THE PRESIDENCY: The Coolidge Week: Nov. 14, 1927

President Coolidge again denied (no one has counted the number of these denials) that he would change his mind about the 1928 nomination.

¶ President Coolidge ordered the U. S. flag displayed on Nov. 11, Armistice Day (ninth anniversary).

¶ As became the honorary president of the U. S. Red Cross, President Coolidge gave permission for a deputationof Washington debutantes to board the presidential yacht Mayflowerand be filmed “tagging” her captain & crew on the first day of the annual Red Cross Drive.

¶ President & Mrs. Coolidge attended the wedding of Miss Barbara Hight and Charles Davis Hayes, at the bride’s home in Washington. Except for relatives and military aides there were no other guests. Mrs. Coolidge wore claret-red satin, black slippers, black fox-fur.

¶ President Coolidge presented to Mrs. Delphine Dodge Cromwell of Detroit a cup she had won with her speedboat, Miss Syndicate, in a Potomac regatta.

¶ President Coolidge “felicitated” the Newark, N. J., club of the International Baseball League, upon obtaining Walter Johnson, longtime (1907-27) hero-pitcher of the Washington (American League) “Senators,” as manager.

¶ President Coolidge reduced the tariff on phenol (carbolic acid) by 50%. Carbolic acid is used to make telephones, cigaret holders, auto enamels, explosives, and many another U. S. product, as well as to disinfect.

¶ From the War Department, President Coolidge learned that it would be inadvisable to send the Army football team from West Point, N. Y., to play Stanford University in California this autumn as he had suggested.

¶ From Amherst, Mass., came news that the President’s son, John Coolidge, had retained his place on his class* dance committee, at Amherst College.

¶ From Baltimore, Md., came news that the Religious Society of Friends were alarmed over “vice conditions . . . widespread disease and moral degradation,” to which they had heard U. S. sailors were exposed on the Yangtse Kiang (river), China. President Coolidge and Secretary of the Navy Wilbur were asked to investigate.

President Coolidge received President Manuel Quezon of the Philippine Senate, Senator Sergio Osmena of the Resident* Commissioner Pedro Guevara, for nearly an hour (see TERRITORIES, p. 13).

¶President Coolidge indicated that he stood firmly behind the $225,000,000 tax reduction suggestions of Secretary of the Treasury Mellon.

¶ From Peru to see President Coolidge came Miles Poindexter, onetime (1911-23) U. S. Senator from Washington, now U. S. Ambassador to Peru but soon to retire. Ambassador Poindexter said that European influences, especially Russian, are at work in South America to make the U. S. unpopular there, to oust the U. S. from South American markets. Washington pondered who Ambassador Poindexter’s successor might be. Banker John W. Garrett of Baltimore seemed likely.

¶ President Coolidge named Charles Evans Hughes to be head of the U. S. delegation at the Pan-American Congress in Havana, Cuba, in January. Critics of Secretary of State Kellogg’s record on Latin-American relations chose to regard the distinguished personnel of this delegation as evidence that President Coolidge is extraordinarily concerned about Pan-American amity. Other observers connected President Coolidge’s concern rather with such unfriendly ganda as that reported by Ambassador-to-Peru Poindexter (see Col. 2), than with Secretary Kellogg. TheHughes-headed delegation will be composed of: Ambassador-to-Mexico Dwight W. Morrow, Ambassador-to-Italy Henry P. Fletcher, onetime (1915-27) Senator Oscar W. Underwood of Alabama, Lawyers Morgan J O’Brien of Manhattan, and James Brown Scott of Washington, D. C., President Ray Lyman Wilbur of Stanford University, Director-General of the Pan-American Union Leo S. Rowe. Whoever succeeds Enoch Herbert Crowder as U. S. Ambassador to Cuba was also to be a delegate. And if he can manage it, President Coolidge will go too, for a day or so.

¶When he came to the U. S. from Paris in September, U. S. Ambassador-to-France Myron Timothy Herrick brought with him the so-called Briand that the U. S. and France agree never to war on one another. Ambassador Herrick left this document at the State Department and went home to Cleveland, ill. The State Department has been conning the Briand document. President Coolidge has been thinking about it. Last week, Editor E. G. Burkham of the Dayton (Ohio) Journal, close friend of Ambassador Herrick and newspaper partner of his son, Parmely Herrick, called at the White House to tell President Coolidge that Ambassador Herrick would soon be well enough to return to Paris. President Coolidge let it be known that when Ambassador Herrick is ready to resume his post, instructions will be ready for him in the matter of the Briand proposal, instructions looking toward a treaty’s adoption.

¶White House callers of the week included:

A committee from the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, with a memorial endorsing the Briand peace proposal (see above).

President Porter Adams of the National Aeronautic Association to endorse the Administration’s air program.

President Roy D. Chapin of the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, to ask that the President invite the International Road Congress to hold its next meeting in the U. S.

Wickham Steed, British journalist, to be presented.

¶ Charles P. Taft I, aged 30, used to live at the White House. Now he is presiding attorney of the Ohio county in which stands his native Cincinnati. Last week, when Charles P. Taft II addressed a Y. M. C. A. audience in Washington, he was introduced as a man “who might again return to the White House to live.” Charles P Taft II’s father and mother heard and smiled. Cabinet members, also in the audience, also smiled. President and Mrs. Coolidge were there and they smiled too.

*John Coolidge is now a senior.

*In Washington, D. C.