30. CALVIN COOLIDGE 1923-1929
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."
