One Summer: America, 1927

the Coolidge home from the nearby general store, the only place in town with a telephone.
    By the light of a kerosene lamp – the Coolidge house did not have electricity or plumbing; rural homes still very often didn’t – Coolidge’s father, a notary public, swore his son in as president. As presidents go, Calvin Coolidge was not a magnificent specimen. He was slight of build and terse of manner. His face was pinched and inclined to scowl; he looked, in the well-chosen words of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, as if he had been ‘weaned on a pickle’. WhereWarren G. Harding had charm but no brains, Coolidge had brains but little charm. He was the least affable, gregarious, metaphorically embraceable president of modern times. Yet America came to adore him. Though he would spend the 1920s doing as little as possible – that was essentially his declared policy as president – he set the mood in the nation in a way few other presidents have. If the 1920s was the age of anyone, it was the Age of Coolidge.
     
    Calvin Coolidge was born on the Fourth of July 1872 in Plymouth Notch, a scattered hamlet of two dozen or so people in a lofty cleft of the Green Mountains of central Vermont. The Notch, as it was known, commanded a lonely valley about a dozen miles from Ludlow, the nearest outlet to the wider world. ‘The scene was one of much natural beauty, of which I think the inhabitants had little realization,’ Coolidge wrote in later life. His birthplace was the general store and post office that his father ran, though the family later moved to a larger house across the road – the house where Coolidge was sleeping on the night he learned he was president.
    The Coolidges were reasonably well off. His father also owned the blacksmith’s and a small farm, from which he produced maple syrup and cheese. But the family also had its share of suffering. Calvin’s mother died from tuberculosis when Calvin was just twelve, an event that touched him deeply. He recorded the event simply but rather movingly in his autobiography:
     
When she knew that her end was near she called us children to her bedside, where we knelt down to receive her final parting blessing. In an hour she was gone. It was her thirty-ninth birthday. I was twelve years old. We laid her away in the blustering snows of March. The greatest grief that can come to a boy came to me. Life was never to be the same again.
     
    That was no exaggeration. Forty years later in the White House,according to Coolidge’s Secret Service agent, Colonel E. W. Starling, Coolidge ‘communed with her, talked with her, and took every problem to her’. Coolidge also lost his only sibling, his beloved sister Abbie. Five years after his mother’s death, almost to the day, she died from a ruptured appendix.
    In autumn 1891, Coolidge entered Amherst, then a small college of 350 or so students, in central Massachusetts. He was a conspicuous oddity. His hair was iron red and his face a splodge of freckles. He was painfully shy, and failed to find a single fraternity that wished to have him as a member – a level of rejection that was more or less without precedent. Only the kindly Dwight Morrow befriended him. With all others he was almost completely silent. ‘Often hardly a word would pass his lips for days at a time, except such as were absolutely necessary to keep him supplied with food and to report his presence in the classroom,’ the writer and advertising man Bruce Barton, also an Amherst alumnus, wrote years later in a recollection.
    Coolidge did eventually warm up a little and even gained admission to a fraternity, but socializing was never his strong suit. Instead he worked hard and graduated with honours. After Amherst, he crossed the Connecticut River to nearby Northampton and there studied law in the offices of Hammond and Field, whose partners were also Amherst men. In 1899, he impetuously ran for a seat on the city council and was elected. It was the beginning of a long political career. In 1905, he married (over the strident objections of her mother, who thought him weedy) a teacher of the deaf, Grace Goodhue, a fellow Vermonter whom he met in Northampton and who was as outgoing as he was retiring. Grace was a great support and did all the talking for both of them in social situations. He doted on her and called her ‘Mamma’.
    With Grace at his side, Coolidge began his long climb up the political ladder. First he became mayor of Northampton; then a member of