Free Coolidge by Amity Shlaes

pride from crafting his work and told Calvin that the best way to secure a good future was to deliver quality.
    As an undergraduate Coolidge also attended lectures by traveling experts, sometimes about religion and often about economics. Such excursions into the real world fortified the oudens, reminding them that college joy was ephemeral in any case. To boys such as Hardy and Deering “town”—the municipality—meant more than “gown”: campus life. Deering later recalled in a newspaper interview that during the holidays they “used to visit each other and work on each other’s place. It’s always more fun for a boy to work on someone else’s place, you know.” On and off Deering and Hardy ate with the brothers of the fraternity Beta Theta Pi. Shortly, Deering and Hardy were approached about entering Beta Theta Pi. Hardy said “yes,” but Deering asked whether Coolidge might join as well. The Beta Theta Pi brothers, however, including Dwight Morrow, did not want to include Coolidge. Morrow made it explicit that he was unwilling to take the oddball. Deering refused to join without Calvin. The two stayed proud oudens.
    In 1893, an incident at the college called to mind why one might be ambivalent about joining other boys in fraternity-style fun. After the annual freshman dinner, some students in the class had fallen into “the meshes of the law” and “were forced to give up a small quantity of plunder in the shape of porcelain and gilt letters which they had taken from the store windows,” The Amherst Student reported. Such activity was not unusual. There was a tradition at Amherst of the sophomores preventing the freshmen class from having their picture taken; several years later the sophomores would break up a photo session of freshmen so violently that the photographer sued for damages; he was represented by the firm of the two Amherst grads in Northampton, Hammond and Field. Coolidge did not join in the small-time looting; he already deemed himself as much town as gown. As the son of a shop owner, he could see, too, that that year, merchants could ill afford extra costs. Banks were failing all over the country. National Cordage, the most actively traded stock at the time, went into receivership. The supply of gold the Treasury held dropped below $100 million for the first time since 1879. In Massachusetts employment figures were added up for industrial plants. In April 1893, the plants employed 320,000. By September, that number was 248,000, a drop of more than 20 percent. Students could see with their own eyes that people were losing jobs and walking away from their homes rather than paying their mortgages. In Boston, R. H. Stearns, the department store run by Frank Stearns, the devoted Amherst alumnus, was hosting a fire sale on black clothing: “When we planned to alter our store we intended to very much enlarge our black goods department and so gave much larger importation orders than usual. Now that we are compelled to give up the changes for the present, we are left with this large stock.” At Amherst and other colleges, currency crowded out all other topics. William Graham Sumner of Yale was lecturing that this crisis was not a bank or a market crisis at all but a currency crisis actually caused, in good measure, by the very step meant to mitigate it, the 1890 Silver Act.
    Now that the terms of the gold standard had been fiddled with, the market sensed more fiddling to come. Later, in a book, Sumner would codify his analysis: “The constant apprehension was, so long as then-existing legislation remained in force, that the unit of existing monetary relations would be changed. Such an apprehension is the surest ground for panic which can be offered. The panic which resulted when this fear became more specific was not a bank panic, nor a crisis in which the banks had any responsibility.” President Cleveland, of the same view as Sumner, recommended repeal of the Silver Act, thereby sending a