One Summer: America, 1927

behind a newspaper. When I told him that Mr Kellogg had asked whether the delegates should wear top hats and tail coats for the drive through the city, or straw hats and summer clothes, he answered without looking up from his paper, ‘That’s his hunt.’
‘Now, Calvin,’ Mrs Coolidge said, ‘that’s no message to send to the Secretary of State.’
Mr Coolidge angrily lowered his paper, glared at me and said, ‘What do you think I should wear?’
I advised straw hat and summer clothes.
He snapped, ‘Tell Kellogg to wear a top hat.’
     
    No one has ever more successfully made a virtue out of inertia than Calvin Coolidge as president. He did nothing he didn’t absolutely have to do, but rather engaged in a ‘grim, determined, alert inactivity’, as political commentator Walter Lippmann put it. He declined even to endorse National Education Week in 1927 on the grounds that it wasn’t necessary for the president to do so. In recent years a revisionist view has emerged that Coolidge was in reality cannier and livelier than history has portrayed him. Well, perhaps. What can certainly be said is that he presided over a booming economy and did nothing at all to get in the way of it.
    Calculated indolence could not be called a good policy exactly, but for most of his term it wasn’t a bad one either. With the markets constantly on the rise, he didn’t need to do anything except keep out of the way. Under Coolidge’s benign watch, Wall Street rose by more than two and a half times in value. The success of the economy not surprisingly did wonders for Coolidge’s popularity. As the newspaperman Henry L. Stoddard wrote in 1927, ‘He inspires a deep, nation-wide confidence that all will go well with thecountry while he is in the White House.’ It became known as ‘Coolidge prosperity’, as if it were his personal gift to the nation.
    Coolidge was also morally impeccable and honest to his bootlaces – qualities that came to seem all the more valiant and noble as the scandals of the Harding administration spilled out. Teapot Dome and the other Harding transgressions occupied great amounts of congressional and court time throughout the rest of the decade and were still rattling on in the summer of 1927. On 6 July, Albert Fall, the interior secretary, and oil man Edward L. Doheny were finally ordered to stand trial in Washington, DC, on bribery charges – charges that both had been fighting since just after Harding expired.
    In the event, Doheny was acquitted. His partner Harry Sinclair, also on trial for corruption in 1927, would have got off scot-free too but foolishly hired twelve detectives from the William Burns Agency and had each tail a juror to see if any could be bribed, blackmailed or otherwise influenced. Sinclair was acquitted of the corruption charges but jailed for six and a half months for the attempted jury-tampering. He was also given three months for contempt for refusing to answer the questions of a Senate committee investigating the oil lease scandals. For those who like to think that cheats never prosper, Sinclair is a painful contradiction. After his short prison spell, he turned Sinclair Oil into one of the country’s largest oil companies, made a fortune supplying chemicals to the military in the Second World War, became part owner of the St Louis Browns baseball team, and, in the admiring words of the American Dictionary of National Biography , became ‘one of the most respected business leaders in the United States’. His companies were worth $700 million when he died in 1956.
    Secretary of the navy Edwin Denby, who was also implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal, was forced to resign from the Cabinet but never charged with anything. Fall was eventually found guilty of corruption and sent to jail for nine months, the first time a Cabinet secretary had been convicted of a felony. Also jailed was ColonelThomas W. Miller, who had accepted bribes while in the position of alien property custodian. Harry M. Daugherty, attorney general, had to resign over alleged kickbacks. He probably should have gone to jail but was acquitted at a trial in 1927. Daugherty’s close associate Jess Smith was found dead of a gunshot wound, which was ruled a suicide, but others publicly suggested it was murder.
    Charles Forbes, who had lost $200 million at the Veterans’ Bureau, an unknown quantity of which ended up in his own pocket, was fined $10,000 and given a two-year prison term. In the summer of 1927