Hundreds of people are expected in Plymouth Notch next week for a four-day centennial celebration commemorating a three-minute event: the inauguration of president Calvin Coolidge in the sitting room of his childhood home. His father administered the oath at 2:47 a.m. on August 3, 1923.
A gala dinner, the premiere of a Coolidge documentary, a naturalization ceremony and five reenactments of the inauguration — including one in the sitting room at 2:47 a.m. on Thursday, August 3 — are among the events organized by the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation and the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation. Most take place at the Coolidge historic site, a village that encompasses the most significant places in the 30th president’s early life.
Stand between Union Christian Church and the maple tree just to the east, and you can see the natural wood-sided home where Coolidge was born, tacked on to the back of the general store his father operated. Across the street is the white house where he grew up (and took the oath of office just inside the bay window). Also in view are the mustard-colored house where his mother was born; the farm across the pond where his father, grandfather and great-grandfather were born; the site of his one-room school; and the cheese factory — still in operation today — that his father helped start.
“This was his world,” foundation president Matthew Denhart said.
Coolidge was the fifth generation of his family to live in Plymouth Notch. He left for boarding school at Black River Academy in Ludlow when he was 13 and then went to Amherst College. Coolidge stayed in Massachusetts, where he became a lawyer, started his political career and became governor in 1919. He was nominated for vice president at the 1920 Republican National Convention.
“Isn’t it sort of fascinating,” Denhart said, “that the moment that he ascended to the highest office — that, of course, being president — he happened to be back where he was born, in Vermont, where so many of his values were formed in this hardy little place?”
Vice president Coolidge was visiting family in 1923 when president Warren G. Harding died at age 57 of an apparent heart attack in San Francisco while on a tour of western states. The news arrived via telephone in Bridgewater, where switchboard operator Nellie Perkins dispatched her husband, Winfred, to the Coolidge home.
Colonel John Coolidge, Calvin’s father, answered the door. On that night, the younger Coolidge wrote in his autobiography, “I was awakened by my father coming up the stairs calling my name. I noticed that his voice trembled.” Before leaving the room, Coolidge wrote, the soon-to-be-president knelt and “asked God to bless the American people and give me the power to serve them.”
He consulted the family’s copy of the U.S. Constitution, then walked about 50 yards to Florence Cilley General Store to use the telephone to call the attorney general to explain how he thought they should proceed: His father, a notary public, could administer the oath of office. Shortly after the call, a small group gathered in the sitting room: his wife, Grace Coolidge; his stenographer; his chauffeur; and U.S. representative Porter Dale (R-Vt.). By the light of a kerosene lamp, with his late mother’s Bible nearby, Coolidge raised his right hand and swore to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.
Then he went back to bed.
The humble, quiet ceremony — conducted “as a whole country slept” — was “classic Coolidge,” Denhart said. “I think that really kind of set the tone for the Coolidge presidency.”
During centennial reenactments, Coolidge’s great-grandson Christopher Coolidge Jeter will portray Calvin, great-granddaughter Jenny Harville will portray Grace and former Vermont governor Jim Douglas, who has secured a period suit from the Middlebury College theater department, will play the role of John. But the colonel wouldn’t have answered the door wearing a suit, Douglas said, “so I got this nightshirt.” He’ll wear it over the suit to make the costume change quick.
Organizers expect the festivities to attract people from near and far. They got a note from a man in Macedonia who plans to attend. Stephen Gilroy, a retired seventh grade social studies teacher who has visited the historic site at least once a year since writing a thesis on Coolidge in 1978, plans to come from Gainesville, Ga. And Mary Evelyn McCurdy will come from Cookeville, Tenn., with her husband and five children.
McCurdy became a Coolidge admirer after learning about him in high school, she said: “I read his biography, and I thought, There’s nothing bad in that. He sounds like a really nice guy.” So she sought out more books by and about him and has collected roughly a dozen. She asked if she could portray Grace Coolidge at the centennial and bought a drop-waist periwinkle dress on eBay to wear for her solo performance on Wednesday, August 2. She plans to share stories from Mrs. Coolidge’s autobiography and sing the 1924 campaign song “Keep Cool With Coolidge.”
The next day, Yuichi Ono, a professor at Japan’s Tohoku University, will discuss in an interview with Douglas the support that Coolidge rallied for Japan after the Great Kanto Earthquake. It struck the month after Coolidge became president, sparking a tsunami and killing 140,000. Coolidge led the American Red Cross’ national relief drive, which raised $12 million — the equivalent of $214 million today. He received a bundle of thank-you letters from Japanese schoolchildren and considered them “among the choicest treasures on his bookshelf,” Denhart said.
If people know anything about Coolidge, they know his “Silent Cal” nickname and the term “brave little state,” which he coined in a speech from a train platform in Bennington while touring damage from the flood of 1927.
“Coolidge is Vermont’s president. Not just because he was born in Vermont.” Amity Shlaes
History books treat him as a minor character, and historians and presidential scholars tend to rank him 24th, 25th or even lower in presidential surveys, Coolidge biographer Amity Shlaes said. She believes he belongs in the top 10.
“The main reason he ranks low is people don’t know about him,” Shlaes said. Coolidge presided between world wars. War presidents and those who confront other major crises tend to rank higher, she added.
“We look for action men in our leaders, and Coolidge presented a different version of president,” Shlaes said. She calls him “the great refrainer.” Like George Washington, he believed that the president is not commander in chief at home; he is presider, she explained. “He’s presiding over his branch. There are three branches; one respects the other branches.” His restrained execution of the presidency is sometimes interpreted as weakness, Shlaes said, “but sometimes inaction takes more strength than action.”
Douglas counts fiscal responsibility among Coolidge’s greatest strengths. “During the eight years of the Harding and Coolidge administrations, not only were the budgets balanced, but the amount of the federal debt actually declined,” he said. “The top margin federal income tax rate declined from 73 percent down to 25.”
More important, Douglas said, was the civility Coolidge maintained. He didn’t always agree with members of Congress. He vetoed their bills, and they rejected one of his appointments, but they respected each other. He invited them to the White House for breakfast, Douglas said: “He would ply them with ‘griddle cakes and maple syrup.'”
Some blame Coolidge for the Great Depression, but Douglas said he believes that is unfair. Even a scholar of Herbert Hoover — who presided over the onset of the Depression — agrees, Douglas said. Coolidge Foundation publication Coolidge Quarterly devoted an entire issue to the topic, Shlaes said, adding that “The short answer to the question ‘Did Coolidge cause the Great Depression?’ is no.”
Coolidge chose not to run for reelection in 1928. “We draw our Presidents from the people. It is a wholesome thing for them to return to the people,” he wrote.
“Coolidge is Vermont’s president,” Shlaes said. “Not just because he was born in Vermont, but also because all his life in government, in Massachusetts but then also in Washington, he personified many Vermont values.” He was thrifty and fair, and he didn’t grandstand or put on airs.
When he took office in 1923, his son Calvin Jr. had just started a job in a tobacco field. As Coolidge wrote in his autobiography, “When one of his fellow laborers said to him, ‘If my father was President I would not work in a tobacco field,’ Calvin replied, ‘If my father were your father, you would.'”
President Coolidge is buried in a long line of Coolidges on a hill in Notch Cemetery, about half a mile from his birthplace. His grave is marked with a simple stone, and every year to mark his birthday, which happens to be the Fourth of July, the White House sends a wreath. Great-granddaughter Harville grew up coming to Plymouth Notch for the holiday every year, and she and her family trimmed the grass around the family graves.
Four days to mark the night his father swore him in as president might strike Coolidge as a lot of commotion. “It seemed a simple and natural thing to do at the time,” he wrote in his autobiography, “but I can now realize something of the dramatic force of the event.”
Calvin Coolidge Centennial Celebration, Wednesday, August 2, through Saturday, August 5, at President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Plymouth Notch. Learn more at coolidge2023.org.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Cool With Coolidge | Plymouth Notch marks the centennial of Silent Cal’s presidential inauguration”
This article appears in Jul 26 – Aug 1, 2023.
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