol Hill, he mastered the new politics of public opinion, emerging as a hugely popular politician associated with the decade’s economic surge. In time, this cautious, unassuming Vermonter would come to embody the virtues of probity and moderation at a time of cultural ferment, of dutifulness and thrift in an era of irresponsibility and exploding consumer capitalism.
The 1920s have usually been portrayed as a time of resurgent conservatism after two decades of progressivism, with Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover constituting a triumvirate of Republican restorers. “After the World War the reaction in American social and political thinking snapped back beyond Wilsonian idealism,” wrote William Allen White, “back even beyond Taft’s chuckling laissez-faire complacence, back of Roosevelt to the Hanna period that followed the Spanish-American War and its rising imperialism.”10
As White surely knew, that simple pendulum’s arc traces too neat a path. While the Republican ascendancy of the 1920s certainly
signaled a muting of progressive impulses, more dissonance and dissent roiled Washington than the trifecta of Republican presidential victories would suggest. In the 1922 midterm elections, for example, the Democrats made huge gains in both houses of Congress. Though they failed to win majorities, their victories shattered the solid support on Capitol Hill that Harding had enjoyed on taking office. These off-year gains—and the seats the Democrats would pick up in the 1926 congressional elections—were not tantamount to holding the White House, but they did keep Coolidge from being able to work his will on the Hill.
Coolidge also faced opposition on some issues from within his own party, which was far from unified. Ever since Theodore Roosevelt had bolted the GOP to run for president on his Bull Moose ticket in 1912, the Republicans had been divided. The “Old Guard” against whom Roosevelt had rebelled remained staunchly right wing and allied with business. In contrast, some of Roosevelt’s followers, while making peace with these party stalwarts, retained a strain of liberal noblesse oblige and a commitment to internationalism in foreign policy that tempered their conservatism. Still others—the so-called farm bloc of westerners—claimed Roosevelt’s progressive label, though they were cut of different ideological cloth. With their constituents facing persistent hard times, such progressive senators from the western and Great Plains states as William Borah, Hiram Johnson, Robert La Follette, George Norris, and Burton Wheeler—many of them holding powerful positions on Senate committees—kept an insurgent spirit alive. Thus, conservatives may have dominated the scene, but America remained divided.
Coolidge fit uneasily into this puzzle. Even within his own party he occupied no clear niche. “He is not easy to classify as either a Conservative or a Progressive—the two major lines of political division,” noted Bascom Slemp, the conservative Virginia congressman whom Coolidge hired as his chief aide. With his northeastern breeding, his exaltation of character, and his view of public service as ennobling, Coolidge was probably closest in type to elite Rooseveltians such as Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, and Henry Stimson.
And yet his small-town roots and mind-set, so fundamental to his politics, made him an altogether different creature from these wellborn internationalists. Most telling of all, he was said privately to despise Theodore Roosevelt. Similarly, despite his sporadic liberal tendencies, Coolidge was not one of the 1920s progressives. He lacked the requisite affection for activist government and visceral contempt for plutocracy. Finally, while he shared the Old Guard’s esteem for business and small government, Coolidge was never really one of their number either. During the Harding years, the heyday of the Old Guard’s restoration, Coolidge had remained aloof and alienated. Besides, in terms of personal style, Coolidge was as different from Harding “as a New England front parlor is from a back room in a speakeasy,” in the words of Alice Roosevelt Longworth.11
Still, on becoming president Coolidge saw little reason to tinker with Harding’s formula. He kept his predecessor’s cabinet, as promised, including the energetic Herbert Hoover at Commerce, the haughty Andrew Mellon at Treasury, and the pragmatic Charles Evans Hughes at State. On the whole he stayed true to their agendas—most enthusiastically to Mellon’s program of tax and budget cutting that the Treasury secretary would seek to advance regularly for the rest of the decade.
A less trumpeted but important decision was to retain Judson Welliver, a former newspaperman who worked for Harding as “literary clerk.” In effect, Welliver served as a White House publicity man and the first dedicated presidential speechwriter. (It was Welliver who coined the phrase “Founding Fathers,” though Harding often received the credit.) Under Coolidge Welliver earned a handsome salary of $7,500, equal to that of senior aides. Although Coolidge worked hard on his own speeches and wrote far more of them than had Harding, Welliver learned to ape the new president’s style as ably as he had mimicked his predecessor’s. Indeed, said H. L. Mencken, he made Coolidge’s style “simpler and clearer,” though he added, “It continued to be, in essence, a device for flabbergasting newspaper editorial writers without actually saying anything … to
roar like a hurricane without letting loose any compromising ideas.” Coolidge’s retention of Welliver—and his decision to preserve the post upon Welliver’s departure in 1925 by replacing him with Stuart Crawford, another Amherst classmate—signaled how important press aides were becoming to the presidency.12
Every president, of course, needs a few trusted aides at his side, and Coolidge made a few key appointments of his own. Though his old mentor Murray Crane had died in 1920, William Butler and Frank Stearns from Massachusetts were on hand for counsel; Coolidge came to view Stearns, a frequent dinner companion, as playing the consigliere role that Colonel Edward House had for Wilson. There was talk of appointing Bruce Barton secretary to the president, but Coolidge chose instead Slemp, who had allies on Capitol Hill and at the Republican National Committee. These hires, however, scarcely signaled a break from Harding’s direction. Normalcy would continue.
There was one area in which a break with the Harding administration was not just wise but necessary. When Harding died, the Teapot Dome scandal, as it came to be called, was just starting to claim the president’s attention. Harding himself was not venal, but he had a weakness for placing unscrupulous men in his cabinet. “I have no trouble with my enemies,” he once remarked, “ … but my damn friends … my goddamn friends … they’re the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!”13
Even while Harding was still alive, news was surfacing about several corrupt transactions involving his aides. The most sweeping centered on Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall’s giveaway of federal oil reserves—at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California—to two businessmen in exchange for large sums of money. Fall and one of the oil moguls, Harry Sinclair, would eventually serve prison time for the shady deal, while two other cabinet members—Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby and Postmaster General Will Hays would suffer taint. Separate scandals would
implicate the director of the veterans bureau, Charles Forbes, and the late president’s crony Harry Daugherty, whom Harding had foolishly installed as attorney general.
Like Watergate in its day, Teapot Dome came to denote the whole raft of Harding scandals, which were seen as outgrowths of the president’s penchant for surrounding himself with morally challenged men. The first to break had been the veterans scandal, in 1922. It was a case of pure graft: Forbes had arranged with contractors to build outrageously overpriced hospitals, stocked with outrageously overpriced goods ($70,000 for floor wax and cleaner), which the government then sold at fire-sale prices. Forbes pocketed kickbacks. Here Harding had acted diligently, firing Forbes in early 1923. Other cases of venality, however, passed the president without notice or even with his unwitting participation. Egregiously, in the case of Teapot Dome, Harding signed off on the transfer of the government oil reserves from the U.S. Navy to the Interior Department that enabled Secretary Fall to line his pockets in the first place.
It fell to Coolidge to clean up the mess. In the autumn of 1923, as the new president was just getting his bearings, the Senate began investigating both the Forbes affair and the early reports about Teapot Dome. Led by Wisconsin’s “Fighting Bob” La Follette and Montana Democrat Thomas Walsh, the progressive coalition spearheaded the probe. Though no doubt sincerely troubled by the corruption, they plainly had political motives as well, and many observers at first viewed the investigations as routine political harassment. Newspaper editorials labeled the senators “scandalmongers,” “mud-gunners,” and “assassins of character”—even after the facts had justified their inquiries.14
By the new year, however, disclosures were mounting high enough to inflame the public. In January 1924, the oilman Edward Doheny told a Senate hearing that he had given Albert Fall $100,000 in a little black bag. Harry Sinclair also confessed to giving bonds to the Interior secretary. Fall claimed the Fifth Amendment. With the facts looking grim, the Republican National Committee sought to discredit the investigations by accusing Senator Walsh and others
of Bolshevik sympathies. But the smear job had limited results. Far vaster in scope than Forbes’s payola scheme, Teapot Dome not only surpassed its sister scandal in magnitude but outstripped past imbroglios, including the Grant administration’s 1872 Credit Mobilier affair, as the benchmark for presidential wrongdoing. Not until Watergate would it be surpassed.
Coolidge temporized. Vowing to enforce the law, he pledged to appoint a special prosecutor from each party to probe the case. Yet even as he faced a barrage of questions about the scandals at his press conferences, he didn’t grasp their gravity; playing for time, the president said he wouldn’t personally “determine criminal guilt or render judgment in civil cases.” Making matters worse, his first choices for the special prosecutor job both turned out to have oil industry ties and aroused Senate opposition. Withdrawing their names, Coolidge instead chose former senator Atlee Pomerene and future Supreme Court justice Owen Roberts.15
As the winter of 1923—24 wore on, the president remained protective of the Harding gang. His sense of duty to fulfill his predecessor’s agenda overrode his better judgment. When in late January the Senate demanded that the president dismiss Navy Secretary Edwin Denby—for having agreed to transfer the oil reserves from his department to Fall’s—the president balked. Several days later, however, Denby resigned on his own, rendering Coolidge’s passivity moot. Nonetheless Coolidge showed his sympathies, telling Denby, “You will go with the knowledge that your honesty and integrity have not been impugned.” In fact, the opposite was true: Denby’s reputation would suffer, although historians have judged him to have been more dupe than scoundrel.16
There was more to come. Still another member of Harding’s cabinet was running into trouble: Attorney General Harry Daugherty, the late president’s closest associate. A classic hack, Daugherty was unconcerned about policy and ethically lax. His problem was twofold. First, questions arose about whether he had tried to block the Teapot Dome investigation; second, it came to light that he may have received bribes himself. A friend and associate of Daugherty’s,
Jess Smith, had helped a group of German bankers recoup $7 billion in securities they claimed to have lost in the world war. After receiving a $224,000 kickback from the deal, Smith placed a chunk of his ill-gotten gains in an account he shared with the attorney general. The Senate, its investigative machinery already up and running, set to work.
Like Denby, Daugherty would never be convicted of a crime. With the odor of scandal around him, however, he too became a liability. (Smith committed suicide.) But rather than jettisoning Daugherty, Coolidge bizarrely summoned him to the White House to meet with himself and Borah, one of Daugherty’s chief critics, as if he were mediating a personal feud. “Don’t let my presence embarrass you,” Daugherty sneered at Borah, who was surprised to have to lobby the president for the attorney general’s ouster in his presence. “I think I should be the least embarrassed person here,” Borah retorted. A shouting match ensued; Coolidge puffed a cigar. Ultimately, the senator prevailed. Daugherty marched noisily out of the White House in an incandescent rage. Still, he refused to resign, and Coolidge was left with no choice but to fire him. On March 27, he finally did.17
Although the scandals were Harding’s, not Coolidge’s, they could easily have tripped up the new president, especially given his early errors. Many observers, especially Democrats, expected the daily banner headlines to spell doom for the Republicans in 1924. But as in the Boston police strike, Coolidge recovered from his missteps and insulated himself from the fallout. In June, his special counsels called for the prosecution of Fall, Sinclair, and Doheny, as well as of Doheny’s son, who had ferried the “little black bag” of money to Fall. The public accepted that justice was being done, just as the scandals were growing too baroque to sustain newspaper readers’ attention. “COOLIDGE HITS OIL DEALS!” a Washington Times headline read. “Has quietly assumed control of the situation—Surprise awaits his foes.”18
Coolidge’s air of rectitude aided his recovery. By dispatching the worst of the Ohio Gang, however halfheartedly, he unloaded an
albatross. His own upstanding appointees to the cabinet—California judge Curtis Wilbur at Navy; former Columbia University law school dean Harlan Fiske Stone at Justice—enhanced his aura of integrity. Coolidge also fired William Burns, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who was implicated in the scandals, replacing him with a young man with a reputation for honesty, J. Edgar Hoover. A housecleaning at the Republican National Committee allowed Coolidge to move his own allies, notably William Butler, into power there. And since the Senate investigations found no wrongdoing by Coolidge himself, his personal reputation emerged enhanced. Even the president’s boilerplate about not prejudging the cases had gone over well.
In contrast to the stench of the Harding pols, Coolidge seemed a breath of fresh Vermont air. Here was the germ of the public persona that William Allen White would later call, in the title of his biography, the Puritan in Babylon. Coolidge reassured the swelling ranks of middle-class Americans who, Walter Lippmann observed, “can [now] afford luxury and are buying it furiously, largely on the installment plan.” As Lippmann explained, these New Era consumers could tell themselves that they “are stern, ascetic and devoted to plain living because they vote for a man who is.”19
Lippmann came close to capturing Coolidge’s appeal, but he missed one important aspect of it. While Coolidge’s morality and old-fashioned values reassured a public concerned about the erosion of personal virtue, the president was no crusading ideologue seeking to turn back the clock. Rather, his parsimony, his modesty, and his preachments about small government seemed to demonstrate that these values could thrive in a contemporary environment. He did not deplore corporate capitalism, or technology, or even consumer spending; he accepted these elements of modernity while trusting in his religious faith and staying vigilant against moral decay. By his example, he gave hope that the mores of the old century might yet survive in the new one.