Brevity, wit, determination and sincerity featured career of âSilent Calâ
Coolidge last appeared here at Hoover rally
From a humble Vermont farmhouse that was still lighted by kerosene when he succeeded Warren G. Harding in 1923, to the Presidency of the United States in his greatest era of prosperity was the career of Calvin Coolidge.
Mr. Coolidge was a homespun Yankee. He was famous for his homespun remarks, the best known of which was:
I do not choose to run for President in 1928.
This ten-word utterance amounted to a virtual declination by Mr. Coolidge of the honor of becoming the nationâs first and only three-term President, one that would have been his for the asking.
Phraseologists, politicians, professors mulled and burned midnight oil over the Coolidge Yankee verbiage. But it meant only one thing â that President Coolidge meant to retire, and was willing to turn the reins of government over to Herbert Hoover.
Ascended all rungs
Mr. Coolidge ascended all the rungs in the ladder of public life in his rise to the Presidency. A quiet student at Amherst College in the graduating class of 1895, his qualities were recognized by the late Senator Dwight W. Morrow, who alone in the class picked Coolidge as the âmost likely to succeed.â
The Coolidge career began across the state boundary from his Vermont home, in Northampton, Massachusetts. From the village council he went to the Massachusetts Legislature, to the Lieutenant Governorship and then became Governor. He had, when elected to this office in 1928, two mottoes:
- âDo the dayâs work.â
- âBe brief.â
Mr. Coolidge had written a book, Have Faith in Massachusetts.
The Boston police strike came the winter of 1919, after Governor Coolidgeâs inauguration. Mr. Coolidgeâs strong, unflinching hand in refusing to deal with the strikers and putting state troopers on the job, catapulted hm on the road to national prominence. The repercussion was heard in Portland, Oregon, in the summer of 1920, when delegates to the Republican convention, after nominating Mr. Harding, threw the bosses overboard.
Nominated Vice President
They nominated Calvin Coolidge for Vice President.
To the quiet, calm Yankee drifted several sobriquets, âLucky Cal,â âSilent Cal,â âthe political accident.â
To the Vice Presidency and to the Presidency, he brought a shrewd common sense, a quiet personality in vivid contrast with some of his predecessors, a keen native wit and many homely likes and dislikes retained from his New England boyhood.
Among his supporters, he inspired an ardent admiration and from his political opponents he often received the bitterest denunciations. But there were, nevertheless, many in the latter group who valued his friendship and liked to smoke a cigar with him and talk things over.
Reaching the Presidency upon the death of Warren G. Harding, Mr. Coolidge was confronted with problems of rehabilitation arising from the World War and the depression of 1921, and almost at once the country was shaken by the scandals which were revealed in the naval oil leases, the Justice Department and the office of the Custodian of Alien Property.
Rode out storms
With serenity and calmness, he rode out these storms and meanwhile instituted a policy of governmental economy and mutual helpfulness in assisting Europe to work out its post-war problems. Such was the success of this program that when he ran for President in 1924, he was returned to office by a popular plurality of 7,000,000, the greatest that had been accorded a candidate for the Presidency up to that time.
The manner of his leaving the Presidency aroused a national interest comparable with that of his induction into that office by his father in a lamp-lit room of the latterâs Vermont farm home.
Mr. and Mrs. Coolidge on the afternoon of the inauguration of Herbert Hoover, his successor, left Washington for their old home in Northampton, Massachusetts, to occupy the same modest house where they started life in 1905, when Mr. Coolidge commenced his public career as city solicitor of that municipality.
As early as the spring of 1927, there was widespread opinion that if Mr. Coolidge wished to be reelected, he only had to indicate it. By his own confession, this view was shared by Mr. Coolidge himself, regardless of the popular tradition that a President must retire after his second term.
In a magazine article published after his retirement, Mr. Coolidge declared he wanted to retire for several reasons which he proceeded to enumerate.
First of all. there was his own health and that of Mrs. Coolidge. He wrote:
It is hazardous to attempt what we feel is beyond our strength.
Confusion clarified
This confusion of âI do not choose to runâ was clarified by Mr. Coolidge in an address before the Republican National Committee the following December. In six crisp sentences which were added at the last minute to a prepared speech, the President declared that he had âeliminatedâ himself entirely from the presidential race and advised the party to continue âthe serious task of selecting another candidate.â This decision, he asserted, âmust be respected.â
But Mr. Coolidge did not stop there. When the Republican National Convention met at Kansas City in June 1928, he dispatched his secretary, Everett Sanders, to the session with instructions âto notify several leaders of the state delegations not to voteâ for him.
He said in his magazine writings:
Had I not done so, I am told I should have been nominated.
Mr. Coolidge is on record as having said that he had never formulated in his own mind what his attitude would have been had he been nominated.
He added:
But I was determined not to have that contingency arise.
One of the major issues of that convention had been a principal subject of contention during the latter years of the Coolidge administration and one that the President had tossed squarely into the center of the presidential campaign. It was farm relief.
Farm unrest
Signs of unrest in the farming sections of the Midwest were apparent when Mr. Coolidge took office. The farmers of that section were confronted with a serious depression and called upon the federal government for help in finding a way out. Their spokesmen in Congress clamored for legislation and the passage of a measure which Mr. Coolidge felt he could not support. That was the original McNary-Haugen Bill, containing the famous and much-discussed equalization fee provision.
Urging the development of cooperative marketing organizations as the best solution for the depression, Mr. Coolidge declared he must oppose any form of price-fixing, either direct or indirect, and called for the measureâs defeat. It was passed twice by Congress and on each occasion, it received a presidential veto. With the second veto, the President sent to Congress a scathing message in which he termed the measure âeconomic folly.â
The Coolidge administration was characterized by peaceful relations with the rest of the world and attempts by the President to make that peace a lasting one. Early in 1927, he asked the principal naval powers to meet for a discussion of the limitation of auxiliary vessels of war, to supplant the Washington Treaty of 1921 which applied only to capital ships. Japan and Great Britain accepted and representatives of the three nations gathered at Geneva.
It has been said that the conference was not preceded by a sufficient amount of preliminary consideration of technical methods of disarmament, but at any rate irreconcilable differences of opinion arising from the widely-varied needs of the United States and England caused the conference to end in a deadlock that continued to the end of the Coolidge administration.
Sought to preserve peace
Mr. Coolidge also sought to preserve peace through the Kellogg multilateral treaty for the renunciation of war, which he declared the most important subject to be discussed by the Senate during his time in the White House. In spite of determined opposition from a group of Senators who regarded the act as an âentangling alliance,â and one destined to lead eventually to membership in the League of Nations, the pact was formally ratified by an overwhelming vote.
The President was also of the opinion that peace could be preserved through the maintenance of a strong national defense, and he was a consistent advocate of a large, but non-competitive navy. In the last year of his administration, he vigorously endorsed a measure authorizing the construction of 15 new 10,000-ton cruisers and a 16,000-ton aircraft carrier. Although the bill encountered stern opposition, it was finally approved by Congress.
Another major Coolidge policy was that of reduction of the high tax schedules that came with the war. These cuts were effected during his administration, which relieved thousands of citizens of the burden of a federal levy in addition to sharply decreasing the amounts paid into the government by the large corporations and big business generally.
Long before he retired from office, Mr. Coolidge received numerous offers to make professional business connections at the expiration of his term, but consistently declined to entertain any of them. After he returned to Northampton, he engaged in literary work temporarily, writing for magazines the story of his administration and an autobiography. About two months after leaving the White House, he made his first business connection when he accepted election as a member of the board of directors of the New York Life Insurance Company. He was chosen to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Myron T. Herrick, U.S. Ambassador to France.
Born July 4, 1872
Calvin Coolidge was born on Independence Day, July 4, 1872, in Plymouth, a country village in the Vermont Hills, the son of John C. and Victoria Moor Coolidge. He was descended from John and Mary Coolidge. who had settled in Watertown, Massachusetts, about 1630, and his ancestry ran through a long line of farmers who lived in Massachusetts until his great-great-grandfather moved into Vermont. His father was the village storekeeper as well as a farmer, and so the son had a double training under his fatherâs care, plowing and digging in the fields and selling and figuring behind the counter. Here were developed in him the industry, frugality and self-reliance which shaped the course of his life. His mother died when he was 13 and four years later, he lost his only sister, but a warm bond of sympathy developed between him and his stepmother.
Between âchoresâ on the farm and in the store, the future President attended the ungraded school at Plymouth, a single room with a wood stove. Afterward he attended the Black River Academy at Ludlow and the academy at St. Johnsbury before going to Amherst College. He was a keen student, but only in a modest way did he enter into the activities of college life.
During his senior year, in open competition with students of all American colleges, he won the first prize, a gold medal, for the best essay on the causes of the Revolutionary War. He graduated in 1895, with the degree of A.B., and at the commencement was grove orator. Had he had money enough to go through law school, that fact might have changed his whole career. As it was, he moved across the Connecticut River to the nearby town of Northampton, Massachusetts, and found a position in the law office of Hammond & Field. Within 20 months, he was admitted to the bar and began practice.
Mr. Coolidge never had time to prove to the world whether he would have made a great lawyer, for he was drawn almost immediately into politics and with few intervals that thereafter was his life work.
Married in 1905
On Oct. 4, 1905, Mr. Coolidge married Miss Grace A. Goodhue of Burlington, Vermont, making a home for his bride in a two-family house in Northampton. They continued to occupy that until Mr. Coolidge became Vice President and returned to it at the conclusion of his services as President. They had two sons, John and Calvin Jr. The latterâs death which occurred after a brief illness during the summer of 1924 was the first of two bereavements in Mr. Coolidgeâs family during his occupancy of the White House. Early in 1928, his father died at his Vermont home while his son was speeding from Washington to his bedside.
Mr. Coolidgeâs training in public service and, it might be said, for the Presidency, began when the latter thought perhaps was farthest from his mind. Less than four years after he left college, he took his seat as a member of the Common Council of Northampton and later served two years as City Solicitor. Next, he was appointed City Clerk, but declined a nomination to succeed himself.
A year after his marriage, he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives and near the end of his second term was elected Mayor of his hometown. Another two years and he was back on âBeacon Hillââ as a Senator, to which office he was reelected. It has often been said that Mr. Coolidgeâs public career was shaped by a series of âpolitical accidents,â and because of them he was frequently referred to as âLucky Cal.â
One of these so-called accidents occurred near the end of his second term as Senator Levi H. Greenwood, who had been president of the Senate, was defeated for reelection because of a campaign against him by the suffragists, whom he had antagonized. Hearing of Greenwoodâs defeat on election night, Mr. Coolidge took the earliest train for Boston and by noon of the next day had lined up enough party leaders to insure him the presidency of the Senate without opposition.
Chosen for second term
It having become a habit with Mr. Coolidge to be reelected, he was chosen for a second term as president of the Senate and his 42-word speech of acceptance became a classic in Massachusetts statecraft. In all that, as in his speech of acceptance the preceding year, he used two phrases which came to be regarded by his friends as his creed: âDo the dayâs workâ and âBe brief.â
Another step forward in the career of the future President that was termed a political accident was his election as Lieutenant Governor in 1915. For more than 50 years, no president of the Senate had been able to ascend higher on the political ladder, but that did not daunt Coolidge. He was reelected twice and during his third term, in 1918, he was chosen Governor of the state by a plurality of 1,700. It was in that year that the late John W. Weeks, afterwards Secretary of War in the Harding and Coolidge Cabinets, yielded his seat in the U.S. Senate to Democrat David I. Walsh by about the same plurality.
Up to the time he was elected Governor, Mr. Coolidge was scarcely known beyond the borders of his state and not very widely within except in the eastern section. Then came the Boston police strike. Whatever the merits of the controversy as to whether the Governor received much of the credit due to Edwin U. Curtis, the Boston Police Commissioner, there is no questioning that the abrupt ending of the strike through the use of the State Guard turned the eyes of the country to the Governor of Massachusetts.
âLaw and orderâ
The next year, Coolidge was reelected Governor on the slogan âLaw and Order.â His plurality was 125,000 and his vote the largest ever given a candidate for Governor up to that time.
During his first term as Lieutenant Governor, Mr. Coolidge formed the friendship of Frank W. Stearns, Boston merchant. The latter immediately became a Coolidge enthusiast, declared the Lieutenant Governor to be one of the great men of Massachusetts and predicted that he would become President of the United States. Mr. Stearns continued to champion the Coolidge cause until his prediction was fulfilled. He became the closest personal friend and unofficial adviser of the President and, with Mrs. Stearns, the most frequent White House guest.
In 1916, Mr. Stearns, in order to learn more about politics, attended the Republican convention in Chicago. Throughout his trip he kept urging the name of Mr. Coolidge and insisted that he was the best âdark horseâ he had ever seen.
Gained prestige
With the prestige that accrued to Mr. Coolidge because of the Boston police strike, some leaders turned to him in 1920 as a possible candidate for the Republican nomination for President. The late Winthrop Murray Crane put his stance behind the Governor and Stearns induced James B. Reynolds to resign as secretary of the National Republican Committee to take charge of the Coolidge campaign for the presidential nomination.
The plans then were unexpectedly upset when Mr. Coolidge in a statement announced that he was not a candidate. In the convention, however, he received the votes of Massachusetts and Vermont and a few scattering from other states. While he was never a serious contender for the head of the ticket, he swept the convention for the place as the running mate of Warren G. Harding.
As Vice President, Mr. Coolidgeâs principal duty was presiding over the Senate. This he delegated to others on Tuesdays and Fridays to permit him to attend the Cabinet meetings at the invitation of President Harding. In 1922, he made a long speaking tour In the West to place before the people the accomplishments of the Harding administration up to that time.
Hardingâs death
After Congress adjourned in March 1923, and before President Harding started on his long-projected trip to Alaska, Mr. Coolidge returned to his native Vermont to visit his father. It was there he received the word that death had cut short the career of President Harding and thus had placed him in the Presidency.
Mr. Coolidge was probably better equipped by experience and knowledge to take up his duties as Chief Executive than any of his predecessors who had been called to that office by the death of a President. He alone of all the Vice Presidents had sat in the Cabinet meetings, where he obtained firsthand information as to the varied affairs of the government and the reasons which had prompted President Harding in his decisions on major problems, domestic and foreign.
It was not surprising therefore that he put his hand to the helm of the Ship of State with a sureness and coolness that impressed those with whom he came in contact. His first announced determination was to carry out the policies inaugurated by Mr. Harding, and in the accomplishment of that task, to retain about him the advisors who had assisted Mr. Harding in shaping these policies.
While this pronouncement was reassuring to the leaders of his party, to most of them he was still an unknown equation. âSilent Cal,â he was called. So, the leader came to see him in a steady stream, ostensibly to pay their respects, but in reality, with the hope of learning what manner of man it was who had sprung overnight to the titular leadership of their party.
Favorable reaction
What the President said to them remained a closed book, but signs were not lacking that he could shed his cloak of reticence and talk, briefly perhaps, but to the end of making known his views, definitely and conclusively. The reaction was favorable and it was not long before some party leaders were hailing him as the logical Republican candidate In 1924.
The tranquil qualities of his mind stood Mr. Coolidge in good stead in many a difficult moment during his Presidency. Within a few months after he was first inducted into office, he found himself facing a situation in government which might have tried the soul of a man lacking his fundamental calm and belief in the unerring judgment of the American people.
Under a drive by the Senate that perhaps was without precedent, revelations of scandal in high places rocked the nation. There first were disclosures as to the conduct of the Veteransâ Bureau under the administration of Charles R. Forbes, followed quickly by a series of sensations in the investigations of the naval oil lease, and the administration of the Department of Justice under Harry M. Daugherty.
Served public interest
Refusing to be stampeded even by his own political advisers, Mr. Coolidge met each situation with a cool deliberation, taking such action in his mind would best conserve the public interest. He quietly ordered prosecutions in the oil scandal, and although eventually he sent Attorney General Daugherty into involuntary retirement, he passed no judgment on the Senate disclosures regarding the Department of Justice, requesting Mr. Daughertyâs resignation on the ground that he was not competent to pass upon what documents in his department, should be submitted to the Senate investigators.
The Presidentâs enemies insisted that his hand was forced in every action he took in connection with the Senate revelations and that thought of his own political future dominated. On the other hand, his friends were equally as positive in their declarations that he had met these situations with the same courage that he had the police strike in Boston which first brought him into national prominence.
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