Warren G. Harding, called “Winnie” by his mother, was born on November 2, 1865, in Blooming Grove, Ohio. When he was ten, his family moved to the small Ohio village of Caledonia where he was raised. Both his parents were doctors—an unusual distinction for Phoebe Harding, who was granted a medical license based upon her experience as a midwife and in assisting her husband, George Harding. Warren cherished his childhood memories that painted a wholesome and perfect picture-book boyhood. An upbringing filled with farm chores, swimming in the local creek, and playing in the village band were the basis of his down-home appeal later in life. Like so many small-town boys in post-Civil War Ohio, Harding, along with his five younger siblings (four sisters and a brother) attended a one room schoolhouse where he learned to read, write, and spell from the McGuffey's Readers. At age fourteen, he entered Ohio Central College, from which he graduated with a B.S. degree in 1882, having achieved some distinction for editing the campus newspaper.

After college, Harding taught in a country school outside Marion, Ohio, for one term before trying his hand at law, insurance sales, and journalism for the local newspaper. In 1884, he raised $300 to purchase with two friends the nearly defunct Marion Star newspaper. They achieved moderate success over the next five years. In 1891, Warren, aged twenty-five, married a local divorcée, Florence "Flossie" Mabel Kling DeWolf, five years his senior. She had a ten-year-old son by her former husband and a sizable fortune from her wealthy family. She pursued Warren relentlessly, and he finally gave in, even though her father once stopped Warren on the street and threatened to kill him if he married his daughter. It was a match that her father objected to because of the rumor that Warren's family had black ancestors.

Publishing and Politics

For the next ten years, Harding's business prospered, in part due to Florence Harding's keen business eye, but principally to Harding's good-natured manner. His paper became a favorite with Ohio politicians of both parties because of his evenhanded reporting. He never ran a critical story if he could avoid it. His employees also loved and respected him for his willingness to share company profits with them. In his entire career, he never fired a single employee. In 1899, Harding won the first of two terms to the Ohio State Senate, serving as majority leader before his bid for the lieutenant governorship in 1903. After leaving office in 1905, he returned to his newspaper for five years, venturing again into state politics in a losing bid for governor in 1910.

So popular had he become with party regulars that he was given the honor of placing President William Howard Taft's name in nomination at the party convention in 1912. When the pro-Theodore Roosevelt delegates shouted him down, Harding went away from this experience offended by the display of loud and rude behavior. In 1914, Harding won the Ohio Republican primary for senator and beat Attorney General Timothy Hogan in the general election. Harding's supporters viciously attacked Hogan for being a Catholic intent on delivering Ohio to the pope. The religion issue dominated the election and gave Harding an overwhelming victory, though he never personally mentioned religion in his speeches. Still, the dirty election campaign was a smudged mark on his political record that never set easy with him.

Harding's undistinguished senate career made him few enemies and many friends. Always the "good fellow," he missed more sessions than he attended—being absent for key debates on the prohibition and suffrage amendments to the U.S. Constitution. As the man acceptable to almost all party regulars, Harding served as the keynote speaker and chairman of the 1916 Republican national convention. On the League of Nations, he stood solidly with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in opposing President Woodrow Wilson's version of the League. (Interestingly, when Harding was President, his position was not as clear.)

The Campaign and Election of 1920:

No one expected Warren G. Harding to gain the Republican nomination for President when he arrived at the Chicago convention in 1920. No one, that is, except his close friend and political manager, Harry Daugherty, the wealthy corporate lawyer and lobbyist from Ohio. Daugherty believed that none of the front-runners would carry the nomination on the first ballots. Harding was known to all of them, had played poker with most of them, and was "right" on every important issue. He represented a critically important state in the election, had not opposed prohibition or suffrage, and had no political enemies. Finally, with his distinguished "presidential" profile, he was among the best-looking politicians in the nation—a sure plus, believed his friends, in an election when millions of women would vote for the first time in the nation's history.

The party leaders gave Harding the nomination on the tenth ballot. The popular governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, was nominated for vice president. Their Republican platform condemned the Wilson administration for its handling of World War I and opposed the League of Nations. On trade and immigration, Harding and Coolidge (who would succeed Harding in office) advocated a higher protective tariff and supported new immigration requirements. Overall, they promised to return the nation to more normal times—like those prior to all the out of control drives for reform that had begun in the 1890s.

The Democrats, who met in San Francisco, also turned to an Ohio newspaperman, James M. Cox, a liberal Democrat who had served as the progressive governor of the state during the Wilson years. But they were hardly united, and it took forty-four ballots to put him over the top. The second spot on the ticket went to the popular Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York, who would become the nation's thirty-second President. The Democratic nominees reflected the party's determination to continue Woodrow Wilson's progressive agenda at home and idealistic involvement abroad.

Returning to the political strategy associated with the pre-Roosevelt days, Harding conducted a front-porch campaign in which he spoke in overused cliché (urging a "return to normalcy" after the hardships of the world war and the struggle over the League of Nations) to reporters and visitors from his home in Marion. Cox traveled twenty-two thousand miles making over four hundred speeches. The most popular entertainer in American, Al Jolson, stumped the nation for Harding, singing songs that compared the candidate to popular Republican President Abraham Lincoln. Harding won in a massive landslide, pulling over 7 million more votes than Cox. The Socialist Party candidate won 3 percent of the electorate, amassing nine hundred thousand votes. In the Electoral College, Harding won thirty-seven states and 404 votes; Cox won only eleven southern states, with 127 Electoral College votes, the traditional "Solid South" base of the Democratic Party.

As President, Warren G. Harding often seemed overwhelmed by the burdens of his administration. He frequently confided to his friends that the job was beyond him. But he worked at his duties intensely and tried to keep his campaign promise of naming the best men in the nation to his cabinet. Some of them were clearly men of talent and energy.

Men of Competence and Corruption

His secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, the former presidential candidate, was one of the ablest of his choices. Andrew Mellon, the fabulously wealthy Pittsburgh financier, proved to be a powerful and effective though rigidly partisan secretary of the treasury. And the brilliant engineer Herbert Hoover, who had earned an international reputation for his work in feeding the starving millions of Western Europe after World War I, transformed the Department of Commerce into an efficient and effective support agency for U.S. business at home and abroad. All three cabinet members would stay on in the Coolidge administration. (Hoover would become the thirty-first President of the United States.)Along with these distinguished men, Harding also surrounded himself with an unpleasant group of dishonest cheats known as "the Ohio gang." Many of them were later charged with defrauding the government, and a few of them went to jail. Harding clearly knew of their limitations, but he liked to play poker with them, drink whiskey, smoke, tell jokes, play golf, and keep late hours. Alice Roosevelt Longworth (the daughter of twenty-sixth President Theodore Roosevelt) once described the scene that she encountered at one of Harding's card games: "the air heavy with tobacco smoke, trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whiskey, cards and poker chips ready at hand—a general atmosphere of waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on the desk, and spittoons alongside." (He once gambled away the entire White House china set in a card game.)His close friend and political manager, Harry Daugherty, whom he named attorney general, was one of the worst—and one of the slickest. He survived impeachment attempts by Congress and two indictments for defrauding the government in the disposal of alien property confiscated by his office from German nationals. Another schemer, Albert Fall, secretary of the interior, secretly allowed private oil companies to tap the Teapot Dome oil reserve in Wyoming and the Elk Hills oil reserve in California in return for least $300,000 paid to him in bribes. Fall was eventually sent to prison for his crimes. Charles Forbes, director of the Veterans Bureau, diverted alcohol and drugs from Veterans hospitals to bootleggers and narcotics dealers and took payoffs from contractors building the hospitals. He went to jail for two years.

It is noteworthy to remember that Harding was a man who could not say "no" to his friends. In fact, his father once told him that it was good that he had not been born "a gal," or else he would have been "in the family way all the time." Apparently, the President was not unaware of his problem. He enjoyed being liked, and he tried to make up for his weakness by supporting a few reform measures.

Reforms to Regain the Presidency

Harding did accept some government reforms to improve its efficiency. After failing to pass during the Wilson presidency, Harding signed a revised version of the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, which allowed the President to present a unified budget for the first time (rather than have each cabinet secretary submit a budget to Congress), and which also created the General Accounting Office to audit government expenditures. He also supported bills assisting farm cooperatives and the liberalization of farm credit. Perhaps most importantly, unlike his predecessor Wilson, Harding was generally tolerant on civil liberties, honestly criticizing the unfair treatment of African Americans. He once lectured a segregated crowd of thirty thousand people at the University of Alabama on the virtues of racial equality and the evils of segregation.

Harding backed away from granting a general amnesty to the hundreds of Americans jailed for nonviolent antiwar protests during the Wilson years, but he did instruct the Justice Department to review each arrest on a case-by-case basis. Among those pardoned was Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist leader and five-time presidential candidate, who was serving a ten-year sentence at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. Debs had won over ninety thousand votes from his prison cell in the 1920 election. As a condition for the pardon, Harding insisted that Debs come to the White House after being released from jail so the two men could meet.

Immigration Quotas and Pro-Business Stance

This generous and humane approach to healing domestic war wounds contrasted with Harding's support for the Johnson Immigrant Quota Act of 1921, which stipulated that the annual immigration of a given nationality could not exceed 3 percent of the number of immigrants from that nation residing in the U.S. in 1910. This quota made it more difficult for immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, whose numbers had been smaller in 1910, to enter the country. It would be the first in a series of anti-immigrant steps in the 1920s that greatly favored northern Europeans and immigrants from the Western Hemisphere over Italians, Russians, and eastern and central Europeans. Republicans passed these laws in part because immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were more likely to enroll in the Democratic Party.

On most issues related to the economy and foreign trade, Harding was decidedly conservative—determined, actually, to make the federal government serve U.S. business interests. He supported efforts by Secretary Mellon, one of the wealthiest men in the nation, to push through substantial tax cuts for the rich and for corporations. By 1926, a person earning $1 million annually paid less than a third of the income tax he had paid in 1920. And Harding's stand-pat attitude helped bestow confidence among U.S. business interests during the sharp deflation in 1920, which lasted for about one year. During that downswing of the economy, wages dropped drastically, and over twenty thousand business failures occurred. Delivering on his campaign promise, Harding supported, moreover, the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act that reversed the downward movement in rates initiated by Wilson. The higher rates resulting from this piece of legislation were favored by industrialists who supported the Republican Party. Equally important in setting a pro-business tone were Harding's actions to encourage the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department, and the Interstate Commerce Commission to cooperate with corporations rather than to regulate them or to instigate antimonopoly actions against them.

Warren Harding gave his secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, a free hand in foreign affairs. A leading internationalist, Hughes worked with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover and Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon to design a foreign policy enabling the U.S. to participate in the world's economic life while retaining a free hand in international relations. They hoped to use American banks, such as the John D. Rockefeller-backed Chase National Bank, to replace British financiers in the handling and financing of world trade. Hoover established a corps of commercial attach�s to work with career Foreign Service officers in the pursuit of foreign markets. Hughes and Hoover used the reciprocity provisions of the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act to secure minor concession on rubber in Malaya and on oil in the Middle East—especially in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) and Persia (modern-day Iran). Hoover and Hughes encouraged seven American oil companies to form a consortium, led by Standard Oil of New Jersey, to seek participation in Iraqi oil concessions, thus inaugurating an "open door" policy for U.S. investment in energy resources in the Middle East.

In Europe, Treasury Secretary Mellon attempted to direct financial affairs in the face of the massive U.S. investments and loans during World War I. Resisting efforts to forgive European indebtedness to America, which stood at about $12 billion in 1920, Mellon secured the appointment of Charles G. Dawes, a midwestern Republican banker, to head a commission to revise the amount owned by Germany for reparations. In March 1923, the Dawes Plan scaled down Germany's payments to 2.5 billion marks over the next fifty years. The German economy then took off like a rocket, fueled by a massive injection of American loans ($2 billion over the next five years) that were used to pay reparations. The Europeans, in turn, used part of the reparation payments to fund debts (drastically reduced by the Dawes Plan) owed to the U.S. in a curiously circular flow of capital. In total, the actual debt paid to the U.S. never equaled more than a mere fraction of the original debt and interest due (about $22 billion).

Washington Armament Conference

High on Mellon's and Hughes's agenda was their desire to curb the arms race that had spun out of control prior to 1914. Committed to reducing spending, Mellon did not want to continue expensive naval development. The U.S. now rivaled England as a naval power, with Japan close behind. Fearful of a costly naval rivalry in the Pacific, Hughes called for a naval conference in Washington to negotiate freezing the present status. Hughes shocked the delegates with his proposal for scrapping fifteen American capital ships built during the war. His plan called for rough equality between England and the U.S., with a Japanese navy 60 percent as strong as the two leaders. Since Japan used its fleet only in the western Pacific while England and the U.S. had a two-ocean navy, the Japanese actually would be the premier naval power in its home waters. France and Italy were held at a ratio far below the other three. Moreover, a Nine Power Treaty emerged out of the conference, in which all of the signature states with interests in the Far East guaranteed the territorial integrity of China and an "open door" to trade and investment there.

Shaken by the talk of corruption among the friends he had appointed to office, Warren and Florence Harding began a tour on June 20, 1923 of the West and Alaska. He hoped to get out and meet people, to shake hands and explain his policies. Although suffering from high blood pressure and an enlarged heart, he seemed to enjoy himself—especially in Alaska. On his return journey, he became ill with what was then attributed to a touch of ptomaine (food) poisoning. The presidential train rushed to San Francisco, where his condition worsened. On August 2, he most likely suffered a heart attack in the evening, while his wife was reading to him. He died quietly and instantaneously.

Word quickly spread that Mrs. Harding, the last person to be with him that evening, had poisoned him to prevent him from being brought up on charges of corruption that soon engulfed his administration. A sensationalist book published in 1930 detailed the allegations against her. Her refusal to allow an autopsy of the President only fed the rumors. Harding left the bulk of his estate, valued at $850,000, to his wife.

Warren and Florence Harding had no family life in the White House to speak of. Although Florence had a son by a prior marriage, her marriage with Warren did not produce any offspring. Thus, their social affairs were limited to elegant garden parties and typical affairs of state. They loved to entertain special friends, however, in the upstairs quarters of the White House with ample supplies of liquor (obtained as medical supplies) in private defiance of prohibition. For Harding, social life revolved around the twice-weekly poker games with his cronies, golf games at the Chevy Chase Country Club, yachting, and fishing. He was the first President to have a radio in the White House, and the first to broadcast a presidential message via radio.

Extramarital Affairs

Harding's two publicly known affairs came to light in 1927 with a book published by one of his lovers, Nan Britton, and in 1963, when love letters written by Harding to Carrie Phillips were uncovered. His affair with Carrie Phillips, wife of his longtime friend James Phillips, ran for more than fifteen years, beginning in Marion, Ohio in 1905. At one point, Phillips, a tall attractive woman ten years younger than Harding, had tried to blackmail him into voting against a declaration of war on Germany. As a German sympathizer who had lived in Berlin off and on, she had fallen under the surveillance of the U.S. Secret Service. In 1920, the Republican National Committee bribed Mr. and Mrs. Phillips with a free, slow trip to Japan, $20,000 in cash, and the promise of monthly payments to keep them quiet. She lived until 1960.

While seeing Carrie Phillips, Harding also was deeply involved with his so-called "niece" Nan Britton, a pretty blonde thirty years younger than himself. Their affair began in 1917, when the moonstruck teenager from Harding's hometown of Marion wrote him asking for a job. Harding put her to work in a clerical position at the U.S. Steel Corporation in Washington, D.C. They continued their affair (often seeing each other in the Oval Office) until his death. Nan gave birth to a baby girl on October 22, 1919, named Elizabeth Ann Christian. Harding never saw the child but made generous child support payments that were hand delivered by the Secret Service. After his death, Britton sued Harding's estate to gain a trust fund for her daughter. Failing that, she wrote a best-selling book (ninety thousand copies), The President's Daughter, dedicated "to all unwed mothers, and to their innocent children whose fathers are usually not known to the world." It recounted the specific logistics of the affair in great detail.

The Warren G. Harding years ushered in a new era of prosperity for the American electorate. After a brief recession in 1920, prosperity returned with a burst of buying by Americans eager to make up for their wartime deprivations. The gross national product (GNP) increased by 16 percent between 1921 and 1922. By 1923, unemployment had dropped to a low of 2 percent. Most workers in manufacturing were fully employed, and their average paycheck reached $22 per week—an all-time high.

Prosperity, Bootlegging, and Nativism

It was a time of fundamental change, a time when American business leaders launched a new wave of advertising aimed at getting Americans to consume new products. Listerine was plugged as the way to increase one's romance with the opposite sex by fighting halitosis (bad breath). General Foods put the image of Betty Crocker on its baking products. An average of 883,000 new homes were built each year of the 1920s beginning in 1922. And some cities, like Los Angeles, had one automobile for every three residents. Radios became a household word, and young men and women began to "date," a new term in the American vocabulary.

Most Americans simply ignored the new prohibition laws against drinking, following the example set by President Harding. In 1923, a federal agent reported that it took a newcomer only thirty-five seconds to get an illegal drink in New Orleans, three minutes in Detroit, and three minutes and ten seconds in New York City. And Al Capone, the Chicago bootlegger, was just getting started during the Harding years. By 1926, his gang numbered one thousand members.

The war, prosperity, and the new morality—symbolized in part by the country's easy acceptance of "the Ohio gang" in the White House and the talk about Harding's "girlfriends"—produced the early signs of a reactionary upheaval in response to the changes all around. A wave of nativism swept the land, producing a new immigration quota (the Johnson Act) and bloody race riots. The new Ku Klux Klan, revived by its glorification in the film Birth of a Nation and a recruiting scheme that profited local organizers, grew from five thousand members in 1918 to over 1 million by 1923. Klan members hailed themselves as "Puritans" doing battle with "a corrupt and jazz-mad age." In Oregon, the Klan pushed legislation that would eliminate Catholic schools because they were perceived as "un-American." It took a Supreme Court case decided in 1925, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, to uphold the Klan's continued existence.

The Harding years also witnessed the introduction of the so-called "American Plan," whereby American businessmen launched antiunion drives by offering workers something known as "Welfare Capitalism." The plan provided workers with benefit programs such as insurance, pensions, cheap lunches in company cafeterias, paid vacations, and stock purchase options in return for leaving—or not joining—labor unions.

Most historians rank Harding as the worst of all American Presidents. Recently, some revisionists see him as an important transitional figure whose easy-going ways helped bridge the gap between Wilsonian idealism and the business prosperity of the Coolidge and Hoover years. Harding is also given some credit for his progressive views on race and civil rights.

Neither a deep thinker, nor a decisive President, Harding failed, in most opinions, to impact the nation simply because he saw the role of President as largely ceremonial. He saw himself as neither a caretaker nor as a leader. He just avoided issues whenever possible.

Unlike other modern Presidents, such as Ronald Reagan, who possessed conventional minds and who thought simply, Harding never understood where he wanted to take the nation. Nor could he communicate his message effectively, because he had none to communicate. He spoke about a "return to normalcy," but he had no idea what this slogan meant. Lacking the moral compass of a Reagan, Harding had no guide to follow. He was lucky to have had a few good men in his cabinet who generally ran fiscal and foreign affairs well.

In the end, it was not his corrupt friends that tarnished his legacy and undermined his historical impact. Rather, it was his own lack of vision and his poor sense of priorities that positioned him so low in the ranking of U.S. Presidents. Then, too, it was Harding's sad fate to have followed in office the most visionary of all our Presidents, Woodrow Wilson, the man whom historians generally rank among the top five or six Presidents in the nation's history.

A quiet and somber man whose sour expression masked a dry wit, Calvin Coolidge was known as "Silent Cal." After learning of his ascendancy to the presidency following the death of Warren Harding in 1923, Coolidge was sworn in by his father, a justice of the peace, in the middle of the night and, displaying his famous "cool," promptly went back to bed.

Calvin Coolidge was born on Independence Day, 1872, and raised in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. His father was a pillar of the community, holding a variety of local offices from tax collector to constable. From him, Coolidge inherited his taciturn nature, his frugality, and his commitment to public service. The early death of his mother and sister contributed to his stoical personality.

Climbing the Political Ladder

While practicing law in Northampton, Massachusetts, Coolidge began to climb the ladder of state politics. From a spot on the City Council in 1900, he became chairman of the Northampton Republican Committee in 1904 and joined the state legislature in 1907. His term as governor of Massachusetts placed him in the national arena just in time to benefit from the return to power of the Republicans at the end of World War I. As governor, he called in the state guard to break a strike by city police in Boston, claiming that "there is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime." This bold action won him public acclaim and swept him onto the Republican ticket as the vice presidential nominee with Warren Harding. As vice president, Coolidge kept a low profile, sitting silently during cabinet meetings and seldom speaking in his constitutional position as presiding officer of the U.S. Senate.

After Harding's death in 1923, Coolidge became President. Intent on running for reelection in 1924, he dispatched his potential Republican rivals with relative ease. He had emerged unscathed from the scandals that plagued the Harding administration, earning a reputation for being honest, direct, and hardworking. The Democrats were split in 1924, finally settling on a compromise candidate, John W. Davis of West Virginia. With a rebounding economy to help him, Coolidge won handily with the slogan "Keep Cool With Coolidge."

A Visible Yet Passive Presidency

In contrast to his disdain for small talk, Coolidge was a highly visible leader, holding press conferences, speaking on the radio, and emerging as the leader among what one survey called "the most photographed persons on earth." Reveling in what would become known as the "photo op," he posed before the cameras dressed in farmer overalls, a cowboy hat and chaps, and an Indian headdress. But his prominent profile was not matched by a commitment to activism. He believed in small government, especially at the federal level, and practiced a passive style of leadership. He saw little need to intervene in issues that Congress or the states could handle without him.

Nonetheless, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had changed the presidency into an activist institution, and public opinion fairly demanded a modicum of leadership from the White House. Coolidge did have an agenda. His chief concern was economics, where he favored low taxes, reduced regulation of business, and a balanced budget. Alongside his Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, the wealthy Pittsburgh industrialist who advocated "trickle-down" economics, as critics called it, Coolidge secured reductions in rates for wealthy Americans (most citizens at the time paid little federal tax). Although many observers at the time gave the President and Secretary Mellon credit for the so-called "Coolidge Prosperity" that characterized the seven years of his presidency, in retrospect he came under criticism for having failed to try to stop the feverish stock-market speculation toward the end of his term that contributed to the stock market crash of 1929. Coolidge also fought against farm-relief legislation that might have shored up the depressed farm economy.

Like Harding, Coolidge allowed his cabinet a free hand in foreign affairs, delegating authority to Treasury Secretary Mellon, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, and Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, all holdovers from Harding's cabinet. The President believed that the United States should seek out foreign markets and refrain from entangling alliances and participation in the League of Nations. He supported the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact renouncing war as a means of settling international differences, a largely symbolic pact that nonetheless became an important precedent in fostering reliance on international law. In Latin America, Coolidge's administration tended to support the interests of U.S. businesses, although the President made steps toward a less adversarial posture than his predecessors had typically maintained. Coolidge chose not to run for a second term because his republican political philosophy led him to value highly the unwritten two-term precedent (toward which he counted the balance of Harding's term that he served). Moreover, the death of his teenage son in 1924 had taken much of the joy out of his work. True to his simple tastes, he imagined he would be happier in retirement in Northampton, Massachusetts.

First Lady Grace Coolidge was as sunny and sociable as her husband was taciturn and sardonic. The press photographed her at every opportunity, and she once joked that she was the "national hugger." Having been trained as an instructor for the deaf, Grace Coolidge brought national attention to the plight of the nation's hearing-impaired and became a close personal friend of the author and activist, Helen Keller, who was both deaf and blind.

Although the public admired Coolidge during his time in office, the Great Depression turned public opinion against him. Many linked the nation's economic collapse to Coolidge's policy decisions. He vetoed the problematic McNary-Haugen bill to aid the depressed agricultural sector while thousands of rural banks in the Midwest and South were shutting their doors and farmers were losing their land. His tax cuts worsened the maldistribution of wealth and overproduction of goods, which destabilized the economy. Although in the 1980s, conservatives, led by Ronald Reagan--who hung Coolidge's portrait in the White House--revived something of a cult of Coolidge, most historians look upon the Coolidge presidency with skepticism, considering him to have offered little in the way of a positive vision, however strong his personal integrity.

He was born John Calvin Coolidge on July 4, 1872, in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. He grew up helping his storekeeper father tend accounts, selling apples, and doing other chores around the store and at home on the family farm. As a boy, Coolidge had little ambition in life beyond hoping to follow his father as a good, honest small-town merchant.

A fair to average student in the Plymouth elementary school, he eventually managed to obtain entry to the prestigious Amherst College in nearby Amherst, Massachusetts, where he blossomed over his four years. He graduated with honors in 1895, racking up good to excellent grades in his last two years and graduating cum laude. A member of the Republican Club and the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, Coolidge won a reputation on campus for his wit and his public speaking skills. He shared the junior prize for oratory, and in his senior year his classmates elected him to deliver the Grove Oration, a humorous send-up of the senior class at graduation. He also took first prize in a national contest for his senior essay, "The Principles Fought for in the American Revolution." 

A loyal Amherst alumnus, he relied throughout his political career on men who were classmates or fellow alumni, including Boston businessman Frank Stearns, advertising guru Bruce Barton, financier Dwight Morrow, and Harlan Fiske Stone, whom he appointed Attorney General and later as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

After college, Coolidge read law in a law firm in Northampton, Massachusetts, passing the bar in the summer of 1897. He then opened a law office and began participating in local Republican politics in Northampton.

Political Legacy and Involvement

Both Coolidge's mother, Victoria Josephine Moor Coolidge, a sentimental and poetic woman, and younger sister, Abigail Gratia Coolidge, died while he was a teenager. He was close to both of them, and their deaths contributed to what was already a fatalistic and taciturn temperament. His father, John Calvin Coolidge, Sr., then married Carrie A. Brown, a local schoolteacher in 1891. She grew very close to Calvin over the years. The senior Coolidge, a man of stern appearance and a pillar of the community, served six years in the Vermont House of Representatives and a term in the Vermont Senate. He also held a variety of local offices from tax collector to peace officer. Known in the county and state as a prosperous and thrifty farmer and storekeeper, the elder Coolidge's quiet nature and commitment to public service greatly influenced his son. So too did his prudence with money.

Coolidge's rise in politics was methodical and steady. Beginning around 1900, his work in the local Republican Club in Northampton won him a spot on the City Council, appointment as city solicitor in 1900, election as county clerk in 1903, and the chairmanship of the local Republican Party organization in 1904. He ran for and lost a bid for a seat on the Northampton School Board in 1905—the only loss he ever experienced at the polls. Two years later, he was elected to the state legislature. In 1910, the citizens of Northampton selected him as their mayor, and then he won a statewide race for the Massachusetts Senate in 1912, serving as Senate President in 1914. Moving up the ladder of state politics, Coolidge became the lieutenant governor in 1916, serving until 1918, when he moved into the executive's chair.

Governor Coolidge

His narrow victory for Massachusetts governor over Democrat Richard H. Long placed Coolidge in the national arena just in time to benefit from the Republican Party's return to national power at the end of World War I. As governor, he won national attention when he called out the state's National Guard to break a strike by Boston city police, exclaiming to the American Federation of Labor union leader Samuel Gompers, "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime." Although later seen as a reactionary move, the action was widely popular in the wake of the lawlessness brought on by the strike, and overall as governor, Coolidge pursued a fairly progressive agenda. He supported a cost-of-living pay increase for public employees, limited the workweek for women and children to 48 hours, and placed limits on outdoor advertising, measures largely welcomed by reformers in both parties. His most important feat, restructuring and consolidating the state government, married progressivism's efficiency to conservatism's taste for small government.

While advancing in local politics, Coolidge married Grace Anna Goodhue on October 4, 1905. The two were wed at her parents' home in Burlington, Vermont. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Vermont, she was a teacher at the Clarke Institute for the Deaf in Northampton. Coolidge first caught her eye one morning when she saw him through the open window of his boardinghouse in Northampton, standing in his underwear and wearing a hat while shaving. She thought that he looked ridiculous, laughed loud enough for him to notice her, and then turned away. He later said that he was wearing the hat to keep his uncombed hair out of his eyes while shaving. His marriage proposal in the summer of 1905 came in the form of a romantic prophecy: "I am going to be married to you." Grace loved the silent but blunt young lawyer and immediately consented. A son, John, was born in 1906; Calvin, Jr. followed in 1908.

Ascending to the White House

Coolidge came to the Republican National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, as his state's favorite-son candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1920, but he received only 34 votes on the first ballot at the convention. In the backroom deal among party leaders that helped ensure Warren G. Harding's nomination, Coolidge's was not among the names discussed for the second spot, and party leaders hoped to nominate Senator Irving Lenroot of Wisconsin. When Coolidge's name was entered into nomination, however, a stampede of support by rebellious delegates swept him onto the ticket. In the ensuing campaign, Harding waged a "front porch" campaign from his native Marion, Ohio, while Coolidge did a modest amount of stumping, notably in the South, in a vain effort to sway that loyally Democratic region. In contrast, the Democratic Party candidate, James M. Cox, traveled 22,000 miles while speaking to two million people, while his running-mate, former assistant navy secretary Franklin Roosevelt, spoke out frequently. The election, a referendum on the Wilson administration, the Treaty of Versailles, and the League of Nations, gave the Republicans 61 percent of the vote. As vice president, Coolidge played little role in the Harding administration, although he attended cabinet meetings. He kept a low profile as President of the Senate—in those days the vice president's chief duty--and mainly devoted himself to making public speeches.

On August 2, 1923, John Coolidge woke his vacationing son and daughter-in-law at the family home in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, to tell them of President Harding's death from a heart attack. Coolidge knelt, prayed, and went downstairs. Although the old house had no phone, it was soon abuzz with reporters. At 2:24 a.m., with the newspaper men settled and a copy of the Constitution retrieved, the elder Coolidge, a justice of the peace, administered the oath of office to his son by the light of a kerosene lamp. Soon after, Calvin Coolidge went back to bed as the 30th President of the United States.

The Campaign and Election of 1924:

After a year in the office he inherited from Harding, Coolidge was ready to assume the presidency in his own right. Historically, vice presidents who had finished out their predecessors' terms did not seek the presidency in their own right; only Theodore Roosevelt, in 1904, had done so successfully. But Coolidge ably muscled out potential challengers, including automaker Henry Ford, for the 1924 Republican nomination. He had emerged unscathed from the Teapot Dome scandals that plagued the Harding administration; indeed, his investigations of the corruption, although faulted by some as half-hearted, bolstered his reputation as a man of simplicity and rectitude--precisely what the country seemed to be craving in the economically and culturally dynamic 1920s. Coolidge's team carefully stage-managed the Republican convention in Cleveland, Ohio, that summer, and it was a veritable coronation, presaging the frictionless affairs of the late 20th century. "Silent Cal," as Coolidge was becoming known because of his disdain for making small talk at social affairs, hoped to balance the ticket with Senator William E. Borah of Ohio as his running mate. Borah was a firm isolationist from the Midwest and a strong progressive on the domestic front. When Borah declined the offer, the party turned to the colorful and charismatic Charles G. Dawes of Illinois--former aide to William McKinley, director of the newly created Bureau of the Budget under Harding, and the author of the Dawes Plan to ease Europe's post-World War I credit problems. Their Republican platform emphasized reducing taxes, collecting foreign debts, passing the protective tariff, opposing farm subsidies for crop prices, enacting the eight-hour workday, banning child labor, and passing a federal anti-lynching law. Compared to the smooth Republican convention, which looked forward to the media-age spectacles, the Democrats' strife-ridden gathering in New York was a throwback to the heyday of party politics. Former Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo of California--President Wilson's son-in-law--fought Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York for more than 100 ballots. McAdoo represented the interests of the West, the rural South, and "Drys," those who supported Prohibition. The aging William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate and still politically powerful, delivered a powerful convention speech voicing his support for McAdoo. On the other side, the New York political machine Tammany Hall, representatives from Eastern cities, and the "Wets"--those opposed to Prohibition--cheered with great enthusiasm when the young Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was attempting a comeback after being stricken with polio, electrified the convention in a lively nomination speech depicting Smith as the "Happy Warrior." Adding to the drama, the convention was suspended in respect for the death of Coolidge's son, Calvin, Jr., who had developed a blood blister playing tennis a week before and, in a time just before the discovery of penicillin, died precipitously of an infection.

For the next 100 ballots, the longest deadlock at any major party convention in U.S. history, neither McAdoo nor Smith could gain the necessary two-thirds majority. Finally, on the 103rd ballot, the convention nominated a compromise candidate, Wall Street lawyer John W. Davis of West Virginia. Davis had served as solicitor general and as ambassador to Britain under President Woodrow Wilson. In a nod to Bryan, the Democrats selected his brother, Governor Charles W. Bryan of Nebraska, as their vice presidential candidate. The Democratic platform favored a reduction in the tariff, a graduated income tax, farm relief with easier credit and farm subsidies for crop prices, independence for the Philippines, a national referendum on the League of Nations, strict enforcement of antitrust laws, and public works projects to reduce unemployment.

Given the general conservatism of both nominees, a number of discontented politicians reconstituted Theodore Roosevelt's old Progressive Party, the breakaway vehicle he had established in 1912, but it drew nowhere near the support TR had. With Senator Robert LaFollette, Jr., of Wisconsin and Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana on their ticket, they offered what was becoming an old-fashioned Progressive reform agenda, including action against industrial monopolies, public ownership of water resources and the national railroads, a substantial increase in the inheritance tax, an excess-profits tax debt relief for farmers, and government subsidies to support crop prices.

In the election campaign, the Republicans urged the nation to "Keep Cool with Coolidge," a popular slogan that reflected the public's sense of optimism, based on the strong economy and prospects of the endurance of peace in Europe. President Coolidge took advantage of the new medium of radio to reach millions with his campaign speeches, while the advertising executive Bruce Barton helped promote an appealing, homespun image of the President through interviews, magazine profiles, and the publication of his speeches. Davis waged an aggressive campaign, attacking the Republicans as the party of corruption and bravely denouncing the Ku Klux Klan where Coolidge would not, but he fared poorly outside the South. In the end, Coolidge won 54 percent of the vote compared to 28.8 percent for Davis and a healthy 16.6 percent for LaFollette. He compiled 382 electoral votes in 35 states.

Calvin Coolidge brought a unique style to the White House. Although known for his public discomfort with chitchat and for his philosophical dislike of excessive leadership, Coolidge was a highly visible president. During his 67 months as President, he held 520 press conferences or an average of nearly eight each month, "bringing himself almost daily," wrote a reporter in 1927, "into the American home." He spoke on the radio at least monthly to national audiences. Coolidge also enjoyed having himself photographed. To the delight of cameramen, the President posed in old-fashioned overalls (when working on his father's farm), full Indian headdress (speaking to a crowd of ten thousand Sioux), and cowboy chaps and hat (on vacation in South Dakota). He was the first President to appear in a talking film--a recording of one of his speeches. He liked to make people laugh, and he used his dry, lean wit to punctuate his silence with pithy slogans. In formal addresses, in contrast, he was high-minded, serious, and dignified.

Although mocked for his afternoon naps, Coolidge was hardly slothful. He worked diligently, relying heavily on his Cabinet, but devoting serious attention to issues that crossed his desk. But his view of the presidency, like that of Harding immediately before him, marked a departure from the activism of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Coolidge's political philosophy and personal temperament conveniently aligned in his belief that the President should not undertake sweeping new reforms to address the challenges of the modern, industrial age. He favored instead a hands-off leadership style and a restrained view of the executive, delegating tasks to his Cabinet, leaving most issues to the states to resolve, and even on federal matters frequently deeming restraint to be the wiser course than bold action.

Yet Coolidge was no reactionary. He is better understood as a transitional figure between the 19th century and the 20th. He embodied the small-town values of thrift and industry and a philosophy of minimal government, but at the same time he celebrated the economic boom over which he presided, and he embraced the new media of the modern culture.

Coolidge's domestic legacy can generally be described as conservative. His main concern was to sustain the economic prosperity that was returning when he took office. He favored a light hand in regulating business, strove hard to balance the budget (even managing to run a surplus), and cut the national debt. His fiscal restraint led him to veto two bills, both popular in Congress, that would have given bonuses to veterans--only to see them passed with a two-thirds majority.

The centerpiece of Coolidge's domestic agenda was his tax cutting. He championed the Revenue Acts of 1924 and 1926, a pet issue of his Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, the wealthy Pittsburgh industrialist whose "trickle-down economics" would later fall into disrepute. The Revenue Acts sharply reduced income taxes, especially surtaxes on the wealthy (taxes on most Americans were already very low). They also cut gift, excise, and inheritance taxes. At the time, many observers credited the cuts for what was widely called the "Coolidge Prosperity": robust growth, rising wages, declining unemployment and inflation, and a bull market. In fact, such propitious conditions probably had more to do with the effects of wartime spending and economic mobilization several years before.

It would be unfair to blame Coolidge for sharing the prevalent optimism of his time. In retrospect, however, it became apparent that his policies contributed to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. His fiscal policy encouraged speculation and ignored inequality, as the flow of dollars into the pockets of the wealthy helped tip the healthy investment of the mid-1920s into the gambling that followed. His hands-off regulatory policy took its toll especially in the financial arena, where the dangerous practice of margin trading was allowed to flourish unrestrained. And for all the heady growth of the 1920s, Coolidge's policies exacerbated the uneven distribution of income and buying power, which led to the overproduction of goods for which there were not enough affluent consumers.

Making matters worse, Coolidge failed to address the worsening economic plight of farmers. Many farm-state progressives embraced a panacea known as McNary-Haugenism, based on a proposal dating back to 1921 that would have established a government corporation to buy surplus crops at artificially set prices (to be held or sold abroad when market prices rose). Although the scheme might have shored up the depressed farm economy, it would have encouraged overproduction, hurt consumers, and posed dangers to the international system. Congress passed versions of the McNary-Haugen bill twice, but Coolidge vetoed them. Still he failed to champion any alternative legislation, thus worsening the farm crisis when the Great Depression struck.

Coolidge was not always doctrinaire. He put aside his political conservatism on several issues, particularly when prodded by his Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who ironically was considered at the time to be fairly activist and progressive in his views. Coolidge thought Hoover boastful and derided him as "Wonder Boy." "That man," he said, "has offered me unsolicited advice every day for six years, all of it bad." But he allowed Hoover to establish a new regulatory regime for the emerging industry of radio by signing the Radio Act, which declared the airwaves to be public property and subject to governmental control by the new Federal Radio Commission (later the Federal Communications Commission). He also reluctantly sent Hoover to the Midwest to undertake a massive rescue, relief, and reconstruction effort after the Mississippi River flood of 1927, the worst natural disaster in the United States until Hurricane Katrina in 2005. When Congress sought federal legislation, Coolidge balked, believing cities and states should bear the costs, but ultimately acquiesced in a compromise that spared the localities that burden.

On cultural matters, Coolidge tried to walk a fine line between the gaudy, freewheeling, new culture of the Jazz Age--many aspects of which he despised--and the resurgent fundamentalism represented by Prohibition, anti-evolutionists, and the Ku Klux Klan. He came under criticism for condemning the Klan only tepidly when it marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington in 1925. He signed the Immigration Act of 1924, which set strict quotas on the number of eastern and southern Europeans allowed into America and excluded the Japanese altogether. On controversies that set the nation abuzz such as the Scopes Trial and the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, he kept a low profile.