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Upon closer inspection, the artifact, which Lakota leaders conferred on Calvin Coolidge during his South Dakota summer vacation in August 1927, hangs on a draped vertical platform inside a glass case at the visitor center of the President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Plymouth Notch, Vt.
And it looks pretty darned well preserved — dozens of eagle feathers, a light-blue headband of gleaming beads, snow-white ermine tails dangling from the ears — for a gift that Coolidge added to the already substantial collection of memorabilia that he and his wife, Grace, had been sending to Northampton, Mass., for safekeeping since the early 1920s.
Coolidge had launched his political career as a city councilor in Northampton in 1895. Over the subsequent quarter-century, the Plymouth Notch-born lawyer would represent Northampton in the mayor’s office and in both houses of the state legislature before serving one term each as lieutenant governor and then governor.
Then in 1920, the Republican Party nominated Coolidge as Warren G. Harding’s running mate in the 1920 presidential election. After the GOP ticket won, the Coolidges began sending official and personal material to Northampton’s Forbes Library, which built the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum around them.
Most eye-catching among the gifts the Coolidges received over the years was the headdress, which the Lakotas gave Coolidge, along with the honorary title of Chief Leading Eagle, as thanks for his signing the 1924 legislation that gave voting rights to Native Americans.
“It’s never been displayed in Vermont before,” William Jenney, administrator of the site of Coolidge’s birthplace, said recently. “I’d known it was there for 30 years, since I came here, so it wasn’t exactly a secret. I finally convinced (the presidential library) that we needed it up here for a season.”
The display is part of a special exhibit, which the Hanover-based graphic designer Charles Gibson assembled, with photos, artifacts and quotes from the five summer vacations that the Coolidges took during Calvin’s presidency. They started in Plymouth Notch in 1924, a year after Coolidge assumed the presidency upon the death of Harding. They summered next in the coastal community of Swampscott, Mass., in 1925, then the Adirondacks in 1926, the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1927 and the Brule River in Wisconsin, in 1928.
“I didn’t know anything about them,” Ferrisburg, Vt., resident Candace Vincent said of the Coolidge vacations, on her way out of the visitor center with her daughter, Susan Gausepohl, on Aug. 2. “In school we learned about the presidents, but they just sort of touched lightly on Coolidge. Most of the pictures I’d seen before, he’s always in a suit, very strait-laced looking.”
Except for the 1924 trip, abbreviated by the death of one of Coolidge’s sons from blood poisoning, and by that year’s re-election campaign, the Coolidges, their white collies Rob Roy and Prudence Prim and their pet raccoon, Rebecca, usually spent between two and three months in locations chosen, in large part, for proximity to good fishing. Coolidge conducted plenty of the country’s business between outings in pursuit of trout, with regular visits from members of his cabinet, world leaders and such titans of industry and invention as Henry Ford and Thomas Edison.
As the years went on, the vacations involved bigger contingents of household help and Secret Service coverage … and bigger press corps, from ink-stained wretches assigned by the nation’s many newspapers to directors shooting newsreel footage.
Before the 1925 trip, according to the Plymouth Notch exhibit, the famously taciturn Coolidge told a journalist, “I don’t know as I can say very much about my vacation. I expect to spend a considerable part of it trying to amuse the newspapermen.”
Sometimes, he even made news, none bigger than during the South Dakota trip: On Aug. 2, 1927, reporters in the press room found slips of paper on which Coolidge declared, “I do not choose to run for President in 1928.”
Photographers and cinematographers reaped the most material from the Coolidges’ visits to Mount Rushmore for the ceremonial first drilling at the monument, which would take another decade to complete — to which Calvin, in a suit, rode a horse — and from the ceremony with the Sioux nation.
Abby Charbeneau, a 1990 Woodstock Union High School graduate who worked in the Plymouth Notch archives for several summers in the early 1990s, recalls seeing photos of Coolidge in full regalia, and eventually helping assemble a collection of postcards that included the Sioux ceremony.
“In those days we had mostly photos and letters — especially Grace’s — and a few other documents to work with,” said Charbeneau, who now teaches music in Concord and still visits Plymouth Notch in the summer to lead music programs. “I didn’t know the headdress was anywhere anymore. When Bill told me it was going to be on loan this summer, that was the first time I was aware it still existed.”
The headdress and its display case traveled separately from Northampton, before being reunited after the assembly of the rest of the vacation display.
“It looks like it was just made,” Charbeneau said. “The way it sits in the case, it looks like a human could be right in there, the way it drapes.”
After a music program at the Coolidge site in June, Charbeneau steered a friend straight to the display.
“I said, ‘I want you to come see it with me,’ ” Charbeneau said. “It kind of gave me goose bumps.”
Other parts of the vacation display, including a set of equally well-preserved chaps with the word “Cal” sewn onto each leg that the president wore along with a 10-gallon hat in one photo op, gave Charbeneau an education not only in presidential history, but in the philosophical side of Calvin Coolidge.
“There’s a quote that’s part of this somewhere, when somebody asked him if he was afraid of looking funny,” Charbeneau said. “He supposedly replied, ‘Well, people need to laugh, don’t they?’ ”
The exhibit
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.