Coolidge, p.45
Coolidge, page 45
Now, in Washington, Coolidge and Mellon had their hands full defending the tax cut. Coolidge had laid siege to Congress before; now they felt themselves to be the ones besieged, like Will Rogers. With each month that passed, lawmakers readied new plans to convert their revenues into deficits or to change the law so that the value of the experiment would never be visible. Muscle Shoals, the nitrate plant at the Wilson Dam on the Tennessee River, remained in the federal government’s hands; progressives such as Senator Norris of Nebraska, who had just ascended to the position of chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, might yet make Muscle Shoals into the basis of a chain of federal hydropower plants. In the halls of the Senate, the topic of Muscle Shoals would not die; its nickname was “The Alabama Ghost.” Though Harding and Coolidge had fought off agricultural subsidy before, the farm senators now sought a new kind of intervention, a government office that managed prices and guaranteed farmers parity, which was defined as the same high price levels that had been the rule years before. The case that farmers deserved regulated high prices remained easy to make as long as the farmers had to pay the artificially high prices for their tools and goods that were ensured by the Coolidge-backed Republican tariff.
Other challenges kept popping up. Many Democrats were like Senator Robinson, and wanted to beat Coolidge and Mellon at their own game, cutting rates, but then using any extra revenue not for debt reduction or tax rebates but for new large programs. The loudest and most authoritative demand for costly programs came from infrastructure engineers, led by Herbert Hoover. Hoover stood by Coolidge and his agriculture secretary, William Jardine, in their hand-to-hand combat with the farming bloc. But in exchange the commerce secretary demanded much, including White House backing for an expensive system of dams and sluices and a new rerouting of the Colorado, Mississippi, and Columbia rivers, not to mention the Great Lakes. The military thought that any extra cash ought to be spent on new cruiser ships; the House Naval Committee was applying all its weight to get Coolidge to put more cruisers into the budget. Policymaking was likely to become tougher after the midterm. If the Republicans, the incumbent party this time, lost seats in the midterms, then their foothold would become weaker. If the progressives or labor parties gained, they too might interrupt the tax plan. There had been costly natural disasters, like the floods in the Midwest. Then there was the economic weather: Ford planned to shut down his factories to build a new model to replace the Model T; that might cause a recession all by itself and strengthen the progressives.
When aviation would be able to realize its potential was not yet clear. Nearly a decade before, the New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig had established the prize offering $25,000 to the first flier who traveled nonstop from the United States to Paris. Now airmen and navies were getting close to succeeding and figured they could hop the Atlantic in a mere day or day and a half. In September, the French fighting ace Captain René Fonck had set off from Roosevelt Field in New York for France. Coolidge, still at Paul Smith’s Hotel in the Adirondacks for the summer, had wired Fonck and his American partner, Lieutenant Lawrence Curtin, to cheer them on in their “fine and courageous adventure.” A gas tank leak in the end had prevented that crossing. Storms at sea had caused the next delay. Then, on September 21, Fonck’s plane crashed at takeoff, cartwheeled on the runway of Roosevelt Field, and exploded into flames, killing two of Fonck’s crew.
In October, eager to sustain the budget side of the experiment as always, Coolidge met with Lord six times and reduced a tariff on paintbrush handles by half, his second cut that year, the other a reduction in a duty on live bob quail. Coolidge planned a speech, but another event intervened: the aurora borealis interfered with the telegraph communication. The midwestern floodwaters receded; a visit from Queen Marie of Romania ate up days. Meanwhile, the progressives duly made the expected advances. Though he had missed the graduation of John at Mercersburg in 1924, Coolidge hoped to travel out to dedicate a new memorial chapel at Mercersburg. The bells of the chapel had been cast in Croydon, England, using copper from all over the world, including bits from Lord Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, a tiny shaving from the Liberty Bell, and a copper wire from an airplane, PN-9, which had made the first flight to Hawaii.
Grace went, taking white roses; yet other roses were dropped from the sky by an airplane. But again, Coolidge was not there, owing to another crisis: too much bounty. The crop that year was so great that farmers feared the volume would drive down their prices enough to kill their farms. Coolidge arranged a credit for farmers; it was a compromise that placated the cotton men, reducing the pressure for the larger sin of passing systematic price management. That week there was good aviation news: a Marine Corps captain completed a cross-country flight from San Diego to Washington, the best record of flying hours for the navy without accident. Coolidge did take time for this, bringing the flier to the White House and awarding the trophy on the lawn.
The floodwaters of the Midwest subsided yet further, but by December the results of the election brought a new tide of trouble. In the House, Republicans retained their majority, but lost seats, including two to the new Farmer-Labor Party candidates who would press for some version of agricultural price setting or subsidy. In the Senate the blow was worse. Coolidge’s old ally William Butler of Massachusetts lost his bid for election to the Senate seat he had been holding since the death of Lodge after 1924. Overall the Senate was now effectively tied, with Republicans holding forty-eight seats to the Democrats’ forty-six. Dawes’s vote became crucial.
Aware that money spoke louder than words, Coolidge and Mellon decided to demonstrate the value of their cuts by making Christmas come early that year, rebating some of the cash the cuts had generated. “Tax Refund, Coolidge Plan” read the headlines, announcing that they would redistribute $150 million of the surplus, a 10 or 12 percent cut in the tax bill people paid, if Congress backed the concept up with a resolution. Nearly every area of the economy was prospering; even the cotton surplus was of course prosperity, if only the mismatch of farmers to buyers could be sorted out. The Commerce Department’s annual report, released that fall, would note that nearly every industry from mineral production to mail-order houses had seen significant increases since 1923, with electricity up to 179 compared with a 1919 base of 100. Farm prices were not down. Department store revenues were at 133 compared with those of 1919, though the chain stories, which emphasized price, were prevailing over service stores like RH Stearns. The United States’ standard of living was higher than ever before.
The Chicago Tribune, reporting the tax giveback news, underscored that Coolidge in no way saw the election as a repudiation “of himself or his party.” In the same pages the Tribune carried a story of yet another of that autumn’s many aviation mishaps. Caught in a snowstorm, a mail plane had suffered engine failure over Bloomington, Illinois, on a trip between St. Louis and Chicago; the pilot had parachuted 13,000 feet and landed in a farm field. The pilot’s name, the paper said, was Charles A. Lindbergh. It was not the first time he had bailed out; after engine failure in September he had parachuted down in Ottawa, Illinois, as well. Two weeks later a navy aviator, Lieutenant Edward Curtis, died in Norfolk at the navy base hospital after injuries received in a crash. In England, the Royal Air Force suffered three fatal crashes in a week.
Coolidge was eager for more evidence from his tax experiment, in part because he knew Mellon, seventy-one now, would not want to fight the tax wars forever. The wedding of Mellon’s daughter, Ailsa, had taken place that past spring; the Coolidges had attended; indeed, they had had their portraits painted by the same artist who had rendered Ailsa the year of her marriage, Philip Alexius de László. The Treasury secretary now wanted to focus on a federal building project with the Fine Arts Committee that would give Washington a complex of edifices worthy of its rank as a world capital. If Washington were to be the world’s creditor—and Mellon was ensuring that it would remain so—it must be more beautiful, like London, whose structures, such as the National Gallery, Mellon so admired. The new project was a set of buildings, which would be known collectively as the Federal Triangle. A well-known sculptor, not Bryant Baker but Gutzon Borglum, who was famous for carving heroic figures in stones in the landscape, was seeking out Mellon for an appropriation for a new project, giant profiles of presidents he would cut into the ancient granite of South Dakota. Mellon was also making other outlays, some personal. In 1926, while the federal government had purchased the Oldroyd Lincoln collection, Mellon had himself been busy purchasing paintings for himself and the National Gallery, a great Rembrandt, A Young Man Seated at a Table, and Rogier van der Weyden’s Portrait of a Lady.
The talk of another term for Coolidge was already loud; however the party fared, however angry committees were at his reluctance to appropriate, Silent Cal’s ways were enormously popular. To be sure, Grace was still homesick for her friend Therese Hills, her street in Northampton, and her son, John. She was at work on a patchwork coverlet for the enormous Lincoln Bed, which expressed her view about the amount of time they should stay in Washington: it would be forty-eight squares, the number of months Coolidge would serve in his first full term. There was also space for a dateline: “August 3, 1923–March 4, 1929.” Still, the Coolidges were now as much at home in Washington as they would ever be. Their menagerie had only grown, to include more dogs, birds, and a raccoon, Rebecca. Without Mrs. Jaffray, Grace found the White House more comfortable and was plotting a renovation of the upstairs to take place during the summer of 1927. She liked Miss Riley, who took care of Rebecca and kept meticulous books for the president. With Miss Riley, Grace found with satisfaction, she could be a better host and could experiment. “Did you ever eat a green salad with tiny bits of fried bacon scattered over it just before serving with oil dressing?—Rather nice,” Grace wrote to the housekeeper. Or, “Please have mint sauce for the lamb.” Grace found she could also respond to the president more easily: “Dear Miss Riley, When the ham is carved tomorrow will you see that it is cut so that the President can get that little round piece which lies near the bone?—G.C.”
Coolidge for his part also found pleasure in hosting, playing up the role of the Vermonter in Washington. Lynn Cady, the farmer who worked his father’s acres, sent him a one-gallon can of maple syrup. “I have used some and find it very fine,” the president had written back, enclosing a check for $5. “I think the House has ordered some but if you need a market for some let me know.” Coolidge served the syrup at the congressional breakfasts he hosted, along with sausage. Through Cady and Lynds, who worked the limekiln lot, Coolidge continued to experience the difficulty of farming. He had asked Lynds to send him payments for whatever Lynds took off the limekiln lot, but those payments clearly could not be much. A reporter noted that Plymouth’s age-old problem of isolation remained: “The sirup producer is in the same boat as the milk producer. Indeed he is the same fellow. He lives far back from ready transportation.” The Vermont Maple Products Cooperative Exchange had been established years before, but distance, again, was a problem for some producers, including the limekiln lot, even when Plymouth was not snowbound. “It lays half way up the mountainside between Plymouth Church and the March sunset,” the same reporter had noted.
Meanwhile, Coolidge and Lord scoured preliminary reports on the taxes, meeting sixteen times in November and December. When not with Lord, Coolidge busied himself planning and pushing back when pushed. The United States kept a contingent force in Nicaragua more or less constantly; Coolidge wanted to end that conflict and would send the former secretary of war, Henry Stimson, down to mediate. Regular vetoes had to be used sparingly, for overrides like the one he had experienced on the bonus bill hurt the authority of the administration. Coolidge could continue to use pocket vetoes at the end of sessions, killing bills by failing to sign them in the recess. Pocket vetoes were difficult to undo; they could not be overridden. Congress had to start anew with a new law in the next session. He used the pocket veto to kill a bill that introduced new pensions for widows of Civil War soldiers. Like so much pension legislation, it affected a tiny group, but established a principle that could be broadened to provide a benefit for millions. Coolidge, like Harding, found himself playing Scrooge.
In the budget message Coolidge sent to Congress on December 9, 1926, the president made aviation his cause, asking specifically that $3 million be spent to regulate the skies and promote aviation commerce. In aviation he saw profits where he did not see them in, say, shipping: none of the lines being operated by the government was self-sustaining, he warned. Most important, he made the case for his tax experiment. “With the experience of another year’s test of the Revenue Act of 1926, and with a more accurate knowledge which the year will give,” he said, the United States could set policy, but only then.
He’d asked for “another year’s test,” but as early as that Christmas Coolidge and Lord were receiving preliminary results of the tax experiment. The Treasury’s surplus for the next fiscal year was already $218.3 million, or $74.4 million higher than it had been the previous year, before the 25 percent top rate. Mellon had saved so much, a billion dollars in fact, that for the 1927 fiscal year the national debt would be $19 billion, a third down from the $28 billion that had greeted Harding. The White House would have three large trees, which Grace promised to decorate herself with electric lights, tinsel, and candy canes. This year the Coolidges gave the White House staff gold coins. Grace hosted diplomatic dinners, to which not only the cabinet, including of course Mellon, but also old friends were invited: George Pratt from Amherst; Mortimer Schiff, whose shirts Morrow had received as hand-me-downs during college; Bruce Barton; General Lord; the Stearnses; and Evalyn McLean. On Christmas Eve Coolidge and Grace went to the living tree, which had itself taken root at Sherman Square; Coolidge himself touched the button and “under leaden skies that threatened to bring snow tomorrow, lights flashed.”
Coolidge wondered when the outlook would brighten for flight. If only flight could be made safer. On December 22, the president received the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce, a delegation of men representing two hundred companies in some part of the new industry, all arguing that aviation was the future of the U.S. economy. But in Great Britain the House of Commons was stirring over the appalling number of air deaths, eighty-three, that had taken place up to early December 1926. “We are constantly making experiments,” Prime Minister Baldwin apologized, trying to suggest that the Royal Air Force might improve the following year. The very same day that Coolidge received the Chamber of Commerce men, three army aviators met their death when their planes collided over Rantoul, Illinois; a fourth died later. But Governor John Trumbull of Connecticut, whose daughter Coolidge’s own son, John, was now seeing, was becoming a pilot. Senator Hiram Bingham of the same state had flown since the war. The more Coolidge thought about planes, the more enthusiastic he was. He had always argued that aviation had the potential to obviate, at least to some extent, destroyers or battleships, perhaps eventually allowing savings in outlays for the War Department. His conviction strengthened: the future was brighter for flight if commerce, not the War Department, drove the industry. Here, though, he encountered resistance. Years before, it had been Mitchell who pushed for military spending, a force in the air, so stridently that he had been court-martialed and mustered out of service; Dwight Morrow’s board and a law he had signed afterward had pushed aviation away from the military and over to commerce. But now Coolidge confronted a tougher antagonist: Will Rogers. Rogers, like Mitchell, wanted more military spending on planes. “Mr. Coolidge on account of his economy plan has suggested they fly as high as they can on what little gas they have and then coast. In that way they get twice the amount of distance out of the same amount of gas,” wrote Rogers.
Rogers was picking up on something: the administration itself was tired of its own saving policy. Lord might still be holding up that $3 billion budget as the target. “That $3 billion,” Lord told the departments at the January budget meeting, was “still beckoning us on.” But Lord and Coolidge, as hard as they were trying, knew they could not cut much more. “With a full treasury and revenues at flood it requires courage to continue along the lines we have been following,” Coolidge confessed to the same crowd. Even after a record of ten meetings that December, and a record of sixty-three meetings for 1926, the debut year of the Mellon Plan, they were not sure they could do much more. The old Two Percent Club he had created to reward departments that saved was no longer feasible. Departments could not find 2 percent more to cut. Now Lord was running a One Percent Club. By selecting those who had served General Pershing in the war, the Budget Bureau had given the directors a certain protection from criticism: what military man would attack General Dawes or General Lord? But now that immunity was wearing off. The Naval Board and the army general staff were alleging that, Morrow Board or no, General Lord was jeopardizing national defense. The tax experiment was not yet ready to yield all its evidence. “We are waiting [for] a test of the producing ability of the revenue act of 1926,” Coolidge clarified. The tax experiment and the flight experiment moved together in his mind. The Orteig Prize was in the news all the time now, trumping little bits of more mundane news, little stories like that of high water at Cairo, Illinois. More fliers were building or finding planes to compete for it. The radial air-cooled engine, high-lift airfoils, and lighter construction made easy flight likelier. The questions were whether the prize flight would be by monoplane or biplane, or whether it would be a Frenchman, American, or Englishman who would win the prize, not whether the prize would be won.
Meanwhile, though, Congress pressed Coolidge harder. Senator Carter Glass, seeking new cruisers, was especially eager to haul General Lord before a senate committee. “I don’t think he is so hedged about by titled consequence that he can’t come here,” Glass said. In February, Glass’s colleagues pushed on farms. Senator McNary and Representative Haugen were offering up yet another farm bill. This one created a government fund of $250 million to stabilize the price of five commodities: cotton, wheat, corn, rice, and swine. Though commodity prices were high, they still stood nowhere near where they had been in the war. Considering the farm legislation, Coolidge also tended to his own land, farming by letter, wire, or telephone. He worried that Cady, his tenant at the Notch, was not prepared for such surprises as drought or flood. “If you have a little dry weather, I am afraid your feed will be short for ten cows,” he wrote Cady, advising him to consider letting another lot to graze the cattle. Coolidge went on, adding more instructions: “I should cut some spruce trees on the limekiln lot and draw them into the mill and have them so as to have some spruce lumber.” The economics of it all did not necessarily add up. Cady was talking of an investment in an evaporator. That made sense only if Cady committed to continuing to farm, Coolidge noted. The president also included a quiet line of resignation: “If you should leave I should probably close up the farm.”
