One Summer: America, 1927

the Massachusetts legislature, the General Court; then lieutenant governor; and finally, in 1918, governor. In all positions,he distinguished himself by his diligence, thrift and parsimony of speech, attributes that endeared him to New Englanders. His personal frugality was legendary. In 1906, he moved with Grace into a modest rented duplex on Massasoit Street in Northampton and remained in modest rented premises for the rest of his life.
    In 1919 Boston had a celebrated police strike. The city’s policemen were paid barely $20 a week, and from that they had to buy their own uniforms, so their grievances were real, but their actions alienated public opinion and left Boston at the mercy of lawless elements. For two days, mobs roamed the streets, robbing and intimidating innocent citizens, and looters had a field day. When city authorities failed to assert control, Coolidge, as governor, stepped in. With an unwonted show of forcefulness he called out the State Guard, dismissed the strikers and hired a new force. ‘There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time,’ he declared – the only occasion in his life, as far as can be told, that he uttered a ringing statement. His action made him a national figure and propelled him on to the nomination for vice-president on the Harding ticket the following year.
    As vice-president, it is fair to say, he made little impression on anyone, even within the administration. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr, assistant secretary of the navy, said he sat through innumerable cabinet meetings that Coolidge attended and couldn’t remember him ever once uttering a word.
    When the nation awoke in August 1923 to find that Harding was dead and the obscure Coolidge was president, most were dumbfounded. Some had stronger feelings. Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the Nation , wrote: ‘I doubt if it [the presidency] has ever fallen into the hands of a man so cold, so narrow, so reactionary, so uninspiring, so unenlightened, or who has done less to earn it than Calvin Coolidge.’ Yet most people found themselves quickly warming to Coolidge, almost in spite of himself. The nation grew fond of his peculiarities and often exaggerated them inanecdote. His most celebrated trait was his taciturnity. An oft-told story, which has never been verified, is that a woman sitting next to him at dinner gushed: ‘Mr President, my friend bet me that I wouldn’t be able to get you to say three words tonight.’
    ‘You lose,’ the president supposedly responded.
    Beyond doubt, however, is that the President and Mrs Coolidge once sat through nine innings of a Washington Senators baseball game without speaking except for once when Coolidge asked her the time and she replied, ‘Four twenty-four.’ On another occasion, a woman sitting beside him at an official dinner, hoping to spark a conversation, asked if he didn’t get tired of having to endure so many such dinners. Coolidge shrugged and said, ‘Gotta eat somewhere,’ and returned to his meal. He was known, not surprisingly, as Silent Cal.
    In some settings, however, Coolidge could be much more forth-coming – ‘almost garrulous’, in the words of one biographer. Twice a week he held private press conferences in which he met with correspondents and spoke freely and sometimes even animatedly, though his comments were all off the record and all questions had to be submitted in advance to his private secretary, a man with a name that sounded like a W. C. Fields snake-oil salesman: C. Bascom Slemp.
    His private eccentricities were even greater than his public ones. According to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, while having breakfast he liked to have his valet rub his head with Vaseline. He was so hypochondriacal that he often stopped in his work to take his own pulse. He had the White House physician examine him every day whether he felt unwell or not. Those who worked closely with him learned to be wary of a streak of ‘pure cussedness’, to quote his long-suffering aide Wilson Brown, with which he rather joyously made many people’s lives hell. Once, on a trip to Florida, the secretary of state, Frank B. Kellogg, asked Brown to find out what clothes he should wear for a parade through Palm Beach later that day. Kellogg was too frightened of Coolidge’s temper to ask thepresident himself, so Brown went to the executive quarters for him. Brown later wrote:
     
I found Mrs Coolidge knitting tranquilly while the President hid