Coolidge by Amity Shlaes Read Free Book Online Page A

in her stomach. At first the doctor thought the illness would pass; Calvin was the more delicate one, everyone believed. But Abbie did not get better. Three doctors were brought in, but she died within a few days in March 1890. Years later, the doctors would guess that it was appendicitis that had killed her, but at the time it was just another of those mysteries borne away with the winter hearse. John gave his son an obituary, which Calvin delivered to the newspaper in Ludlow. In April, Coolidge wrote to John, “It is lonesome here without Abbie.”
    After wavering and despite the death, Calvin began to look forward again. He was finishing well at the academy. A principal who had recently arrived, George Sherman, thought Calvin was college material. Sherman took care to help the boy prepare for his college exams. Sherman was plotting the boy’s application to his own college in Massachusetts, a morning’s train ride south from Ludlow. Calvin too was considering how his life might be at Amherst and how to soften the isolation of entry.
    For graduation, in May 1890, Calvin wrote and memorized a speech about the power of oratory; he noted that it was Cicero’s voice, “the force of Cicero’s oratory,” that had helped drown out dictators and “made even Caesar tremble.” The speech was also about the advances Great Britain had enjoyed after free traders had won their case there: “What mighty changes have been wrought in England’s political system within the last fifty years by the indomitable energy of such orators as Vincent, Cobden, Bright and scores of others, who traversed the kingdom advocating the repeal of the Corn Laws and other measures which were once deemed Utopian and hopeless.” There was an inconsistency between his praise for the free-trade Britons and the pro-tariff rule in his region. It was actually an inconsistency typical of New England, which liked to see old England’s markets open even when some of its own were closed. The Vermont Tribune lavished praise on him: “Calvin Coolidge gave an historical resume of the influence of oratory in the formation of public opinion and in the great movement of history.”
    But with school ending, the question pressed: what might Calvin do now back in Plymouth Notch and without Abbie? It was the isolation that troubled them all again. Yet again, John Coolidge was trying a new venture. Without a train or, yet, refrigeration, it was hard to commercialize the milk of Plymouth Notch. He and the nearby farmers therefore thought they would try their hand at making cheese. Cheese, after all, could be preserved and could withstand slow transport. Breaking the old rule of do-it-yourself, they imported a cheese expert from Shrewsbury, Eugene Aldrich.
    By early summer, the new factory was buying thousands of pounds of milk from surrounding farms. The cheese factory was an intrusion upon the life of the Coolidges. The cheesemaker, Aldrich, even moved in with the family for a time. The wagons of milk went past the Coolidges’ door; the smell of it permeated Plymouth Notch. The village did not mind, though; this stink was the stink of commerce.
    But the cheese factory was still a modest venture. Plymouth did not feature a big lake or river for easy transport, as did the towns on Lake Champlain. In 1877 and 1878, a merchant and quarry owner on Isle La Motte in northern Lake Champlain made money shipping ice to New York, where the Hudson had not frozen over in two warm years. But such opportunities did not seem to come to Plymouth. The prospects for a railroad to the town were still dim. And with each year that passed, it became clearer that whatever the Coolidges did in rural Plymouth would have to be on a small scale. The Great Plains were unrelenting in their competition with old New England. In the past year alone, as Calvin had finished school, six new states had been admitted to the union: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming. Looking