Coolidge by Amity Shlaes Read Free Book Online Page B

around themselves and at the factory, and at the neighbors with whom they sometimes quarreled, the Coolidges came to a cautious decision: they would follow the advice of the principal. Calvin would go down to Amherst College to sit the entrance exam in September. He was often sickly. But it was clear that something with books, maybe medicine or the law, would suit him more than keeping store or farming. If he became a doctor, he could come back to Plymouth; if he became a lawyer, he could practice in Ludlow. It was evident that he wanted to move into the greater world. John and his mother, Sarah, took comfort in the thought that Amherst was not really so far away, just down the Connecticut River Valley, in an area where Coolidges had been before. But everyone understood. Calvin was the heir to the family that stayed. Now he was leaving too.

Two : The Ouden
    Amherst
    NO FRESHMAN IN THE history of Amherst College seemed less likely to succeed than John Calvin Coolidge, class of 1895. The thin country redhead did not speak. He boarded at Trott’s on South Pleasant Street, ten minutes from the college, farther away than most students. His roommate was not another freshman, as was common, but an upperclassman, a champion in the hammer throw. The Protestant college in the Connecticut Valley attracted students from all over the country, boys with far more social experience and ambition than he. The others moved along the streets and into and out of the school buildings or chapel fast; they stopped to talk, but not to him. The school newspaper, The Amherst Student , spilled the names of undergraduates liberally all over its pages, but not his.
    It was only because of a loophole and a recession that Calvin had even made it to Amherst at all. He had botched his first entrance exam, in September 1890, when he had arrived at the college town with a cold and come down sick in the middle of the tests. It had been bronchitis severe enough to scare them all. The same Vermont Tribune that had reported his graduation oratory had mentioned now that J. Calvin Coolidge was “gaining slowly.” Eventually, he had returned to Black River Academy for a short period of tutoring and review. From there he wrote to his father, “I have not the training of a man from a school like St. Jonsbury [ sic ], Saxton’s River, or Phillips Exeter, but I hope I have the ability yet to secure it.” His old headmaster, George Sherman, chagrined and aiming to boost the reputation of Black River Academy, pondered how to regroup. Sherman recalled that a school farther north than Plymouth, St. Johnsbury Academy, maintained a special arrangement with Amherst. When students completed satisfactory work at St. Johnsbury, they were automatically admitted to the Massachusetts college. The headmaster at St. Johnsbury, Charles Putney, was operating in the midst of a downturn. The Fairbanks family, which had endowed St. Johnsbury, was dying off; several faculty members had volunteered to return part of their salaries to the school rather than put it farther in the red. Dividends from the railroad stocks that had supported the school had been suspended.
    Putney made an exception to precedent and allowed Calvin to come and try to qualify for his certificate in one term. John Coolidge shipped Calvin up to St. Johnsbury for a crash course in Latin, algebra, Greek, and elocution. Perhaps the alacrity with which John had agreed surprised Calvin, but John himself had been preoccupied; over the spring of 1891, he was courting the schoolteacher Carrie Brown, and a neighbor. Calvin, a normally erratic speller who became worse when anxious, had written his father in determination, “I believe I can get a cirtificate.” St. Johnsbury and Putney had indeed given him one.
    He had begun to count on going to Amherst and thought not only of the academic but of the social side. “Dick Lane thinks he and I had better go down to Amherst some time this spring to see about getting me into a