Beyond America’s Shores
On March 4, 1925, a clear, mild day in Washington, Calvin Coolidge took his second oath of office. The day was a study in self-effacement. The president’s speech was unmemorable, historic only as another first in radio broadcasting. He was upstaged, in fact, by Dawes, his irrepressible vice president, who in his maiden speech surprised the senators of whom he was now the nominal leader by urging them to reform their antiquated rules of debate, which he called “inimical … to the principles of our constitutional government.” Coolidge’s parsimony, meanwhile, put a damper on the lunchtime festivities. Instead of hosting the usual feast, the Coolidges lunched on sandwiches with the Daweses in private while cabinet officers and dignitaries stood around in the White House Blue Room, baffled. Eventually, a military officer invited the crowd to join in a buffet next door at the State, War, and Navy Building, and thus when Coolidge and Dawes eventually descended from their meal, the entourage had disappeared.1
Coolidge’s big victory in November and the Republican gains in Congress should have improved his prospects on Capitol Hill. The death in November of Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican Senate leader, also should have smoothed relations—especially because Coolidge saw to it that his ally William Butler was picked to serve out Lodge’s term. Nonetheless Coolidge again ran into trouble,
starting with that potential pitfall of all new administrations, his appointments.
Even before his new term began, Coolidge had a vacancy to fill on the Supreme Court. Justice Joseph McKenna, eighty-one years old and nearly senile after a stroke several years earlier, finally retired. According to Nicholas Murray Butler, the president considered nominating the New York jurist Benjamin Cardozo to replace McKenna but concluded that with one Jew on the Court already (Louis Brandeis) the choice of a second “would excite criticism.” Instead, Coolidge nominated his old Amherst chum and well-regarded attorney general Harlan Fiske Stone.2
Praised in the legal world and in the press, the Stone nomination should have sailed through the Senate. But as attorney general Stone was carrying out a politically motivated investigation of Senator Burton Wheeler, which Harding’s attorney general Harry Daugherty had vengefully initiated back during the Teapot Dome scandal when Wheeler was clamoring for Daugherty’s head. Foolishly (or courageously), Stone sought an indictment of Wheeler on the eve of his own confirmation vote.
Wheeler, Thomas Walsh, George Norris, and a few other farm bloc senators went after Stone, both for retaining Daugherty’s men at Justice and for his own Wall Street ties. For the first time in history, a High Court nominee had to appear personally before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where his antagonists grilled him. Ultimately, however, the westerners’ obstreperousness came across as political, and Stone was confirmed, 71 to 6. He would go on to a distinguished term on the Court, where he became an important voice upholding the constitutionality of the New Deal, and Franklin Roosevelt would name him chief justice in 1941. (Wheeler, for his part, was acquitted.) Nonetheless, the fracas showed Coolidge that his mandate with the public wouldn’t give him the free hand on the Hill that he had lacked in his first term.
Coolidge stumbled again when, on Inauguration Day, he chose Charles Warren of Michigan to replace Stone as attorney general. A
lawyer, businessman, and former ambassador to Japan and Mexico, Warren was disliked by many fellow Republicans for his arrogance. More troubling, his work as counsel to the Michigan Sugar Company, which was under investigation for antitrust practices, made him ethically suspect. Given the administration’s reputation for serving big business, the choice was ill considered.
Coolidge hadn’t consulted with party leaders on the pick, and his allies on the Hill managed the nomination poorly. Convinced they had the votes they needed, they neither actively addressed the ethical concerns nor carefully planned their floor strategy. Even Edmund Starling, having heard that Warren was in trouble, tried to warn Coolidge, but the president grew testy. “Well,” he snapped, “you’re such a great Secret Service man I guess you know more than anybody else. You know everything.” Then, on March 9, during the Senate’s debate on the nomination, Republican floor leader Charles Curtis feared he was losing support and called the roll without the full Senate in attendance. It soon became clear that the senators present would split down the middle, 40—40. Normally, the vice president would break the tie, but Dawes had gone to his Willard Hotel room for a nap. Summoned, he hurried over in a taxicab but arrived too late to vote, and Warren’s nomination was defeated—the first time the Senate had rejected a cabinet appointee since 1868.3
Coolidge was furious. “I hesitate a good deal to subject anyone I might appoint to any such ordeal as confronted Mr. Warren,” he sniffed to reporters. He refused to accept defeat. He talked of temporarily appointing Warren, as was his constitutional prerogative, while Congress was in recess. Leaning on his Senate loyalists for help, he renominated Warren and got another vote. But on March 18, the Senate rejected Warren again, this time by a decisive margin, 46 to 39—a slap at the president, who had raised the stakes. Coolidge was distraught; Starling watched him, upon learning the news, take a curtain cord from the Oval Office anteroom and absently tie it into knots. Abandoning the idea of a recess appointment, Coolidge
instead chose a lifelong friend, John Sargent of Plymouth Notch, a former attorney general of Vermont, for the position. Sargent passed unanimously and without delay.4
Coolidge’s other new appointments went smoothly. Hughes’s retirement from State left the biggest shoes to fill; to succeed him Coolidge chose Frank Kellogg, a contemporary and friend of Theodore Roosevelt, a former senator from Minnesota, and the ambassador to Great Britain. Though sixty-nine and blind in one eye, Kellogg had the stature, if not the skill, to replace Hughes. At Agriculture William Jardine of Kansas filled the seat of Henry Wallace Sr., who had died the previous autumn. Bascom Slemp, unable to persuade Coolidge to give him a cabinet post, stepped down, and former representative Everett Sanders of Indiana took his place as chief White House aide.
A final decision of note was the retention of Herbert Hoover as secretary of commerce. Hoover was a perpetual rival of the president’s. Both men had been dark horse candidates for the GOP nomination in 1920, and before Coolidge ascended to the presidency in August 1923, Hoover’s name had been floated for the 1924 nod as well. He was also in many ways Coolidge’s stylistic opposite. A Stanford-trained engineer who had heroically supervised food relief efforts for war-torn Europe, Hoover was a workaholic, policy wonk, and hands-on manger. As commerce secretary, he was forever seeking ways to reduce waste throughout the private sector. Coolidge viewed Hoover’s ambition and ostentatious activism—as well as his insatiable appetite for publicity—with scorn, and he privately labeled him “Wonder Boy.” But the president also knew that Hoover’s penchant for taking on projects meshed perfectly with his own practice of delegation. “I cannot tell you how many things I feel we are dependent on you about,” Slemp told Hoover in December 1923. (Nor were all these things policy matters; with his California ties, Hoover helped Coolidge quash Hiram Johnson’s bid for the 1924 GOP nomination by bringing the Golden State delegation into line behind the president.) In Coolidge’s second term, Hoover would spearhead many of the
administration’s most prominent initiatives—from bringing water to the interior West to coordinating relief after the ruinous 1927 Mississippi flood—as he plotted his own run for the presidency in 1928. “Except in the newspapers and the political field,” remarked T.R.B. of the New Republic, “there is more Hoover in the administration than there is Coolidge.” Seeing the wisdom in retaining Hoover, Coolidge nonetheless eyed him warily.5
Hoover’s activism would, at least initially, take a backseat to developments abroad that claimed the president’s attention as his second term opened. Coolidge turned to foreign affairs with reluctance. Here, as with other matters, he liked to delegate, rather than dictating policy himself. Regarding his China policy, he once told Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew, “I don’t know anything about this. You do, Mr. Grew, and you’re in charge. You settle the problem, and I’ll back you up.” Another time he told Mellon, as the Treasury secretary set sail for Europe, to tell all inquirers that “their problems should properly be taken up through regular diplomatic channels.”6
The delegation created the appearance of indifference. Elihu Root, Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state, moaned that Coolidge “did not have an international hair on his head.” He ultimately declined to recognize the Communist government of the Soviet Union, and his policy toward the internal strife and rising anti-Western sentiment in China was uncertain and reactive. Coolidge, however, was no isolationist. Rather, his cautious temperament disinclined him from making bold ventures. He governed, moreover, at a moment when the public had lost its patience for the swashbuckling of a Roosevelt or the internationalism of a Wilson. Indeed, the president’s critics on foreign affairs were mainly those men who distrusted his internationalist forays altogether, from the Dawes Plan in his first term to his efforts to join the World Court in his second. He was fighting isolationism, not carrying its banner.
The question of the World Court, formally known as the Permanent Court of International Justice, came to the fore early in
Coolidge’s second term. Since the body’s formation in 1922, the issue of American membership had loomed large. The nations of Europe, recoiling from the horror of World War I, hoped that the court, as a judicial arm of the League of Nations, would help them settle their conflicts peacefully. But in the United States, politics had been convulsed less by the war itself than by Wilson’s failure to secure American membership in the league. Thus, where European leaders looked to forge a sense of collective security, American leaders feared running afoul of popular isolationist feeling. By Coolidge’s presidency, pacifist Progressives and Main Street Republicans allied to snuff out any talk of joining the League. “The incident, so far as we are concerned, is closed,” Coolidge conceded in his 1923 State of the Union address.7
Joining the World Court was another matter. The body, which sat at The Hague in the Netherlands, comprised a panel of arbiters who adjudicated disputes among nations. Republican eminences such as Elihu Root and William Howard Taft had come to see international law, rooted in principles and dispensed by impartial judges, as a more stable and fair guarantor of peace than diplomacy, which could change with new administrations and new players and was full of intrigue. Following such thinking, President Harding had called for America to join the World Court, and Coolidge repeated the plea. “The proposal,” he said, “presents the only practical plan on which many nations have agreed, though it may not meet every desire.”8
At first Coolidge pressed his case lightly. Although Lodge was dead, William Borah, who had taken the reins of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was equally stout in his opposition to the court, and Hughes and Coolidge feared taking on the powerful Idahoan. The president rationalized his inaction to Theodore Roosevelt Jr., now occupying his father’s old post of assistant secretary of the navy: “My predecessor submitted it to the Senate. No action is called for, therefore, by me as an executive.”9
During the 1924 campaign, however, Coolidge reiterated his desire to join the World Court, and his new term offered another chance to persuade Borah and the so-called Irreconcilables to temper
their fierce jealousy of American sovereignty. In a post-election message to Congress, Coolidge again called for the United States to join the body while pledging that “our country shall not be bound by advisory opinions which may be rendered by the Court upon questions which we have not voluntarily submitted for its judgment.” Although the Senate declined to take up the issue in its winter session of 1924—25, in March the House of Representatives, in a symbolic but powerful gesture, approved American membership by a whopping margin of 303 to 28. Coolidge took up the matter again in his March inaugural.10
It was a new player in the drama, Frank Kellogg, who kept the issue alive. In his first official statement as secretary of state, on April 25, 1925, Kellogg firmly backed membership with words that reflected the enlightened opinion of the age: “Is it not time that the conscience of the world should inculcate in the minds of the people a better way to settle disputes than by going to war?” Emboldened by public support of membership, Coolidge pressed the matter himself, declaring, “I can conceive of nothing that we could do, which involves assuming so few obligations on our part, that would likely prove to be of so much value to the world.” Nudged by public opinion, senators too looked for ways to support a modified protocol.11
Finally, on January 26, 1926, in a 76—17 vote that crossed party lines, the Senate approved the protocol with the required two-thirds supermajority. But the protocol carried amendments that limited the court’s jurisdiction over the United States and stipulated that by joining the court the United States would not be also joining the League of Nations. Many pro-court senators supported these provisions in order to garner the needed votes—as did Coolidge. “It will be regarded all over the world as a helpful attitude,” he predicted of the Senate’s action, “and an expression of the sentiment of desiring to cooperate.” But the provisions turned out to be poison pills. “I believe with the reservations that it carries,” South Dakota’s Peter Norbeck pronounced with satisfaction, “that it is entirely harmless, if not helpless.”12
World Court members, led by Britain, immediately made clear
their skepticism of the Senate’s tinkering. It was now incumbent on Coolidge, if he was serious about joining, to sway European opinion. Yet he failed to do so. Before the National Press Club in April, he expressed his satisfaction with the Senate’s problematic amendments, and he declined an invitation from the League of Nations to discuss the outstanding issues. “Of course, it was a most courteous thing for the League to do,” he told reporters, before adding matter-of-factly, “I don’t see any necessity for any discussion on our part.” Coolidge feared giving domestic critics new grounds for claiming that court membership was a prelude to submission to world governance. But his caution would be his undoing. In September 1926, a conference of court signatories gathered in Geneva to consider the Americans’ “special conditions.” But Coolidge had given them little reason to accept the Senate’s terms. Rather than spurning the United States outright, they put the ball back in Coolidge’s court by consenting to the terms but with modifications of their own—modifications that the already balking Senate would find hard to swallow.13
Coolidge still refused to budge. For all the enthusiasm he had shown the year before, he now seemed fatalistic about the irreconcilability of the court signatories’ stand and the Senate’s—which he gave no reason to believe differed from his own. Even pro-court voices at home concluded, with the New York Herald Tribune, that America “could not accept membership at the Geneva Conference’s price.”14
Coolidge made his position clear on November 11, after the midterm elections. Having failed to bring the European nations around to the Senate’s position, he did not ask the Senate to review its January terms. “I do not believe the Senate would take favorable action on any such proposal,” he said, “and unless the requirements of the Senate resolution are met, I can see no prospect of this country adhering to the Court.” The issue languished for another year, and despite a final effort to revise the protocol led by Elihu Root at the end of Coolidge’s term, the United States would not join the
League of Nations World Court under Coolidge—or, for that matter, under any American president. Only after the hard lessons of World War II would the United States join a new world court, reconstituted as part of the United Nations.15
Coolidge faced trouble closer to home as well. The Americas had been a source of both opportunity and irritation for the United States for decades, and since Theodore Roosevelt’s time presidents had regularly dispatched the marines to the Caribbean or Central America to depose or shore up various regimes. By Coolidge’s day, the United States was more or less managing the affairs of ten Latin American countries. In some countries Coolidge began to repair strained relations—early in his second term, notably, he arranged for the withdrawal of marines from the Dominican Republic—but elsewhere old problems were resurfacing.
One sore spot was Mexico. The latest round of hostilities dated to 1916, when Woodrow Wilson sent troops there in an unsuccessful bid to apprehend the revolutionary leader Pancho Villa; then Mexico, unofficially casting its lot with Germany in World War I, nationalized much land and property—including oil fields—claimed by American companies. When President Alvaro Obregon took office in 1920, the United States refused to recognize his government.
By the time Coolidge became president, however, the situation was improving. During Harding’s last months, Hughes had worked to normalize relations between the two countries, and Obregon reciprocated. On September 1, 1923, Coolidge recognized the Obregon administration, and Mexico agreed to compensate Americans whose property had been seized. A few months later, Coolidge strengthened the bond: to help Obregon suppress a revolt, he lifted a weapons embargo and urged American banks to tender loans to Mexico to buy arms. “If we allow Obregon to be overthrown,” Coolidge explained, “we shall be put in a ridiculous position as we have already rendered him some aid and are committed to his cause.”16
The ascension of Plutarco Elias Calles to the Mexican presidency in late 1924 changed the calculus. Unhappy with the 1923 accords, Calles indulged in sharp anti-American rhetoric and in late 1925 restricted American oil and land claims—a move that Coolidge and Kellogg, along with many businessmen, viewed as an illegitimate confiscation of Americans’ property. Calles also sought to nationalize the holdings of the Catholic Church, provoking a fight with the bishops of Mexico and prompting American Catholics to join the oil companies in seeking military intervention. Under countervailing pressure from Borah and the Senate, Coolidge and Kellogg resisted. Instead, they tried for the next year to salve tensions with rhetoric, praising the Mexican government’s progress in restoring order and minimizing the problems, even as they insisted on indemnity payments for the disputed land.
Compounding matters, the Mexican crisis had become entwined with tensions in another long-standing Latin American trouble spot: Nicaragua. There, too, Coolidge’s term had dawned amid hope. American-supervised elections in 1924 had gone well, and “for the first time in many years,” Joseph Grew asserted in January 1925, the nation was “in a peaceful and progressive condition.” In August, Coolidge withdrew the American troops that had been buttressing Nicaragua’s conservative regime since 1912.17
When the marines left, however, civil war resumed. By January 1926, the American-backed president had been overthrown by General Emiliano Chamorro, who imposed a military dictatorship. The deposed vice president, Juan Sacasa—a liberal who owed his post to a short-lived power-sharing arrangement—fled to Mexico, where he secured Calles’s help in launching an armed effort to regain power.
Coolidge realized he could restore order—and protect American corporate interests—only by sending the marines back in. The USS Cleveland landed in May 1926, and Coolidge escalated American involvement over the next months. In November 1926 Chamorro agreed to resign in favor of the pro-American Adolfo Diaz. But Sacasa’s liberal forces remained bent on seizing power, and in late
December more marines headed south. “This government is not taking any sides, one way or the other, in relation to the revolution,” Coolidge insisted disingenuously.18
In 1927 the twin Latin American crises came to a head. In Mexico, the American ambassador, James Sheffield, resigned, having led Coolidge “into a bog,” as Bruce Bliven wrote. In July, Coolidge asked his old friend Dwight Morrow to clean up the mess. “My only instructions,” he told Morrow, “are to keep us out of war.” Morrow came through. Good-natured and freewheeling, he charmed Mexican officials and, with his broken Spanish and trips to the bazaars, endeared himself to the people as well. He brought Charles Lindbergh and Will Rogers to Mexico City, to his host citizens’ delight. Within the year, despite some grumbling from American oil companies, he struck a deal with Calles that let American companies keep the rights to lands they had bought before 1917, with leases required for post-1917 acquisitions. Morrow also helped the Calles government negotiate agreements with the Catholic Church and Mexican businesses. A period of good neighborliness followed.19
The Nicaraguan problem, however, festered. At the start of 1927 civil war was still raging, and Diaz was far from popular. On January 10, Coolidge delivered a speech to Congress, trying to persuade Borah, Norris, Wheeler, and his other antagonists to support continued military intervention. “There is no question that if the revolution continues, American investments and business interests in Nicaragua will be very seriously affected, if not destroyed,” Coolidge said candidly. The senators balked; Coolidge sent more marines anyway.20
But congressional pressure led Coolidge to pursue other avenues as well. Again the turning point came when the president chose a high-profile diplomat to mediate, in this case the august former secretary of war Henry Stimson. “If you find a chance to straighten the matter out,” Coolidge told him, in a tone similar to that which he used with Morrow, “I want you to do so.” Arriving in Nicaragua in April, Stimson adopted a stance akin to Morrow’s: the confident gentleman diplomat mixing charm and muscle. Within weeks, he
coaxed the combatants into a coalition government. New elections were scheduled for 1928 and 1932, under American supervision, and United States troops would be withdrawn by 1933. Stimson and Coolidge claimed victory.21
In this case, however, the resolution was illusory. Although the November 1928 election came off more or less as hoped, with the liberal Jose Moncada prevailing, peace didn’t last. General Augusto Cesar Sandino, previously aligned with Sacasa, rejected the Stimson agreements, took to the jungles, led a prolonged insurrection, and killed a handful of marines and thousands of Nicaraguans. After several years of continued warfare, the U.S.—backed government and its National Guard, led by Anastasio Somoza, had Sandino assassinated in 1934. The wars between the Somozas and the Sandinistas would fester for decades.
Indeed, despite short-term gains, Coolidge had in the end done little to address the core problem in the hemisphere: for all their eagerness to attract investment, Latin Americans viewed the United States as an imperial power. Thus, U.S.—backed regimes were inherently unstable, while those that sought to redistribute land and wealth invariably incurred American suspicion. Coolidge’s interventions, though restrained in contrast to those of some presidents, still amounted to meddling, especially since he barely concealed the goal of protecting American business interests. For Coolidge, the chief business of empire was business.
The hemisphere’s simmering anti-Americanism erupted at the Sixth Annual International Conference of American States in Havana in January 1928. Leaving the United States for only the second time in his life, Coolidge delivered the keynote address, arguing that the American nations shared common values and goals. But Coolidge’s overture—the first trip by a sitting president to Cuba—couldn’t suppress long-standing resentments. After his departure, Mexico, El Salvador, and Argentina proposed a resolution, clearly directed at the United States, denying the right of any state to “intervene in the internal affairs of another.” One delegation after another rose to offer support for the resolution, while Charles
Evans Hughes, representing the United States as a special envoy, squirmed. When his turn came, Hughes mustered a tour de force of a speech that convinced the Salvadoran delegate to withdraw the divisive resolution. But the issue of American imperialism had been broached.22
After the conference, Kellogg had his legal adviser draft a white paper that advised against direct military intervention in Latin America, arguing for other methods of maintaining hemispheric influence. The paper never became official policy but it did signal that, as Coolidge’s presidency waned, the State Department was starting to take anti-Americanism seriously. Soon the United States would be inching toward the “Good Neighbor Policy” of Franklin Roosevelt. The Coolidge crises, in bringing Latin American discontent to a head, had the small saving grace of helping to clarify the need for a less imperialistic policy.
This shift in Latin American policy was of a piece with the growing postwar desire among the world’s powers to erect structures to promote world peace. If Coolidge could not (or would not) join the League of Nations or the World Court, he was keen to pursue arms control.
Again, Coolidge followed Harding’s path. In 1921—22, Secretary of State Hughes had convened the Washington Conference on International Disarmament. Those parleys produced three treaties, signed by nine world powers, that capped the number of their battleships, aircraft carriers, and naval armaments. Although Coolidge wished to continue the arms limitation process, it wasn’t until the fall of 1926 that he committed himself to the effort. One unforeseen result of limiting battleships and carriers in 1922 had been renewed competition to build another class of warship, cruisers, whose development remained unchecked. Thus in February 1927 Coolidge called for a June conference in Geneva aimed at limiting these vessels as well.23
The gathering got off to a poor start. France and Italy declined to
participate, leaving only the United States, Britain, and Japan to negotiate. Moreover, America’s relative paucity of existing cruisers made its demands for caps on these ships sound self-serving. Japan and Britain, for their part, failed to surmount their fears about restricting their own defenses. Coolidge’s conference thus concluded in August with no new treaties. The failure provoked pointed criticism of the president and his international leadership. In the budget he unveiled in December, he called for a huge increase in naval building—a departure from his fiscal discipline and a concession that a naval arms treaty was not to be.
Geneva’s failure, however, gave a boost to another campaign that sought something even more ambitious than arms limits: outlawing war altogether. For years an assortment of domestic peace activists had been championing an international pact that would commit its signatories to renouncing military aggression as a national policy. Only peaceful means, they hoped, would be used to solve international disputes.
The “outlawry of war,” as it was called, had its roots in the revulsion against the horrors of World War I and gathered a strong grassroots following throughout the 1920s. In March 1927, James Shotwell, a prominent Columbia University professor and leading advocate, visited France, where he pitched his ideas to the French foreign minister, Aristide Briand. France had just sat out the Geneva Conference, and Briand saw an opportunity to repair relations with the United States while gaining an American pledge to secure the existing boundaries in Europe. On April 6, he endorsed the idea of a bilateral treaty, and the movement gathered momentum.
Initially, Coolidge and Kellogg remained cool to the scheme. They distrusted Briand’s motives and found the whole idea naive. “There isn’t any shortcut to peace,” Coolidge told reporters. But the peace activists and editorialists, having lost on the League of Nations and the World Court and seen the Geneva Conference fizzle, ratcheted up the pressure. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman William Borah threw his weight behind the idea—an important
push, since the Idahoan spoke for the many Americans who opposed the League of Nations and the World Court as foreign entanglements yet loftily sought peace. Borah also insisted that any treaty encompass more than just the United States and France; a bilateral treaty would put the signatories at a disadvantage relative to other world powers, he maintained, whereas a comprehensive pact would not. In December 1927, Coolidge and Kellogg endorsed this more palatable version of the proposal, which also solved the problem of seeming to forge a special bond with France.24
Soon one nation after another was voicing its enthusiasm for the pact. Coolidge agreed to send Kellogg to Paris to sign the treaty, although he continued to express some skepticism. “I do not especially like the meeting that is to be held in Paris,” he said. “While it is ostensibly to sign the treaty, I cannot help wondering whether it may not be for some other purpose not yet disclosed.” Eventually the president, sensing the public mood, surmounted his doubts. On August 27, 1928, the United States joined fourteen other nations in signing the Kellogg-Briand Pact in Paris, outlawing war as an instrument of national policy.25
Ratification came next. Coolidge knew he couldn’t afford to lose another Senate battle. Although his term was winding down, he desired a political victory to go out on. Britain and France spoke of attaching reservations to the treaty, but Coolidge resisted the temptation. Instead he impressed on Congress the urgency of ratifying what he called “one of the most important treaties ever laid before the Senate of the United States.” Showing an unwonted knack for working the Senate, he deployed Kellogg and Dawes to sway wavering senators and even lobbied lawmakers himself. Ultimately, he prevailed, on a vote of 85 to 1, in January 1929, shortly before he left office.26
By 1933, another forty-nine countries had signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Following Dawes, Kellogg became the second Coolidge administration official to win a Nobel Peace Prize. Others, however, derided the pact as “worthless, but harmless.” In the long run, the
naysayers proved to be correct. The Nazi regime would shred the pact, along with the Locarno agreement and every other treaty the Weimar German government had signed. Ironically, in the case of a rare congressional and diplomatic victory, Coolidge’s initial instincts were right. There was no shortcut to peace.27