In those twenty months he had learned enough law to pass his bar examination. Using a minute inheritance he then rented two small rooms in the Masonic Building, hung out his shingle, and waited for clients. Northampton was then a city of fifteen thousand, its industrialism tempered by its rural past and by Smith College for women, just then completing a second decade. Its established middle and upper classes were undeviatingly Republican, but the newcomers, the Irish and “Canuck” mill workers, were usually numerically sufficient to elect a Democratic mayor. Northampton would seem to have no political future for a young Republican like Coolidge, but he had two hidden qualities that would become apparent in time, and that were both essential to political success. First of all, he was lucky. Secondly, for all his introvert taciturnity, he had the knack of winning the goodwill and even the liking of those at or near the working-class level—the cobbler, the barber, the deliveryman, the plumber, the news vendor, even the tavern keeper. With such people he could pass the time of day, whereas the upper-crust Northampton of the Fields and the Hammonds reduced him to silence. In times to come, it would be seen that French-Canadians and Irish, who would never vote for a Field or a Hammond, would even abandon their traditional party to mark their ballots for a Coolidge.
“Calvin,” Coolidge now called himself with unconscious appropriateness, discarding the adventitious and seldom-used “John.” After an impecunious start he managed to earn a modest living as a lawyer, but found more interest in local politics than in the law. His luck began here, for he lived in a furnished room on Round Hill in the one solidly Republican ward of the city. His Republican allegiance to the party of respectability, sound money, and business was as much part of his nature as his Vermont inheritance, and in his semisilent way he made his politics known. During the McKinley-Bryan campaign of 1896 he wrote an article for the Hampshire Gazette attacking Bryan and the free coinage of silver.
Not long after being admitted to the bar he became one of five chosen from his ward to serve on Northampton’s Republican City Committee. Two years later he was elected as one of the ward’s three members to the city council, a post that paid nothing but might with luck be the first step up the Massachusetts Republican escalator. That smooth-running machine, if one waited one’s turn and minded one’s place and held tightly to the rails, could carry an astute and adaptable politician a long way, from the precinct and the ward, to councilor or mayor of a small city, to the gilt-domed State House and even—with a certain winnowing at the higher levels—to Congress or the ultimate destiny of the governor’s chair. Beyond that lay the blessedness of a directorship in a life-insurance company or the perfect peace of the Boston Safe Deposit or the First National Bank.
From the council Coolidge was appointed to the unfilled term of city solicitor. The next year he was elected to that office, though the following year he was defeated by a brasher and more plausible Democrat. It would mark his sole defeat in a lifetime of holding office. Republicans looked after their own, and following the death of the clerk of court of Republican Hampshire County, Coolidge was named to replace him. Though there were no outward signs, political ambition quickened within. He soon quit the profitable but dead-end clerk’s job to run for the legislature, making few speeches but carefully visiting every voter in his district and taking particular pains with the Irish Democrats. “I want your vote. I need it. I shall appreciate it,” he told them. Nothing more. To the surprise of everyone but himself, he defeated the Democratic incumbent. “An enigmatic little devil,” Judge Field observed as he noted his clerk’s slow rise on the escalator.
Representative Coolidge became one of the four legislators from Hampshire County, for which he received $750 a year plus his travel expenses. The mousy, middle-aged young man with the freckled flinty face and the high grating voice made no great impression in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. His colleagues suspected he might be either a schoolteacher or an undertaker. He took a small back room in the Adams House on Washington Street at a dollar a day and returned by train each weekend to his family in Northampton. After ten years in Northampton he had married Grace Goodhue, a young woman of such animated charm that neighbors wondered and continued to wonder what she had ever seen in him. She, living on Round Hill, had caught a first ludicrous glimpse of him one morning as he stood near his bathroom window in long underwear, a felt hat on his head, while he shaved. Nevertheless, after a prolonged and rather silent courtship, she accepted him. It is said that in the course of a walk, during which he had proposed and she agreed, he had remained silent for the next fifteen minutes. When she asked him why he said nothing more, he replied that perhaps he had said too much already.
The Coolidges lived in a two-family house on maple-shaded Massasoit Street, a duplex with three bedrooms upstairs, downstairs a front hall that opened into a bay-windowed parlor that in turn opened into a dining room. Coolidge himself had taken care of the furnishings. In the parlor the chairs and table were of mission oak. On the wall hung a framed sepia reproduction of “Sir Galahad” and a photograph of Plymouth Notch. The mantel displayed the embroidered quotation:
A wise old owl sat in an oak
The more he saw, the less he spoke;
The less he spoke, the more he heard.
Why can’t we be like that old bird?
No one would ever accuse Coolidge of speaking too much, but he gave more attention to the legislature and its operation than did most of his colleagues, seldom missing a session, and being always on hand to vote, study bills, and attend the dullest of drawn-out committee meetings and hearings. The social world of Back Bay and Beacon Hill, the world of Symphony Hall and the art museum and the opera house and the Athenaeum, remained as remote from him as the arctic. He had no hobbies, no need of recreation. Evenings under the flaring gas jet in his room he read the Evening Transcript and the Manual for the General Court. In his loneliness he honed his political sagacity. The Democrats came to recognize him as a man of his word, yet not averse to doing favors. Gradually he built up a political reputation for faithfulness and reliability. Even western Massachusetts was feeling the reform currents engendered by Progressivism, and Coolidge as a legislator voted for a six-day week, limitation of working hours for women and children, direct election of United States senators, women’s suffrage, and limitations on injunctions in labor disputes. But as Progressivism faded and as Coolidge rose on the escalator, his conservatism asserted itself. He grew more and more suspicious of innovation and what he considered radicalism. By inheritance and by his very place of birth he remained a Puritan. William Allen White, who knew him well, wrote in A Puritan in Babylon:
He brought the habits which were inevitable in a meager but happy civilization; thrift, energy, punctuality, self-reliance, honesty and caution. These marked the man to the end. His morals were Hebraic. Plymouth Town, with its villages nestling in the hills, was governed something as the ancient Hebrews were: the town meeting was supreme, the voice of the people was the voice of God. There was no doubt about God. In the morals of this boy God was the force outside himself that governed that inexplicable chance in the game of life which makes in the end for righteousness. There was no doubt about righteousness. Righteousness was neighborly consideration, justice between man and man, kindness institutionalized in various social forms and political works and ways. The barn-raising was one of the social forms of righteousness. The common school which guaranteed educational equality was a political work of righteousness. And the public care of the poor to eliminate begging was an economic way of the righteous life. And these morals which were founded upon the hypothesis of an orderly cosmos were ingrained in Calvin Coolidge in those years of his childhood. He never forsook them. Always he had faith in the moral government of the universe. He felt that God keeps books and balances them with men and with nations. He believed obviously that it pays to be decent and kindly and just. He had the Bible for it—that righteousness exalteth a nation and sin is a reproach to any people. When he came ou
t into the world to fight his dragons he was never unsure. He never faltered, nor halted in a complex world; a cynical world, a world full of a thousand doubts, an order rocking in a flood of disconcerting and terrible facts. His truth was unshaken.
Some of the party leaders began to take note of the unprepossessing newcomer, one of whom described him as “like a singed cat—better than he looks!” Not so his distant and high-toned Coolidge relatives in Boston and Cambridge. Even after he became governor, that branch of the family declined to assert the relationship. “Calvin Coolidge,” Harvard’s Professor Julian Coolidge—who was also a Lowell—remarked with sniffy genealogical exactitude “is an eighth cousin once removed.”
It was customary on the lower reaches of the Republican escalator for a representative to the General Court to serve two annual terms. Coolidge was re-elected after his first year, though by a perilously slight margin. The following year, 1909, he was unanimously endorsed by Northampton’s Republican City Committee to run for mayor, and even in that Democratic center managed to win by a small margin. The close-mouthed Coolidge with his stony features, his quacking voice, his obvious rectitude, and his sixth political sense was on the way to becoming a political character, the subject of anecdotes, an enigmatic vote-getter for whom people voted at least in part because he reminded them of the past. He was re-elected mayor. From then on he would never be out of office until he left the White House. His luck held. In 1911, that Democratic year, when the president of the Massachusetts Senate, Allen Treadway, left his safely Republican district to run for Congress, Coolidge declared himself a candidate for the vacant seat and easily won the nomination and election. He served two terms in the senate, making himself increasingly felt as a deft and knowledgeable politician. Then, in spite of the informal two-term tradition, he decided with the backing now of the wealthy paper-manufacturer Republican boss of western Massachusetts, United States Senator Murray Crane, to run for a third term, since the president of the senate, Levi H. Greenwood, was considering running for lieutenant governor. Greenwood later changed his mind and decided to go back to the senate, but in the election he was defeated by a general Democratic sweep plus the antagonism of the suffragists in his district. In the same election Coolidge, even as he defied the rotation system, was almost automatically elected to a third term. At the age of forty-two he replaced Greenwood as president of the senate. Since a Democrat, David Ignatius Walsh, had been elected governor, Senate President Coolidge became the highest-ranking Republican official in the state, able to reward his friends and conciliate his enemies. In spite of his glum silences and still-rustic manner, he was recognized as a skilled parliamentarian. The Boston Globe noted under “State House Gossip” that
those who have been in the State House in recent years say that the President of the Senate, Mr. Coolidge, is one of the keenest men who have filled that chair in a long time. When he first came to the Legislature, his nasal twang and other peculiarities made some of his Eastern colleagues laugh, and they used to call him—behind his back—David Harum.
David himself was a pretty shrewd Yankee, and so is Mr. Coolidge…. If it is not injudicious to apply the word “countryman” to a man who is a graduate of Amherst College and has been Mayor of Northampton, the word might be used to describe the President of the Senate at first impression.
That resemblance to David Harum may bring Mr. Coolidge still higher honors if he cares for them and the times are ripe…. The ability to appeal to the people who work the plough is an asset not to be disregarded. Mr. Coolidge has that.
Coolidge was re-elected in 1914, in spite of the opposition of the Democrats and the Progressives. In 1915, after Republicans and Progressives had buried their differences, he announced: “I am a candidate for lieutenant governor.” He won the nomination readily over a rather bombastic opponent, then, in that year of a Republican return to power in Massachusetts, led his party as a vote-getter. The well-oiled escalator moved ahead with relentless quiet.
Traditionally a lieutenant governor served three annual terms before moving up to the governor’s level. No lieutenant governor took office without the thought and prospect of that goal. Coolidge, biding his time, was rotated into the governor’s chair in 1918. It was an uncomfortably narrow rotation, for his Democratic opponent had been Richard Henry Long, an adder-tongued shoe and shoe-machinery manufacturer who had made a dubious fortune on government contracts during the war and whose chief political motivation was a grudge against the United Shoe Machinery Company for what he considered an infringement of patents. Opposed for the nomination by a staidly conservative Colonel Gaston, Long had turned rabble-rouser, posing as a friend of labor in spite of an ambivalent record at his factory, and espousing such incongruent causes as Czechoslovak independence, the abolition of the fish trust, government control of refrigerator cars, and public ownership of utilities. Coolidge defeated him by a mere 16,773 votes.
“What is your hobby?” a feature-writer asked the newly elected governor. “Holding office,” Coolidge quacked at him. Yet he was said by those who found his David Harum aspect less than picturesque to be the laziest governor the Commonwealth had ever had. Despite appearances, he was not so much indolent as lethargic. And his political instincts were always alert. Every day after an uncommunicative lunch at the Union Club, where as governor he was an ex officio member, he would mince to his office, lean back in his chair with his feet on the vast glass-topped desk, and smoke a cigar while he read the early edition of the Transcript. Then he would doze off for several hours. He had felt from the beginning that the troubles of Boston’s police department were not his. In any case the impending crisis was one of those troubles that would probably run into a ditch before reaching his particular spot on the road. Yet, little as he might consider the prospect, he and Commissioner Curtis and Mayor Peters were the three Yankees destined to be the leading characters in the police drama that was gradually developing in the last weeks of July.
Unlike the dour Coolidge, Andrew James Peters had a sprightly manner, an affable air of good fellowship, and an eagerness to please. But whereas the governor was a political expert, the mayor was an innocent. James Michael Curley, his predecessor as mayor and himself no slouch at diverting public funds, wrote witheringly that Mayor Peters
was a pawn of his palace guard, who were selling jobs and promotions right under his aristocratic nose. Peters was a part-time mayor with a passionate addiction for golf, yachting, hammock duty and other leisurely pursuits, and although a person of mighty moral muscle and admitted courtliness, he deserved the censure even his friends heaped upon him when they called him “an innocent dupe for a conscienceless corps of bandits.”
The vulturous palace guard who surrounded him made a travesty of the highest political office in Boston…. The wholesale pilfering of the city treasury reached such scandalous proportions in his do-nothing regime that Boston was left in a sorry condition, with a depleted treasury and little of a tangible nature to show for the funds that had disappeared.
Of an old if undistinguished Colonial family, Peters was that Massachusetts anomaly, a Yankee Democrat. Here and there such Democrats were to be found, of Puritan descent, with inherited wealth, Harvard graduates, yet through some twist of family allegiance standing outside the old Bay State Federalist tradition. Harvard’s president-emeritus, Charles W. Eliot, was such a Democrat as were the Russells of Cambridge, Cleveland’s Secretary of War William Endicott, the Quincys, Colonel William Gaston, and Winslow Warren, president of the Cincinnati and descendant of the Bunker Hill general.
The Peters family came from Jamaica Plain, a higher social as well as geologic level than neighboring Roxbury but still not the haunt of the Cabots and the Lodges. Peters remained on the fringe of the Brahmin world rather than part of it. Not until after his marriage to Martha Phillips of the rich and established Boston Phillips family was his name included in the Boston Social Register. As a boy he attended St. Paul’s School, then entered Harvard with the class of
1895, but left no scholastic or athletic record behind him. In his sophomore year he “ran for the Dickey,” the club within a club comprising the first eighty of those taken into the Institute of 1770. Members of the Institute generally became members of the Hasty Pudding Club the following year. (Some years later the two clubs would combine.) Those belonging to these threshold clubs—about a quarter of each class—were winnowed into the eight final clubs. Peters, to his chagrin, failed to survive the winnowing.
From the college he moved on to the Harvard Law School, and after receiving his degree in 1898 joined the law firm of Colonel William Gaston—son of the former governor—as a novice lawyer. In 1902 he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives and, after a term there, served a term in the state senate. His Republican district was of singular advantage to him. A Democratic nomination there could be had almost for the asking. The Democrats voted for him because he was a Democrat, the Yankee Republicans crossed party lines out of allegiance to a Mayflower descendant. Politics was nothing he took very seriously, certainly not as seriously as club life. He was a member of the Eastern Yacht Club, the Tennis and Racquet, the Somerset, the Exchange, the Tavern, and the New York Harvard Club. In 1906 he ran for Congress and was elected to the first of four terms from his safe but shabby Eleventh District. Fifteen years out of Harvard, he finally married. By 1919 he had had five sons, the first born in 1911, the last in April of his second year as mayor. Peters lived in the white Regency house in which he was born, at 310 South Street, Jamaica Plain, opposite the Arnold Arboretum’s Bussey Institute on a butte overlooking Forest Hills. One of the few genuine Regency houses in Massachusetts, graceful in line and elegant in expanse of window, it looked slightly incongruous in that increasingly plebeian neighborhood. One could scarcely imagine a Boston Brahmin living there. Peters felt as bound to his district as to his paternal home. Yet he could not fail to note that over the years the district with its growing Irish working-class electorate could no longer be considered safe. He prudently did not run for a fifth term in 1914, accepting instead an appointment from President Wilson—always considerate of Yankee Democrats—as assistant secretary of the treasury in charge of customs. Resigning from this post in 1917, he was appointed a member of the United States section of the International High Commission, a position he held only briefly until Boston’s mayoralty election of that same year.
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