4

Hitting His Stride

Calvin Coolidge’s air of rectitude comforted Americans in a time of shifting values. It helped him to navigate the shoals of the Harding scandals and, later, to rally the public when his legislative leadership proved weak. Indeed, the quirks and habits that made up the Silent Cal persona invested Coolidge’s tenure in office with much of its distinctive flavor.

A neglected element of Coolidge’s appeal was his religiosity, which was both genuine and generic, pervasive and personal. Coolidge took office at a time when the public culture of the United States was becoming more secular, and the president’s bland piety affirmed a central place for faith in American culture without triggering fears of the kind of moral crusade associated with the Ku Klux Klan or fundamentalist anti-Darwinism. Sincerely devout, Coolidge believed unquestioningly in the Protestant values with which he was raised, though he showed no signs of having thought much about theology. His was a soft spiritualism, bearing the imprint of his college professor Charles Garman and sharing affinities with the “social gospel” that liberal Protestants of the day espoused—albeit without the robust liberal politics that often accompanied it. “Our government rests upon religion,” Coolidge said in 1924. “It is from that source that we derive our reverence for truth and justice, for equality and liberty, and for the rights of mankind.” And though the president quoted often from the Bible in his speeches, he never deployed Christian teachings as a political weapon. He described himself as “an instrument in the hands of God”—not to suggest grandiosely that a divinity had selected him for leadership but to underscore what he called his “increasing sense of humility” at having “been placed in the White House.”¹

Just as his religion was mostly unreflective, so was his interest in history, which he studied mainly to buttress his homiletic and patriotic speeches. A speech he delivered at the Jewish Community Center of Washington, for example—which must have required significant research—included an admiring but dry and potted history of Jews in America, teeming with antiquarian tidbits about the influence of Mosaic law on the legal code of Connecticut and about “Hebrews” who served in the Revolutionary army. Admirable for its strong defense of toleration, it lacked much in the way of analysis.²

Coolidge preferred experience to ratiocination and valued knowledge for practical, not intellectual, purposes. Although built-in bookshelves were installed in the White House to accommodate his voluminous library, Grace attested that he read little and that when he did he preferred books “with the object of ‘improving the mind,’ an expression he used often.” The journalist Gamaliel Bradford suggested that Coolidge’s references to books sounded “more like the respect of one who reveres afar off than with any intimate daily acquaintance.” This anti-intellectual tenor pervaded Coolidge’s presidency.³

An impatience with what Coolidge considered needless complexities contributed, somewhat unfairly, to his reputation for slacking in office. Ike Hoover, the head White House usher, claimed that Coolidge worked less than any other president he had known. But Coolidge’s schedule wasn’t lax. Never an athlete, he maintained his lifelong trimness by starting his day with a morning constitutional, on which Starling accompanied him. After breakfast, usually with Grace, Coolidge began holding meetings by 9 A.M. and continued through the morning. In the afternoon, he would greet droves of White House tourists—he was the last president to work the rope lines regularly—and once shook hands with 1,900 callers in 34 minutes, probably a record. In early afternoon Coolidge took a nap, the duration of which became a source of some contention: Coolidge claimed his naps lasted one hour, Ike Hoover said “two to four hours,” and his biographer Claude Fuess, splitting the difference, settled on two. Afternoons were spent immersed in the pile of documents that invariably awaited, with no more than one or two appointments scheduled. Sometimes Coolidge would find time for more exercise, on a mechanical hobbyhorse he purchased—to titters in the press corps—or on what he described cryptically in his memoirs as “the vibrating machines kept in my room.” The Coolidges typically dined as a couple, with Frank Stearns and his wife sometimes joining them as well.⁴

How much Coolidge worked at night is hard to determine. He claimed that after dinner he drafted speeches and messages and retired by ten o’clock. But Starling recalled the president saying explicitly that he didn’t work at night, and that a man who couldn’t finish his tasks during the daytime couldn’t be terribly smart. Certainly, the president passed more than a few evenings in a rocking chair on the White House portico, smoking a cigar—though eventually the crowds that flocked to watch drove him indoors or to the back porch. Either way, Coolidge became known publicly for going to bed early. Once, when he attended the live Marx Brothers revue Animal Crackers—later the classic movie—Groucho spied the president in the audience and from the stage quipped: “Isn’t it past your bedtime, Calvin?”⁵

Political writers remarked on habits like Coolidge’s early bedtime because they evoked a lost age—the old order of the New England village, the slower pace of rural America. And in many ways Coolidge had never left Plymouth Notch. Disdainful of packaged foods, he had the White House cook whip up a morning cereal by boiling raw wheat and rye, which he sometimes ate while having his scalp massaged with Vaseline. He shaved with a straight razor, even though safety razors had been around for decades. A formal man, he rarely called colleagues by their first names, not even friends such as “Mr. Butler” or “Mr. Stearns” (though by one account “Mr. Morrow” was sometimes graced with “Dwight”), and in speaking to others he would refer to “Ol’ Man Stearns” or “Ol’ Andy Mellon.” Disliking travel, he never ventured outside the United States, apart from a brief honeymoon in Montreal and a 1928 diplomatic trip to Havana. “I have so many places to go in the United States that I don’t know when … I will arrive at a time when I can visit other countries,” he once said. He never did.⁶

Nonetheless, Coolidge wasn’t immune to the charm of modern amusements. For relaxation and solitude, he repaired to the presidential yacht, the Mayflower, after Sunday church services. Like millions of Americans, he became a movie buff—“the first national executive to depend on motion pictures,” Film Classic reported, “as his sole recreation.” He screened films on the yacht, on his vacations, and in the White House, once with a forty-four-piece orchestra brought down from New York. On a post-presidential journey to Los Angeles, he visited the MGM studios, where he watched as the filming of a Ramon Novarro film was disrupted by a rampaging trained bear, leading Coolidge to break out in uncharacteristic hysterics.⁷

There was a boyish simplicity to Coolidge that was all the more winning because of his usual dourness. He amused himself by bestowing nicknames on the White House staff—John Mays, a doorman, was “The Mink,” and the butler, named Thomas Roach, was “Bug”—though many saw this trait as condescending or cruel. Likewise, the practical jokes for which Coolidge was known were, to different observers, either appealingly childish or gratuitously nasty. He would ring the White House doorbell and then hide behind the curtains, or press the buzzer to announce his impending arrival at the White House, only to head out the door for a stroll as staffers scurried around to prepare for him. “Anyone who cannot revert to boyhood in a big job is lost,” said Coolidge’s White House physician, James Coupal. “That’s just what Calvin Coolidge did. He was always kidding.” The president agreed. “Do you know,” he once said to Stearns, “I’ve never really grown up?”⁸

Coolidge’s attitude toward his wife also smacked of an earlier time. Feminism was in full flower in the 1920s. Women had just secured a constitutional amendment giving them the vote, and the nation was becoming comfortable with powerful women as first ladies. Edith Wilson had all but served as president after her husband’s hushed-up stroke of 1919, and Florence Harding was immersed in her husband’s affairs—at least the professional ones. Grace Coolidge, moreover, was an educated, modern woman. But the president shut her out of his political business. She barely knew the members of his cabinet and was often clueless about his schedule; once, when she asked for it, he replied, “Grace, we don’t give that information out promiscuously”—his sarcasm failing to conceal the underlying contempt. Considering himself the head of the household, he supervised his wife’s spending, second-guessed her social plans, and occasionally acted with unbecoming nastiness. Sometimes he refused to talk to her for days. Grace grew irritated at his treatment and early in their marriage wondered if she could remain with him forever. But for all his chauvinism, he clearly loved her, and when she was away—hating Washington’s humid climate, she often withdrew to Northampton—he would sort through the White House mail to cull the letters she sent him, stuffing them in his pocket to read in private. The devotion was touching, particularly in a man whose losses had led him to shield his vulnerabilities.⁹

The curtness with which Coolidge often treated Grace—and the sternness remembered by his sons—was characteristic. He could be prickly and impatient, and Ike Hoover wrote that White House employees lived in “fear and trembling, lest they lose their jobs … [Coolidge] kept them in a state of constant anxiety” with his outbursts. Even admirers such as Starling attested to the president’s short temper. Once, after a fishing outing on which the agent caught more fish than the president, Coolidge angrily insisted they return home at once, refusing to wait for Starling even to dismantle the rods, and, upon arriving at his hotel, “walked through the crowd in the lobby without speaking or looking to left or right, got in the elevator and went up to his room.”¹⁰

Coolidge’s anger was mostly kept private, however, whereas his endearing eccentricities were evident to the public. He made the most of his old-fashioned ways, allowing his personality and private habits to become fodder for news stories. “I think the American public wants a solemn ass as a president,” he quipped to the actress Ethel Barrymore, “and I think I’ll go along with them.”¹¹

 

 

The restraint that marked Coolidge’s private behavior also colored his political style. Uninterested in the minutiae of policy, he didn’t think that consulting a bevy of experts would help him solve problems and preferred to work alone. He was often seen in the White House, as Slemp put it, “thinking and thinking and thinking.” Coolidge saw the presidency as a position of isolation, its burdens to be borne dutifully.¹²

Accordingly, the president delegated most official business. “He is not so much an originator of policy as a policy administrator,” said Slemp. As governor during the police strike, he had deferred to the judgment of Commissioner Curtis; as president, he assigned decisions to agency heads. This practice fed the impression that he was a slacker and meant that others often got credit or blame for the president’s policies: Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone shared the plaudits for restoring integrity to the Justice Department after the Harding scandals; Ambassador Dwight Morrow won praise for his diplomacy in Mexico in 1927; and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover drew the acclaim for delivering relief after the 1927 Mississippi flood. Yet Coolidge believed his hands-off approach freed him to focus on his duties. For those problems that demanded presidential attention, there too he deemed inaction the better part of efficiency. “If you see ten troubles coming down the road,” Coolidge would advise Hoover, “you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you, and you have to battle with only one of them.”¹³

For all its virtues, there was a shortsightedness to Coolidge’s preference for letting problems pass—not least because they sometimes didn’t. This wait-and-see approach prevented Coolidge from pursuing the kinds of goals that can make presidents great. In keeping with the norms of his day, he didn’t feel a need to propose any grand vision or goals—even though Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had risen above the prevailing expectations for the office to do so. “Both Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wilson cherished visions of a better America,” noted the New Republic in December 1923. “But Mr. Coolidge has not seen the vision of an America better than the America of which he is president.” Coolidge probably wouldn’t have minded the criticism. The nation had enough laws and regulations, he liked to say, and didn’t need any more.¹⁴

Yet if Coolidge rejected his predecessors’ activism, he followed their lead in his style of public leadership. He grasped that the growth of a mass industrial society and new forms of technology were changing politics. Traditionally, presidents had seldom appealed directly to the public through speeches or an independent press. Congress and party leaders had represented the people’s concerns, with the president serving as an executive. But in the early twentieth century, as presidents assumed responsibility for setting the national agenda, they appealed increasingly to public opinion to do so. Reforms such as the secret ballot were limiting the influence of party bosses, while the rise of mass media, including film and radio, were making a politician’s personality, rather than his party, central to his success. Where winning elections had once depended on the party mobilizing a large, loyal base of voters, it now relied on an individual’s ability to rouse a broad range of citizens, including those willing to split their tickets.

Different competencies, therefore, were now required to succeed, and if Coolidge lacked the horse-trading talents of a legislative leader and the fine-grained feel for America’s motley political cultures and voting blocs, he possessed the skills suited to the newer strategy of what the journalist William Allen White called going “over the heads of the politicians” and appealing directly to voters. He grasped how to use new tools of mass media and public relations to sell himself to America as a whole. “It is because in their hours of timidity the Congress becomes subservient to the importunities of organized minorities,” Coolidge wrote, “that the president comes more and more to stand as the champion of the rights of the whole country.” After turning the Harding scandals from a liability into an asset—a reminder of his own taut integrity—Coolidge continued to use his public persona as his chief political instrument.¹⁵

Coolidge accommodated himself to the demands of modern politics in part through the bully pulpit. “One of the most appalling trials which confront a president is the perpetual clamor for public utterances,” Coolidge said. “Invitations are constant and pressing.” Though he shuddered at the “attendant receptions,” he met the challenge with hard work. “It requires the most laborious and extended research and study, and the most careful and painstaking thought … . It is not difficult for me to deliver an address. The difficulty lies in its preparation.” But it was work Coolidge knew he could handle, and it allowed him to feel at ease behind the podium.¹⁶

Coolidge also “talked at length” to the newspapermen who covered the White House, according to Frederick Essary of the Baltimore Sun, a leading Washington correspondent. “He answered every question propounded and elaborately elucidated his answers,” Essary recalled. “He was communicative to the point of garrulousness.” More than most of his peers, Coolidge understood the press corps’ growing importance, and his dedication to and skill at courting them—rated by some as equal to that of Theodore Roosevelt—remains an overlooked key to his success as president.¹⁷

Since at least the 1890s mass circulation newspapers—as opposed to the partisan broadsheets read by elites in earlier times—had been influencing national politics, and several of Coolidge’s predecessors took strides toward integrating them into White House practice. But Coolidge’s contributions were notable. As he had promised on taking office, he diligently met with reporters twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, throughout his presidency. Wilson had started the regular parleys but abandoned them when he got fed up with the grilling. (His aide Joe Tumulty took over and fared much better.) Harding revived the conferences, but his two and a half years in office weren’t enough to cement them as standard practice. Coolidge’s commitment to a regular presidential press relationship entrenched the press conference as an official duty and, as a reporter wrote in 1927, “turned it into an engine for bringing himself almost daily into the American home.” His use of the news corps underscored his determination to seek to reach the public above all, and not Congress, party leaders, or other rivals to presidential decision making.¹⁸

Coolidge tailored his sessions with reporters to his skills. He made them submit questions to him in writing so he could reply in an orderly fashion. He sometimes ignored a question for no reason besides his own whim, but reporters tolerated such exercises of his prerogative. He spoke “on background,” meaning that the reporters could attribute his words to “a White House spokesman” but not to the president himself. The practice provoked grousing and mockery, and often the identity of this unnamed spokesman was so thinly disguised that any sentient newspaper reader would know it was the president and not some functionary offering his views. In one of the sharper critiques of Coolidge’s ground rules, the political scientist Lindsay Rogers argued that the “White House ‘spokesman’” amounted to “an extra-constitutional person who increases both presidential influence and irresponsibility.” But the president defended the practice in terms consonant with his philosophy of reticence: “The words of the President have an enormous weight and ought not to be used indiscriminately. It would be exceedingly easy to set the country all by the ears and foment hatreds and jealousies, which, by destroying faith and confidence, would help nobody and harm everybody.” Most reporters agreed that the shield, whatever its drawbacks, allowed the president to speak candidly. “At least I have some intimate close-up of what the president is thinking,” explained Essary.¹⁹

Coolidge wasn’t above flattering the correspondents. He once claimed (perhaps sarcastically) to be amazed “at the constant correctness of my views as you report them.” He didn’t pal around with reporters or flout Prohibition at card parties, as Harding had, but he did invite the journalists to dinners, social events, trips on the Mayflower, and even his summer vacations, earning their gratitude and goodwill. Newspaper moguls, too, including William Randolph Hearst and Clarence Barren of the Wall Street Journal, became social companions.²⁰

Coolidge was equally sensitive to the needs of the newer corps of photographers and newsreel cameramen. “He avoided every appearance of publicity seeking, but he probably was the most photographed man who ever occupied the White House,” noted Jay Hayden of the Detroit News. “It was a joke among the photographers that Mr. Coolidge would don any attire or assume any pose that would produce an interesting picture. He was never too busy to be photographed.” Long before Ronald Reagan chopped wood at Santa Barbara or George W. Bush cleared sagebrush in Crawford, Coolidge’s Plymouth Notch sojourns provided ideal settings to catch him working on the farm—however incongruous his black suit or dress shoes might appear. His aides were constantly communicating with professional photographers to take and print professional-quality portraits of the president.²¹

Coolidge also made avid use of newsreels. Theaters showed short films such as “Visitin’ ’Round at Coolidge Corners”—more populist image making—before their features, reminding Americans of the president’s rural roots. In April 1925, he became one of the first Americans to appear in a talking film. At a New York Friars Club dinner of some five hundred guests, Coolidge “spoke,” the New York Times excitedly reported, “although the president was actually in Washington, more than 200 miles away.” Less interested in the speech’s message than its medium (then called the “phonofilm”), the Times reporter marveled, “The tones of his voice came clear and synchronized perfectly with the movement of his mouth … . Once during the speech the synchronization was so perfect that the guests gave involuntary applause.” Lee De Forest, the phonofilm inventor, was so pleased that he took to using the short in demonstrations to attract investment in his machines, but Coolidge didn’t like his words being used to drive up De Forest’s company’s stock. After an investigation by J. Edgar Hoover, the administration had De Forest desist. Taken aback, the filmmaker sent the reels to the White House, urging that they be donated to the Smithsonian Institution.²²

The contrivance behind Coolidge’s film appearances and photo ops didn’t escape censure. Even in the 1920s critics bemoaned that image making was corrupting politics. “Certainly no president has ever been willing to submit to such nauseating exhibitions in the news reels as has Coolidge,” noted Sherwin Cook, a political writer. “Cultured Americans wince at the thought of their president putting on a smock frock to pose while pitching hay and milking a bossy.” Some White House aides feared their efforts would backfire. Ted Clark warned against disseminating one photograph of Coolidge in a rural setting because his formal “costume, while true to life on the farm at Plymouth, is … so different from any other that I doubt if the average farmer would believe it was real and not especially prepared for the occasion.” The faux rural poses became a joke among reporters. At one Gridiron Dinner, they sang, to the tune of the Yale song “Boola Boola,” “Mr. Coolidge went to Vermont upon a sunny day / The movies took his picture as he pitched the new-mown hay.”²³

Coolidge also endured rebukes for his efforts to shape the news. The most severe line of criticism suggested that he was undermining democracy with news management that hardened into propaganda. The rise of advertising and public relations, coupled with the odor left from Woodrow Wilson’s barrage of propaganda to maintain support for the American war effort, left many people afraid that the public was becoming helpless to question how the government presented information. Ludwell Denny, a correspondent for the Scripps-Howard papers, called the press conferences “a vicious institution in American life [that] should be abolished”; he argued that Coolidge turned them into “propaganda agencies” and that “correspondents have to submit to protect themselves.”²⁴

On the whole, however, Coolidge’s media-friendly strategy paid off—perhaps proving his critics’ point. His obliging manner not only helped him choose the images that the public would see, it also endeared him to the men who conveyed those images to the public. Newspapermen conceded the positive tone of their coverage. “No president in our time has had such a ‘good press,’” wrote the pseudonymous T.R.B. columnist in the New Republic. Though barbs still came from H. L. Mencken, for whom sourness was stock in trade, or from ideological critics such as Lincoln Steffens, among the workaday reporters Coolidge sustained steady favor. “Contrast what Mr. Wilson went through, in the shape of press criticism of his foreign policy, with the trivial nature of the Coolidge criticism,” wrote Willis Sharp in the Atlantic Monthly. “I venture to say that neither in the domestic nor the foreign field has any president in this generation had as little as Mr. Coolidge—few have had less since the beginning.”²⁵