Calvin Coolidge

President of the United States (1923–1929)

• Born: July 4, 1872
• Birthplace: Plymouth, Vermont
• Died: January 5, 1933
• Place of death: Northampton, Massachusetts

Practicing the virtues most Americans seemed to honor in absentia, Calvin Coolidge served as president of the United States during the central years of that extraordinary decade, the 1920’s.

Early Life

Calvin Coolidge’s father, Colonel John Calvin Coolidge (the rank was an honorary one bestowed for service on the governor’s staff), was a prominent figure in Plymouth, Vermont, who had served several terms in the state legislature. Calvin’s mother, the former Victoria Josephine Moor, died when young Calvin was twelve. It was a painful loss to the boy, and his memories of his mother were very precious to him. It was from her family that he inherited the dash of Indian blood that so charmed political pundits during his presidential years. His only sister, Abigail, who was three years younger than Calvin, died in her teens. Her death was another blow to the sensitive youth.

After a brief period spent teaching school, Coolidge entered Amherst College in 1891. There he joined the College Republican Club and, in his senior year, a social fraternity. He was one of three persons in his class chosen to speak at graduation. His was the task of presenting a humorous speech, which he completed with considerable wit and the approval of his class. In 1895, he moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, and began the study of law. At the age of twenty-five, he was admitted to the bar and settled into the quiet, sober, often dull, and always frugal lifestyle that he followed until his death.

Standing slightly over five feet eight, Coolidge was a slim, rather drab, and colorless figure. His once reddish hair became a sandy brown as he matured. With his broad forehead, cleft chin, and thin features, he lived up to the Washington description of him as one who was “weaned on a dill pickle.” Well deserving the sobriquet Silent Cal, Coolidge began his diligent climb through small-town politics. Always listening and working rather than talking, though he could speak effectively, with his dry, raspy voice and flat New England accent, Coolidge became a local Republican committeeman before he was thirty and not long thereafter was elected to the Republican State Committee. In addition, Coolidge served on the town council, was named vice president of a local savings bank, and, in 1900, was appointed city solicitor.

At the age of thirty-two, Coolidge courted and wed Grace Goodhue, a teacher at the local school for the hearing impaired. Her charm and vivacious personality were a perfect foil to his lack of, and disregard for, the social graces. Theirs was a happy and contented marriage, each understanding and accepting the foibles of the other. They had two sons, John and Calvin Jr., who completed the family.

In 1906, Coolidge was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where the same qualities that had served him so well in Northampton led to his slow but steady rise to leadership. Coolidge was elected mayor of Northampton in 1910; in 1912, he was elected to the state senate; and two years later, he was chosen president of the state senate. The next logical step was the office of lieutenant governor, to which he was elected in 1916, and in 1918, he was elected governor of Massachusetts.

Life’s Work

Events conspired to make Governor Coolidge a national figure. The labor unrest that followed the end of World War IWorld War I produced the Boston police strike in 1919. Though the strike was settled largely without the intervention of the governor, Coolidge captured the imagination of the country and the convictions of the time with a dramatic phrase in a telegram sent to American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” This statement catapulted Coolidge into national prominence and made him the popular choice for vice president among the delegates to the Republican National Convention in 1920. Safely elected with President Warren G. Harding in the Republican return to “normalcy,” Coolidge gave undistinguished service in an undistinguished office.

Coolidge had no part in the scandals that pervaded the Harding administration. He remained untouched by the revelations of bribery and misuse of high office. When he succeeded to the presidency on the death of Harding in 1923, he seemed to represent the incorruptible side of a tarnished Republican coin. As if to symbolize his virtues, Coolidge, visiting his home in Vermont when he learned of Harding’s death, was sworn in as president by his father (a notary public) in the light of a kerosene lamp. The rugged simplicity of the swearing in was in sharp contrast to the bright urban lights and fast-paced life that seemed more typical of the 1920’s. Coolidge made no changes in Harding’s cabinet. He came especially under the influence of Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, who represented the established wealth that was, to Coolidge, the result of success in America. Coolidge particularly identified his and the country’s interests with the class represented by Mellon in his most often quoted statement that “the business of America is business.”

Coolidge presided over a government largely retreating from the Progressive Era, with its activism and reforms, and from the demands of victory in World War I. He was personally honest, loyal, and frugal, and he served as the keeper of America’s conscience. While the nation indulged itself in an orgy of spendthrift frivolity, the silent approval of so austere a president seemed to make virtuous an otherwise hedonistic attitude toward life.

Coolidge was personally popular and was always an adroit politician, so it was with ease that he was nominated for president in his own right in 1924. These same factors, supported by an accelerating prosperity and aided by a seriously divided Democratic Party (whose nominating convention cast 103 ballots before deciding on John W. Davis of West Virginia as its candidate), led to a Republican victory. The Coolidge years saw decreasing governmental activity and few legislative accomplishments. Coolidge vetoed one of the few major bills of the era, the McNary-Haugen bill, which was designed to bring stability to the farm market. He continued the traditional high tariff policy supported by the Republicans, and both his policy and his pronouncements encouraged the upward movement of the stock market that characterized his years as president.

Coolidge vigorously supported economy in the operation of the government. He believed that a reduction in government costs, while beneficial in its own right, would also make possible a reduction in taxes, particularly for the business classes. He mildly favored railroad consolidation in the interest of greater efficiency and was interested in a waterways project in the St. Lawrence area (though never the Mussel Shoals project proposed during his term, which formed the base of the future Tennessee Valley Authority). In spite of a growing reputation as “Silent Cal,” Coolidge held frequent and often lengthy press conferences during his years as president.

In foreign policy, Coolidge, like his party, opposed American membership in the League of Nations. He did, however, unsuccessfully support American participation and membership in the World Court. In line with his respect for business, Coolidge staunchly demanded that European nations repay to the United States their debts from World War I. He supported efforts to work out a schedule of payments (tied to the payment of German reparations), and he believed that the payment of the valid debts was necessary to provide worldwide economic stability. He was also a strong advocate of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and its effort to promote peace by outlawing the use of war as a national policy.

Coolidge’s personal popularity, combined with the continuing prosperity of the nation during his administration, made him seem a logical candidate for renomination in 1928. Therefore, it was a stunning surprise when, while on vacation in 1927, he informed reporters that “I do not choose to run for President in 1928.” It was a statement on which he never elaborated and from which he never deviated. Many contemporaries believed that he wanted another full term but wanted to be drafted by his party. Others believed that the decision stemmed from a reluctance to violate the two-term tradition (since he had already served the remainder of Harding’s term). For others, it seemed that the death of his youngest son in the White House had taken much of the joy from public life, and he seemed tired of holding office. Whatever the reason, the decision was never effectively challenged, and the Republicans turned to Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover as their candidate in 1928.

Coolidge and his wife left the White House in the same quiet style that had always characterized their life. Coolidge refused many offers of employment, lest his name and former position be used to advertise a business. He and Grace returned to Northampton, where, for the first time in all of their years of marriage, Coolidge finally purchased a house. He kept busy writing his autobiography, as well as a number of magazine articles, and served on several committees. He died quietly and alone of a coronary thrombosis on January 5, 1933.

Significance

With the advent of the Great Depression in 1929, the Roaring Twenties, the Coolidge era, came to an end. Coolidge was deeply concerned about the effect of the Depression, especially so for those whose losses were heavy. Yet he had always had a clear perception of credit as another form of debt and was, himself, largely untouched by the crash. Far more a Hamiltonian than a Jeffersonian in his philosophy of government, Coolidge supported the interests of property as necessary for the stability of the government. He believed that a healthy business environment was essential to the national well-being of the United States. Coolidge was personally frugal, always saving a part of his salary no matter how small, and he carried that same commitment to frugality with him into government.

Coolidge believed that government should not intrude in the daily lives of its citizens. It is one of the great ironies of American history that his years of inactivity at the head of the nation helped to pave the way for the enlarged role of government that the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt brought about in an effort to recover from the Depression.

The decade of the 1920’s was unique in American history. Presiding over this boisterous era was a person who was essentially shy, yet competent, respectable, cautious, loyal, and honest. These were qualities of character held in high regard by Americans even as they flouted them. Coolidge was always an intensely political person, a quality often overlooked as more flamboyant personalities strutted on center stage. He had a politician’s sensitivity to the public’s needs and wishes. He captured in himself those qualities Americans both desired and trusted—an island of stability and old-fashioned virtue in an ocean of new values.

Coolidge Prosperity was more than simply a campaign slogan. It was a very real perception of cause and effect, and much of Coolidge’s popularity stemmed from that perception. Coolidge was an enormously popular president—popular more as a symbol than as an individual whose idiosyncrasies and foibles were well known and well loved. He was precisely suited to the public temperament in the 1920’s, and perhaps he could have succeeded in no other era. His personality and philosophy could not have provided effective leadership for either the surging reforms of the Progressive Era or the demands for an enlarged government under the New Deal. Rather, he provided a period of rest and retreat from government activity.

Coolidge was not a great president; neither was he a failure. He was a person unusually suited to an unusual time. More a symbol of an imagined past in which simplicity, honesty, and frugality were cherished than a reflection of the roaring rush of modernity that characterized the 1920’s, Coolidge gave Americans what they wanted, though the lesson of history might suggest that he was not exactly what they needed.

Bibliography

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Bradford, Gamaliel. The Quick and the Dead. Boston: Houghton, 1931. Print.

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Gilbert, Robert E. "Calvin Coolidge's Tragic Presidency: The Political Effects of Bereavement and Depression." Jour. of Amer. Studies 39.1 (2005): 87–109. Print.

Greenberg, David. Calvin Coolidge. New York: Times, 2006. Print.

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Murray, Robert K. The Politics of Normalcy: Governmental Theory and Practice in the Harding-Coolidge Era. New York: Norton, 1973. Print.

Romero, Francine Sanders, ed. Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt Through Coolidge: Debating the Issues in Pro and Con Primary Documents. Westport: Greenwood P, 2002. Print.

Taylor, Jeff. "fighting Bob Vs. Silent Cal: The Conservative Tradition from La Follette to Taft and Beyond." Modern Age 50.4 (2008): 295–305. Print.

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White, William Allen. A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge. New York: Macmillan, 1938. Print.