Quotes from William Allen White

His fairy godfather in the legislature was Senator Murray Crane. Few persons influenced Coolidge's life more than Crane; his father, and Dwight Morrow perhaps, then Crane. So we must pause here a moment and consider Winthrop Murray Crane, twenty years older than Calvin Coolidge, a papermaker, who having been dead a decade and a half as these lines are penned Crane may well be called a statesman.

Incidentally the squires scrambled in Boston for the state funds which might be distributed among their banks as patronage. They asked little else. Postmasters and the court house officials were of the lower orders. But the squires supported them and required a sort of political military service from them. Thus the squirearchy reigned feudally in a capitalistic democracy

Thin soil like Massachusetts highly cultivated" was the estimate of Congressman Lodge made by Thomas B. Reed, Speaker of the national House of Representatives.

It is interesting to note that Senator Lodge, Crane's rival, was invincible in Essex County, the most northeasterly in the state, and Senator Crane was moated in Berkshire, the most southwesterly. Harvard and the Catholics and an urban civilization dominated the seaboard. A sophisticated Congregational industrialism—farms, fields, and workshops—gave color to the Republican cast of thought of western Massachusetts.

He reasoned because human consciousness is a part of universal life, that the part may not be greater than the whole. Therefore he concluded that the purposive force which directs life, which guides the stars in their courses and spurs and speeds the energies inside the atom, is of itself a consciousness.

And what with the mystery of death and bereavement and the mysticism of the Bible, with all the beauty of the mountains and their ever-changing moods, naturally this New England child became set in his ways, a Yankee mystic to the end.

First of all we must remember that Theodore Roosevelt was young, a President in his early forties. His appeal was directly to young Republicans. He awakened hope in the colleges. It was not strange that Calvin Coolidge heard him.

He writes of the Garman ethics that "there is a standard of righteousness that might does not make right, that the end does not justify the means, and that expediency as a working principle is bound to fail. The only hope of perfecting human relationships is in accordance with the law of service under which men are not so solicitous about what they shall get as they are about what they shall give.

Coolidge, in those days and always, distrusted reformers.

Arthur P. Russell, who was vice president of the New Haven Railroad, and Charles Hiller Innes, commonly accredited as the Republican boss of Boston, and of course called "Charlie," were fairly close to the Northampton senator, and, according to the tradition of the day,{98} in a pinch Innes could deliver Coolidge's vote. Innes testified in 1919 that he received forty thousand dollars in three years from the New Haven Railroad.

Too often privilege in Massachusetts was bolstered by class-conscious arrogance tempered only when necessary by corruption. Coolidge was not corrupt. His personal ideals were high. But he was serene in the presence of this corruptible body in Boston even though he put on the incorruptible—a quickening spirit. He played a clean game with the run of the dirty cards!

But when Jim Curley needed something for the final uphill pull in his mayoralty race, Guy Currier knew where to find it, and when Malcolm Nichols ran on the Republican ticket, Currier was his friend; Nichols won. Such a man could not escape the admiration of Calvin Coolidge.

In those years from 1893 to 1896, Congress was thrown into turmoil by the demand for "the free coinage of silver at sixteen to one" when the commercial ratio was about thirty to one.

President Cleveland, deserting his party, battled alone for the gold standard and the big dollar.

Governor McCall desired to go to the United States Senate. There was some feeling that he should continue his gubernatorial task. But McCall understood Coolidge's ambition to be governor. McCall realized that Coolidge had not announced his gubernatorial candidacy out of deference to McCall. The governor apparently desired the excuse of opposition to retire gracefully as much as Coolidge desired to be governor.

Those two were never friends. But Grace Goodhue was right about Calvin Coolidge, her mother was wrong. It was love at first sight. She, however, probably saw him first. Not only was her social experience wider than his, her emotional intelligence was keener. So when her lover and her mother clashed, she followed her lover.

Coolidge declared later that no one knew that McCall had told him to run and "some supposed I would run against him." But Coolidge was not of that stripe.

McCall started to run for the Senate but for some strange reason gave up the race in the midst of his primary campaign and John W. Weeks entered the senatorial race. It was a sad campaign in Massachusetts.

President Wilson had made his unfortunate plea for Democratic support which antagonized the West but was not a sufficient handicap to defeat David I. Walsh, the Democratic leader, who overcame Senator Weeks.

He told Clarence S. Brigham, of the American Antiquarian Society, that he had begun translating Dante's "Inferno" before he was married and he liked it so well that he kept right on with it and finished it afterward.

I have never seen a public man who more quickly, shrewdly, efficiently got through a pile of Sunday newspapers than Calvin Coolidge. I was interested in his skill. It revealed a sharp mind, a lively set of brains. He rose abruptly after his morning stint of reading, walked out of the smoking-room without saying a word; indeed he had passed less than a dozen syllables during the hour and a half while we sat watching him above the rims of our papers.

Luck often is a lazy man's explanation for the result of intelligent diligence.

Outside that periphery in the middle eighties, America was boiling her melting pot. The exploited millions of Europe were pouring into the United States, splashing over the rim of the cauldron into economic oppression—if not social—as harsh and cruel as that they left in Europe save for this: the opportunity to rise, to climb out of the hell into which they were dumped.

Along a plateau the traveller passes the reservoir, the Wachusett Reservoir, its bank more or less covered with pines, to West Boylston, a village by the lakeside. "Mount" Wachusett looks over the wilderness from Clinton northward.