by Robert Sobel
After 1896 Coolidge never again denigrated his opponents in political races, and in most races he didn’t even mention his opponent by name. As chairman of the Northampton Republican Committee, he wrote of an unsuccessful campaign in 1904 he helped manage: “We made the mistake of talking too much about the deficiencies of our opponents and not enough about the merits of our own candidate. I have never again fallen into that error.”
Coolidge was as good as his word. He was gracious in victory, and went out of his way to make certain the losers in those campaigns in which he was involved knew he bore them no enmity.
In addition to campaigning locally for McKinley, Coolidge traveled to Plymouth Notch to visit his father, and while there delivered an address supporting the candidate. If other political appearances were made in Northampton, we have no record of them. Coolidge was still a neophyte. Attention was afforded him, but not much.
The Bryan nomination and the money issue divided the Democratic Party badly, and many Democrats voted Republican. McKinley defeated Bryan in Massachusetts by a margin of more than two to one, while incumbent GOP Governor Roger Wolcott, who had succeeded on the death of Governor Frederic Greenhalge only eight months before the election, won over his Democratic opponent by a vote of 260,000 to 104,000. Since Field won handily in Northampton, Coolidge started his political career with a winner.
In 1897 Coolidge received his first political “reward,” being selected as a member of the Republican City Committee for Ward Two. The following year he served as delegate from Ward Two to the Republican State Convention.
In December 1898 Coolidge won his first election. The position was modest: he was to be one of the three councilmen for Ward Two. Coolidge came in second out of six candidates in the race for the two seats, receiving 207 votes. As expected, all three of the top finishers were Republicans, the bottom three, Democrats. Quite simply, Coolidge won because of his party designation, not because he had entranced the electorate. Almost immediately, he demonstrated political acumen. An Irish–American Democrat had died, and Coolidge introduced a motion to honor his memory. Already thought of favorably by Irish–Americans in the city as a result of hanging around barbershops and the shoemaker’s shop, he was now solidifying his support with the political opposition. It was one of earliest instances in his long political career in which Calvin Coolidge used his political astuteness to achieve results—avoiding the glad-handing that politicians normally employ.
On many occasions in the coming years he observed that anytime a Democrat voted for him, the vote counted as two—one less for his opponent, one more for him. Certainly, Coolidge was not nonpartisan, but he did solicit the good will of his opposite numbers. He was unfailingly courteous to the Democrats, whether voters or politicians. It paid off. Few Massachusetts politicians were more popular with members of the opposition party than was Coolidge. In a 1929 book entitled Presidents I’ve Known and Two Near Presidents, journalist Charles Thompson wrote of this appeal: “When he began to stir about in the politics of Northampton the bewildered Republicans in that city learned there was a body of voters there whom they came to classify as ‘Coolidge Democrats.’ He first went to the Legislature from a Democratic district, and as he spread out locally the Coolidge Democrats spread out too—spread out all over Northampton.”
Coolidge dutifully attended all meetings of a legislature that didn’t have much responsibility. He introduced a motion to employ a Northampton architect rather than an outsider to draw up the plans for an extension to the schoolhouse, and voted for an appropriation of $350 to defray the expenses of a visit by President McKinley. It was that kind of body. The following year Coolidge became a delegate to the Republican State Convention, and he was well on his political path before he was welcomed to the bar. Coolidge wrote that he worked very diligently in this period, so much so that he wasn’t able to visit his father for three years. Later, when his practice was growing, he credited his success to following Stephen Taft’s dictum:People began to feel that they could consult me with some safety and without the danger of being involved needlessly in long and costly litigation in court. Very few of my clients had ever to pay a bill of costs. I suppose that they were more reasonable than other clients, for they usually settled their differences out of court. This course did not give me much experience in the trial of cases, so I never became very proficient in that art, but it brought me a very satisfactory practice and a fair income.
In his first full year in practice Coolidge earned $1,200. This was the amount he earned, but not all of it was received; his total take was less than half that sum. In that time and place, clients paid lawyers’ fees slowly, often over a period of years. As a result, Coolidge wrote often to his father, asking for small sums to tide him over. “I shall want $22 to pay my board June 1,” he wrote on May 25, 1898. “My business has been good this month, I judge it will amount to about $350, but in cash I have had only $17 and my incidental expenses have just about covered that sum.” And: “I am short of money again and think I shall have about $40 before the first of February,” Coolidge wrote to his father on January 13, 1899: “I will write you again when I know what I must have.” Whenever Coolidge asked for money, his father complied and never complained. In 1917, when he was lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Coolidge wrote to thank his father for a $20 check.
Coolidge spoke and wrote about how he had always tried to save money while a lawyer and working his way up in politics, and there is no reason to doubt him on this score. But, all the same, he had a loving, generous father on whom he could count for anything he needed. Indeed, Coolidge relied upon his father financially as well as emotionally, indicating the warmth of family feeling he possessed—which, along with other aspects of his private life, he attempted to keep carefully hidden from the public.
Matters improved. In 1899 he was appointed counsel and vice president at the newly organized Nonotuck Savings Bank, and his earnings came to $1,400. In 1900 Coolidge ran successfully for the post of city solicitor, which was selected by the city council, meaning that Coolidge won it by lobbying the members, not by facing the general electorate. The post carried a salary of $600, but more important, it brought him greater professional and political exposure. “I wanted to be city solicitor because I believed it would make me a better lawyer,” he wrote. “The training in this office gave me a good grasp of municipal law that later brought some important cases to me.” The work wasn’t onerous, and didn’t interfere with Coolidge’s private practice. He won reappointment in 1901. Writing to his father on January 28, he did not sound triumphant, but rather spoke once again of his worries.
There were a couple of Irishmen after the job. They made me some trouble but they did not get votes enough. I have business enough to get a fair living, but there is no money in the practice of law. You are fortunate that you are not having me to support. If I ever get a woman some one will have to support her, but I see no need of a wife so long as I have my health.
Coolidge lost his bid for a third term to Democrat Theobald Connor, perhaps one of those Irishmen to whom he referred in his letter to his father. The loss was due not to any mishaps on his part; rather, he lost because the council had a tradition of rotation in office, and so turned him out. Indeed, two of the Republicans on the council voted against him, probably for that reason. In effect, Coolidge was asking for something he knew he shouldn’t have. It was a mistake he would not repeat.
The following year Coolidge bounced back, when on the death of the incumbent he was appointed temporary clerk of courts for Hampshire County, a political post paying a salary of $2,300. This was a much sought-after position, a fine career move that could easily lead to a judgeship down the line. Coolidge considered this “the greatest compliment ever paid my professional ability,” but realized this was not for him. For all of his fears regarding the law, he thought there were more possibilities—political as well as financial—in private practice.
Coolidge was named chairman of the Republ
ican City Committee, worked at the clerkship, and continued handling private cases. He had reason for satisfaction. “My earnings had been such that I was able to make some small savings. My prospects appeared to be good. I had many friends and few enemies. There was a little more time for me to give to the amenities of life.” Which was his ever-practical way of saying he could now consider marriage.
Whether Coolidge courted anyone before he met Grace Anna Goodhue is a matter of some conjecture. Her biographer writes of an “infatuation for a red-haired Northampton girl who refused to marry him,” but didn’t go into details. What seems more certain is that Coolidge decided early on not to think seriously of marriage until his professional and financial situations were secure, and then he cast about for a proper mate. As with so many important aspects of his life, Coolidge was fortunate in the time, the place, and the person.
At the time Coolidge was rooming at Round Hill, at the home of Robert Weir, the steward of the nearby Clarke Institute for the Deaf, where Grace Goodhue worked. She came from a good family, and, like Coolidge, was a Vermonter—her family lived in Burlington, approximately one hundred miles northwest of Plymouth. Her father, Andrew Goodhue, was a steamboat inspector for the Champlain Transportation Company. Goodhue was a Democrat, obtaining his job through political pull. Grace’s mother, Lemira Barrett Goodhue, was a reserved and somewhat dour housewife. Grace herself was in stark contrast to Calvin Coolidge: friendly, gregarious, and vivacious. She attended the University of Vermont, where she was a popular figure on campus. Upon graduation in 1901 she took a course in lip reading and obtained the requisite skills to apply for a position at the Clarke School, arriving there in 1902.
According to Grace Coolidge, she first saw her future husband as she walked past Round Hill. He was standing at a window, shaving, with his hat on, in a union suit. Coolidge saw her, too, and according to one account, decided on the spot he would ask her to marry him. He spoke with Weir about her, and learned she was a teacher at the school. Weir introduced the two soon after. She mentioned the business with the hat, and he explained that he had a lock of hair that always got in the way when he shaved, and so before taking up the razor he would wet his hair, comb it, and then don the hat.
The two dated—streetcar rides, picnics, church socials, walks, and the like. They must have seemed an unlikely pair. Grace was quick to smile and laugh, while Coolidge was tight-lipped and not given to banter, sometimes cranky and, in public at least, undemonstrative. Two months before their marriage, they visited a college classmate of Grace’s, and Coolidge just sat in a corner, looking straight ahead, saying nothing. After a while he stood and said, “We’ll be going now.” Privately the friend said, “My land, Grace, I’d be afraid of him.” As they drove back to Northampton, Grace remarked, “Now, why did you act like that? She thinks that you are a perfect stick and said she’d be afraid of you,” to which Coolidge replied, “She’ll find I’m human.” But Coolidge would never be able to banter with strangers—or even friends, for that matter. Perhaps Grace understood this early in their relationship. In any case, she cheerfully put up with this kind of behavior. When in the White House someone remarked on her vivacity, she laughed and said, “Well, I have to talk for two.”
It was quite clear almost from the first that he considered Grace’s education inadequate, and he would not talk with her about politics and his work. In her memoir of their lives together, she wrote:Sometimes I wonder if Mr. Coolidge would have talked with me more freely if I had been of a more serious turn of mind. I do not think that he was very favorably impressed with my education. As a matter of fact, he definitely cast aspersions upon it when he asked me one evening, out of the blue, when Martin Luther was born. I had no more idea than the man in the moon, and I said so; whereupon he asked, “Didn’t they teach you anything where you went to school?”
After the birth of their first child, Mrs. Coolidge purchased a book entitled Our Family Physician, for $8.00, but was too scared to tell her husband. Several weeks later she picked up the book and glanced at the flyleaf, to discover Calvin had written: “Don’t see any recipe here for curing suckers! Calvin Coolidge.”
Grace later wrote, “If I had any particular interest, I am sure I should have been properly put in my place.” What a lively, inquisitive person like Grace Goodhue saw in Coolidge is difficult to imagine. Of course he was hardworking, honest, decent, and trustworthy. Of all the presidents of the twentieth century, Coolidge is the most difficult to imagine as a philanderer. Almost undoubtedly, Grace was the first woman he thought seriously about marrying. Also quite certainly, Coolidge went about it methodically. He would not marry unless and until he felt himself financially capable of supporting a wife, and then he would go shopping. There was nothing impulsive about Coolidge, at any time of his life. Yet he did have a sentimental side, which he kept carefully hidden from public view. Coolidge unquestionably loved her deeply. In his Autobiography, he wrote:I have seen so much fiction written on this subject that I may be pardoned for relating the plain facts. We thought we were made for each other. For almost a quarter of a century she has borne with my infirmities, and I have rejoiced in her graces.
Grace even learned to appreciate his sense of humor, perhaps because, being from Vermont, she understood it. After they married, he presented Grace with fifty-two pairs of socks that needed mending, telling her that when she finished, he would have some others. Apparently he had saved them up against the time he would have a wife to do such tasks for him. Later, Grace asked if he married her to get his socks mended, and he answered, “No, but I find it mighty handy.”
This relationship was not unusual for the time. It was a period in which a man’s home was his castle—his castle, that is, not his wife’s.
Calvin and Grace visited the Coolidge and Goodhue families. The Coolidges took to Grace immediately, and Andrew Goodhue got along well with Coolidge once he became accustomed to his quiet ways. But Lemira Goodhue was wary about Coolidge, perhaps because he was somewhat like her, and they never became anything more than correct with one another. Although she attended his inauguration in 1925, she visited the White House for only ten days while the Coolidges were in the White House.
One day, in the spring of 1905, Coolidge appeared uninvited at the Goodhue residence in Burlington. When Mr. Goodhue entered his living room, he found Coolidge sitting there, reading a magazine. “Hello Calvin, what are you doing in Burlington? Got some business here?” he asked. “No,” Coolidge replied. “Came up to marry Grace.” “Why, have you spoken to her yet?” the father asked, to which Coolidge said, “No, I can wait a few days if it’s any convenience to you.”
Coolidge asked Grace to marry him soon after. Or to be precise, he declared, “I am going to marry you.” She accepted. At the time, he was thirty-three years old, and she was twenty-six. This was not the marriage of two impulsive youths. Mrs. Goodhue, unhappy at this turn of events, tried to talk her daughter into quitting her job and returning home for a year, perhaps hoping the separation and time would lead her to reconsider. But Grace was certain of herself and refused. They married in the Goodhue residence in Burlington on October 4, 1905. There was a small party the night preceding the wedding, and one friend, who arrived late, observed Calvin in a corner, looking on, saying nothing. Knowing Grace was a teacher of the deaf and dumb, she asked, “That young man standing by himself in the corner—is he one of Grace’s pupils?”
They went to Montreal for their honeymoon, intending to see the sights for two weeks, but even then, Coolidge had other things on his mind, and they returned to Northampton after only one week. He had decided to run for a place on the Northampton School Board, a nonpaying post but one that would keep him involved in politics and in a position to meet future constituents. Ordinarily he would have had an easy time of it, but another Republican, S.D. Drury, entered the race so that Democrat John Kennedy won, with 934 votes to Coolidge’s 840 and Drury’s 762. It was hardly a major setback. Indeed, had Coolidge known of the sec
ond Republican candidate he would have withdrawn from the race, but when he returned it was too late. Coolidge showed style. When he ran into Kennedy during the campaign, the Democrat said, “Calvin, I think I’ve got you beat.” Coolidge replied, “Well, either way they’ll have a good man.” Several weeks later a Republican in the district told him that he had voted for Kennedy, because the Democrat had children in the public school and Coolidge did not, to which Coolidge replied, “Might give me time.”
Three years later, when Kennedy ran for reelection, he did so with Coolidge’s support. When asked how he could recommend that Republicans vote for a Democrat, Coolidge replied that he had a good record.
After living for a brief time in a nearby hotel, Coolidge rented a seven-room duplex, half of a two-family house at 21 Massasoit Street, and retained the lease almost to the end of his life. They lived frugally; while there they had a party line telephone. Now that he was married with responsibilities, Coolidge’s earlier confidence in his future was again replaced by the familiar doubts. Afterward, he wrote of his thoughts in this period:Of course my expenses increased, and I had to plan very carefully for a time to live within my income. I knew very well what it means to awake in the night and realize that the rent is coming due, wondering where the money is coming from with which to pay it. The only way I know of to escape from that constant tragedy is to keep running expenses low enough so that something may be saved to meet the day when earnings may be small.
