Calvin Coolidge: The Silent President

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Looking through U.S. presidents from the first half of the 20th century, you’ll find a surplus of icons. Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Harry Truman are still famous for being among America’s greatest leaders, while Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover are known for being the exact opposite. Heck, even William McKinley and William Howard Taft remain known—one for being assassinated, the other for his size, which led to many jokes. Yet the most fascinating president of this era is likely the one most of us have never heard of: Calvin Coolidge. Rarely making lists of best or worst commanders-in-chief outside political history geek circles, his five years and seven months in office are barely remembered, yet they constituted one of the most quietly radical eras that Washington has ever seen.

As president of the 1920s, Coolidge oversaw a roaring economy even as he trimmed government spending to the bone. When he left office, it was as a conservative hero, a man who had brought prosperity. So why isn’t “Silent Cal” better remembered today? The answer lies in a tale of excess, prosperity, and heartbreak.

In terms of over-the-top symbolism, it’s hard to beat a future president of the United States being born on Independence Day, but that’s exactly what John Calvin Coolidge did, entering the world on July 4, 1872. This well-timed entrance would turn out to be a rare flash of bombast in the quiet life of the 30th president. We don’t mean quiet in the sense of boring; we mean he literally barely ever spoke. Growing up in picturesque but hard-scrabble Plymouth, Vermont, young Calvin absorbed the family trait of speaking only when absolutely necessary. Even his father, a merchant and legislator, treated words like expensive chocolates, doled out in small doses and only on special occasions. Compared to his son, the man was practically loquacious. Calvin Coolidge grew up so silent that it was a local joke that he was mute; for him, muttering a greeting was a conversation, while exchanging two sentences was like launching into a soliloquy.

While that quietness was in his nature, the boy also relished the opportunity it gave him to observe. As most kids his age were playing or studying, Coolidge seemed to be absorbing life lessons, storing them away in a special safe deep within his soul. He noted, for example, the way debt crushed family friends—a fate he swore he’d never endure. He also noticed that his father’s economical use of speech wasn’t a hindrance at town meetings but almost a superpower, a way to ensure no one could ever throw ill-advised words back in his face. Much later, Coolidge would remark of his own taciturn nature, “The things I don’t say never get me into trouble.”

However, there were times when perhaps more should have been said. When Coolidge turned 12, his mother died of tuberculosis. Sent in to see her one last time, he was merely told by his father not to cry. In the aftermath of her death, there was mourning but no grieving; the two men simply never spoke about it, much as they would keep silent when Coolidge’s sister died. It’s back to these twin tragedies that some today trace Coolidge’s temperament—irritable, melancholic, and difficult to be around. But you could also just as easily trace back to them his drive to succeed.

Years earlier, Coolidge’s grandfather had left the boy 40 acres on the understanding that he would continue to work the hard Vermont soil like his family always had. Instead, following his sister’s death, the boy suddenly left Plymouth and traveled to Amherst to get an education. There, Coolidge was unwanted by the fraternities and forced to live instead in boarding houses. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as it allowed him to gradually level up his social skills. He didn’t really do small talk, but at least every sentence no longer felt like a double colonoscopy.

Where he did start to excel, though, was in making speeches. It sounds counterintuitive—a guy for whom “hello” was one word too many was happy to get up before an auditorium and wow them for 40 minutes. Yet it seems Coolidge’s natural reticence simply melted away in these formal settings. In the sheltered world of college, he was free to discover his hidden talents and his political beliefs. One of Coolidge’s tutors at Amherst was Professor Charles Garman, a man who regularly turned his lectures into paeans on individual liberty, property rights, and conservatism. Under his spell, Coolidge began to identify more and more as a Republican. By the time he graduated, it was no longer enough to return to Plymouth and get into farming; the young man now had another destiny—one it might be even harder to reap rewards from than the cold northeastern soil. Coolidge was going to get into politics.

Normally, when we do videos on presidents who came up through party politics, like Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, there’s a section where their career takes off like a rocket ship. Calvin Coolidge’s rise, by contrast, was like watching a snail climb up a stepladder. Rather than aim straight for the House or Senate, Coolidge instead set his sights on the city council in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he moved after graduation. Only five years later did he bolster this with a run for the school committee—a race that he lost. But rather than shrug his shoulders and move on, Silent Cal went back. He analyzed what had gone wrong and tried to figure out how he could have turned the loss into a win. When he next stood for election, he used that knowledge to secure his victory.

For the rest of his career, Coolidge never lost a single race, and so Silent Cal began his slow but unstoppable rise through the Massachusetts GOP. He became a member of the state House of Representatives, then mayor of Northampton, then a state senator, and then lieutenant governor. As he rose, he began to develop his political beliefs. In 1912, Coolidge mediated a textile strike in Lawrence and came away convinced that a pro-business, anti-strike position was the only one to take. That same year, he threw his lot in with William Howard Taft’s re-election bid, divorcing himself from the Republican progressive wing personified by Teddy Roosevelt.

More important, though, may have been Coolidge’s time in the state senate. There, he realized that the work of government shouldn’t be passing endless laws but actively revoking bad ones. The state passed fewer bills while he was said to be president, which was a source of pride for him. Still, we don’t want to give the impression that Coolidge’s life was nothing but politics. There was also time for romance. For a man as reserved as Coolidge, the story of how he met Grace Goodhue is unexpectedly sweet. A teacher at the Northampton School for the Deaf, Silent Cal one day heard her laughing through an open window and was so enamored by the sound that he resolved then and there to date her. They married in 1905, leading to the snarky joke that Grace taught the deaf to hear, and now she might be able to teach the mute to speak.

By the time the Wilson presidency got underway, Coolidge was a happily married father of two with a solid career as a conservative lawmaker who was independent enough to track left on issues like women’s rights and immigration. In the 1918 race for Massachusetts governor, this combination was enough to land him the job. He was sworn in the following January, just in time for the crisis that would make his name: the Boston Police Strike. It was a mass walkout over the right to form a union. Suddenly, without cops, the city plunged into chaos and looting. But rather than do as everyone expected and cut a deal, Coolidge went on the attack, ordering the state guard into Boston to restore order. Coolidge fired all the striking officers, declaring, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.” It was such a forceful reaction that his friends begged him not to sign the order, saying it would end his career. Instead, it turned Coolidge into a national hero. The lawlessness in Boston horrified the nation; people saw the police officers not as regular strikers but as deserters who surrendered the city. So when Coolidge crushed the strike, America applauded. Even Woodrow Wilson came out in support of him.

From a solid but unremarkable governor, Calvin Coolidge had suddenly become the hottest property in politics just as the election year of 1920 dawned—not that his party was currently looking for anyone popular or principled to lead it. The 1920 Republican Convention saw the affably corrupt, infinitely clubbable Warren G. Harding handed the nomination in a shady backroom deal. Angered by these shenanigans, the rank-and-file delegates rebelled, forcing one of their own picks onto the party ticket as VP. Coolidge was in the governor’s mansion in Boston when he got the call that a voter insurgency had landed him the vice presidential nomination. His wife Grace asked if he was going to accept. “I suppose I shall have to,” he replied with characteristic understatement. And just like that, Coolidge’s path to the presidency was set.

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Now, back to Calvin Coolidge. The 1920 election—the question wasn’t if the Republicans would win, but just how much of a victory was on the cards after eight years of Wilson’s progressive agenda, after a war that had killed 116,000 Americans, after a deadly pandemic, and amid a deep recession. People were simply ready for change. Warren Harding capitalized on this, running with Coolidge under the slogan “A return to normalcy” without ever telling anyone what exactly that meant. Not that this ambiguity mattered; that November, Harding and Coolidge demolished their Democratic opponents, James M. Cox and his VP pick, Franklin D. Roosevelt, thus making Coolidge the only person to ever defeat FDR in a national election. It was a landslide win, a sign the electorate was ready for real Republican leadership. Unfortunately, what they got was Harding and his dodgy mates sucking the nation dry.

As you might remember from our video on him, Warren Harding and his Ohio gang were of the “go big or go home” school of corruption. In his three years on the job, they did everything from sell off the Navy’s oil reserves to their friends to steal life-saving medicine from veterans’ hospitals. Luckily for Coolidge, though, they never once cut their VP in on the action. As far as the White House was concerned, Silent Cal was a boring sap they’d gotten lumbered with, the lame millhouse to Harding’s devilish Bart. So they basically ghosted him. Coolidge had little contact with Harding’s team; even in Congress, Coolidge’s role as Senate president was sidelined by GOP majority leader Henry Cabot Lodge. It was a time of immense frustration for Coolidge, but it would also save his career.

By 1923, corruption under Harding had gotten so extreme—ranging from extortion to unleashing the DOJ on political enemies—that the Senate had started taking note. Before the scandals could break, though, Harding went and died of a suspected stroke. On hearing the news, it’s said that Henry Cabot Lodge turned pale and cried in disbelief, “My God, that means Coolidge is president!” As indeed he was. The day Harding went off to the great beyond, Coolidge was vacationing with his family back in Plymouth, far away from any telephone line. By the time the messenger reached the house, the vice president was asleep. He was woken in the night by his father, now a justice of the peace, and told to get ready. Coolidge got out of bed, prayed, and went downstairs. In the early hours of August 3, 1923, Silent Cal stood under a kerosene lamp in a darkened room in his childhood home while his father administered the oath of office. At 2:24 AM, Coolidge officially became the 30th president of the United States. The drama over, he went straight back to bed as if nothing had changed. But of course, it had.

Dimly aware of the brewing scandals, Coolidge became president just as revelations of Harding’s misconduct exploded. Just as during the police strike, the new president responded ruthlessly. Harding’s crimes were open to investigation while his old Ohio gang were purged from government. Although Coolidge tried carefully at first, afraid of uncovering too much corruption in his party ahead of the 1924 election, all of the 29th president’s lackeys had soon been cold-bloodedly dispatched from Washington. Amid the booming economy of the 1920s, this show of force was enough for voters. Rather than punish Coolidge for his proximity to Harding, they instead rewarded him. In November 1924, Coolidge carried over 54% of the vote, securing himself a full term. The era of clearing up Harding’s mess was over; from now on, Coolidge would be his own president.

While his term would never be as dramatic as Harding’s, it would still manage to radically reshape everything Washington thought it knew about government. The arrival of a monosyllabic president was a field day for American satirists. H.L. Mencken famously declared that President Coolidge’s ideal day would be one in which nothing happens. But while this was meant in jest, it does get to an essential truth—not that Silent Cal wanted nothing to ever happen, but that he wanted the federal government to do as little as possible. Conservative to his core, Coolidge believed that businesses should be left to themselves, that the states should take care of their own affairs, and that Washington should aim for blissful inaction. Combine this with his penchant for taking long afternoon naps, and the 30th president got a reputation as a man with all the spirit of a recently deceased dodo.

Yet Coolidge wasn’t lazy; he really believed America could basically run itself, once saying, “If the federal government were to go out of business, the common run of people would not detect the difference.” The only time he got really animated was where money was concerned. Throughout his tenure, Coolidge obsessively cut government spending, even dictating what color bags the postal service used in order to save a few pennies. He became one of the few modern presidents to run a budget surplus—something he called among the noblest monuments of virtue. But it wasn’t just spending; Coolidge slashed taxes as well, with the top rate plummeting to 25%, still the lowest on record since World War I. Among the not-rich majority of the population, federal taxes dropped to effectively nothing. All this cutting and light-touch regulation really seemed to work. The “Coolidge prosperity” is basically what we think of when we think of the Roaring Twenties: growth was strong, wages soared, unemployment fell, and money was everywhere. It sounds great, and for most people living through it, it probably was.

Yet we would be lying if we said there wasn’t a dark side to the Coolidge prosperity. The 30th president was so committed to small government, for example, that it sometimes eclipsed his humanity. In 1927, catastrophic flooding along the Mississippi River inundated an area the size of the Republic of Ireland. Two hundred thousand people were displaced, and whole communities were ruined. Yet Coolidge was adamant that the affected towns should pay for the damage themselves. It took the Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, to convince him to begrudgingly launch a federal relief effort. Similarly, a federal anti-lynching bill that had been championed by Harding was quietly dropped by Silent Cal, who felt the groundbreaking legislation would have infringed on states’ rights.

But the darkest side of all involved the thing Coolidge loved the most: business. As the second half of the ’20s roared into view, Wall Street was doing a worse and worse job of regulating itself. Speculation was out of control, and elsewhere, the agricultural sector was in dire need of help. Yet Coolidge never intervened, and well, we all know where that ended. Still, hindsight is 20/20. It’s worth noting that no one in Coolidge’s time saw the Wall Street crash coming; they were too busy enjoying their Great Gatsby-style parties and moving jerkily to the distant strains of jazz. Broadly, then, life was good in the Coolidge years—so good that everyone expected him to run for a second term in 1928.

But there was one person who wasn’t enjoying the Coolidge prosperity. As his term wore on, the 30th president began to spend more and more time sleeping—long epic slumbers that soon left him with as little as a four-hour workday. In his era, Coolidge’s hypersomnia was a not-so-secret joke, a strange quirk of a strange president. But in the last couple of decades, a new theory has emerged—one that could explain a lot about his one term. What if Calvin Coolidge wasn’t just some quiet dude who liked naps but someone in the grips of a depression so deep he could no longer see a way out?

In summer 1924, less than a year after his dad