CHAPTER XXIV
THE PLAIN-SPEAKING STATESMAN
In the summer of 1923, a full-fledged boom was under way to nominate Henry Ford for President of the United States. Ford was set to run on either major party ticket, but preferably the Republican, judged the most likely to win. To a later generation, one nursed on the picture of Ford as a man above politics, or even against politics, this movement would seem unbelievable. Ford himself later denied that he had Presidential ambitions.
But it is indisputable that the boom had his approval.1
An article signed by Ford entitled “If I Were President,” appeared in Collier’s magazine August 8, 1923. Allen Benson, prominent in the Socialist Party, wrote a laudatory biography of Ford as part of the boom. Besides, Ford as much as admitted to Couzens that he was a receptive candidate. On one occasion, at a wedding, “with just the inflection of seriousness to make me realize that he meant every word,” he even discussed with him the possibility of having him in his cabinet.2
A good deal of joking went on in the press about the Ford-for-President movement. But the reality of the Ford boom was no joke. Even Senator Norris, the Nebraska liberal, greatly admired Ford at the time, and perhaps would have suggested him for President.3
That summer there was also much discussion, pro and con, of the desirability of modifying the national laws, adopted during World War I, prohibiting sale of intoxicating beverages. Both subjects—the Ford boom and prohibition—were too hot for most public officials to discuss openly with any forthrightness. The passions they generated were too strong. But Couzens, though he hadn’t planned it that way, was soon doing precisely that.
2
That June he was visiting in Ottawa, while on a motor trip with his family. A newspaper reporter there asked him to comment on the liberal Quebec liquor laws, “I think they are fine,” he said. “I think the United States might with good grace adopt some of them. If our constitution were easier to amend, I believe the Volstead act would be repealed.”4 Somewhat embroidered, these comments were telegraphed to newspapers in the United States—on the same day that President Harding, on a “voyage of understanding,” spoke in Denver in spirited defense of prohibition. “I am convinced,” Harding had said, “they are a small and a greatly mistaken minority who believe that the Eighteenth Amendment will ever be repealed.”
The result of this divergence of views between Harding and Couzens was a newspaper sensation:
HARDING DEFENDS DRY LAW: COUZENS ASKS O.K. ON BEER
The results could have been foreseen.5 Couzens was denounced by the prohibitionists all over the land, but especially in Michigan. The Anti-Saloon League, the most powerful pressure bloc of the day, went after him in full cry. He was called a “traitor to America,” a “betrayer” of his party, his state, and his nation, and of all decent people. The Anti-Saloon League served notice it would seek his defeat in 1924 if he had “the gall” to become a candidate to succeed himself.6
He hit back at the Anti-Saloon League. It was, he said, an organization that sought “to dictate” who should hold public office on the basis of one issue, “disregarding all other problems.” “They are out to elect a man who will go to Congress and do what they want, no matter whether he is a bum, an anarchist, or what not.”7 These were fighting words, and other politicians shuddered at his daring—or folly.
To the amazement of other politicians, he gave a half dozen speeches in this vein. Time, a new magazine, ran his picture on its front cover as if to cheer him on. But for the few who praised him, hundreds denounced him.8 “Mr. Couzens Destroys Himself,” the Christian Science Monitor headlined. “It is a pity. There were possibilities in Couzens as a public man that now may never be tested, for his political future is, alas, behind him.”9
With this din in his ears, Couzens took himself and his family off to Europe for the balance of the recess between Congressional sessions, wiser perhaps, but not chastened in spirit.
On his return from Europe he made some interesting comments about European conditions. La Follette, Borah, Norris, Johnson, and Wheeler, on foreign affairs, were largely “isolationist,” to use a term which became current only in the 1940’s. It was then almost a hallmark of a Progressive to turn one’s back on Europe and Asia. But with remarkable insight, Couzens warned:
Germany is decidedly unhappy, with sixty-five or seventy millions of people, the majority of whom are in great distress. . . . The extreme isolationists [in America] have forbidden or intimidated the United States from having a voice in world affairs. We cannot go on that way. We have got to stand up and be counted, for or against these various proposals for settling the economic conditions in Europe.10
He also advanced a program. The United States with other powers should establish “a receivership for Germany,” to put its affairs in order. Ultimately, he hoped, there would develop a “United States of Europe.”
While in Paris, he copied into his notebook a statement by Victor Hugo. “I belong to a party not yet born, but which will be born in the Twentieth Century. This party will have its principle in a United States of Europe.” He read this to newspaper reporters, pronouncing it a “sound idea.”11
3
While Couzens was on the ocean, Harding’s death had occurred. Promptly on his return, Couzens wrote a letter of advice, based on his observations in Europe, to the new President, Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge should abandon “the Harding isolationism,” he said. He hoped, he wrote, that Coolidge in his first message to Congress, would “express a very strong, energetic, forward position on foreign relations.”
At that time, the principal “isolationist” in the Senate was Hiram Johnson. Johnson was and remained Couzens’ friend. Nevertheless, Couzens now bluntly told Coolidge: “I do not think that we are going to get anywhere in any way by trying to placate Senator Hiram Johnson.”12
4
Couzens also made a number of public comments at this time that caused some observers to suggest that he had gone over completely to the camp of “noisy radicals,” notably La Follette, who was being accused of wanting “to undermine the Constitution and the Supreme Court.” For he was outraged just then by a decision of the court against federal regulation of child labor, a decision which set off a revival of the movement Theodore Roosevelt and Albert J. Beveridge had sponsored a decade earlier for permitting Congress to overrule the court.13 La Follette sounded anew a call for “curbing the court” and Couzens was instinctively in agreement. To the press, he said: “I am for bringing about a change which will not permit the Supreme Court to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional by a majority of one. I would have at least a favorable vote of two-thirds of the court necessary.”14
To Editor Arthur H. Vandenberg in Grand Rapids, who was alarmed by his comments, he wrote:
“The point I want to raise . . . is that the interpretation of the Constitution is made by human minds, and I do not believe the opinions of five human minds should offset the interpretation of the Constitution of the United States made by hundreds of Congressmen and four members of the Supreme Court. . . .”15
Vandenberg attempted, by long letters, to change Couzens’ views, arguing that Supreme Court decisions ought to be considered sacred. Any proposal to let Congress “nullify” a court decision would “emasculate” the court and turn Congress into a “despotism,” he said.16 He sent Couzens copies of editorials he had written in the Grand Rapids Herald, including one that bitterly denounced the Scripps-Howard newspapers, as well as the Detroit News, for supporting the La Follette proposal to permit Congress to overrule the Supreme Court.
It was all very well, Couzens came back at Vandenberg, to be “theoretical” about such matters. But he could not see how “a decent man” could defend a Supreme Court decision that condemned children to labor in factories and mines. “I am not out looking to stir up trouble, where trouble does not exist,” he wrote. “I cannot help, however, before concluding, raising the question of how many thousands of children may be suffering because of the Supreme Court. . . . May it not be that we are prone to let these things go, rather than risk a change? Does not the doctrine of ‘leaving well enough alone’ sometimes impose a lot of hardship, which we do not truly visualize?”17
5
As for Ford, who had been granting some interviews to Dr. William L. Stidger, a Methodist minister later associated with Boston University, for publication in newspapers and in a book on Ford’s Presidential aspirations, the Detroit Times on October 25, 1923, published this:
DR. STIDGER: What do you think of the stand that your friend Senator Couzens is taking on the prohibition laws? He is in favor of going back to five per cent beer and light wines.
FORD: He knows he is wrong about it. Mr. Couzens knows better. He knows that in the Ford motor plant booze never did anybody any good, and he is taking a backward step when he stands for five per cent beer and light wines. Jim Couzens knows better than that. Maybe he feels he is striking a popular chord.
Couzens considered Ford’s remarks about him an attack on his integrity.18 A week later, Couzens, for the first time in his career, publicly gave vent to his anger at Ford.
He began a speech before the Republican Club at the Hotel Statler in Detroit with an apparently general discussion of the need for truthfulness in public affairs. “Parties and public men have not always been truthful,” he said. Then he said he was “forced” to discuss a man who “exemplified” this. “The example is our chief Democratic politician, Henry Ford, who recently gave a newspaper interview, so it is reported, and he has not denied it, differing with me on the amendment I suggested on the Volstead act.” He denounced Ford in particular for ascribing political motives to Couzens’ suggestion that the Volstead Act be modified. He went on:
It comes from poor taste from a man who is so politically ambitious as Mr. Ford and who has never gotten over his peevishness because of his defeat for United States senator on the Democratic ticket. A man who has perhaps made more unfulfilled promises than any man in America should be more guarded in challenging the motives of other people. . . .
If Mr. Ford wants to be president—and it is quite evident he does—because he has filed his name, or at least permitted it to be filed, in the Nebraska primaries—why does he refrain from announcing himself as a candidate? The reason, it appears to me, is that he is afraid, realizing that the probable outcome would be as great a fiasco as his “Peace Ship”. . .
Mr. Ford for president? It is ridiculous. . . . If the American people ever stop to analyze Mr. Ford’s experience and his qualifications for the presidency of the United States, he will never even get started. It is my hope that they will stop and think.
I say this not only because I want to save Mr. Ford from the greatest humiliation that could befall him. But I want equally to save the United States from the humiliation it would suffer.19
A good many persons had been saying precisely these things privately. Republican leaders generally were pleased that Couzens did so publicly. In his syndicated column from Washington, Mark Foote wrote: “Republican politicians howled with delight. President Coolidge is said to have pulled a wry Puritanical smile. . . . Politicians who had never been able to discern any good points in James Couzens now declared him a great man.” There also was some comment on the fact that just before leaving Washington for Detroit to make his speech on Ford, Couzens and his wife dined with the Coolidges.20
6
He did not return to the subject of Ford’s Presidential ambitions. He had not really relished attacking his former associate openly. Moreover, the Ford boom suddenly petered out, after Ford and Coolidge had a meeting at which Coolidge seemed to agree to support Ford’s ideas for Muscle Shoals.21 After this meeting, Ford said to reporters: “Muscle Shoals? Where is Muscle Shoals?”22
Ford did not answer Couzens. And before long, curiously enough, he and Couzens seemed better friends than they had acted for a long time.
Besides, Couzens was soon involved in an heroic controversy with Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon, who more than any other individual embodied the dominant philosophy of the Republican party in this era.
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