One Summer: America, 1927

on his announcement. Then the reporters rushed out to break the news to the world. The message itself waseither ten words or twelve words long, depending on whether one counted ‘nineteen twenty-eight’ as one word or three – no one could agree – but the correspondents filing reports from the Western Union office in Rapid City sent nearly 100,000 words that day and the next.
    Why Coolidge decided not to run is a question that has fed speculation for over eighty years. Probably there were many reasons. Neither he nor his wife had any fondness for Washington, particularly in the sapping mugginess of summer, which was why he was pleased to take such a long vacation in 1927. Nor was it as if he had a great programme to see through. Whatever mark Calvin Coolidge was going to leave on the world was unlikely to be altered by another four years in office. Coolidge also seems to have enjoyed a certain prescience regarding the economy. ‘Poppa says there’s a depression coming,’ Grace Coolidge remarked to an acquaintance soon after her husband announced his decision.
    But there was one other reason, nowhere noted at the time, that may have stood out above all others. Calvin Coolidge was depressed, chronically so. The reason was a family tragedy for which he blamed himself. Three years earlier, on the last day of June 1924, Coolidge’s two sons, John and Calvin Junior, had a game of tennis on a White House court. Calvin Junior wore sneakers without socks and developed a blister, which became infected. Within a day or so, he was running a high fever and was drifting in and out of delirium. On 3 July, the day before his father’s birthday, he was hurriedly admitted to Walter Reed General Hospital.
    Coolidge wrote to his father: ‘Calvin is very sick … He blistered his toe and infection got into his blood. The toe looks all right but the poison spread all over his system … Of course he has all that medical science can give but he may have a long-sickness with ulcers, then again he may be better in a few days.’ In fact, three days later the boy was dead.
    Coolidge had been president for just over eleven months and had been nominated to run for president in his own right just twoweeks earlier. Coolidge and his wife were devastated. All interest in affairs of state seemed to drain out of the president. ‘When he went the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him,’ Coolidge wrote later.
    Coolidge was convinced that his role as president was entirely responsible for his son’s death. He wrote in his autobiography, ‘If I had not been President he would not have raised a blister on his toe, which resulted in blood-poisoning, playing lawn tennis in the South Grounds … I do not know why such a price was exacted for occupying the White House.’ The final sentence of Coolidge’s autobiography was strangely heartfelt: ‘It costs a great deal to be President.’
    Among the nation’s press, the question concerning the president’s announcement was not why he decided not to run, but why he chose such an ambiguous phrase as ‘I do not choose to run’ as opposed to a more direct ‘I choose not to run’ or ‘I have decided not to run’. Many saw it not as an outright refusal to run but almost as the very opposite – a reluctant willingness to be drafted if that was the will of the people. The humorist Will Rogers put it succinctly in his popular newspaper column:
     
I think Mr Coolidge’s statement is the best-worded acceptance of a nomination ever uttered by a candidate. He spent a long time in the dictionary looking for that word ‘choose,’ instead of ‘I will not.’ It don’t take much political knowledge to know that a man can get more votes running on the people’s request than he can running on his own request. Mr Coolidge is the shrewdest politician that ever drew government salary.
     
    The person in America most excited by the announcement was Herbert Hoover, who saw himself as the clear front-runner to succeed Coolidge even if the rest of the nation did not, or at least did not necessarily. Hoover was holidaying in the redwood forests of northern California when the news broke and was as puzzled aseveryone else by Coolidge’s choice of words. ‘The word “choose” has various connotations in its New England usage,’ he reflected later. ‘I determined at once to say nothing until I could have a talk with the President.’ According to Hoover’s memoirs of 1952, he waited till