From collection Member List
Mayor 1910-1911, Northampton Massachusetts; State senator 1912-1915, President State Senate 1914-1915; State lieutenant governor 1916-1918, State Representative 1907-1908, Governor 1919-1920, Massachusetts; US Vice-President 1921-1923; US President 1923-1928.
###
As America’s 30th President (1923-1929), Calvin Coolidge demonstrated his determination to preserve the old moral and economic precepts of frugality amid the material prosperity which many Americans were enjoying during the 1920s era.
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.”
###
Coolidge’s Phi Gamma Delta Story
Coolidge entered the freshman class of Amherst in the fall of 1895.
He was a shy new fellow from Vermont, and weighed 119.5 pounds when he entered. (They measured them!) There were plenty of big men and athletes on campus from places like New York. For example, the Pratt Family (oil/Rockefeller) had several sons who were star footballers. Coolidge was not especially athletic. When asked what he did for sports at Amherst, he said, “I held the stakes.”
Amherst rush seems to have occurred freshman year. Coolidge anticipated getting tapped. He wrote his father his before college, “Dick Lane thinks he and I better go down to Amherst some time this spring and see about getting me into a society there…It means something to get into good society at Amherst. They don’t take in everybody.’ 1
In the event, Coolidge did not join a fraternity. We don’t know the bloody details. As he wrote his father, in October of freshman year, “I don’t seem to get acquainted very fast.” While never a star student, he picked up in sophomore and junior year. By senior year, he became known as a speaker.
Six men started a chapter of Phi Gamma Delta somewhere around 1893, and 1894. (his junior year, start of senior) Somewhere, apparently first term senior year, Coolidge was tapped by a Phi Gamma Delta.
In January 1895, second half of senior year, Coolidge wrote his father:
“We had a very fine banquet at Northampton Thursday evening. There were four men from Yale. I was not on the card but should have been had I joined the fraternity before the card was printed.
I responded to the toast of “Our Future” and think I must have done fairly well as one of the seniors from Yale, who has been around society banquets for four years, told our Toastmaster that it was the best toast he ever heard at a fraternity banquet. Perhaps my dress suit lent me inspiration as it was the first time I ever wore one. There
is nothing in the world gives me so much pleasure as to feel I have made a good speech…I think I must stand very well in the college now.” 2
This Phi Gamma Delta dinner, which took place at the Hotel Norwood, is apparently reported in the Phi Gamma Delta Quarterly of that spring, inspired CC. After graduation, the young man went to work as a clerk at a law firm in nearby Northampton, Mass. and was early recognized as a hard worker and good speaker! And upward from there!
_______________________________________________________________________
1 source: Claude Fuess bio page 47
2 page 65 “Your Son Calvin Coolidge,” a compendium of Coolidge letters to his father.
