THE PRESIDENCY: Coolidge Fund

The mobility and expressiveness of Mrs. Coolidge’s face, particularly her mouth, have often occasioned flattering public comment. Sometimes they have been mentioned as a contrast to the limited eloquence of Calvin Coolidge’s features. More interesting is the use to which Mrs. Coolidge put her lips and tongue as a young woman. She was, as most people know, a teacher at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Mass., the first U. S. school to teach deaf people to read lips and deaf-mute children to articulate.* The lipreading method, which for mutes is followed by tongue exercises and finger-study of throat and chest vibrations, depends almost entirely upon the patience and oral expressiveness of the teacher. Many an unfortunate, cut off from aural and oral contact with the surrounding world, has owed restoration of communication to patient, expressive Grace Goodhue.

It was natural that young Lawyer Coolidge, who roomed near the Clarke School and married young Teacher Goodhue, should acquire an abiding interest in the education of the deaf. He became a trustee of the Clarke School. When he was Vice President, he conceived and lent his name to a $2,000,000 endowment fund to widen the school’s activities. The late Publisher Clarence W. Barren (Boston News Bureau, Wall Street Journal, etc. etc.) gave $110,000 and took the project in hand.

The elevation of Vice President Coolidge to the Presidency interrupted the fund’s progress. But last week, with Earle P. Charlton of Fall River, Mass., installed as treasurer to succeed Publisher Barren, the Coolidge Fund got under way again with a luncheon at a Washington hotel and a tea at the White House. Treasurer Charlton announced that half of the $2,000,000 objective was in hand.

President Coolidge sent a letter saying he hoped the Coolidge Fund would “arouse a greater interest in the problems of the deaf and” in this humanitarian work which has seemingly failed to keep pace with progress in other fields.”

From other sources came the suggestion that contributing to the Coolidge Fund was one way, if not the only way, in which citizens could express appreciation of Grace Goodhue Coolidge’s “administration” as First Lady. ¶ President Coolidge received, at the hands of Archbishop Curley of Baltimore, an honorary LL. D. from the Catholic University of America, at ceremonies in Washington inaugurating the Right Rev. Dr. James Hugh Ryan as Rector of the University, succeeding Bishop Thomas J. Shahan. A letter from Pius XI was read, enjoining the university to serve. At “Catholic,” as the 400 students call it, there are courses in Theology, Law, Philosophy, Letters. Science, Canon Law.

¶ The second big social event of the White House season came to pass, the reception to the diplomatic corps. British Ambassador Sir Esme (William) Howard and his lady led the representatives of 56 foreign powers into the Blue Room to greet President & Mrs. Coolidge. Miss Marian Jardine, daughter of Agriculture, led a delegation of debutantes. Following their custom, President and Mrs. Coolidge withdrew to their rooms upstairs after receiving all guests. The only Ambassador missing was Don Alejandro Padilla y Bell of Spain, who was on the ocean, returning to the U. S.

¶ Five of the six New England Governors (all but Rhode Island’s Aram J. Pothier) sat down together in the waiting room of Boston’s new North Station. The room had been converted for the moment into a banquet hall. They watched a light go on, made speeches. The light-lighter was, of course, President Coolidge, button-pushing in Washington. To President George Hannauer of the Boston & Maine R. R., President Coolidge telegraphed: “. . . The building is a credit to your company and the city.” ¶ In consideration of $15.50, the State of Virginia issued a nonresident hunting license to Calvin Coolidge. Col. E. W. Starling of the Coolidge staff conferred with Game Commissioner Major A. Willis Robertson in Richmond, ..about a Presidential bird shoot, over fine-nosed dogs, at Swannanoa Country Club in the Blue Ridge Mountains the two days following Thanksgiving Day.

¶. A last message from President Coolidge to the Congress was in course of preparation. Topics to be touched on were easily foreseen—the Kellogg Treaty, the Cruiser Bill, Farm Relief, Tariff, Economy, Prosperity, etc. etc. Senator McNary of Oregon had audience at the White House and announced that he was framing an agricultural measure which would, this time, omit features that have so vexed the President and include features which the President approves. Approved features, long known in a general way, were hinted at in a speech last week by President Coolidge to the National Grange as they will probably be hinted at again in the message to Congress, viz.: a Federal farm loan fund, further encouragement of co-operative marketing associations, further reliance upon the protective tariff. “Sometimes I wonder,” said the President, “if gatherings of farmers are not a little tired of hearing discussions of farm relief.” ¶ Apropos President Coolidge’s dutiful diligence in the closing months of his administration, Political Pundit Mark Sullivan of the arch-Republican New York Herald-Tribune ventured a respectful semi-prophecy: “. . . One cannot help feeling it is within possibility that Mr. Coolidge’s high regard for his office may result, sometime before he retires, in something that may have the mood of George Washington’s Farewell Address.”

¶ From the American Council of Learned Societies, President Coolidge received a first volume of the new, exhaustive Dictionary of American Biography, which will contain 20 volumes when completed. The first volume contained no Coolidges, going only from “Abbe” to “Barrymore.” Subsequent volumes will be published at the rate of three per year, but President Coolidge will not live to read about himself in the Dictionary of American Biography. No person or personnage is given space therein until he is dead (see p. 26).

*The so-called Manual of Silent Method—finger-sign language—was brought to the U. S. by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, who went to Europe in 1815 to study education of the deaf, and for whom Gallaudet College, founded in 1864 at Washington, was named. The Clarke School, founded in 1867, had as its first trustee-president the late famed Alexander Graham Bell, whose wife was deaf. It was while experimenting on sound-amplification to aid the deaf that Dr. Bell invented the telephone, in 1876. One Jeanie Lippitt, now Mrs. William B. Weeden of Providence, R. I., was the first U. S. deaf-mute child to regain speech by the lipreading method.