Coolidge, p.5
Coolidge, page 5
The college that he encountered in his first few weeks of the fall of 1891 was worthy. Amherst had been founded not in the name of wealth or sport or Greek fraternities but to educate poor students to be ministers. It had been a splinter of a splinter: men who had deemed Harvard University too impious had founded Williams College, safe in the wilderness of western Massachusetts; Williams President Zephaniah Swift Moore, dissatisfied, had moved over to Amherst from North Adams, and students had followed him. From its beginning in the 1820s, Amherst had been small but mighty. “The infant college is an infant Hercules,” an astonished writer named Ralph Waldo Emerson had written in his diary after passing through. “Never was so much striving, outstretching, and advancing in a literary cause as is exhibited here.” The students, he said, “write, speak, and study in a sort of fury, which, I think, promises a harvest of attainments.”
Amherst welcomed all Christians but tended to the Congregationalist, like St. Johnsbury, where Coolidge had worshipped at “the North Congo,” the North Congregational Church. The fervor of the professors also recalled his grandmother Sarah Brewer, a Baptist. Christianity was, one president had said, “top stone and cornerstone” of Amherst, a fitting image in a region known for its granite and marble.
The quality of the education was seen as high enough to create leaders. “Terras irradient” was the Amherst motto: “Let them illuminate the earth.” Amherst men might become senators, preachers, or diplomats. The Amherst campus was its own City upon a Hill, situated to exploit a view of purple mountains. The steeples there were like those of Vermont: steeples of independence. The town itself, like St. Johnsbury and Ludlow before it, was showing Calvin how the world worked; the Fairbanks’ factory in St. Johnsbury had made great scales, purchased the world over, by customers as far away as Russia. In Amherst there were bicycles everywhere, whereas a few years before, there had been only horses.
Here in Amherst were names and achievements to aspire to. Among Amherst graduates was Henry Ward Beecher, who had preached abolition so successfully in Brooklyn. Even junior professors at Amherst were extraordinary: Charles Garman, who taught philosophy, had been described by none other than William James as “the greatest teacher” of all the colleges. Another Amherst star was a young librarian named Melvil Dewey, who had come up with a new classification of knowledge. During one Sunday sermon, staring at the pulpit, Dewey had come up with a way to organize books: “while I lookt stedfastly at [it] without hearing a word,” Dewey later wrote, “my mind absorbd in the vital problem, the solution flasht over so that I jumpt in my seat and came very near shouting ‘Eureka!’ It was to get absolute simplicity by using the simplest known symbols, the arabic numerals as decimals, with ordinary significance of nought, to number a classification of all human knowledge in print.”
Coolidge learned quickly that there were Amherst dynasties, not always wealthy but respected, chains of alumni with names such as Stearns or Dickinson. The bells of Stearns steeple, which chimed in the key of E, had been given by the father of an Amherst man who had died at Williamsburg in the Civil War. A Boston merchant, Frank Stearns, was class of 1878; he had married the daughter of an officer who had brought back a cannon from the Civil War; Stearns was also the name of an Amherst president. Stearns had his own department store in Boston. A Dickinson had founded Amherst, and another Dickinson had ferociously guarded the college’s virtue; Edward Dickinson, the son of the founder, Samuel, and father of Emily, made it clear that Amherst would sacrifice all rather than become impure. Laying the cornerstone of the Barrett Gymnasium in 1859, Dickinson, a Whig politician, had warned that if the structure were “desecrated to any purpose of immorality,” it should be destroyed: “Would that a fire consume it or an earthquake throw it down.”
Austin Dickinson, Edward’s son, was the school treasurer; the poems of his late sister Emily were praised in the press. The Dickinsons were royalty and broke rules, their own or the college’s, with impunity; Austin was an indifferent bookkeeper, and there was gossip about an old affair he was said to have conducted with the wife of the astronomy professor, David Todd, class of 1875. Henry P. Field, class of 1880, was the son of a professor, Thomas P. Field, class of 1834, and a loyal alumnus. He was also the Dickinson family lawyer, based in Northampton, the county seat. Field, a bachelor and secretary to his class, stayed at the Lord Jeffery Inn whenever he visited other alumni. Field’s law partner was John C. Hammond, class of 1865. Both men, Calvin noticed, were Republicans. Herbert Pratt, a member of his class, was from a family that had made a fortune in kerosene and given the school the Pratt Gymnasium and Pratt Field, completed in the spring of 1891, just months before Calvin’s arrival. For such people, doors seemed to fly open.
But for him the doors shut one by one. Fraternity recruitment came. Charles Andrews, a young man he met, pledged Phi Delta Theta. Dwight Morrow, a boy from a family with even fewer resources than his own, found a new home at Beta Theta Pi, which maintained a gaudy house with a prominent porch on the corner of College Street and Boltwood Avenue. “He was master of the situation,” Coolidge would say later of Morrow’s response to it all. Boy after boy found some kind of affiliation. Coolidge looked on, helpless.
Athletics likewise did not seem possible, and that too hurt because physical fitness was a near obsession at Amherst. Coolidge lacked the talent that would win someone a name on the field; he was not an especially fast runner, he was not especially comfortable with a ball, and he was certainly not comfortable dancing. He could not make a team. He experienced the well-known shock of arriving at a school and finding oneself to be not steps but leagues behind the serious athletes. One of the humiliations of college was that students’ physical shortcomings were quantified—and meticulously. Amherst had its own health guru, another dynasty man, Edward Hitchcock, the son of a geologist and Amherst university president. He taught physical culture—what we today would call health studies—to the freshmen. Hitchcock was also a pioneer in anthropometry, the study of the physical measures of men. Not only did “Doc,” as he was known to the students, record the height and weight of each Amherst freshman, he also measured them up and down and tested them for strength of lungs, arms, and legs. He carefully recorded additional physical characteristics of decades of Amherst students and took extra care to study students who stood out.
A fellow freshman in Coolidge’s year, H. W. Lane, held Hitchcock’s attention: “Mr H. W. Lane of this class makes the most remarkable record of strength tests in our books,” Hitchcock wrote. Ernest Hardy of Northampton, the county seat, weighed in the heaviest, at 191 pounds. Coolidge weighed only 119.5 pounds, below the class average, despite a height that was slightly more than average, 68.9 inches. Other physical characteristics were also recorded, such as hair color: Coolidge was one of five “auburns” counted in the class.
If Coolidge could not be Greek, at least he could read Greek, along with Latin. But even in academics the reception was less warm than he had hoped. With newspapers being the only input from the outside world, the professors and clergy were giants at a campus like Amherst. In 1890, professors’ salaries were $2,500, more than twenty times tuition. The step up from laborer to professor was immense, for the average wage earner in 1890 earned $425 a year. When a young Scottish American, Alexander Meiklejohn, just Coolidge’s age, began his first job as an assistant professor teaching philosophy at Brown, in 1897, he would receive a salary almost equivalent to that of his six brothers combined. A “prexy,” or university president, earned even more than the professors. The giants did not seem to pay much attention to Coolidge. They read lectures aloud; the first-year students’ work, just as at the academies, was to memorize, recite, or stay silent. Coolidge found his assignments both unsatisfying and tiring. There was a word, he learned, for a man who was left out without a fraternity: they called such a man an ouden, from the Greek for “nothing.” Some of the oudens at Amherst were oudens on principle: Harlan Stone, a year older, rejected fraternities as “a rather artificial way of forming friendships.” But most in the band of outsiders were never invited, boys too quiet or too much the hayseed to make the cut.
“I am in a pleasant place and like very much,” Calvin wrote to his father, John, on October 15 of his freshman year, in a kind of shorthand. “but suppose I shall like better as become better acquainted, I don’t seem to get acquainted very fast however.”
He was back where he had been at the beginning at Black River Academy: on the margin. There was nothing to do but press on and wait for Christmas. As he trudged around, Coolidge found that he often thought of home. In November, he wrote home to his grandmother, starting out bravely, “This term is almost done it is 11 weeks since I left home; I never was away as long before but to be gone one week is just about the same as 11 only a repetition of the same thing. We get very good advantages here for quite a broad education.” Shortly, though, he segued to that beloved topic of the homesick, food: “I suppose you will have the bed set out in the kitchen for me when I come to stay with you and I can have some coffee with cream in it I have not drunk a cup of coffee as I remember since I came here. . . . I don’t like their potatoes here.” When he went home at Christmas, he had not yet received his first grades. Amherst graded on a scale of 2 to 5. Calvin, perhaps suspecting that his grades would be far worse than 4 or 5, decided he did not want to go back to college. As much as his father would have liked him to stay home, he saw that school was worthwhile in Calvin’s case. There was also the principle of finishing what one started. His father sent him back.
Returning to Amherst in January 1892 was even harder than starting in September, perhaps harder even than sitting down to take the exams while he was sick in 1890. “I hate to think I must stay here 12 weeks before I can go home again,” he wrote to Plymouth Notch. “I think I must be very home-sick my hand trembles so I can’t write so any one can read it. It is just seven o’clock I wonder if you are most home there is some snow here but it has stopped snowing now.” His life seemed to be going in the wrong direction: “Each time I get home I hate to go away worse than before and I don’t feel so well here now.” The grades for the first semester were indeed disappointing 2s, just passing, which “seem pretty low don’t they?” as he wrote to his father January 14.
With no exit, though, he gradually pulled himself together. There were bright points if you looked for them. Coolidge’s work in mathematics was good enough for him to move up a level. Though he was not chosen to speak at the freshman dinner, his recitations in class didn’t go too badly. Politics somehow afforded distraction from loneliness. The local Republicans were beginning to catch his eye. He saw that they and other parties advertised; even college boys hung out signs reading “Womens’ Rights and Free Cider” or “Free Silver and Non Compulsory Church”—an appealing idea at a school where chapel was mandatory. His stepmother kindly sent him graham crackers and jelly, which he shared with his roommate, Alfred Turner; together he and Turner even decorated, putting up a curtain at the door to insulate their room. There was even the possibility, but just that, of a fraternity membership; a senior, Charles Stebbins, asked if he would join a new fraternity, Phi Gamma Delta, which was establishing a chapter. Coolidge, timid, offered one of his ambivalent answers: “I don’t know but I would.” The possibility faded. Still, he determined that he would loyally follow Amherst sports and began to report scores and stories of games back to his father. Somehow the dread second half of freshman year finished. He had not succeeded, but he had not failed; five or six men left the college, but he was not one of them.
Though Coolidge was an ouden at school, he was somebody at home, and that summer Plymouth welcomed him back and did its part to cheer up its native son. Dell Ward, an old friend, was there waiting for him; the two plotted to steal the old cannon back from Plymouth Union, where it had been for the year, and succeeded, at 3:00 A.M., in moving the weapon and its carriage up the hill to their own village. His fellow villagers invited him to speak, another boost, and Coolidge took the challenge of oratory seriously, preparing a rousing speech: “Roll on America! Roll on, bearing rich blessings with o’erflowering hand through the endless ages of all eternity.” The cannon he carefully dismantled and hid under his grandmother Moor’s bed.
Back in the autumn, he found Trott’s discombobulated, with twenty-six boarders, often strangers, eating at different times; he still sometimes had to eat alone. He decided to move to shift his meal place. It didn’t hurt matters that the price was cheaper: $3.50 a week instead of $3.75. The proprietors of the new place were black: “They are coons,” he wrote in the language of the day. He wrote also, in regard to football, that “our best man of last year” was now playing football for Harvard, advantaging Harvard. “He is a negro by the name of Lewis.” This was William Lewis, who was now studying law at Harvard. Calvin was endeavoring to talk more of “we” and “us” to try to find ways into the community.
But the community was not ready for him. Beyond Turner, his roommate, and a few others, it was still hard to make contact. He noticed a lack of resilience in himself. Other students, such as Dwight Morrow, seemed to be able to turn circumstances to their own favor in a way Calvin could not. When he compared his Amherst progress with theirs, he fell short. Coolidge wrote home asking for money: there was scarcely a letter to Plymouth, in fact, that did not contain some kind of request for cash: “I think I forgot to mention in my last letter the gymnasium uniform that I have to get, each man is measured the first of the term and they send off and get the uniforms made, they are eleven dollars.”
Morrow, by contrast, had taken on the task of finding cash himself, in part by borrowing from his soldier brother, in part through tutoring in math, and, eventually, by winning cash prizes. What money Morrow took from his father he considered not a gift but rather a loan, borrowed “off Papa.” Coolidge’s own arm had healed well enough from a boyhood break, and he stood, as Hitchcock had noted, slightly above average height. Morrow was decisively short; one of his arms bent oddly, the result of a fall from an apple tree when he was twelve. Another student, Mortimer Schiff, handed down shirts to Morrow, but the shirts bore Schiff’s monogram, “MLS.” Morrow’s mother asked what the letters stood for. “Morrow’s Little Shirts,” her son told her blithely. Morrow had a way of turning disadvantage to advantage, of pushing on, so that people admired his humor and pluck. Even in politics, Morrow seemed to move ahead fast. It was Morrow, not Coolidge, who went onto the board of the new Republican Club.
His sophomore year, Coolidge took Greek, rhetoric, German, and analytic geometry. He had not yet conquered the undergraduate challenge of managing time and sleep. William Tyler, his Greek teacher, was famous; that was the last year he would teach “Demosthenes on the Crown.” Coolidge wrote home drily that if Demosthenes’ speeches were the best to be found, the world had not made much progress in rhetoric in the two millennia since he had spoken. He sometimes could not stay awake in the class. An anonymous classmate published a rhyme in The Olio, the yearbook:
The class in Greek was going on
Old Ty a lecture read.
And in the row in front there shone
Fair Coolidge’s golden head.
His pate was bent upon the seat
in front of him; his hair
Old Tyler’s feeble gaze did meet
With fierce and ruddy glare
O’ercome by mystic sense of dread
Old Ty his talk did lull—
“Coolidge, I wish you’d raise your head
I can’t talk through your skull!”
Though he may have slept, Coolidge was coming to value his teacher’s lectures and discovered a new blessing; these courses, heavy in logic, focused him. He was beginning to plan instead of merely to react: he posted a paper on the wall to remind himself when homework was due. Perhaps too the subject matter compelled him. Like Coolidge, Demosthenes had started out sickly. He had even spoken with a lisp. He had become a great orator notwithstanding. Demosthenes’ rebellion against the kings paralleled the rebellion of Calvin’s own forefathers against England.
In the fall of 1892, politics were also heating up, and that cheered him on. He knew his father supported Benjamin Harrison, who had endorsed a strong tariff that included protection for wool. This time he was able to take in the national questions, along with the Vermont ones. After a boom, prices for steel were coming down. Carnegie Steel in Pennsylvania had cut wages significantly, by 20 to 40 percent. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers struck at Carnegie Steel’s Homestead Plant over wages; then the strike broadened. This wage issue was a new one: before such big factories had been established, workers hadn’t been able to compare salaries easily. The companies, led by Henry Clay Frick, the chairman of Carnegie Steel, saw the outcome at Homestead as crucial: if they could not cut wages when they needed to, they believed, they would not survive, especially if the 1890 tariff was repealed. By the summer of 1892, eighty thousand men west of the Allegheny had laid down their tools. With the aid of the state militia, the steel company broke the strike, but only after Alexander Berkman, an anarchist, found his way into Frick’s office, shot him three times, and stabbed him for good measure. Frick survived, but the horrifying event shocked all. Coolidge doubtless followed the story, even from Plymouth Notch. After the Homestead strike was settled—the company won a bitter victory—the papers carried stories of Berkman’s trial and conviction, as well as his association with a flamboyant woman anarchist, Emma Goldman. Depending on whom you talked to, that was the problem of either Harrison’s predecessor, Grover Cleveland, or Harrison himself.
Harrison was a big spender; under him, the federal budget had reached a million dollars for the first time. Harrison also supported tariffs. Cleveland campaigned against the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, passed in 1890, blaming it for instability; by expanding the money base beyond gold, he alleged, the Harrison administration had set the stage for a panic. Americans were choosing to redeem their new silver money for gold, which in turn was reducing the gold supply and forcing a contraction upon the economy. At Yale, which Amherst played against in football, there was a professor, William Graham Sumner, who was laying out the argument against protectionism. But Cleveland was living it.
