Calvin Coolidge

Calvin Coolidge: The Republic of Fewer Words

At 2:47 in the morning, in a farmhouse parlour in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, a man in a village without a telephone or electric light was sworn in as President of the United States by his own father, by the light of a kerosene lamp. Warren Harding had died in San Francisco. The new president went back to bed. The scene tells you almost everything about Calvin Coolidge, except that he had once won a national essay prize and been the best public speaker in his college.

Plymouth Notch

He was born John Calvin Coolidge on 4 July 1872 at Plymouth Notch, and grew up between his father's store and the family farm. John Calvin Coolidge Sr. sat in the Vermont legislature and held a string of local offices; the Miller Center identifies his quietness and fiscal caution as the mould in which his son's character was cast. It is a rare case of a presidential temperament that can be traced directly to a single household.

The Amherst Orator

He began as an average student and then, at Amherst College in Massachusetts, turned into a good one, graduating cum laude in 1895. What he was actually known for there was talk: he took the junior prize for oratory, delivered the Grove Oration, and won first prize in a national contest with his senior essay. The reticence for which the country later knew him was a choice, not a limitation.

He read law at Northampton, Massachusetts, was admitted to the bar in the summer of 1897, opened his own practice and went into Republican ward politics. On 4 October 1905 he married Grace Anna Goodhue, a University of Vermont graduate and a teacher; they had two sons, John in 1906 and Calvin Jr. in 1908.

Twenty Years of Small Offices

Nobody has ever climbed the American political ladder more methodically. Coolidge served on the Northampton city council, then as city solicitor in 1900, county clerk in 1903, local Republican Party chairman in 1904, state legislator in 1907, mayor of Northampton in 1910, state senator in 1912, president of the Massachusetts Senate in 1914, and lieutenant governor from 1916 to 1918. Every rung, in order, over eighteen years.

Anybody, Anywhere, Anytime

Elected governor of Massachusetts in 1918, he met the crisis that made him a national figure. When the Boston police went on strike in 1919 he called out the National Guard, and to the labour leader Samuel Gompers he sent the sentence that defined him: "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime."

It was fourteen words and it made him vice-presidential material. At the 1920 Republican convention the delegates nominated him for the second place on the ticket in defiance of the party managers, who wanted someone else.

A Kerosene Lamp

Harding died suddenly in San Francisco in the first days of August 1923 while his vice president was visiting Vermont, out of reach of telephones and electricity. Coolidge took the oath at 2:47 a.m. in his father's parlour. He had, the Miller Center notes, "emerged unscathed from the scandals that plagued the Harding administration, earning a reputation for being honest, direct, and hardworking" — the exact quality the office required at that moment.

In 1924 he ran on the slogan "Keep Cool with Coolidge" and won decisively, taking 54 per cent of the vote and 35 of the 48 states.

Coolidge Prosperity

His programme was a short one: "low taxes, reduced regulation of business, and a balanced budget." With Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon he pushed through tax reductions that chiefly benefited wealthy Americans. He set his face against farm relief and vetoed measures intended to help an agricultural sector already in depression. Abroad he backed the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, "a largely symbolic pact that nonetheless became an important precedent in fostering reliance on international law."

The boom of the mid-decade took his name — Coolidge Prosperity. He was also, despite the silence, a modern media president, working press conferences, photographs, radio and film with real skill. But, as the Miller Center observes, "his prominent profile was not matched by a commitment to activism." He believed the federal government should do less, and he did less.

The Blister

On 7 July 1924 his sixteen-year-old son Calvin Jr. died of blood poisoning that began with a blister raised playing tennis. The father never recovered. "When he went," Coolidge wrote, "the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him." In the summer of 1927, on holiday in South Dakota, he handed the press a single line: "I do not choose to run for president in 1928." He left office in 1929 and died of a heart attack on 5 January 1933, aged sixty.

Why Calvin Is Called a Genius

The claim for Coolidge is aesthetic and temperamental before it is intellectual, and it has a real basis. He was the finest compressor of English prose to hold the office. The Gompers telegram settled a national argument in one clause. "I do not choose to run" ended a presidency in six words and has never been improved upon. And this economy was deliberate craft, not slowness: the same man had won his college's oratory prize and taken first place in a national essay competition. He then spent thirty years subtracting. He also understood the new mass media — radio, newsreel, the press conference — better than most of his contemporaries, and grasped that a public man who says little is quoted more accurately.

The counter-case is the mainstream scholarly one, and it is heavy. David Greenberg of Rutgers University writes that "scholarly opinion looks upon the Coolidge presidency with skepticism, ranking him relatively low," and puts the core failure precisely: "Despite his personal integrity, he offered no sweeping vision or program of action." Greenberg holds that Coolidge's refusal to help a collapsing farm economy let "nearly five thousand rural banks in the Midwest and South" fail, and that his tax cuts widened inequality and fed overproduction; many Americans afterwards linked the crash directly to his decisions. The Kellogg-Briand Pact and the Dawes Plan, his proudest foreign achievements, "did little to prevent the rise of Nazism in Germany or the resurgence of international hostilities." Coolidge's rehabilitation, Greenberg notes, came in the 1980s from conservatives — Ronald Reagan hung his portrait and praised his "hands-off leadership" — which is an ideological revival rather than a scholarly one. The honest summary: a genius of style and self-restraint, and a president whose central conviction was that the presidency should not be used.

Legacy

Coolidge left office at the peak of a boom that collapsed eight months after he handed over. That timing has determined his reputation ever since: to his admirers he is the last president who understood that government could subtract as well as add; to most historians he is the man who watched a speculative bubble inflate and a farm economy die and decided that neither was his business. What survives without argument is the prose. Almost a century on, the sentences are still shorter and harder than anyone else's.

Achievements

• President of the United States (1923–1929)
• member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1907–1908)
• Governor of Massachusetts (1919–1921)
• Vice President of the United States (1921–1923)
• Educated at Amherst College and St. Johnsbury Academy