Vice President Calvin Coolidge rose to the presidency in 1923 when Warren G. Harding suddenly died of a stroke on his way back from visiting Alaska. Vermont-born Massachusetts Governor Coolidge caught the nation's eye when he ended the Boston Police strike in 1919, proclaiming "there is no right to strike against the public safety, anywhere, anytime" and was picked in 1920 to be Harding's running mate.
Coolidge became, more than scandal-plagued Harding, the presidential face of the 1920s. Coolidge never visited a speakeasy or danced the Charleston as far as we know. He was a quiet man and usually dour and unsmiling, especially after his son Cal Jr. died in 1924. When asked why he spoke so little, Coolidge said "I never got in trouble for something I didn't say". When a lady seated next to him at a dinner party told him she had bet a friend she could get him to say more than two words, Coolidge sourly said "you lose". When asked why he accepted dinner invitations even while not participating in the banter, he said "have to eat somewhere". The fun in being President may have also ended when his son Cal Jr. died in 1924, after a foot blister he got playing tennis got infected, giving him septicemia. In 1931, when informed that Coolidge had died, wit Dorothy Parker asked at the Algonquin Roundtable (see page 2) "how could they tell?".
But Coolidge typified the popular opinion that government should not meddle with business, and cut taxes. "The business of America is business" proclaimed Coolidge. When some of our WW1 allies, France especially, called for us to give them relief from their war debts, Coolidge said no, saying "they hired the money, didn't they?" The public approved, and gave him a second term in 1924.
He choose not to run in 1928, confiding to a friend that he was tired, still sad over the loss of his son, also didn't want to exceed George Washington's two terms, and he also thought a depression was coming. So, whatever his faults, he had a Yankee shrewdness. He let his Commerce Sec. Herbert Hoover run in 1928 instead. Coolidge didn't like the stiff and somewhat pompous Hoover, derisively calling him "Wonder Boy", telling an associate that Hoover often gave him unsolicited advice, "all of it bad".
Here is a short speech Coolidge read in his twangy and somewhat pinched Yankee voice, giving his view on a limited role for government in economic matters, and for lower government spending and lower taxes. The film short, taken on the White House lawn in August 1924 during the re-election campaign using the new De Forest sound on film (phonofilm) process , was the first sound film made of any President. "Silent Cal" speaks!:
• Video Link
Here is a very good bio of Calvin Coolidge, about 30 minutes. Very good about the great impact of the loss of his son Calvin Jr. in 1924 on his Presidency, and his engagement and enjoyment of his high office. Perhaps Coolidge smiled so little because he was depressed, just going through the motions. Coolidge himself said in his autobiography that when his son died, "the power and the glory of the presidency went with him". Coolidge's wife Grace later told her surviving son John that his father "was never quite the same after Cal died". Calvin Coolidge died of a heart attack in 1931, barely 2 years after leaving office. Shortly before he died, Coolidge told a friend that he "no longer felt part of these times", as the Great Depression erased Coolidge Prosperity (as he earlier predicted it might when he choose not to run in 1928). The film has interviews with Coolidge's other son John:
• Video Link