Getting Elected
Whatever setbacks Coolidge’s antagonists in Congress dealt to his agenda, they did not slow his march toward the Republican presidential nomination in 1924. In fact, despite a meager record of achievement and no real base in his party, the president sewed up the prize with relative ease. When he assumed the presidency in August 1923, he had struck many as a placeholder, destined to ride out Harding’s term until a worthy successor, such as his ambitious Commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover, could take over. At that time, vice presidents were not considered heirs apparent. Apart from the inimitable Theodore Roosevelt, no vice president who inherited the presidency had won so much as his own party’s nomination in the next election cycle: not John Tyler in 1844 nor Millard Fillmore in 1852 nor Andrew Johnson in 1868 nor Chester Arthur in 1884.
Many observers in 1923 thought Coolidge had no greater claim to a full term than those hapless presidents of yesteryear. Certainly, he had yet to achieve what the political vernacular of a later day would call gravitas. With the Republican Party in “virtual chaos,” wrote Richard Oulahan of the New York Times, exhibiting the misplaced certainty characteristic of many political pundits, “the national convention … will not be a ratification meeting.”1
Some wiser heads realized that Coolidge planned to seek the office in his own right. He was, Literary Digest noted on August 23,
“already an avowed and formidable candidate for the next Republican nomination.” The president wasted no time in buttressing his position. Showing a political skill he didn’t bring to his battles on the Hill, he methodically disposed of his major rivals for the nomination. 2
First to go was Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot—Theodore Roosevelt’s old friend and ally, a leader of the Progressive Republicans, and a serious contender for the 1924 nomination. Just weeks after acceding to the presidency, Coolidge turned a potentially nettlesome labor dispute in the anthracite coal mines of Pennsylvania into an occasion to co-opt Pinchot—and, in the process, defuse an explosive situation.
In 1900 and 1902, and again in 1919, miners had struck for better wages and working conditions. In the 1920s, they were agitating anew, sowing fear about continued public access to a vital source of energy, as well as about the return of labor radicalism. But Coolidge glimpsed an opportunity. In 1902, Pinchot had urged Roosevelt to take the unprecedented step of setting up a commission to mediate the debilitating strike, which the president did to great acclaim. Now, in August 1923, with another strike looming, Pinchot offered the new president his services as a mediator, expecting to receive some glory as the election year approached. Coolidge responded by inviting Pinchot and John Hays Hammond, chairman of the U.S. Coal Commission, to lunch at the White House, where he accepted Pinchot’s offer of help. The president stated publicly, however, that Pinchot would be following the administration’s guidance in pursuing a deal, angering Pinchot but still binding him to his role.
Pinchot was left to carry out the hard work of negotiation, which he performed creditably. The miners walked off the job on September 1, but within a week Pinchot cobbled together a deal that gave them a 10 percent wage increase. As a result, the governor scored points with those sympathetic to the miners—but so did Coolidge, who also dispelled impressions lingering from 1919 that he was reflexively anti-labor. The Republican Party’s conservatives, however, blamed Pinchot, and not the president, for appeasing the agitators.
Mellon, who owned a Pennsylvania coal-mining company, held enough sway with his state’s delegation to make sure it didn’t rally behind a Pinchot candidacy. In a few months’ time, Pinchot, outplayed, threw his support to Coolidge.
A more troublesome rival was the automaker Henry Ford. Though Ford had lost a Senate bid from Michigan in 1918, running as a Democrat, he remained extremely popular as a businessman—in no small part for dramatically raising his workers’ wages—but also as a public figure. In many quarters his plainspoken and populistic pronouncements passed for wisdom. Scenarios being bruited about envisioned the Republican Party drafting Ford for its nomination or his running as an independent. But the president co-opted Ford as well. In December, just as Coolidge was formally declaring his own presidential bid, he met with the automaker at the White House, where—not to put too fine a point on it—he seems to have bought him off.
The apparent deal with Ford centered on the dam and factories on the Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where the Wilson administration had begun generating hydroelectric power and making fertilizer. Opposed in principle to state ownership of industry, Coolidge and other conservatives had long wanted to privatize the holdings. Soon after meeting with Ford, the president asked Congress to sell the carmaker the properties. Then, on December 19, Ford retrieved his hat from the ring, declaring, “I would never for a moment think of running against Calvin Coolidge for president.” And although the Muscle Shoals deal never went through—an outraged Senator George Norris of Nebraska blocked it—the timing raised eyebrows. “Did Mr. Coolidge bribe Mr. Ford with a renewed offer of Muscle Shoals?” the New York Times asked bluntly. Or did Ford think “more of getting rid of his own surtaxes than … of righting the wrongs of the plain people?” Regardless, Republican officials exulted that Coolidge was now a shoo-in for the nomination.3
By the new year, Coolidge had largely clinched the nomination. Slemp delivered southern delegates to Coolidge’s camp and shored
up support among the Old Guard. Chief Justice Taft brought party power brokers in line. Progressive discontent remained, with hopes centering on Hiram Johnson and Robert La Follette. But while Johnson fanned the Teapot Dome investigations and fought Coolidge’s agenda—he spearheaded the fights for Japanese exclusion and against the tax cuts and the Dawes Plan—and even won a primary election in South Dakota, he never posed a serious threat. La Follette, for his part, chose to run with Montana Democrat Burton Wheeler under the banner of a reconstituted Progressive Party. Although they attracted the support of midwestern farmers and struck many prominent politicians and intellectuals as the only tolerable ticket, the Progressives never had more than the faintest hopes of victory.
Contrary to Richard Oulahan’s forecast, the Republican convention, which opened June 10 in a sleek new 15,000-seat skylighted arena in Cleveland, was a far cry from the nail-biting saga of 1920. Butler ran the show, helped by Stearns and Slemp. To reach the widest possible audience, they invited in the radio networks for the first time. To celebrate the president’s economic policies, they trotted out Mellon, the embodiment of prosperity, to kick off the convention—which he did to deafening applause. Finally, to drive home the message of party unanimity, they made sure that no one was nominated besides the president. On the first ballot Coolidge gained 1,165 of the 1,209 votes. Johnson and La Follette, who had not yet bolted for a third party, each netted a handful from the rural upper Midwest, where Coolidge was weak because he opposed aggressive relief measures for farmers. It turned out to be a coronation after all.
What drama remained surrounded the vice-presidential choice. It eventually went to Dawes. Flush with publicity from his leadership on European debt, Dawes was charmingly blunt; he shocked sensibilities by peppering his speech with profanities like “hell,” which were then raw to many ears. Though Coolidge and Butler had courted the Progressive senator William Borah of Idaho, who declined the offer, Dawes was more than acceptable. He had had a proud career in both private and public service, and his parsimony
appealed to Coolidge. Not least, he was certain to revel in the fall stumping that was the running mate’s main task.
Coolidge found even more cause for optimism when the Democrats convened in New York City on June 24. Deeply torn over the Klan and Prohibition, the party struggled to find a nominee. New York governor Alfred Smith, a Catholic who was anti-Klan and “wet,” had the support of the cities and the East; Wilson’s son-in-law and Treasury secretary, the Georgia-born William McAdoo, a “dry” who enjoyed Klan support, was popular in the West and South. But both men had fatal flaws. Smith’s Catholicism was thought to be a liability, while McAdoo’s bit part in Teapot Dome—he had taken a $25,000 payment from the corrupt businessman Edward Doheny—threatened to annul whatever advantage the scandal might afford the Democrats. Stalemate ensued.
Ten days and a record 102 ballots passed with no resolution. The nation again listened on radio, but this time fascination curdled into horror as the deadlock persisted, with ugly rhetoric abounding. The Democrats retained a censor to keep any offensive speech off the airwaves, but to spare themselves public revulsion, they would have had to censor the convention itself. Finally, on the 103rd ballot, they settled on John W. Davis, a West Virginia native, a former solicitor general and ambassador to Great Britain, and a corporate lawyer whose firm, Davis, Polk, held prestige with the white-shoe class but not the rank and file. Despite denouncing the Klan over the summer, he was sufficiently retrograde on racial politics to appeal to the party’s white supremacists. (Davis would end his career in 1954 defending segregation before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education.) To run with Davis, the Democrats selected Nebraska governor Charles Bryan, the younger brother of their thrice-failed presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan, creating the bizarre coupling of a Wall Street insider with a scourge of Wall Street.
As the Democrats immolated themselves in Madison Square Garden and the Progressives met quixotically in Cleveland to nominate La Follette, Coolidge—having accepted a tax bill he thought too mild, taken credit for an immigration bill he thought imperfect,
and gloried in a popular European debt plan that would prove feckless—looked placidly at what were turning out to be bright prospects for his election.
Nonetheless, the summer of 1924 was not to be a time of celebration for the president. Closer to home, terrible misfortune was to deprive his election campaign—and, he later said, his entire presidency—of its glory.
On Monday, June 30, the president’s two sons were playing tennis on the White House courts when sixteen-year-old Calvin Jr., wearing sneakers but no socks, developed a blood blister on the middle toe of his right foot. Two days later, the boy began to feel weak and tired. White House doctors examined him. A 102-degree fever, swollen glands, and red streaks on his leg suggested a bacterial infection. The next day, tests confirmed that a staphylococcus had poisoned his bloodstream.
Modern antibiotics for treating such infections were unknown at the time. Not for another four years would Alexander Fleming happen upon the curative powers of the penicillium fungus, and penicillin as a drug wouldn’t come into use until the 1940s. In 1924, doctors could try only injections of the antidotes then in currency: mercurochrome, a mercury-based compound, and a staphylococcus-based antigen designed to stimulate the production of antibodies. Neither serum worked.4
During the week Calvin Jr. was increasingly confined to bed at the White House. As the severity of the illness dawned on the president, he became deeply distressed. When he dined with Dawes at the White House, the new vice-presidential nominee noted that Coolidge “seemed to lose all interest in the conversation, and the dinner soon ended.” Coolidge wrote to his father that although Calvin Jr. was receiving “all that medical science can give him,” his recovery was uncertain. “He may have a long illness with ulcers,” Coolidge noted; “then again he may be better in a few days.” But the boy’s condition worsened.5
Powerless to help, the president poignantly tried to cheer up his son. Knowing the boy’s love of furry animals, Coolidge waded into the shrubbery around the White House to capture a small brown rabbit, which he eagerly delivered to Calvin Jr. The boy flashed an appreciative smile, and the president, for the time being, returned to his work.6
As his son’s condition deteriorated, however, the president found himself unable to think about anything else. “The president was a stricken man,” Edmund Starling observed, “going about as if in a dream.” On Friday, July 4, the Democrats were meeting in New York and the Progressives in Cleveland, but the president’s birthday passed without celebration at the White House. The next day doctors took Calvin Jr. to the Walter Reed Army Hospital for surgery, giving the Coolidges some hope, and on Sunday the president wrote to his father in Vermont that the operation seemed to have been a success. Yet he was mistaken. The staphylococcus continued to spread through Calvin Jr.’s system, and soon he was alternating between sleep and delirium. The president and first lady waited by their son’s side at Walter Reed.7
By July 7, a week after the injury, Calvin Jr. was slipping away. The president sat for much of that Monday simply gazing at his son. At one point the boy hallucinated that he was riding backward on a horse and called out to be turned around. The president reached over, held his son, and turned him, in the vain hope of giving the boy some satisfaction. Later, the president pressed into his son’s hand his treasured gold locket containing a photo of Victoria Coolidge and a lock of her hair. But the boy, who was lapsing into a coma, kept dropping it. Repeatedly, the locket would fall to the floor and the president would pick it up and hand it to his son. “In his suffering he was asking me to make him well,” the president recalled stoically. “I could not.”8
By nightfall, Calvin Jr. was unaware of his surroundings. At 10:20 P.M., he died.
Calvin Jr. was the first child of a sitting president to die since 1862, when Abraham Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son Willie succumbed to
typhoid fever. The nation reacted with a commensurate outpouring of grief. Letters and telegrams flooded the White House. The Democrats—still bickering and dickering over their nominee in Madison Square Garden—adjourned immediately for the night, all traces of rancor evaporating from the hall. In Plymouth Notch, John Coolidge heard of his grandson’s death by radio and walked over to the family plot where Victoria and Abigail lay buried.9
The president and Grace were devastated. Grace bore the loss more easily than her husband. Her comments about her late son contained warm memories of happy moments she had spent with him and a serene confidence that “in a very real sense he is with us.” Coolidge, in contrast, felt deep despair for months. One night, when the boy’s corpse was lying in state in the East Room, the president came into the room wearing his bathrobe after the callers had all left and stood staring sadly at the coffin, caressing his son’s hair. For months his demeanor remained funereal. “His face,” a friend noted, “had the bleak desolation of cold November rain beating on gray Vermont granite.” The president often said that he was never the same gain.10
Visitors attested to the emotional toll Coolidge bore. A reporter who paid a call on the president in his office remarked on the open and uncharacteristic flood of feeling: “His voice trembled and tears ran down his cheeks. He was not the president of the United States. He was the father, overcome by grief and by love for his boy. He wept unafraid, unashamed.” To another White House caller, the president noted, “When I look out that window, I always see my boy playing tennis on that court out there.” When Edmund Starling came upon a child outside the White House who asked to meet Coolidge “to tell him how sorry I am that his little boy died,” the president, overcome with emotion, instructed his aide, “Whenever a boy wants to see me, always bring him in. Never turn one away or make him wait.”11
Coolidge blamed himself for his son’s death, following the tortuous chain of logic that if he hadn’t been president, Calvin Jr. would never have injured himself on the White House grounds. He took
solace in telling himself that “the ways of providence are often beyond our understanding,” yet ultimately even Coolidge, with his appetite for pieties, couldn’t accept this platitude as an explanation for the cruelty of the loss. “It seemed to me that the world had need of the work that it was probable he could do. I don’t know why such a price was exacted for occupying the White House.” Where Coolidge had coped with his mother’s death through careful, dogged achievement, the loss of his son seemed to deflate his proudest triumph. “When he went,” Coolidge wrote in his autobiography, “the power and the glory of the presidency went with him.”12
Even if Coolidge had not suffered such a loss, he probably would not have stumped aggressively for president in 1924. Although speaking tours for presidential candidates were no longer as taboo as they had once been, most incumbent presidents of the era—McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson—had campaigned in a limited fashion. Averse by temperament to mingling with the hordes, further disposed by Calvin Jr.’s death to withdraw from the public eye, Coolidge found an alternative to public touring in the new broadcast media of radio and newsreels, which he used to burnish his Silent Cal image with the public at large.
In truth, Coolidge’s public relations campaign had never stopped. No sooner had Harding been interred in August 1923 than Bruce Barton was back at work penning admiring profiles of the new president for the nation’s leading magazines. That September Barton published in the American Review of Reviews another formulaic paean extolling Coolidge’s Yankee humility and common sense (“Doing the Work and Forgetting About the Credit,” “Honesty and Courage in Dealing with the Public”). In December, as Coolidge made his bid for the nomination official, Barton outlined a strategy of magazine stories—including some of Grace Coolidge in the women’s magazines—preconvention advertising, and publicity. Barton discerned the new importance of personality in national politics. “This is not a party campaign in the old sense,” he
noted. “I have not met anybody who is going to vote for the Republican Party. They are going to vote ‘for Coolidge’ or against him.” Accordingly, Barton drew up pamphlets with hokey but effective themes such as “The Farmer Boy, The Public Servant, The President.” And he contracted with Charles Scribner’s Sons for a sequel to Have Faith in Massachusetts—a collection of Coolidge’s pre-presidential speeches entitled The Price of Freedom.13
The president’s aides also had a novel tool at their disposal in 1924: radio. Although Coolidge didn’t listen to radio much, he used it more effectively than any of his contemporaries. As early as November 1923, Eugene McDonald, the president of the National Association of Broadcasters, a newly formed trade group, urged the president to exploit the fledgling medium. Not only would speaking on the radio spare Coolidge the ordeal of traveling—an ordeal, McDonald suggested, that had felled Harding—it would also allow the president to remake the presidency. “Radio will draw you close to the American fireside for you will be speaking to people as they sit in their living room,” McDonald wrote, in language that presaged Franklin Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats. “Your voice and your personality will become familiar to them and in consequence … you will mean more to them than now.” Barton as well insisted that radio had “made possible an entirely new type of campaign” that “enables the president to sit by every fireside and talk in terms of that home’s interest and prosperity.”14
Coolidge’s embrace of radio underscored, rather than undermined, his Silent Cal image. Because he could count on his remarks reaching audiences of unprecedented size, he could otherwise retain his customary and effective posture of virtuous reticence. His “reputation is built,” his aide Ted Clark explained, “on his habit of keeping silent unless he has some definite idea to get across … . The country … likes his silence, and it would be a dangerous thing to tear down the picture which they have built.” As Coolidge himself told reporters, “I don’t recall any candidate for president that ever injured himself very much by not talking.” In the campaign, Coolidge gave markedly fewer addresses than Davis or La Follette,
but radio and the platform of the presidency guaranteed that his speeches were noticed.15
After his 1923 State of the Union message, Coolidge began to give speeches regularly on the radio. He didn’t draft remarks expressly for the new medium, as Franklin Roosevelt later would, but arranged to broadcast talks that he was already planning to deliver to live crowds. Otherwise, Coolidge grasped radio’s novel benefits. Most obviously, he could command audiences that already numbered in the tens of millions. (Theodore Roosevelt, in contrast, reached perhaps 13 million people with all the speeches he ever gave.) Recognizing the special requirements of addressing large, diverse audiences, Coolidge typically chose to air the talks he gave to nonpartisan forums, at which he delivered statesmanlike speeches, saving more partisan remarks for targeted groups off the air. Some speeches were recorded and distributed on phonograph records as well.16
Coolidge knew his voice went over well on the new medium. “I am very fortunate I came in with the radio,” he reflected. “I can’t make an engaging, rousing, or oratorical speech to a crowd … but I have a good radio voice and now I can get my messages across … without acquainting them with my lack of oratorical ability.” Bascom Slemp declared that radio “seemed to have been invented” for the new president. Less partisan sources agreed. Charles Michelson, the Democratic publicity chief, noted that radio softened the “wire edge to his voice,” and William Allen White said that “over the radio, he went straight to the popular heart. His radio campaign helped greatly because it is one of the few mediums by which the president always appears with his best foot forward.”17
In mid-July, the president’s political aide William Butler announced that Coolidge wouldn’t be stumping around the country but would wage a front-porch campaign, like Harding and McKinley, only this time from the front porch of the White House—and aided by radio and film. “Supplemented by motion pictures showing the president in action,” the New York Times reported, “persons identified with the campaign believe that addresses by
President Coolidge, broadcast throughout the country, would prove a great attraction even to audiences that do not ordinarily go to political meetings.”18
On August 14, two months after the Republican convention, Coolidge took to the airwaves to accept the GOP nomination, in keeping with the custom of the day. (Not until FDR changed the practice in 1932 did nominees address the convention itself.) A crowd of more than 2,000 people crammed into Washington’s Constitution Hall, while another 10,000 massed outside, listening to the speech on loudspeakers. But the main audience—some 25 million—sat in living rooms from the Atlantic to the Rockies and beyond, listening on fifteen networks. The president outlined the economic progress the nation had made over the previous four years, touted the immigration quotas, the Dawes Plan, and his tax cuts, and preached his standard message of stability, prosperity, and industry.19
Editorialists on both sides of the aisle heard the speech as an expression of Coolidge’s character: straightforward and full of common sense to admirers; cool and uninspired to critics. But the mere fact that Coolidge’s personality was now the focus of the campaign represented a triumph for the president. “We might as well recognize frankly that we have nothing to sell but Calvin Coolidge,” Barton wrote to George Barr Baker, a journalist turned GOP publicist, in July. The statement contained more confidence than concern, for Calvin Coolidge, as the public understood him, was a sturdy product.20
Throughout the summer the focus remained on Coolidge personally. When the president went to Plymouth Notch to visit his son’s grave and to escape Washington, Barton made sure that reporters and cameras recorded him in his native setting. Coolidge chopped trees and pitched hay in his business suit and homburg, as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone—longtime “camping pals,” according to the papers—journeyed to Vermont for a publicity stunt. The businessmen sat with Coolidge in a Gloucester hammock on his veranda and sang his praises for reporters,
while the president gave Ford a sap bucket that had belonged to his great-great-grandfather John Coolidge, the first of his line to settle in Plymouth. The predictable headlines followed.21
The Silent Cal strategy generally seemed to be succeeding. But one flaw was that Coolidge’s shyness could also make him seem chilly or unappealing to voters. So the president undertook to calibrate his persona. Besides Barton, he brought in another leading public relations man of the day, Edward Bernays, the nephew of the great psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, to help humanize him in the public eye. More liberal politically than Barton, Bernays also took a different view of publicity. Where Barton emphasized the appeal of the ordinary, Bernays stressed the extraordinary; where Barton’s gimmicks tended to reassure audiences, Bernays sought to excite them.
Bernays convinced Coolidge to host a breakfast with a gaggle of entertainers—in those days mostly Republicans—including the wildly popular vaudeville artist and blackface performer Al Jolson. On an October morning, thirty actors showed up at the White House after an all-night train ride from New York for what the New York Times, showing itself vulnerable to the public relations men’s craft, described as “an old New England breakfast of sausage and hot cakes.” Afterward, Jolson led the guests in a song, “Keep Coolidge!” in which he trilled: “The race is now begun / And Coolidge is the one / The one to fill the presidential chair.” The next day, the Times headline marveled: “Actors Eat Cakes with Coolidge … President Nearly Laughs.” As Bernays later reflected, “The country felt that a man in the White House who could laugh with Al Jolson and the Dolly sisters was not frigid and unsympathetic.” 22
Bernays did some other work for the president, too. He joined forces with Rhinelander Waldo, a former police commissioner of New York City and a Coolidge admirer, in creating a front group called the Coolidge Non-Partisan League, which would showcase prominent Democrats as well as Republicans who favored the incumbent. In later times, boasting of testimonials from the other
party would become a tried-and-true campaign technique, but in 1924 it still had considerable novelty. Barton, for his part, prescribed a tactic used in cosmetics advertising called testimonials, in which average Americans would mouth seemingly spontaneous praise for the president. “We will build up a wonderful Coolidge legend in the country,” he gushed. “Emotions affect votes much more than logic. I am sure of the soundness of this plan.”23
As the election neared, Coolidge took to the radio regularly. “We literally filled the air with Republican addresses from the various studios during the entire month of October,” crowed John Tilson of the Republican Party’s speakers’ bureau. Coolidge gave a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on October 23 that was broadcast nationally and another radio address the night before Election Day. Carried on a coast-to-coast hookup, the latter speech attracted an audience greater than any other speaker had ever enjoyed. Playing to the exhilaration about the event’s novelty, Coolidge paid tribute to his whole audience “including my father, up on the Vermont farm, listening in.” The journalist Bruce Bliven noted, “Calvin Coolidge’s speeches have been heard by at least ten times as many people as have heard any other man who ever lived.” This fact alone, he suggested, provided hundreds of thousands of voters with “a link between themselves and the White House and a powerful reason to vote in his favor.”24
Some found all the theatrics a bit much. At a time when cultural critics were awakening to the power of propaganda—and questioning its implications for democracy—several accused the president of perpetrating a massive snow job. “The American people dearly love to be fooled,” the Nation lamented, “to worship politicians of whom they have created portraits which bear little or no resemblance to the originals.” Its editors asserted that “the Coolidge myth has been created by amazingly skillful propaganda.” Bliven contended that Coolidge was sold “as though he were a new breakfast food or fountain pen”—a campaign in which “the Republican National Committee had the whole-hearted aid of the editors, film
producers, etc., to an extent which was likewise without any parallel in our history.” Such complaints, however, remained confined largely to journalists and intellectuals. Coolidge could rest confident that most Americans perceived him as sincere and true.25
Ironically, publicity innovations may not have been necessary to reelect Coolidge. With labor radicalism diminishing, business improving, and even farmers enjoying a brief uptick in their incomes, Coolidge could stick to the kind of ground game that suited his temperament. “If you keep as much as you can to an expression of general principles, rather than attempting to go into particular details of legislation,” he advised Dawes, who was stumping for the ticket, “you will save yourself from a great deal of annoying criticism.” (He added: “P.S. Whenever you go anywhere, take Mrs. Dawes along.”) The absence of a record of legislative achievement like Wilson’s or of executive dynamism like Roosevelt’s seemed to bother relatively few voters. The $4.3 million Republican Party war chest, which dwarfed the Democrats’ $820,000, didn’t hurt either.26
La Follette’s presence in the race, moreover, helped Coolidge substantially. The Republicans attacked the Wisconsin Progressive more than they did the hapless Davis. Since the Red Scare of 1919 and 1920, fear of Bolshevism had cooled considerably, and Coolidge had even softened the hard line against recognizing the Communist regime in Russia. But assailing La Follette’s radicalism, even to the point of fearmongering, proved irresistible. “Whether America will allow itself to be degraded into a communistic or socialistic state, or whether it will remain American,” said the president, loomed as the signal issue in the campaign. “Coolidge or Chaos” became the Republicans’ rallying cry, with the sober, even-keeled president offering himself as a rock of stability in changing times. Oswald Garrison Villard, the editor of the Nation, explained that Americans seemed to feel that Coolidge “is just what the country needs, a
quiet, simple, unobtrusive man, with no isms and no desire for any reform.” Coolidge even managed to rally to his side a number of prominent liberals. In October, the New Republic ran a debate among its contributors over whom to vote for. While the liberal thinkers Herbert Croly and Felix Frankfurter backed La Follette and Walter Lippmann came out for Davis, Chester Rowell, a longtime progressive, maintained that he and other onetime Theodore Roosevelt supporters “are now for Coolidge” because of their “confidence in his personal independence of reactionary influence.”27
Coolidge had done an exceptional job of mastering the new methods of politics in a mass society. Just as in his statements on the veterans’ bonus and tax cuts he had invoked his belief in a common good that trumped minority interests, so in his campaigning he had held himself out as a tribune of the American people writ large. To his loyal aide Bascom Slemp, the appeal to the majority was undeniable. “From his lips fell his declaration of policy, drawled in the tang of Vermont, with no grace of delivery or art of oratory, but so profound and true that it captured and held the minds of men,” he wrote. “In eighteen months he had a unanimity of following in the country rare in our political history.” More objectively, Kenneth Roberts of the Saturday Evening Post noted, “The Coolidge political machine to all intents and purposes has always been a one-man machine, and the one man has been Calvin Coolidge.”28
On November 4, Coolidge and Dawes were elected in another Republican landslide. The president won 15 million votes—more than Davis’s 8 million and La Follette’s 4.8 million combined. (La Follette’s 17 percent of the vote was a strong showing, historically, for a third-party candidate.) Thirty-five states cast 382 electoral votes for Coolidge, with Davis winning only the former Confederate states and Oklahoma. Davis garnered the lowest percentage of the vote of any Democrat ever. Even the historically low turnout—only 48.9 percent of eligible voters showed up at the polls, a dramatic contrast to the high percentages of the late nineteenth century—revealed at worst a lack of burning discontent with the incumbent. In the Congress, the Republicans bolstered their majorities, gaining
four seats in the Senate and twenty-two in the House. Yet as Bruce Bliven would later note, “The election of 1924 is now universally admitted to have been not a Republican victory but a Coolidge triumph.” As such, it would mean a second term in which the president’s personal popularity would remain high but his opportunities to produce far-reaching changes would remain few.29