At 2:30 on the
morning of August 3, 1923, while visiting in Vermont, Calvin Coolidge received
word that he was President. By the light of a kerosene lamp, his father, who was
a notary public, administered the oath of office as Coolidge placed his hand on
the family Bible.
Coolidge was
"distinguished for character more than for heroic achievement," wrote a
Democratic admirer, Alfred E. Smith. "His great task was to restore the dignity
and prestige of the Presidency when it had reached the lowest ebb in our history
... in a time of extravagance and waste...."
Born in
Plymouth, Vermont, on July 4, 1872, Coolidge was the son of a village
storekeeper. He was graduated from Amherst College with honors, and entered law
and politics in Northampton, Massachusetts. Slowly, methodically, he went up the
political ladder from councilman in Northampton to Governor of Massachusetts, as
a Republican. En route he became thoroughly conservative.
As President,
Coolidge demonstrated his determination to preserve the old moral and economic
precepts amid the material prosperity which many Americans were enjoying. He
refused to use Federal economic power to check the growing boom or to ameliorate
the depressed condition of agriculture and certain industries. His first message
to Congress in December 1923 called for isolation in foreign policy, and for tax
cuts, economy, and limited aid to farmers.
He rapidly
became popular. In 1924, as the beneficiary of what was becoming known as
"Coolidge prosperity," he polled more than 54 percent of the popular vote.
In his Inaugural
he asserted that the country had achieved "a state of contentment seldom before
seen," and pledged himself to maintain the status quo. In subsequent years he
twice vetoed farm relief bills, and killed a plan to produce cheap Federal
electric power on the Tennessee River.
The political
genius of President Coolidge, Walter Lippmann pointed out in 1926, was his
talent for effectively doing nothing: "This active inactivity suits the mood and
certain of the needs of the country admirably. It suits all the business
interests which want to be let alone.... And it suits all those who have become
convinced that government in this country has become dangerously complicated and
top-heavy...."
Coolidge was
both the most negative and remote of Presidents, and the most accessible. He
once explained to Bernard Baruch why he often sat silently through interviews:
"Well, Baruch, many times I say only 'yes' or 'no' to people. Even that is too
much. It winds them up for twenty minutes more."
But no President
was kinder in permitting himself to be photographed in Indian war bonnets or
cowboy dress, and in greeting a variety of delegations to the White House.
Both his dry
Yankee wit and his frugality with words became legendary. His wife, Grace
Goodhue Coolidge, recounted that a young woman sitting next to Coolidge at a
dinner party confided to him she had bet she could get at least three words of
conversation from him. Without looking at her he quietly retorted, "You lose."
And in 1928, while vacationing in the Black Hills of South Dakota, he issued the
most famous of his laconic statements, "I do not choose to run for President in
1928."
By the time the
disaster of the Great Depression hit the country, Coolidge was in retirement.
Before his death in January 1933, he confided to an old friend, ". . . I feel I
no longer fit in with these times."