TIIE SUNDAY - OREGOXIAX, PORTLAND, ' MAY 15. 1921
ONE COOLIDGE, CALVIN, WHO DESERTED HARD-WON SOIL
"My Grandfather Thought It a Disgrace to Engage in Anything But Agriculture," Says Vice
President in His Call to "Get Out, Dig, Harrow and Plant, " But "We Can't All Be Farmers"
villus:
17
t r 1 4 v
i'r;:, f - 1 jfp w ? u ? - - -i. - , ffr, .T1 ss?
i -"i4K v : vwvisti v , ,r, a v,- -ic ,vvm j-
f 1 MJOMMilMVJM''i-
X9?liSW WM :&WtyfSA the day's toil, he ill go up to sleep
-,tws8!?? , V ' " W v( S MyyZf under the rafters .here he slept as a
'f't -1 fir TW sP WOVV! boy, little dreaminB o( Ihe dy when
"--Ws- Wsi UllllilW Y J 'A11syjvM t,l suite of a palatial Washington
. Bj m iMm h -e .menean has ever heen I j
V'y mJa. Jli mXXJk monweaun and tne state, pomts or.
bi- 'ymmim the vice-president, who. despite the
2;"sr 6 VjgiMW Wni A'c ' ffifo f has the inherent love of the quiet re-
SS fa - ,J WnH'M!Wlwi VltoHVi ' i 74TJ-' cesses of America, the open fields and
rZmStx ? . ' H. Ife , pretty good fellows, aren't they?" : i
yyy. , . ftv"" 1 H
Ir, .wF,:-
sajiuu
n
FOI.I.OWlVti MAYBE THEY ARE CALLED "OLD STAR AVD WHITE FOOT" ALO.VG A REWLY TIR.ED
Fl'BROW OX THE COOLIDUE HOMESTEAD.
Coin V milk the com. An unusual
picture of our vlee-prenident iu hla
boots and old-world amock Mam
pus, he call it.
BY CHARLES W. DUKE.
OW is the time for all good
people to get out and dig.
harrow and plant!' saith the
Vice-president of these United States.
Calvin Coolidge is essentially a son
of the soil. Looking out of the win
dows of his apartment in the Willard
hotel in Washington, over the green
sward of the White House lawn and
the Mall, he is thinking in terms of
the farm this fine early spring. His
mind travels back to the pastures of
boyhood up in Vermont. What he has
to say is of particular interest just
now, for he is going to visit this
state soon.
Jly grandfather and his father be
fore him thought it a disgrace to
engage in anything but agriculture."
reminisced the vice-president. "You
see, my folks were all rooted in the
oil. so to speak."
Whereupon Mr. Coolidge related an
Interesting story. Grandfather Cool
idge was so intent on having his fam
illy stick to the plow and the reaper
that he endeavored to bind his hers
to the Coolidge acres in the Green
Mountain state.
"Grandfather Coolidge lived close
to Mother Eartlf." said the vice
president, pressing a hand lightly
over his high forehead. "Jt was his
Intention that the Coolidges should
stick to the family acres. In his will
he decreed that the old farm should
be handed down to my father pro
vided he would stick to its soil. The
document provided that the farm
should be handed along from genera
tion to generation.' My father is to
leave it to me; I, in turn, am to leave
It to my boys. In this way he hoped
to keep us all on the farm."
Ten years after the Pilgrims landed
from the Mayflower, John Coolidge
and his wife, Mary, settled at Water-
town, a pioneer community on the
Charles river. It is related that in
17S0 the grandfather of the vice
president migrated northward, choos
ing his acres in the hill country back
of the Conneqticut river. There
four generations of Coolidges have
been raised to the plow. Three gen
i erations stuck to the soil. The fourth
John Calvin, who later dropped the
John for plain Calvin was the first
to break away.
"How do you reconcile your pres
ent position with the desires of your
grandfather?" was the question I
propounded.
The farm boy, but now Calvin
Coolidge. vice-president, moving in
the circles of the world's leaders,
grinned.
i "Did you ever notice, ln your study
of American biographies, how so
many of our leaders sprang from the
farm?" was his graceful sidestep,
facetiously couched. "Look at the
list of presidents from George Wash
ington down through Abraham Lin
coln to the present. Not only presi
dents, but vice-presidents, statesmen
and others. The American farm seems
to have been a pretty good breeder
of American leaders."
"Then you don't think you have
been recreant to the wishes of your
forebears?" I countered.
Not all of us can be farmers," was
his dry rejoinder.
When one goes to interview Cal
Coolidge he must perforce go well
primed with questions of all kinds.
The answers are about one-tenth of
one per cent of the interview, so
frugal is the Hon. Cal with his lan
guage.
"Would you infer that for the fu
ture we may expect to find our presi
dents ahd national leaders coming
from the cities rather than from the
farms, considering the shift in popu
lation from the rural districts to the
white lights of the cities within re
cent years?" was ventured.
"Who can tell?" was the Ciceronian
reply. "Time alone will show that.
We can onlysj5eak accurately of the
past in this connection."
But when it comes to discussing the
American farm, the present and fu
ture status of agriculture, the vice
president can be pried loose from his
taciturnity. In fact, the longer he
lives in Washington as vice-president
of the United States the further he
retreats from the embrace of the
Sphinx, to which , he has so long
clung. It may be the company he is
keeping; at any rate, the Hon. Cal is
thawing out in the limelight of this
flue spring sun.
As to the farm problem cheer up!
The back-to-the-farm problem short
ly is to solve itself without the aid of
the -tociologic and economic special
ists who have heen carping on "The
Impending Decline of Agrarian Amer
ica." One gains that Impression after
talking with the Hon. Mr. Coolidge.
"Don't know that there is such a
thing as the farm problem, after all."
says the imperturbable Calvin.
"Nature has a wonderful way of
taking care of us," he continued.
"Men are drawn away from the farm
by the lure . of higher wages and
easier living conditions in the cities.
They flock into town and work for
the higher wage. But when people
get hungry they must have food.
When they are hungry and without
food they will go out and produce it.
They will go back to the farm."
"Then you figure, in these days of
unemployment, scarcity of houses
and expensive living condi'tions, that
folks will start back to the farm?"
"That's a reasonable , deduction,"
was his slow-spoken reply. And then,
after a short pause "I guess the tide
has turned the other way already."
Frankly the Hon. Mr. Coolidge is an
optimist as. regards the farm ques
tion. More than that, he's a dealer
in common sense, applied not only to
agriculture, but all the way from A
to Z through the alphabet of exis
tence. "If my memory serves me right,"
he added, "this country last year pro
duced bigger and better crops than
ever before. With all the talk of
scarcity of labor on the farms, of
empty farmhouses and abandoned
fields, we still seem to be keeping
well up in the matter of farm pro
duction. There is no famine in the
land. If the farm is being aban
doned, trow do you account for the
continued productivity of the farm?"
He was quick to answer his own
question. . .
"For one thing, work on the farm
today is not so hard as it used to be.
Nor are so many men required to do
the work. Science has jome to the
aid of the farmer. Tbey say a trac
tor can do the work of 16 men.
Science will do more and more. Tour
farmer today can easily find out what
his farm Is" best fitted for. He gets
an analysis made of his land and
then applies to it the kind of . seed
that "will best grow in it. The farmer
of today
used to.
reads a lot more than he
He has the newspaper, the
farm journal or theagricultural aid
handed in to him by the mail carrier.
He knows his business better."
The vice-president speaks slowly
and deliberately. But piecing his sen
tences together one. by one you get a
logical and complete answer.
"There's not the drudgery on the
farm there once was. Up in our
New England section the farmer used
to do a lot of butchering. Today you
may find the . farmer Buying iresn
meat in the city markets and carry
ing it home In his motorcar. The
packers have come along and taken
over that work, doing it easier on a
large scale. Not nearly so many cat
tle are raised' in New England as
there 'were a' quarter of a century
ago. Where they are, they are mostly
sold on the hoof."
, Well the vice-president remembers
the drudgery of his youth. All his
early memories are of the farm as
one biographer has put it "of his
grandfather putting him on the back
of an old white mare; of his sliding
off and breaking his right arm so
that the bones stuck through the
flesh; of his waiting for the doctor
to come from Ludlow: of 'the wall
eyed cow' that the hired man hit with
the milking stool and that ran under
the hay and got wedged in and was
so frightened that the hired man
could never milk her again, all of
which meant that little John had to
get up at 5 A. M. to help with the
milking."
When tte Honorable Coolidge goes
home to the Vermont farm for vaca
tion, as he will this summer, he will
don the frock of his father, a farmer's
frock woven by his grandmother. He
will jnflk the cows and help with the
harvest; at eventide, tired out with
the day's toll, he will go up to sleep
under the rafters where he slept as a
boy. little dreaming of the day when
iie would sleep in the "vice-presidential
suite of a palatial Washington
hote
The American farmer has ever been
the eubstantial citizen of the com
monwealth and the state, points out
the vice-president, who, despite the
fact he has strayed far from the Ver
mont acres of his forefathers, still
has the inherent love of the quiet re
cesses of America, the open fields and
the uncrqwded meadows.
""Some people profess the belief that
the farmers are the backbone of the
nation. As a matter of fact they are
pretty good fellows, aren't they?"
this with a typical smile.
"In nearly every case you find the
man who owns a piece of land or a
parcel of property all his own to be a
pretty good sort of citizen. The
farmer in few cases is likely to be a
'bad man.' The kind of life that he
leads breeds contentment and appre
ciation of all the fundamentals of life.
Out in the country is a pretty good
place for clear thinking. You don't
find many socialists or bolshevists or
whatever ists you choose to call them
cut on the farm..
"He's a thrifty citizen, too. Do you
know that two put of every three
people you meet up in New England
man, woman or child is a safety
bank depositor? (The most conspicu
ous buildings in the vice-president's
home town of Northampton are sav
ings banks.) The savings bank Is the
barometer of financial safety and the
farmer is high among the aggregate
cf savings ' depositors.'
Mr. Coolidge never had any fear of
bolshevism gaining any foothold in
this country. He says too many peo
pie are partners ln the ownership of
their country to engage in any new
-freak forms of government based on
a redistribution of that which already
belongs to them. He had heard
said that 52,000,000 people in this
country either directly or indirectly
are investors in the railroads of the
nation.
- "Our people are getting back to
their former places," he says. "Possi
bly for the future we won't find so
many of them out in the rural dis
tricts; but possibly we won't need sj
many.of them on the farm. As I have
already pointed out we still seem able
to produce enough food for all and
Tlenty to ship abroad. The modern
processes of industry and commerce,
trade and manufacture require that
more people live in or closer to the
cities where the factories and mills
are located. .
"In every event, I believe the bal
ance will adjust itself. The cities
may grow and other cities may spring
up, but we shall always have farms
because we have 'to have them. And
having to maintain farms where we
grow our food and clothing supplies
we shail always have farmers.
"The thing to do for the farmer is
to encourage him id every way; to
make country life attractive. The
needed thing is to pay the farm la
borer a living wage, fitted to his
needs and comparable with the wage
that he might draw in the city.
"Thanks to the various agencies
now working for the welfare of the
country dweller, the modern farm is
much more attractive than it used to
be. There is less drudgery for the
farmer's wife. The farmer's children
have community life, motion pictures,
better schools and the like. The au
tomobile and the tractor have done
much to stabilize conditions affecting
the farm. You see, these problems
seem to be solved as we, go along."
"Have faith in America."
"Do' the day's work."
"Just use plenty of common sense.'''
Bromidic, maybe; but they were
good enough for young America in
the days of infancy, and they are good
enough for the growing republic to
day, thinks the .farmer boy of Ver
mont as he alternates today between
the rostrum of the United States sen
ate and the vice-presidential suite of
the Willard, whence he gases out
upon grass as green as that which
grows up there along the Connecticut
river shores ln old Vermont.
CODE INDICATES TELESCOPE
LONG KNOWN BY ROGER BACON
Key to Works of Monk-Believed to Show Scientist More Than Three
Centuries Ahead of Uis Time.
EY WALTER HART BLUMENTHAL.
TARTL1NG disclosures are prom-
sed the scientific world by those
elucidating the Roger Bacon
cgiher manuscript, which for more
than three years baffled all attempts
at Interpretation. The work was
found seven years ago by Dr. Wilfred
M. Voynich, a noted Pole. It lay neg
lected with other medieval books in
an Austrian castle. It Is what bibli
ographers call a hermetic work, oi
one sealed to the common understand
ing by virtue of its occultism or the
code in which its purport is con
cealed. This type of writing was once
adopted by many savants, if only to
make their works seem more recon
dite than they really were.
One American booklover, George
Fabyan, of Geneva. 111., collects only
cryptic, books and manuscripts which
are known under, the general name
steganography, or any form of cipher
or symbol writing. Of course, short
hand is the commonest of these,
though it is not generally known that
stenography was used centuries ago.
There Is in the British museum a
16th century manuscript Bible writ
ten entirely in shorthand.
The bound Bacon manuscript, which
contains about 750,000 words in
crabbed Latinita;, ciphered and In
parts illegible, has many charts and
diagrams which are the best clews to
the meaning of the text. In the-13th
century, when it was compiled, exper
iments in physics were regarded as
black magic.
TrleHvope Believed I ed.
Roger Bacon,, the English Francis
can monk, who wrote it, lived as long
before Francis Bacon (the contempo
rary of Shakespeare) as we do after
the author of the sententious "Es
says. That gives an Idea ot now me
earlier Bacon made discoveries wl.'oh,
because of his secrecy, were not hit
upon by the rest of the world for
centuries.
The cipher work, to the decoding of
which Dr. William Romaine Newbold
ot the University of Pennsylvania has
now devoted two years, is said to
show that Roger Bacon understood
the theory of the telescope and per
haps actually constructed one more
than three centuries before astron
omers had these inslruments. That
he knew the principle of the enlarg
ing glass, perhaps even of a low-
power microscope, is disclosed ln the
extant manuscript record of his re
searches. How many other discover
ies were locked up in this cipher re
mains to be told by Dr. Newbold
when he addresses the College of
Physicians and the American Philo
sophical society on the remarkable
work.
If, as Dr. Voynich states, Roger
Bacon had a knowledge of the tele
phone it would be a peculiar coinci
dence, for Francis Bacon, in his "New
Atlantis," which p'ctured a future
ideal commonwealth, undoubtedly
foresaw that invention. In the per
fect state which he describes he in
stalls "means to convey sounds In
trunks and pipes, in strange lines and
distances." Not only that, but the
later Bacon guessed a continent where 1
Australia was afterward discovered,
for he placed h'a "New Atlantis"
there. He Inflicts his perfect Antipo
des with a weather bureau. More
over, he antic'pated Burbank, for he
suggests growing "divers new plants,
differing from the vulgar, and mak
ing one plant turn Into another."
The question whether Roger Bacon
used a telescope and a microscope re
vives the contention as to whether It
was not ln the new world that both
tl.ese Instruments were f'rst Invented.
For antlquar'ans who have studied
extant hieroglyphic codices of the
Aztecs say this race when overthrown
by the Spanish conquerors was more
advanced in astronomy and optics
than Europe of that day.
Astec Surgreom Good.
It Is known beyond cavil that ln
surgery the Aztecs practiced the tre
phining operation', and there is reason
to believe that they could produce a
form of local anesthesia. Hpspltals
existed in the native cities of Mexico
at the time of Columbus, and the at
tending native surgeons, says one
annalist, "were so far better than
those ln Europe that they did not
protract the cure In order to increase
the pay." Their skill was, according
to the annalist, of a high order.
But the best proof of the advanced
state of Aztec civilization was their
calendar. Cortez found the European
system, known as the Julian reckon
ing, to be more than 10 days ln error
when tried by the Aztec calendar.
The leap year Is an attempt to adjust
an even number of 365 days to the
actual solar , period of 365 das, i
hour3, 48 minutes, 46 seconds, which
constitutes the true year. .The Aztecs
approximated the true length of the
year within two minutes and nine
seconds. Hence more than five cen
turies elapsed before the loss of an
entire day.
brom the nicety of their calendricsl
system and the fact that comets and
eclipses are marked on their hiero
glyphic drawings, authorities have in
ferred that the Aztecs were familiar
with astronomical Instruments. Their
accurate ideas of the movements of
the heavenly bodies could not have
been gained without such aid. In the
opinion of several authorities.
The early Spanish annalist Ulloa,
speaking of a fine magnifying glass
which he found in Peru, wrote: "I
have seen them of all kinds (convex,
plane and concave), and from the
delicacy of the workmanship one
would have thought these people hud
been furnished with all kinds of In
struments and completely skilled In
optics."
Pearl Harbor Plans in . Abeyance.
HONOLULU. T. H. Plans for devel
opment of Pearl harbor.'lf carried out,
will Increase the monthly payroll of
the naval station from 1500.000 to a
full million dollars and maybe more,
declares Rear-Admlral R. W. Shoe
maker, commandant, but these plans
are being held in abeyance until such
time as housing conditions In Hono
lulu have improved sufficiently to
permit the bringing of greater naval
fcrccs here.
i