Coolidge by Amity Shlaes Read Free Book Online

saw that he might use oratory in his own life. His own equivocations continued, whether they referred to humans or the animals he knew: “I do not think she [a cow] is gaining much so I guess she will die but hope she will not.” But Cicero did not equivocate, and Calvin began to learn from him.
    At home, the rural economy still tested the family. John was wondering how to make better money from dairying. Sheep farming had enjoyed a boom and then fallen back. If a business did survive, it seemed to the Coolidges, that was in part because tariffs protected it. John’s work in law enforcement was wearying. A feud that began while he was still at home and continued through Calvin’s years at Black River Academy was typical. Over the years a cousin, Warren Taylor, had worked a farm with his father south of Plymouth Union. Taylor had married a woman from Sherburne. To avoid the tax collector, Taylor moved to Sherburne each year in March at tax collection time. In 1884, the selectmen of Plymouth ordered the tax assessor to go to Sherburne and assess Taylor’s property there as well. Then Coolidge, the bailiff, was ordered to arrest Taylor and take him to Woodstock Common Jail. But Taylor could not be found.
    The schoolboy followed the reports his father gave of each stage of the drama. Taylor paid but then sued, contesting the assessments. In 1887, the county court decided for the town, and John was assigned to collect $269.63, which included back taxes and penalties. In 1889, John Coolidge would arrest Taylor and take him to Woodstock Common Jail, the same one where Oliver had sat four decades before, albeit updated with brick and an addition. Taylor would spend the night in the prison, which he described as a “stone house with an iron bedstead for a couch,” among “thieves and ruffians.” After his release, Taylor would take John Coolidge to court for improper arrest. William Stickney, an old classmate of John Coolidge who lived in Ludlow, was engaged to represent John. It was an unpleasant business, and one had to ask what it was about the place that put people like Taylor into the straits they were in.
    Now, toward the end of the decade, President Grover Cleveland and Congress pulled down the tariff wall as a farmer might pull down an old wall on his property. Cleveland, a Democrat, was a true free-market and hard-money man. Cleveland’s consistency inspired many, including an old New Englander, William Prescott Frost, who, transplanted to the West Coast, campaigned for Cleveland with his young son Robert, later to become a poet. Cleveland’s change benefited those who used wool to manufacture clothing and other goods, because now, without a tariff, good foreign wool was cheaper. But in the part of Vermont where Coolidge lived, and in Ludlow, the effect of Cleveland’s move was to give an unassailable advantage to Australian merino over Vermont merino. The farmers joked about it: they said the lower tariff policy had so decimated the wool farmers that “a Democrat couldn’t look a sheep in the face.”
    In 1888 Coolidge turned sixteen and gave his attention to a national election, that between Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, for the first time. One question of the contest was protectionism; another was the durability of prosperity: villagers such as Coolidge’s father did not always know whether they could comfortably pay that $7.20 a semester for their children’s schooling. Calvin became so interested that the contest even penetrated his dreams: “dreamed C carried Ind by some over 4000 and NY by 30.” In fact, the election proved wonderfully intricate. Cleveland won the popular vote, but Harrison triumphed in the electoral college, taking the presidency. That was all right with Vermont, which had given Harrison almost three times as many votes as Cleveland.
    The spring of Calvin’s final year at Black River Academy took a sudden and dark turn. His sister, Abbie, became ill with a fever and terrible pains