CALVIN THE FIFTEENTH
BOOKS OF THE DAY
By D. W. BROGAN
To the prosperous classes in America the reign of Calvin Coolidge has naturally enough acquired a golden glow. They feel about it as Talleyrand felt about the ancien rjgime, that only those on the right side of the system under the old order have known the true douceur de vivre. Of course, under Coolidge, as under the King, there were less fortunate areas and classes. But these spots in the sun did not materially lower the temperature of America the Golden, when it held east and west in fee, and when a depressed and dazzled Europe was offered, by M. Siegfried, the choice between Henry Ford and Gandhi.
What part did Calvin Coolidge play in this farce that ceased to be funny so suddenly in 1929 ? Was he merely a symbol, and if so what kind of a symbol ? That he was a symbol, Mr. White makes plain. Politicians and businessmen agreed that they were fortunate in having in office the shrewd Yankee who had said " the business of the United States is business." But Coolidge, if a symbol, was an apparently incongruous symbol of the flush times. No one less like the patron of the age of easy-come easy-go could be imagined than this meagre, economical, tight-mouthed, ungracious Yankee. As Mr. White suggests, it was his apparently anachronistic appearance and ways that made him so useful a front. And an America rapidly racing away from the moral moorings to which Messrs. Smoot and Fess were trying to tie her by law, wanted a reminder of the stern old days of the Republic, when an austere economy had made America what she was. Now, of course, in the magic world of the new economics there was no real need for these qualities, the prophets were giving America congenial counsel : " Lavish of your grandsire's guineas, Show the spirit of an heir."
And Mr. Coolidge was a most agreeable mentor to have around, for he openly approved of the national imitation of Coal Oil Johnny, while himself putting on so fine an impersonation of the Spirit of Thrift. He was the perfect partner for Mr. Andrew Mellon and, according to Mr. White, of Mr. Montagu Norman in their disastrous policies of easy money for specula- tion. The smash, when it came, was so complete that it was hard not to blame Mr. Coolidge and to attribute to him an "after me the deluge" attitude which was only in part his. Yet it was his in part. For he was a Yankee after all. No Coolidge had gone west. Once they had got as far as Vermont, they had stayed at home and prospered. And no really optimistic and adventurous soul stayed behind in rural New England unless chained to that barren soil by accident like Ethan Frome. The Coolidges were people who had got as far as they had by watching their step, which was just what Coolidge's America refused to do. But Calvin Coolidge had reverence for people who had been much more successful in gathering gear than had his father and grandfather, and who was he to be less confident than Andrew Mellon, now seen as at best the Pompadour, at worst the du Barry, of the Coolidge era ?
In any case, even had Coolidge been always as foresighted as it is possible that he occasionally was, it would have been an act of superhuman courage for him to have taken action that would have cut short the life of the great bull market. In one of his many ingenious speculations as to what really made Coolidge tick, Mr. White stresses the influence of the Professor of Philosophy at Amherst, Garman. Garman used
A Puritan In Babylon : The Story of Calvin Coolidge. By Williaro AVen White. (Macmillan. i6s.)
Hegel as an earlier generation uscd Kant to restate the truths of the New England Primer in modern dress and Coolidge learned from him a respect for the status quo (dialectically interpreted, of course) that justified his inaction. The President who helped to blow up the balloon that burst under Mr. Hoover really heard in the tickers announcing that U.S. Steel had gone up another five points the march of God in the world.
But the chief interest of this book is the light that is cast in it on the workings of politics, on the mystery of how X becomes a ruler in the democratic State. For the task of showing this process at work Mr. White is peculiarly well fitted. In America, he is the rough equivalent of the late C. P. Scott. He has had the hard task of driving together his liberalism and his loyalty to the Republican Party and it is this " from the inside looking out " point of view that gives his account of how Coolidge became President its peculiar interest. The career of Coolidge, especially when studied under the guidance of so expert, friendly and critical a guide as Mr. White, is as good a case- history as we can get. It is not only that Mr. White was a witness and occasionally an actor during these years, but that Coolidge was so completely a politician. He was a lawyer and began his life pravising law, but from very early years he was not only a politician, but a successful one—that is to say he was in office ; he was a professional politician, associating necessarily with men practising the higher and the lower graft, the graft of the small-town politician and the graft of the great banker. He was an American party politician—that is to say he had to work within the framework of a party big enough to hold him and Henry Cabot Lodge and William Allen White and Hiram Johnson and Fiorello La Guardia. He got on by being reliable, by being personally honest (but not so much of a prude as to blow the gaff unnecessarily), by industry, by loyalty to his patrons. As he said, " while I have differed with my subordinates, I have always supported loyally my superiors."
That is how you get on in Russia or Britain or America, as long as the rules of the game don't change on you. Being loyal to his superiors meant backing Senator Crane against Senator Lodge ; and opposing the late Senator Lodge was one way of being on the more generous and historically defensible side of most questions. But although Coolidge doubllzss did wish success to the League of Nations, for instance, he was a party man and when he ran on the ticket with Harding in 192o we may be sure that he did not succeed in deceiving himself (as more eminent people did) into the belief that the way to get America into the League was to vote the Republican ticket. It is this success of the politician in the regular game that makes this book so fascinating for any- one who is willing to take American politics seriously, which is one way of taking America seriously. Here you have the whole story, told in a racy if occasionally archaically racy style, of conventions and deals, party meetings and jobs, the daily dodges and the occasional intrusion of unwelcome truth. And it is told by a man who takes politics seriously if with humour (which makes it all the more surprising that Mr. White should have ignored the senatorial defeat of Coolidge's manager, Mr. Butler, in 1926). And it is told from Emporia, Kansas, about a man from Northampton, Massachusetts. So many Americans really worth knowing come from places like Emporia and Northampton. And they decide American policy' quite as often as the people from Boston and Bar Harbor.
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