Coolidge by Amity Shlaes

Author:Amity Shlaes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Presidents & Heads of State
ISBN: 9780061967559
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2013-02-11T23:00:00+00:00

Eleven: The Siege and the Spruce

Washington, D.C.

WHAT JUMPED OUT WAS the number. It was $1,841,759,316.80, the total income tax revenues for the fiscal year that had ended in June. The number was too high. The year before, revenues had been $1,691,089,534.56. Nor was this the only leap. Several of the documents that were passing across his desk suggested that revenues would be higher than expected. Why? Numbers always drew Coolidge, and figuring out such a puzzle would distract him for hours.

Distract him, that was, if anything could. For if he even chanced to look up, to glance out a White House window, he would see it there, between the tennis court and the fountain: the spruce from the old limekiln lot. The tree was five feet tall, shorter in fact than Calvin had been when he died, but about the size they remembered the boy as being. On their last day in Plymouth that summer, Grace, John, Coolidge’s father, and the Secret Service man Jim Haley had gone down together to the lot with a shovel to select it. Grace and the others had wrapped the spruce’s roots carefully in burlap, sprinkling in extra dirt to protect them. Grace was planning to order an inscription on a bronze plaque for the spruce, in Calvin’s memory. If the spruce survived. For a Vermont spruce, Washington was strange soil.

“When I look out that window I always see my boy playing tennis out there,” the president told Richard Scandrett, Dwight Morrow’s brother-in-law.

Coolidge knew he had changed since Calvin’s death. In darker moments, he told himself that the presidency had caused the event. Working backward, he reverted to a logic as rigid as that of the preacher Jonathan Edwards. Had Coolidge not been president, Calvin would not have played tennis on the court outside. Had Calvin not played tennis, there would have been no blister. Had there been no blister, Calvin would not have died.

The process of politics held less interest for him now. But when it came to completing the work that Harding and he had begun, Coolidge found, he was more determined than before. Lincoln had not given up when his son had passed away; indeed, it had been after Willie’s death that he had made the decisive move that had won the Civil War, replacing the ineffectual General McClellan and eventually settling on General Grant to lead his armies. Coolidge would not give up until he completed his own campaigns: the campaign to push the government back—back from spiritual life, back from commerce, back from new sectors in the economy—and find prosperity and peace. Protecting the space that faith enjoyed in American culture, the realm of the spiritual, seemed to him especially important. In those early days after Calvin’s death he had refused many appointments, but had agreed to talk to a group of Boy Scouts in a telephone hookup. “It is hard to see how a great man can be an atheist,” Coolidge had told the boys. “We need to feel that behind us is intelligence and love.

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