48 Fun Facts About Calvin Coolidge

Calvin Coolidge's presidency is identified with which boom era?

The Roaring Twenties: Coolidge left office in March 1929 still popular, with the boom intact. The stock market crashed that October, and the Depression took his reputation with it.

What nickname did Coolidge earn on Washington's dinner-party circuit?

Silent Cal earned the name by saying little at Washington dinners. Yet much of the reputation was cultivated, and as president he held press conferences several times a month.

Coolidge is the only US president born on which holiday?

Independence Day: three presidents, Adams, Jefferson and Monroe, died on the Fourth of July, but Coolidge, born in 1872, is the only one whose life began on it.

Massachusetts made Coolidge's career, but which state was his birthplace?

Vermont: he was born in the hamlet of Plymouth Notch, where the family kept the general store, and he is buried there rather than in the state he governed.

Where did Coolidge study, graduating cum laude?

Amherst College gave him more than a degree: fellow graduates such as the Boston merchant Frank Stearns organised and publicised his rise through Massachusetts politics.

In which Massachusetts city did Coolidge practise law and serve as mayor?

Northampton: he read law in an office there, served as mayor from 1910 and, frugal as ever, insisted on renting his home rather than buying one.

Where did Grace Goodhue teach when she met Coolidge?

A school for the deaf: Grace taught at the Clarke School and first saw Calvin through a window, shaving in his underwear with a hat on. Her laugh made him look up.

Which race gave Coolidge his only defeat at the ballot box?

School board member: a second Republican entered the race, split the vote and let a Democrat in. The neighbours' stated objection was that he had no children in the schools.

Which 1919 event made Governor Coolidge a national figure?

The Boston police strike left the city to two nights of rioting. Coolidge called out the State Guard, backed the dismissal of the strikers and became a national hero of law and order.

Which labour leader received Coolidge's "no right to strike against the public safety" reply?

Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, had telegraphed asking that the strikers be taken back and the official who suspended their leaders removed. Coolidge's reply made front pages.

Which 1912 labour dispute did state senator Coolidge help arbitrate?

The Bread and Roses strike had shut the woollen mills of Lawrence for two months. Coolidge chaired the special committee whose proposed settlement the company finally accepted.

Rob Roy and Prudence Prim, Coolidge's favourite White House dogs, were which breed?

Collies, both white. Coolidge wrote that they became so bound up with him that he had them drawn into his bookplate, 'where they will live as long as our country endures'.

Sworn in as president in the middle of the night, what did Coolidge do next?

Went back to bed: the house had no telephone to keep him up, and he set off for Washington only after a night's sleep.

Who was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee Harding and Coolidge defeated in 1920?

Franklin D. Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, ran with James M. Cox and lost in a landslide. Twelve years later he won the presidency himself.

Who administered Coolidge's first presidential oath of office in August 1923?

His father, a notary public, read him the oath in the family sitting room by the light of a kerosene lamp, because electric light had not yet reached the hamlet.

In which city did President Harding die, making Coolidge president?

San Francisco: Harding fell ill on his way back from Alaska, near the end of a long tour of the West, and his train was rushed to the city, where he died on 2 August 1923.

Why was Coolidge sworn in a second time at the Willard Hotel?

A state official had given it, and the attorney general questioned whether such authority reached to a federal oath. A Washington judge repeated it at the hotel, with no publicity.

Which Harding-era scandal did Coolidge inherit on taking office?

Teapot Dome: Coolidge let the Senate's investigators do their work, named special counsel to pursue the oil-lease cases, and forced out Attorney General Harry Daugherty for refusing to cooperate.

Coolidge's December 1923 annual message to Congress was the first to be what?

Aired nationally on radio: Harding's message a year earlier had reached only a very limited audience. Coolidge went on to use the new medium to carry his 1924 campaign speeches to millions.

What did Coolidge's son Calvin Jr. die from in 1924?

Sepsis from a blister, raised playing tennis on the White House court, killed the 16-year-old within about a week. Coolidge wrote that the power and the glory of the presidency went with him.

Which 1914 speech as state senate president summed up Coolidge's philosophy of government?

Have Faith in Massachusetts carried his name beyond the state. Six years later a delegate from Oregon put him up for vice president, and the convention stampeded to him against the party bosses.

Which federal force was set up in May 1924, two days after Coolidge signed the Immigration Act?

The Border Patrol was created by a Labor Department spending act two days after the quota law, to watch the stretches of frontier between official inspection stations.

Which Treasury Secretary's "scientific taxation" drove Coolidge's tax cuts?

Andrew Mellon, a Pittsburgh industrialist, argued that lower rates would bring in more revenue, not less. The Revenue Acts of 1924 and 1926 cut the surtaxes on large incomes accordingly.

Which future president served as Coolidge's Secretary of Commerce?

Herbert Hoover got no warm send-off: Coolidge called him 'Wonder Boy' and grumbled that for six years the man had given him unsolicited advice, all of it bad.

Who was Coolidge's vice president during his full term from 1925?

Charles G. Dawes got the nomination only after Frank Lowden turned it down. In office the author of the Dawes Plan for German reparations clashed with Coolidge over farm relief.

Which farm relief bill did Coolidge veto in both 1927 and 1928?

McNary-Haugen would have had the government buy up surplus crops to prop up prices. Coolidge vetoed it twice, the milder plan he preferred never passed, and critics blamed him when the farm crisis deepened.

Which 1927 disaster is Coolidge criticised for not visiting?

The Great Mississippi Flood: Coolidge believed a visit would achieve nothing and look like grandstanding, so he reluctantly sent a cabinet member to run the relief effort instead.

Which 1928 treaty, signed in Coolidge's term, pledged its signatories to renounce war?

The Kellogg-Briand Pact had no means of enforcement, and Coolidge himself doubted that it would prevent a war. It still won his Secretary of State the Nobel Peace Prize.

Coolidge's only foreign trip as president was to a conference in which city?

Havana: Coolidge went in person in January 1928 to hold out an olive branch to Latin American leaders embittered by United States interventions in the region.

Whom did Coolidge appoint to the Supreme Court in 1925?

Harlan F. Stone had been brought in as attorney general to restore the Justice Department after the Harding scandals. A Democratic president later promoted him to chief justice.

Where was Coolidge on holiday when he announced he would not seek another term?

The Black Hills of South Dakota: Coolidge handed reporters slips of paper bearing a single sentence, and his wife Grace learned of it only after he had told the press.

Which word completes Coolidge's 1927 statement, "I do not ___ to run for President in 1928"?

Choose. Coolidge had the sentence put on slips of paper and handed to reporters exactly four years after the death that made him president.

Coolidge said the chief concern of the American people is what?

Business: 'the chief business of the American people is business,' he told newspaper editors in 1925. Later in the same speech he said that their chief ideal is idealism.

Which Washington wit said Coolidge looked as though he had been "weaned on a pickle"?

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt's daughter, won the credit by constant repetition, but she said the line was not hers: it came from another patient of her doctor's.

What did Coolidge supposedly say to a guest who bet she could get three words out of him?

"You lose" is a much-told story of a dinner guest who announces her bet and gets two words back. Coolidge heard it retold at a press luncheon in 1924 and called it a rumour "without any foundation".

Which nation adopted Coolidge in 1927 and dressed him in a feathered war bonnet?

The Sioux made him one of their own, and Coolidge, who never minded a camera, posed for the photographers in the full feathered headdress.

What kind of animal was Rebecca, the Coolidges' famous White House pet?

A raccoon: Rebecca was sent to the White House in 1926 to be served for Thanksgiving dinner. The Coolidges kept her instead and gave her a collar embroidered 'White House Raccoon'.

Coolidge was the first president to appear in what kind of motion picture, in 1924?

A sound film: in August 1924 a pioneer of sound-on-film recorded him giving a short speech on the White House lawn, so Coolidge became the first president audiences could both see and hear.

Which Republican senator ran against Coolidge in 1924 on a new Progressive Party ticket?

Robert La Follette won about a sixth of the popular vote but carried only his home state, and Coolidge still took 54 percent.

Who was the Democratic nominee Coolidge defeated in 1924?

John W. Davis, a Wall Street lawyer, emerged as a compromise only on the 103rd ballot, after two rivals had deadlocked the Democratic convention.

Which state outside the South did Coolidge fail to carry in 1924?

Wisconsin went to its own senator, the Progressive candidate, and it was the only state he won. Coolidge carried 35 states and 382 electoral votes.

Harding and Coolidge carried which former Confederate state in 1920, the first to vote Republican since Reconstruction?

Tennessee broke the Solid South: no state of the old Confederacy had backed a Republican for president since the 1870s. Coolidge had spent the campaign touring the Upper South.

Which 1927 law created the commission that regulated broadcasting?

The Radio Act declared the airwaves public property and set up the Federal Radio Commission to license stations. Coolidge, no friend of regulation, signed it at his Commerce Secretary's prompting.

What did Harding invite Vice President Coolidge to do that was then rare for the office?

Attend cabinet meetings: Coolidge later wrote that the experience was 'of supreme value' when he suddenly became president. His own vice president announced that he would stay away.

After leaving the White House, Coolidge took up which kind of paid writing for about a year?

A newspaper column: from mid-1930 Coolidge filed a daily piece of about 200 words for a year, and a syndicate sold it to papers across the country.

Late in life, Coolidge said he no longer fitted in with what?

"These times": Coolidge said it to an old friend shortly before he died at 60, in January 1933. Two months later a new president launched the New Deal, the reverse of his own hands-off approach.

Which later president had a portrait of Coolidge hung in the White House?

Ronald Reagan put the portrait up in the 1980s and praised Coolidge's hands-off style, crediting it with seven years of prosperity, peace and balanced budgets.

As governor, Coolidge vetoed a 1920 bill that would have allowed what in Massachusetts?

Selling light beer, at 2.75 percent alcohol, was the bill's aim. Coolidge disliked Prohibition himself but vetoed it as a breach of the Constitution he had sworn to defend, and the veto held.