the principle [ sic ] works of Burke, Hamilton and Webster, I should get a very strong hold on legal and political ideas, and then if I could add to it some actual experience of my own I should have a wisdom that at least would insure me a living if it did not give me power to direct great measures for the welfare of communities or states.” Finally he appeared to lose heart: “I am only trying to get some discipline now. I never earned any money and I do not know as I ever made any happiness but I hope these may come later. I am almost ready to think of coming home again. . . .”
A trip home for his last spring break to the Vermont mud shifted his mood yet again. He could see his father struggling with his springtime work as road commissioner. “The heavy rains must have cost the Town considerable,” he wrote sympathetically. “I hope you will be able to fix up the roads so every body will not be whining about them. Almost every sluice in Town needs to be repaired.” In Vermont there was always some unexpected disruption: the summer after freshman year, lightning had struck his father’s barns, burning them. Coolidge spelled out his ambivalence yet again for his patient father: “I have not decided yet that I want to leave Plymouth, not because I like the place to live in, I do not, not because I could do more good there, there are larger fields, but because I may owe some debt to the place.”
The ensuing months found him and his father discussing not whether or not his trade would be law but the details of his legal education. There were two ways one could qualify to practice. One was law school. Several members of the class of 1894 attended school; Harlan Stone, a year out already, had enrolled at Columbia University in New York. Dwight Morrow was considering law school too. But there was another possibility, the old way, for country lawyers: to read law while at a law firm, like an apprentice, and then sit the bar exam. That was less expensive. It was also what two lawyers the Coolidges knew, John Garibaldi Sargent and William Stickney, had done. Sargent, an older graduate of Black River Academy, had attended Tufts and then read the law in Ludlow. Now “Garry,” as he was called, practiced law with Stickney, who was climbing in Vermont politics. Sargent was the model of a gentleman—an enormous man, six foot four, who would build a library and a much-admired vegetable garden. To live like Garry or Stickney would be to live closer to what Jefferson, Garman, and Emerson described, closer to Cincinnatus. Coolidge, still eager to spend a few more years on a campus, gruffly informed his father that Stickney and Sargent’s way wasn’t the only one. John might try to educate himself on the merits of law school: “If you want to find something about law schools see French of Woodstock. . . . I do not think you will find the answer in “Men of Vermont” [an old book]. I should like very much to impress upon you that my life will be in the twentieth century.” But again, typically, even as he postured, he vacillated: “But still a law office may be the best place to get discipline.” He was nervous before his Grove Oration.
Yet the speech was a triumph. Calvin summed up the college experience, including its triviality, as a four-year period that “begins with a cane rush where the undergraduates use Anglo-Saxon, and ends with a diploma where the faculty use Latin, if it does not end before by a communication from the President in just plain English.” The speech was also a quiet declaration of victory, a celebration of Calvin’s own ability to make others laugh over a whole speech. “The mantle of truth falls upon the Grove orator on condition he wear it wrong side out,” he declaimed. He promised in the speech to share with them “the only true side of college life on the inside.” The fact that he was the orator proved to himself that he was finally there—at the inside, within college life.
A trip home for his last spring break to the Vermont mud shifted his mood yet again. He could see his father struggling with his springtime work as road commissioner. “The heavy rains must have cost the Town considerable,” he wrote sympathetically. “I hope you will be able to fix up the roads so every body will not be whining about them. Almost every sluice in Town needs to be repaired.” In Vermont there was always some unexpected disruption: the summer after freshman year, lightning had struck his father’s barns, burning them. Coolidge spelled out his ambivalence yet again for his patient father: “I have not decided yet that I want to leave Plymouth, not because I like the place to live in, I do not, not because I could do more good there, there are larger fields, but because I may owe some debt to the place.”
The ensuing months found him and his father discussing not whether or not his trade would be law but the details of his legal education. There were two ways one could qualify to practice. One was law school. Several members of the class of 1894 attended school; Harlan Stone, a year out already, had enrolled at Columbia University in New York. Dwight Morrow was considering law school too. But there was another possibility, the old way, for country lawyers: to read law while at a law firm, like an apprentice, and then sit the bar exam. That was less expensive. It was also what two lawyers the Coolidges knew, John Garibaldi Sargent and William Stickney, had done. Sargent, an older graduate of Black River Academy, had attended Tufts and then read the law in Ludlow. Now “Garry,” as he was called, practiced law with Stickney, who was climbing in Vermont politics. Sargent was the model of a gentleman—an enormous man, six foot four, who would build a library and a much-admired vegetable garden. To live like Garry or Stickney would be to live closer to what Jefferson, Garman, and Emerson described, closer to Cincinnatus. Coolidge, still eager to spend a few more years on a campus, gruffly informed his father that Stickney and Sargent’s way wasn’t the only one. John might try to educate himself on the merits of law school: “If you want to find something about law schools see French of Woodstock. . . . I do not think you will find the answer in “Men of Vermont” [an old book]. I should like very much to impress upon you that my life will be in the twentieth century.” But again, typically, even as he postured, he vacillated: “But still a law office may be the best place to get discipline.” He was nervous before his Grove Oration.
Yet the speech was a triumph. Calvin summed up the college experience, including its triviality, as a four-year period that “begins with a cane rush where the undergraduates use Anglo-Saxon, and ends with a diploma where the faculty use Latin, if it does not end before by a communication from the President in just plain English.” The speech was also a quiet declaration of victory, a celebration of Calvin’s own ability to make others laugh over a whole speech. “The mantle of truth falls upon the Grove orator on condition he wear it wrong side out,” he declaimed. He promised in the speech to share with them “the only true side of college life on the inside.” The fact that he was the orator proved to himself that he was finally there—at the inside, within college life.
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