“A Puritan in Babylon”

Jesse Halsey's review of A Puritan in Babylon, The Story of Calvin Coolidge, by William Allen White, The Macmilliam Company, 1938

A best seller surely, “definitive” likely.

The Kansas editor looks at the Yankee politician and with shrewd observations, keen appraisals, and dogged persistence tracks his subject (neither victim nor hero) through the decades.

Some college prank involving the revolutions of a pot-bellied stove down a dormitory stairway; young Coolidge questioned disclaims responsibility—“It wasn’t my stove.” True to form he meets the successive emergencies of life from there on to the oil scandals—“not my stove.”

“Money honest” refusing lucrative positions, unsmirched by any suspicion of ever having been bought, he “avoided the big problems” (as he said to Will Rogers) and so “became an attitude rather than an executive” (so says Mr. White). On the verge of economic earthquake—“a time of momentous decision”—“yet the President apparently knew nothing of it. Certainly did nothing about it.”

“A man who has been President is not free—“ no business offer (there were plenty) allured him after his term. He died a poor man, earning every penny—and making it “work.”

Praise there is—but “faint praise” that often amounts to damnation. Fair is the author and painstaking. He is faithful to his thesis equaling Gamaliel Bradford, but hipped on no psycho-analytical procedure. His sources are many of the personal—sometimes it seems as if it hurt him as a friend to tell all the truth, but he does tell it.

Coolidge was shy and taciturn, often impolite and boorish. White charges it up to the repression of a Puritan background, his mother’s death, and (later) to his boy’s. “Plymouth never entirely died out of his heart. Inside him that little boy—sentimental, mischievous sometimes inconsiderate and cruel—never grew up.”

New Hampshire’s governor stood by Gov. Coolidge for five hours during a parade when the rainbow division came home after the war and Coolidge spoke to him just once in the five hours! At a White House weekend when the Whites and a few intimate friends were present, the President was almost dumb except one night when sitting next to Mrs. White he talked at length quietly to her. It was after his boy had died—the White’s had lost a girl of twelve!

General Edwards under criticism for some war statement met Gov. Coolidge. “Hello, Chatterbox,” ventured the general. “Well, General, I notice what I don’t say gets me in less trouble than what you do say.” “His habit of silent cerebral cogitation make him conspicuous sometimes but never notorious,” so comments the author.

“While I have differed with my subordinates, I have always supported loyally my superiors” . . . “Stated cynically and therefore not entirely truthfully, this means that Calvin Coolidge always knew on which side his bread was buttered.”

There is a lot of gossip here picked up as only a newspaper man can pick. And then deleted and appraised as a good biographer should and as only William Allen White can.

Mr. White has a knowledge of economics, of war-time history, of politics and of American life and middle-class psychology that admirably fit him for his task (at times it seems like his labor of love). He is critical and appreciative; he preached little but hits hard. He reveals an era and a dynasty, now gone forever. We hope his next biography will be on Henry Cabot Lodge. We have a notion he might uncork his vials as he has not in his lives either of Calvin Coolidge or of Woodrow Wilson.

Calvinisms

By Jesse Halsey c1937

2726 Cleinview Ave.,

Cincinnati, Ohio, 24385

[rejected by The Reader’s Digest, Pleasantville, N.Y.]

We had come up through the hills along the twisting roads, brushing the wisps of fog that half hid the mountains and blanketed the lakes. It was early and we were looking for breakfast—and other things to follow. An old man who was trudging along the road leaning heavily on a light pole, such as the Bible would call a staff, stepped aside to let us pass. I stopped the car to ask the way to Plymouth.

“Top of the hill, turn right fer the cemetery, the village’s t’th’ left”—direct Yankee fashion.

No, he would not ride.

“Good day t’yer”—like that.

We drove to the cemetery. Wrong light for pictures. But the severity of the place, and the simplicity of those two stones in granite, made their impression. Films not needed.

Some unknown hand that very morning, beside the President’s stone, has laid a handful of goldenrod, rosemary, and yarrow. The Coolidge name is common in that cemetery. Seven generations lie there. Always a “John” or a “John Calvin.”

Breakfast was not ready, “yet.” So to the post-office store.

It is hardly a village, just a few houses and barns scattered about with a flagpole, a store and a church snuggling where the roads meet in a triangle.

A “tea-room,” in thrift and cleanliness, stands down the road. “Open at eight.”

While we waited for our griddle-cakes and maple syrup (made famous in the White House), we asked questions of the postmistress (a thousand times repeated, she said!) and looked in on the room where “he was born” and visited the house across the way where “he was sworn in, by a kerosene lamp,” and there bought some maple syrup, “in the very room,” and made, “on this very farm.”

Hurrying back, half-famished, toward the tea-room, we found our ancient guide, now sitting on a corner of the post-office stoop, titled back in a Windsor chair, balancing with the aid of his stick.

Breakfast over and light favorable, I began to take pictures. When I snapped the store, the old man turned his face away. The second time, before focusing, I asked him to turn around.

“No,” he said, “I don’t like it.” “Lots o’ times they been here taking pictures when the President was home, but I always went inside. Somehow, I just don’t like it.”

So I have my pictures of the place where Coolidge was born, there in the back room of his father’s store, and of his father’s house across the street, (which later became his own), but I have no picture which shows the face of that old man on the post-office steps.

He was, however, glad enough to talk, when later, I asked him some questions—and he found out that I wasn’t a reporter.

His name was Brown, he said.

“Knew the President?”

“Well, he’d oughter! Had talked with him many times while they waited with the neighbors on the steops for the mail.”

Neighbor Brown, Miss Cilley, and the keeper of the tea house tell you interesting things, but you glean no gossip; there is none to glean. Their memories of their famous neighbor are wholesome; they have a genuine respect and affection. You feel you are back in the presence of some of the simplicities and realities that helped make the nation. More generous, the setting (and these characters) might be. Care and prudence are in evidence, but not parsimony.

At the time of the Civil War the township had fifteen hundred population and now it is less than four. But the contemporary Plymouth did its bit, and under the great elm stands a granite stone to a dozen World War veterans.

I asked about the old homestead across the way. He told of the new addition, never used, with its fireplace and extra bath—“so they could have company”—the furniture and gifts from Washington, never unpacked. A small house in trim New England weather-boarding with clean white paint, one building attached to another, the house, the sheds, the barn, strung together, all white and glistening in the early morning light, but with some kind of green composition roof. I listened while looking. Somehow, that roof was not properly acclimated.

Brown told about the man—“the President,” their neighbor. He told me many things—they were all true to form, “a plain man, well respected.” And then, this, which I remember almost word for word, though the drawl and accent I can’t convey by my pen.

“I was settin’ there, right on the top step.” His long stick tapped the spot. “I was settin’ there waitin’ fer the mail one day when the President was home on his vacation. That was the year, likely, they put on that new roof you was askin’ about. I was settin’ here when he come across the street and sets down on that lower step, awhittlin’ on a stick he carried. Not sayin’ much, but whittlin’ slow and careful. Bym’bye the President he says to me, ‘Brown, that looks like a nickel’—pointin’ toward the road with his stick he was whittlin’. Then he gets up, goes down the step, bends over, and picks up somethin’ out of the dirt, and comes back. ‘By Jiminy, Brown, it is a nickel,’ he says, and puts it into his vest pocket.”

Luckily, I didn’t interrupt and he went on.

“A few days later I saw Mrs. Coolidge. She passed the time o’day with me, and I says to her, ‘Mrs. Coolidge, excuse me, ma’am, but what did the President do with that nickel he found in the road, t’other day?’”

“’Why, Mr. Brown, he’s put it to work,’ says she.”

We talked on. That roof still interested me. I had seen Sunday supplement pictures, some years back, of Mr. Coolidge cleaning up old shingles while his father’s house was being repaired. He had worn a curious kind of over-all-apron, and had his arms full of old shingles ready for the woodhouse.

In that country, in the heart of the wooded New England hills, it seemed a pity to put anything except wooden shingles, with their deep shadows, on that old house. But I is now resplendent (and “tight,” no doubt) in a coat of fire-resisting, green-colored composition asbestos—imitation slate. (I am not expert enough in such things to give the name of the brand.”

A leaky roof, it seemed, had “been the botheration of the Colonel” (the President’s father) who had long since sold his store and moved to the little house across the road. While he was looking round for a carpenter, so Mr. Brown said, and pricing wooden shingles, a salesman from a concern that manufactures asbestos ones appeared and offered to cover the house and barn and connecting sheds and woodhouse—all of them—with his superior product, free of all cost to the owner—“just for advertising.” After due investigation, the Colonel accepted the offer and told the agent to “go ahead.”

A few days later, along came another agent extolling the quality of another kind of composition shingles. He offered to cover the buildings—and to pay a premium of $5,000 for the privilege! “Good advertising, I suppose,” said Brown.

“And what did the Colonel do?” I asked.

“Do? Why he told that second feller there was ‘nothing doin’ . . . ‘the thing was settled’ . . . ‘a contract was a contract, whether it was signed or not’ . . . ‘He’d told the other man, that was the end of it.’”

“And that,” said Mr. Brown, tapping the top step with his staff and squinting up at me as the sun came into full view above the mountains, with the fog “all burned off,” “that’s the other side of yer nickel.”