Calvin Coolidge
30th U.S. President
| Date of Birth | : | 04 Jul, 1872 |
| Date of Death | : | 05 Jan, 1933 |
| Place of Birth | : | Plymouth Notch, Plymouth, Vermont, United States |
| Profession | : | Lawyer, Statesperson |
| Nationality | : | American |
Calvin Coolidge (ক্যালভিন কুলিজ) was an American attorney and politician who served as the 30th president of the United States from 1923 to 1929.
Born
Born in Vermont, Coolidge was a Republican lawyer from New England who climbed the ladder of Massachusetts politics, becoming the state's 48th governor. His response to the Boston police strike of 1919 thrust him into the national spotlight as a man of decisive action. The next year, Coolidge was elected the country's 29th vice president and succeeded the presidency upon the sudden death of President Warren G. Harding in 1923. Elected in his own right in 1924, Coolidge gained a reputation as a small-government conservative with a taciturn personality and dry sense of humor that earned him the nickname "Silent Cal". Though his widespread popularity enabled him to run for a second full term, Coolidge chose not to run again in 1928, remarking that ten years as president would be "longer than any other man has had it – too long!"
Throughout his gubernatorial career, Coolidge ran on the record of fiscal conservatism, strong support for women's suffrage, and a vague opposition to Prohibition. During his presidency, he restored public confidence in the White House after the many scandals of the Harding administration. He signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which granted U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans, and oversaw a period of rapid and expansive economic growth known as the "Roaring Twenties", leaving office with considerable popularity. He was known for his hands-off governing approach and pro-business stances; as biographer Claude Fuess wrote: "He embodied the spirit and hopes of the middle class, could interpret their longings and express their opinions. That he did represent the genius of the average is the most convincing proof of his strength."
Scholars have ranked Coolidge in the lower half of U.S. presidents. He gains nearly universal praise for his stalwart support of racial equality during a period of heightened racial tension in the United States, and is highly praised by advocates of smaller government and laissez-faire economics, while supporters of an active central government generally view him far less favorably. His critics argue that he failed to use the country's economic boom to help struggling farmers and workers in other flailing industries, and there is still much debate among historians as to the extent to which Coolidge's economic policies contributed to the onset of the Great Depression.
Early life and family history
John Calvin Coolidge Jr. was born on July 4, 1872, in Plymouth Notch, Vermont—the only U.S. president to be born on Independence Day. He was the elder of the two children of John Calvin Coolidge Sr. (1845–1926) and Victoria Josephine Moor (1846–1885). Although named for his father, from early childhood Coolidge was addressed by his middle name. The name Calvin was used in multiple generations of the Coolidge family, apparently selected in honor of John Calvin, the Protestant Reformer.
Coolidge Senior engaged in many occupations and developed a statewide reputation as a prosperous farmer, storekeeper, and public servant. He held various local offices, including justice of the peace and tax collector and served in both houses of the Vermont General Assembly. When Coolidge was 12 years old, his chronically ill mother died at the age of 39, perhaps from tuberculosis. His younger sister, Abigail Grace Coolidge (1875–1890), died at the age of 15, probably of appendicitis, when Coolidge was 18. Coolidge's father married a Plymouth schoolteacher in 1891, and lived to the age of 80.
Coolidge's family had deep roots in New England. His earliest American ancestor, John Coolidge emigrated from Cottenham, Cambridgeshire, England, around 1630 and settled in Watertown, Massachusetts. Coolidge's great-great-grandfather, also named John Coolidge, was an American military officer in the Revolutionary War and one of the first selectmen of the town of Plymouth. His grandfather Calvin Galusha Coolidge served in the Vermont House of Representatives. His cousin Park Pollard was a businessman in Cavendish, Vermont and the longtime chair of the Vermont Democratic Party. Coolidge was also a descendant of Samuel Appleton, who settled in Ipswich and led the Massachusetts Bay Colony during King Philip's War. Coolidge's mother was the daughter of Hiram Dunlap Moor, a Plymouth Notch farmer, and Abigail Franklin.
Early career and marriage
Education and law practice
Coolidge attended the Black River Academy and then St. Johnsbury Academy before enrolling at Amherst College, where he distinguished himself in the debating class. As a senior, he joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity and graduated cum laude. While at Amherst, Coolidge was profoundly influenced by philosophy professor Charles Edward Garman, a Congregational mystic who had a neo-Hegelian philosophy.
Coolidge explained Garman's ethics forty years later
There is a standard of righteousness that might does not make right, that the end does not justify the means, and that expediency as a working principle is bound to fail. The only hope of perfecting human relationships is in accordance with the law of service under which men are not so solicitous about what they shall get as they are about what they shall give. Yet people are entitled to the rewards of their industry. What they earn is theirs, no matter how small or how great. But the possession of property carries the obligation to use it in a larger service...
At his father's urging after graduation, Coolidge moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, to become a lawyer. Coolidge followed the common practice of apprenticing with a local law firm, Hammond & Field, and reading law with them. John C. Hammond and Henry P. Field, both Amherst graduates, introduced Coolidge to practicing law in the county seat of Hampshire County, Massachusetts. In 1897, Coolidge was admitted to the Massachusetts bar, becoming a country lawyer. With his savings and a small inheritance from his grandfather, Coolidge opened his own law office in Northampton in 1898. He practiced commercial law, believing that he served his clients best by staying out of court. As his reputation as a hard-working and diligent attorney grew, local banks and other businesses began to retain his services.
Marriage and family
In 1903, Coolidge met Grace Goodhue, a graduate of the University of Vermont and a teacher at Northampton's Clarke School for the Deaf. They married on October 4, 1905, at 2:30 p.m. in a small ceremony which took place in the parlor of Grace's family's house, having overcome her mother's objections to the marriage. The newlyweds went on a honeymoon trip to Montreal, originally planned for two weeks but cut short by a week at Coolidge's request. After 25 years he wrote of Grace, "for almost a quarter of a century she has borne with my infirmities and I have rejoiced in her graces".
The Coolidges had two sons: John (1906–2000) and Calvin Jr. (1908–1924). On June 30, 1924, Calvin Jr. had played tennis with his brother on the White House tennis courts without putting on socks and developed a blister on one of his toes. The blister subsequently degenerated into sepsis. Calvin Jr. died a little over a week later at the age of 16. The President never forgave himself for Calvin Jr's death. His eldest son John said it "hurt terribly", and psychiatric biographer Robert E. Gilbert, author of The Tormented President: Calvin Coolidge, Death, and Clinical Depression, said that Coolidge "ceased to function as President after the death of his sixteen-year-old son". Gilbert explains in his book how Coolidge displayed all ten of the symptoms listed by the American Psychiatric Association as evidence of major depressive disorder following Calvin Jr.'s sudden death. John later became a railroad executive, helped to start the Coolidge Foundation, and was instrumental in creating the President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site.
Coolidge was frugal, and when it came to securing a home, he insisted upon renting. He and his wife attended Northampton's Edwards Congregational Church before and after his presidency.
Presidency
Acceding to the presidency upon Harding’s unexpected death (August 2, 1923), Coolidge took the oath of office from his father, a notary public, by the light of a kerosene lamp at 2:47 AM on August 3 at the family home in Plymouth, Vermont. He inherited an administration mired in scandal. Cautiously, quietly, and skillfully, Coolidge rooted out the perpetrators and restored integrity to the executive branch. A model of personal rectitude himself, Coolidge convinced the American people that the presidency was once again in the hands of someone they could trust. The change of ambience in the White House did not miss the keen eye of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, who said that the new White House was “as different as a New England front parlor is from a backroom in a speakeasy.”
At the Republican convention in 1924 Coolidge was nominated virtually without opposition. Running on the slogan “Keep Cool with Coolidge,” he won a landslide victory over conservative Democrat John W. Davis and Progressive Party candidate Robert La Follette, gaining about 54 percent of the popular vote to Davis’s 29 percent and La Follette’s nearly 17 percent; in the electoral college Coolidge received 382 votes to Davis’s 136 and La Follette’s 13. Coolidge’s inaugural address, the first inaugural address to be broadcast on national radio, focused principally on his vision of the role of the United States in the world.
Coolidge was famous for being a man of few but well-chosen words. Despite his reputation, “Silent Cal,” as he was called, had a keen sense of humour, and he could be talkative in private family settings. His wit was displayed in a characteristic exchange with a Washington, D.C., hostess, who told him, “You must talk to me, Mr. President. I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you.” Coolidge replied, “You lose.”
Coolidge captured the prevailing sentiment of the American people in the 1920s when he said, “The chief business of the American people is business.” The essence of the Coolidge presidency was its noninterference in and bolstering of American business and industry. Government regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, now were staffed by people who sought to assist business expansion rather than to police business practices. Most Americans, identifying their own prosperity with the growth of corporate profits, welcomed this reversal of progressive reforms. They generally agreed with the assessment of Oliver Wendell Holmes, associate justice of the Supreme Court: “While I don’t expect anything very astonishing from [Coolidge] I don’t want anything very astonishing.”
Key to the conservative, pro-business focus of the Coolidge administration was Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. A multimillionaire himself, Mellon believed strongly that reducing taxes for the rich was the best way to expand the nation’s wealth. He held that, as the rich invested funds that otherwise would have been taken away in taxes, new businesses would form and older enterprises would expand and that the result would be more jobs and greater national production. Under the leadership of Coolidge and Mellon, Congress sharply reduced income taxes and estate taxes.
One form of business enterprise, however, received almost no help from the Coolidge administration: agriculture. Farmers constituted the one group of producers clearly not participating in the decade’s prosperity. Twice Congress passed the McNary-Haugen bill, calling for the federal government to purchase surplus crops. Twice (1927 and 1928) Coolidge vetoed it, and the economic woes of American farmers persisted well into the following decade. Coolidge also vetoed a bill offering a bonus to veterans of World War I; Congress overrode that veto in 1924.
U.S. Pres. Calvin Coolidge (seated left) signing the Kellogg-Briand Pact, January 1929, Washington, D.C.
Reflecting its focus on internal economic growth, the Coolidge administration showed little interest in events outside the nation’s borders. Coolidge adamantly opposed U.S. membership in the League of Nations, though he did increase unofficial American involvement in the international organization. Ironically for such an inward-looking administration, two of its members received the Nobel Prize for Peace. In 1925, Vice President Charles G. Dawes won the prize for his program to help Germany meet its war debt obligations, and Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg won it in 1929 for his role in negotiating the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a multinational agreement renouncing war as an instrument of national policy.
Cabinet of Pres. Calvin Coolidge
The table provides a list of cabinet members in the administration of Pres. Calvin Coolidge.
| August 3, 1923–March 3, 1925 (Term 1) | |
|---|---|
| State | Charles Evans Hughes |
| Treasury | Andrew W. Mellon |
| War | John Wingate Weeks |
| Navy | Edwin Denby |
| Curtis Dwight Wilbur (from March 18, 1924) | |
| Attorney General | Harry Micajah Daugherty |
| Harlan Fiske Stone (from April 9, 1924) | |
| Interior | Hubert Work |
| Agriculture | Henry Cantwell Wallace |
| Howard Mason Gore (from November 21, 1924) | |
| Commerce | Herbert Hoover |
| Labor | James John Davis |
| March 4, 1925–March 3, 1929 (Term 2) | |
| State | Frank B. Kellogg |
| Treasury | Andrew W. Mellon |
| War | John Wingate Weeks |
| Dwight F. Davis (from October 14, 1925) | |
| Navy | Curtis Dwight Wilbur |
| Attorney General | John Garibaldi Sargent |
| Interior | Hubert Work |
| Roy Owen West (from January 21, 1929) | |
| Agriculture | William Marion Jardine |
| Commerce | Herbert Hoover |
| William Fairfield Whiting (from December 11, 1928) | |
| Labor | James John Davis |
Death
Coolidge died suddenly from coronary thrombosis at "The Beeches" on January 5, 1933, at 12:45 p.m., aged 60. Shortly before his death, Coolidge confided to an old friend: "I feel I no longer fit in with these times." Coolidge is buried in Plymouth Notch Cemetery, Plymouth Notch, Vermont. The nearby family home is maintained as one of the original buildings on the Calvin Coolidge Homestead District site. The State of Vermont dedicated a new visitors' center nearby to mark Coolidge's 100th birthday on July 4, 1972.
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