Coolidge by Amity Shlaes

1893 and 1894, quantifying joblessness was still a young science. Charles Dow, the editor of a new paper, The Wall Street Journal , had begun to compile yet another product, his first market average; the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In the same years Dow Jones made and marketed the ticker, an electric machine that spat out stock prices for banks and offices. The Dow data that moved on the ticker were originally made up of nine railroads and two industrial stocks.
    The Pullman Palace cars, private cars for rail lines, represented all Americans’ dreams. They were the mode of travel to which everyone aspired, but now the prospect that workers would ever get near to riding one was dimming. Pullman workers were especially outraged because Pullman, also their landlord, did not cut rents in his company town or prices in the company store commensurately with the wage cuts. The strike spread throughout the industry so that hundreds of thousands of workers and dozens of states were involved; transport ground to a stop. In the summer of 1894, before Coolidge’s senior year, President Grover Cleveland called in U.S. marshals and 12,000 U.S. troops on the argument that the strike was interrupting the U.S. mails, a federal responsibility. In the case of Pullman, the violence was worse than at Homestead. The strikers’ opponents cited the new Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibited restraint of trade. They argued, successfully, that the workers themselves were a combination restraining trade. Progressives who believed in both organized labor and trust busting found the use of the latter to hurt the former perverse. Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the strikers, went to jail for six months; Judge William Woods sent Debs to jail in Woodstock—not Woodstock, Vermont, but Woodstock, Illinois, far out in McHenry County, near the Wisconsin border.
    The price to both sides in lost hours, lost dignity, and lost profits was enormous. Many smaller companies, including one called American Steel and Wire Company, saw their workers go on strike. American Steel and Wire fired its workers for striking, among them a young man just Coolidge’s age named Leon Frank Czolgosz. So did many other companies. Others did not fire their workers but instead cut their wages. At Fairbanks Scales in St. Johnsbury, where Coolidge had crammed, directors had ordered a 10 percent reduction in wages for some workers; others were working shortened hours. But the international market stabilized business at Fairbanks; when the economy was slow at home, sometimes overseas orders made up for the shortage. But there were no strikes in St. Johnsbury. The lessons of Pullman, Homestead, and Fairbanks were hard to absorb or clarify. Could a company never cut wages in a downturn? Was cutting wages wrong?
    The missing jobs had something to do with the missing money, and everyone had his own idea about what had gone awry, or how to fix it. Jacob Coxey himself made money the center of the story; he even named his infant son, who was along on the trip, “Legal Tender Coxey.” Those were the same years when William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska was warning that capital was exploiting the worker and that hard money—the gold standard—would strangle farming. The undergraduate Coolidge kept his own books rigidly and noticed when others were lax. The loose management of Amherst’s treasurer, Austin Dickinson, did not escape him, though he saw that it allowed students some flexibility. “My tuition is due first of March and can be paid any time,” he wrote home in spring 1894. Nonetheless, Coolidge still found himself coming up perpetually short. As at Black River Academy, his college letters home were peppered with requests for money. He himself was tiring of that and on the lookout for a way to reverse the flow.
    He was in fact already finding a professional skill that might one day earn him a living: speaking. When the outside world matters, students turn to peers who know how to talk