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."