Calvin Coolidge

Calvin Coolidge was the thirtieth president of the United States, from 1923 to 1929, and the most deliberately inactive occupant of the office in the modern era. He was a Republican lawyer from Vermont who made his career in Massachusetts politics, rising from city council to the governorship in 1918. National attention came from the Boston police strike of 1919, which he broke with the line that there is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time. That put him on the ticket as Warren Harding's vice-president in 1920. He was woken at his father's Vermont farmhouse in August 1923 to be told Harding had died, and his father, a notary public, swore him in by lamplight. He inherited the Teapot Dome scandal and cleaned up after it without being touched by it, which won him the 1924 election outright. His politics were tax cuts, debt reduction and a conviction that the government should do as little as possible. He was famously reticent, held regular press conferences without ever being quoted directly, and was nicknamed Silent Cal. He signed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States, and the same year signed an immigration act designed to exclude Asians and to cut southern and eastern European arrivals sharply. He declined to run again in 1928. The Wall Street crash came seven months after he left office, and his reputation has risen and fallen with opinion about whether he should have seen it coming.

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