Coolidge_An American Enigma

by Robert Sobel

  So would his son.

  John Coolidge was much more than a shopkeeper and farmer, however. He served in a wide variety of public offices—constable, justice of the peace, tax collector, and pound keeper. In addition he was a member of both the state house of representatives and senate, serving in the latter body while his son was climbing the political ladder. He was commissioned a colonel on the staff of the governor of Vermont in 1900, and for the rest of his life was called “Colonel Coolidge.” John Coolidge was also an insurance agent, dabbled in real estate, and wrote credit reports for R.G. Dun & Company. He was handy with tools and machines. John Coolidge was, in short, one of the most prominent people in the district, the prototypical big fish in a little pond. He was impressive physically, a powerfully built man with an impassive square face. “If there was any physical requirement of country life which he could not perform,” wrote Coolidge, “I do not know what it was.”

  Calvin was close to his father, one of the few people to whom he opened his heart completely. To judge from the frequent letters they wrote each other over a period of more than forty years, Calvin held his father in deep respect, high esteem, and abiding love. As a boy and young man he strove to impress him by working long hours and succeeding in whatever he attempted. They would kiss whenever they met, even after Coolidge was president and dogged by reporters. His letters to his father while governor and president indicate how pleased Calvin was to have honored his father in such a way. John Coolidge rarely prodded Calvin on to new heights, but the son knew that they would please his father, and to do so was one of his chief goals in life. “I was exceedingly anxious to grow up to be like him,” Coolidge wrote in his Autobiography. In an interview published soon after John Coolidge’s death in March 1926, Coolidge said:My father had qualities that were greater than any I possess. He was a man of untiring industry and great tenacity of purpose…. He always stuck to the truth. It always seemed possible for him to form an unerring judgment of men and things. I cannot recall that I ever knew of his doing a wrong thing. He would be classed as decidedly a man of character.

  The Coolidges had arrived in America in the early years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Calvin Coolidge’s great-great-grandfather, John Coolidge, had come to Plymouth around 1780 with his young wife, the former Anne Priest of Marlboro, giving the family deep roots in the town. The Coolidges, of both Massachusetts and Vermont, were sturdy and stolid for the most part, and John Coolidge was a fine example of the breed. Most of them remained there, and several became important forces in industry, banking, and government. T. Jefferson Coolidge became president of the Old Colony Trust Company of Boston, was an early backer of the telegraph and later on the telephone, and was one of American Telephone & Telegraph’s (AT&T) most important figures in the 1890s.

  As close as Calvin was to his father, he was closer still to his mother, Victoria Moor Coolidge. “She was of a very light and fair complexion with a rich growth of brown hair that had a glint of gold in it,” he wrote in his Autobiography. “Her hands and features were regular and finely molded. The older people always told me how beautiful she was in her youth.” The Moor family had moved to the Notch in 1849, and Victoria attended the local schools and had a year in Black River Academy, a private school in Ludlow. Apparently she loved literature, and instilled this in her children. Victoria Coolidge was an invalid when she bore Calvin and his younger sister, Abigail. She died in 1885, probably of consumption, at the age of thirty-nine, when Calvin was twelve years old. Recalling her almost half a century later, Coolidge wrote:Whatever was grand and beautiful in form and color attracted her. It seemed as though the rich green tints of the foliage and the blossoms of the flowers came for her in the springtime, and in the autumn it was for her that the mountain sides were struck with crimson and with gold.

  “The greatest grief that can come to a boy came to me,” he continued. “Life was never to seem the same again.” When president, he drifted into a friendly relationship with Edmund Starling, who was a member of the Secret Service assigned to the White House. They would walk together often, and occasionally they would sit at night, smoking cigars, while Coolidge rambled on about his youth. Sometimes he reminisced about his mother. “I wish I could speak with her,” he said one evening. “I wish that often.” He carried a portrait of his mother wherever he went. It was on his dressing table every night. It was in his breast pocket when he died. But he never spoke of these matters in public.

  The young boy was never quite the same after his mother died, one of several deaths that affected him while growing up. He had been a favorite of his grandfather, Calvin Galusha Coolidge, who died when the boy was six years old, and his paternal grandmother, Almeda, who helped raise the boy. He was particularly close to his sister, “Abbie,” a plump, friendly, intelligent girl, who died in 1890, at age fifteen, when Calvin was eighteen.

  None of this was unusual for the time and place. The life expectancy at birth at the time was forty years; among the leading causes of death were tuberculosis, influenza, and gastritis, and among women, birthing. In Vermont in the 1880s, tuberculosis accounted for 16 percent of all deaths. And Calvin did not inherit his father’s robust physique, but rather he favored his mother’s branch of the family—and quite a few Moors had died of tuberculosis.

  Young Calvin Coolidge was small, slender, and delicate. The only thing close to flamboyant about him was his bright red hair, which contrasted with his pale, freckled skin. The frail boy seemed destined for a short life. Calvin often came down with colds, some of which would debilitate him for weeks, and he had asthma as well. Death stalked Calvin Coolidge then and later.

  Calvin cared little for sports or other activities that interest boys, although he did like to ride horseback, usually by himself, and in the winter he would go sledding with friends. He was not mischievous or adventuresome, and was uncomfortable in large groups. Calvin did his chores about the store, tended the farm animals, helped with the plowing, and attended school when it was in session.

  Calvin’s favorite avocation was reading. In those early years he may have been shy, because friends later remarked how little he engaged in classroom discussions, how difficult it was to draw him out on any subject. His wife, Grace, wrote that he once told her, “I am as much interested in human beings as one could possibly be, but it is desperately hard for me to show it.” To his closest friend, Frank Stearns, he later confided:When I was a little fellow, as long as I can remember, I would go into a panic if I heard strange voices in the house. I felt I just couldn’t meet the people, and shake hands with them. Most of the visitors would sit with Mother and Father in the kitchen, and it was the hardest thing in the world to have to go through the kitchen door and give them a greeting. I was almost ten before I realized I couldn’t go on that way. And by fighting hard I used to manage to get through that door. I’m all right with old friends, but every time I meet a stranger, I’ve got to go through the old kitchen door, back home, and it’s not easy.

  Even so, he had fond memories of his childhood, which he portrayed in almost bucolic terms: It would be hard to imagine better surroundings for the development of a boy than those which I had. While a wider breadth of training and knowledge could have been presented to me, there was a daily contact with many new ideas, and the mind was given sufficient opportunity to thoroughly digest all that came to it.

  Country life does not always have breadth, but it has depth. It is neither artificial nor superficial, but is kept close to the realities.

  While much of this might have set young Calvin apart in some other places and other times, few of these qualities were remarkable for the rural Vermont of the 1880s. He was, in other words, a fairly ordinary boy, hardly one who seemed destined for an important role in history.

  In elementary school Calvin performed well enough, but not outstandingly. “He was not an inquisitive boy. He seldom asked for an explanation of anything we had in hand,” recalled one of his first teachers. “He seemed to understand ev
ery question that came up in class. He always seemed to be thinking of something.” Another of his teachers, Carrie Brown, was to become John Coolidge’s second wife. In a small town like Plymouth, such closeness was common.

  At the age of fifteen, in 1887, Calvin was registered in Black River Academy in nearby Ludlow. The switch from local public school to a private boarding school was not unusual; quite a few Plymouth boys had preceded him there. The fees were $7 a term, and room and board were another $3 a week. Coolidge figured the total came to $150 a year, at a time when the average family income in America was approximately $360. John Coolidge could afford that amount. He drove Calvin there in the family buggy, along with a calf he was sending to Boston to be sold. Coolidge recalled the trip and his thoughts vividly in his Autobiography.

  My whole outfit went easily into two small handbags, which lay in the straw in the back of the traverse sleigh beside the fatted calf that was starting to market. The winter snow lay on the ground. The weather was well below freezing. But in my eagerness these counted for nothing.

  I was going where I would be mostly my own master. I was casting off what I thought was the drudgery of farm life, symbolized by the cowhide boots and everyday clothing which I was leaving behind, not realizing what a relief it would be to return to them in future years. I had on my best clothes and wore shoes with rubbers, because the village had sidewalks.

  I did not know that there were mental and moral atmospheres more monotonous and more contaminating than anything in the physical atmosphere of country life. No one could have made me believe that I should never be so innocent or so happy again.

  As we rounded the brow of the hill the first rays of the morning sun streamed over our backs and lighted up the glistening snow ahead. I was perfectly certain that I was traveling out of the darkness into the light.

  According to one version of the story, the Coolidges said little as they rode to the academy. When they parted, the father said to the son, “Well, good-bye Cal. You may some day, if you work hard, get to Boston. But this calf’s going to beat you there.”

  Ludlow was hardly a metropolis, but unlike Plymouth, it qualified as an urban location. Waterwheels on the Black River provided power for several red brick mills, of the type that can still be seen in New England towns, and which were the reason for Ludlow’s existence. Yet it did not have electricity, a sewer system, or concrete sidewalks, nor would these appear for years after Coolidge left.

  Calvin took a room east of the business district, a short distance from what was called B.R.A., then celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. The school itself occupied three rooms on the first floor of an erstwhile church, but had been taken over by the town for municipal purposes. In late 1888 B.R.A. moved to larger quarters in a new building. The curriculum included mathematics, English and American literature, American and world history, and—for those hoping to go on to college—Latin, Greek, and classical literature. There were three terms a year, and students might attend any of them they selected, since the boys might be needed on the farms during the other two, and the girls could work as elementary school teachers during the spring term. The student body numbered 125 or so, and drew students from many parts of the area.

  Coolidge did not do well that first year, probably because he had stiffer competition at B.R.A. than at Plymouth. In addition, his letters indicate homesickness, which was relieved in part when in 1888 Abbie joined him at the school. Now and then there would be a social, often held in the meeting room upstairs. Calvin attended, but he didn’t dance or mix with the others. When he felt lonely, he would walk four miles to the home of an aunt and uncle, the Pollards, in Proctorsville. They had three sons with whom Calvin would socialize and then, on Sunday afternoon, after a large dinner, he would return to Ludlow. Other times he would travel to Plymouth, also on foot, and visit with his father. Occasionally he would work on Saturdays in a nearby toy factory.

  I worked there some on Saturdays, so I came to know how toys and baby wagons were made. It was my first acquaintance with the factory system, and my approach to it was that of a wage earner. As I was employed at piece work my wages depended on my own ability, skill, and industry. It was a good training. I was beginning to find out what existence meant.

  This was Coolidge’s first exposure to a small part of industrial America, and to industrial workers. It also was his last. Never again would he have direct contact of this sort with the new kind of nation that was emerging.

  During this period, the nation’s railroad network was remaking the face of American industry, and gasoline was supplementing the age of steam. Little of this touched Coolidge directly. He did not visit Boston until he was a college upperclassman. He didn’t take his first automobile ride until 1904, when he was thirty-two years old. His driver recalled that Coolidge was quite shaken by the experience. “It’s wonderful to ride in a horseless wagon,” he told the driver. “But it won’t amount to much.” All his life, he remained a product of rural Vermont. “The chief industry of the town was a woolen mill, that always remained a mystery to me.” So it was.

  Later, when he became president, some of his classmates were asked about what he was like in this period. As might have been expected, all were quite positive about him, but from their answers it appears clear he was not a leader in sports or academics. Calvin had difficulties with mathematics and Greek, but excelled in Latin and history. In his Autobiography he gave special thanks to two of his teachers—George Sherman, who was also principal at the school, and Belle Challis—both of whom lived to see him enter the White House. In an uncharacteristically florid statement, he wrote:Under their guidance I beheld the marvels of old Babylon, I marched with the Ten Thousand of Xenophon, I witnessed the conflict around beleaguered Troy which doomed that proud city to pillage and flames. I heard the tramp of the invincible legions of Rome, I saw the victorious galleys of the Eternal City carrying destruction to the Carthaginian shore, and I listened to the lofty eloquence of Cicero and the matchless imagery of Homer. They gave me a vision of the world when it was young and it is almost impossible for those who have not traveled that road to reach a very clear conception of what the world now means.

  Calvin discovered Cicero in his last year at B.R.A., and was entranced by his orations against Cataline. He read all he could by Cicero, and became fairly fluent in Latin as a result. In this period in which Calvin’s political consciousness was being molded, Cicero—a political moderate who looked to law and reverence for tradition to preserve stability and liberty—was a profound influence. Calvin became known as an able speaker. Word of his accomplishments spread through the small school, and at the end of his junior term, he was selected to write and deliver the traditional farewell speech to the graduates.

  Coolidge devoured the classics at B.R.A., but in time he turned to history and political science. Later, after Coolidge became president, John Coolidge was constantly badgered by reporters who wanted to know more about the enigma. “My boy was always shy and quiet-like and never put himself forward,” John reminisced. “I thought the boy had the makings of a good doctor, but he told me he didn’t care particularly; all he wanted was a good education.” Afterward, in his junior year in college, Coolidge told a friend that he might return to Plymouth and become a storekeeper like his father, and spend his spare time reading. That is, he did not attend school to better himself socially or financially, although he was always aware that money could purchase security and freedom. But he was also too practical to be an intellectual who enjoyed simply playing with ideas.

  The boys had to wear coats, ties, and stiff collars, but Calvin went overboard, wearing a derby, a starched dickey, and carrying a cane, perhaps in order to draw attention to himself. Not only did he become something of a fashion plate, but he also started a small business of selling mail order jewelry to his classmates.

  Abbie died, apparently from appendicitis, in March of his senior year, less than three months from graduation. She had always been a healthy girl, and
had been ill for only a week. Calvin was depressed, as he had been when his mother died. “It is lonesome here without Abbie,” he wrote his father. Two years later, he wrote again about her, telling John Coolidge, “We must think of Abbie as we would of a happy day, counting it as a pleasure to have had it but not a sorrow because it could not last forever.”

  In the spring of 1890, Calvin graduated in a class of five boys and four girls. Part of the ceremony consisted of brief speeches by each graduate, and Calvin elected to talk on the subject of “Oratory in History,” alluding to Peter the Hermit, Martin Luther, John Cobden, John Bright, James Otis, Patrick Henry, Daniel Webster, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips, as well as Cicero, indicating the breadth and depth of the education he had received at B.R.A.

  The school did not have the privilege of certifying students for college, and by then Calvin had decided he wanted to apply to Amherst College, largely because George Sherman had gone there and had urged Calvin to consider enrolling. In this period B.R.A. was a “feeder” school for Amherst. John Coolidge was quite willing to see his son attend the school. Now that Abbie was gone, he had only Calvin to pin his hopes on, and he wanted to do all he could to assure his son a good life. Besides, he had asked Carrie Brown to become his wife, and she had accepted. She was an attractive, intelligent, and warm woman, who in addition to having been a teacher had also clerked in the store John once owned. Calvin instantly took to Carrie. And while she did not take Victoria’s place in his affections, the two became very close.