What do I remember about Calvin Coolidge? I’m rather ashamed to admit that the only thing I can recall about ol’ Silent Cal is a story I once heard about him. And to this day I’m not sure if it’s an urban legend or not. Oh well. Here it is: One night Calvin Coolidge was at a dinner party, sitting next to his benevolent hostess. Well she turned to him and said, “Mr. President. I made a bet that I could get you to say more than three words tonight.” Coolidge then turned to her and said, “You lose.” End of story.
Hahahah…good one, right? Well it’s all I got. I guess it’s time for me to learn about the man behind the silent demeanor. Back to the library where I grabbed Calvin Coolidge: The American Presidents Series by David Greenberg (New York: Times Books, 2006). The first thing I noticed about the author of this book is that he’s young! He’s also the professor of several erudite classes at Rutgers. Impressive. Let’s see how he handled our 30th prez.
John Calvin Coolidge (he later dropped the John) was born on July 4, 1872 to John and Victoria in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Not much is known about Calvin’s early years growing up in the New England countryside except for the fact that in 1885, his mother died with his sister following her 5 years later. The very next year, Calvin was sent away to school at Black River Academy. “A wallflower at school social events, he wrote to his father about his homesickness, and on weekends he frequently returned to Plymouth Notch to see his father or visit an aunt and uncle in a nearby town” (p. 18). In 1891, he moved on to Amherst College in western Massachusetts where he focused on history, politics, and oratory, even while remaining a loner. “His classmates came to appreciate his deadpan wit and talent for speech making, which he developed through conscientious application in and out of class” (p. 20).
After college, his father urged his son to practice law and so in 1897, Coolidge passed the bar. He never actually practiced law though because starting in the next year, he began his career in the political field by being elected to the city council of Northampton, MA. While working in Northampton, Coolidge met Grace Goodhue, a teacher at the Clarke Institute for the Deaf in Northampton and by 1905, they married. (They would eventually have two sons, John and Calvin Jr.).
For someone allegedly so quiet, Coolidge really rose quickly through the political ranks. In 1909, Coolidge became the Mayor of Northampton and then was elected to the state senate. He attained the highest office in the state when he became Governor of Massachusetts in 1918. “He signed into law measures to improve working conditions, regulate landlords, fund new forests, and control outdoor advertising. He endorsed b ills crossing his desk that provided bonuses, hiring preferences, and other benefits to returning veterans, though he opposed more sweeping measures to guarantee them jobs. And his most significant feat as governor married progressivism’s efficiency to conservationism’s taste for small government: he restructured the state government, consolidation in a single year more than one hundred agencies into fewer than twenty” (p. 28).
In 1919, Coolidge faced the hardest battle of his career to date: the Boston Police Strike. “Poorly paid, saddled with long hours, subject to danger in their daily work, the officers, mostly Irish-Catholic, resented the city’s English-descent Protestant elite” (p. 29). Once the police went on strike, Boston descended into city-wide riots. Coolidge came down hard on the side of the middle class and against labor in this dispute. He said “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time” (p. 31) and sent in the military.
His conservative stand in regards to the Boston Police Strike recommended him to the Republican brass. With the election of 1920 fast approaching, they put him on the Republican ticket with Warren Harding which propelled him into the Vice Presidential office after they won the election. Quiet and unassuming, the position of vice president suited Coolidge quite well. He agreed. “Aside from speeches, I did little writing but I read a great deal and listened much. While I little realized it at the time, it was for me a period of most important preparation” (p. 39). Indeed before he knew it, on August 3, 1823, Coolidge became the 30th President of the United States.
Unfortunately it was after Harding’s death and after Coolidge was president that the scandals of Harding’s administration would gain momentum and hit the public like a sledgehammer. Coolidge had to walk a fine line between upholding Harding’s memory and punishing those near him who deserved it. “While Coolidge’s morality and old-fashioned values reassured a public concerned about the erosion of public virtue, the president was no crusading ideologue seeking to turn back the clock. Rather, his parsimony, his modesty, and his preachments about small government seemed to demonstrate that these values could thrive in a contemporary environment” (p. 53). He loved watching movies and playing practical jokes on people. However, he could also be curt, stern, prickly and passive at times.
Coolidge’s laissez-faire role in government promoted the prosperity of the 1920s. “But the prosperity was beginning to reach an enlarged middle class, and it appeared to bode well for increasingly widespread and long-lasting material comfort in the future” (p. 67). Most do not know this about Coolidge but he began the first application of “trickle down” economics: “the idea that cutting taxes on the rich (or providing them with subsidies) would lead them to invest their windfall and spur productive advances that would benefit workers and consumers alike” (p. 71). It was an extremely popular economic policy at the time.
Coolidge also busted trusts but out of the 70 suits, most of them ended in favor of the trust in question. It was also during this time that the incidents of Ku Klux Klan activity began to rise again along with the Red Scare. Excitement over Prohibition waned while angst over immigration (specifically Jews and the Japanese) increased. The Harlem Renaissance was in full swing and overseas, the Dawes Plan went into effect which promised US monetary aid to war-torn Germany. “Still, when the Dawes Plan was signed, few people foresaw dire consequences. In the summer of 1924 the resolution of the European crisis, however temporary, enhanced Coolidge’s popularity” (p. 90). On this wave of popularity, Coolidge and his vice president, Dawes, won the 1924 election.
Coolidge tried to use his reputation to get the United States to join the League of Nations World Court but he failed every time. On the other hand, he helped fix the situation with Mexico and promoted the Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed in 1928, which outlawed war internationally. In 1926, Andrew Mellow put forth a bill which “provided for across-the-board income tax cuts, zeroed out the gift tax, halved the estate tax, and slashed surtaxes on the wealthy to 20 percent” (p. 128). Lindbergh successfully flew over the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 and Coolidge passed through Congress the Radio Act which foreshadowed the inception of the FCC.
Coolidge decided not to run for a second term in 1928 even though the stock market went into a huge boom and everyone seemed happy. However even then there presaged problems to this prosperity. “This maldistribution of wealth and income compounded the downturn in key economic sectors, because poorer Americans, including farmers and low-wage workers—many of whom still wanted to buy homes and cars and appliances in the decades later years—remained barred at the gates of the new economy” (p. 143).
Upon retirement, Coolidge and his wife moved back to Northampton and traveled a little to Florida, Louisiana, and California. He took the time to head the Harding Memorial Association and the American Antiquarian Society. He even worked for the New York Life Insurance Company and in 1929, published his autobiography. In 1929, he also witnessed the start of the Great Depression, one he would be accused of having begun. Calvin Coolidge died on January 5, 1932 from a heart attack.
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