Coolidge was born on July 4, 1872 in Plymouth, Vermont. His father was a storekeeper and local public official. Coolidge attended a local school before enrolling nin 1886 at the Black River Academy in Ludlow, Vermont. He studied at Amherst College from 1891-95. He then studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1897.
His father, John Calvin Coolidge was a farmer and storekeeper. He was also a justice of the peace and was able to deliver the oath of office to his son. His mother, Victoria Joesphine Moor, died when Calvin was 12. His only sibling, as sister, Abigail Gratia Coolidge, died at age 15. He married Grace Anna Goodhue and had two sons, - John Coolidge and Calvin Coolidge, Jr.
Coolidge practiced law and became an active Republican in Massachusetts. He began his political career on the Northampton City Council (1899-1900). From 1907-08, he was a member of the Massachusetts General Court. He then became Mayor of Northampton in 1910. In 1912, he was elected to be a Massachusetts State Senator. From 1916-18, he was the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts. In 1919, he won the Governor's seat. He then ran with Warren Harding to become Vice President in 1921.
Coolidge made an energetic and effective governor. He worked to settle labor disputes by encouraging reasonable pay increases, and to grant additional home rule to municipalities. Yet his national reputation did not come from such accomplishments, but from the 1919 Boston police strike.
The police of Boston had grievances over pay, hours of work, and working conditions. Receiving little satisfaction from the city, they affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and when 19 local police union leaders were suspended from the force, the police voted to strike. Their walkout brought disorder to Boston. Coolidge did not step into the strike until peace had been largely restored, when he took command of the various forces that had been introduced to bring order. He denied the right of the strikers to return to their jobs, and defended the city's and state's actions in a telegram to Samuel Gompers, president of the AFL, in which he asserted, "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time." Coolidge received the acclaim of the nation, including that of President Woodrow Wilson, for meeting a dire threat to public safety, and that fall he was reelected governor.
At the 1920 Republican national convention, Coolidge, a favorite-son candidate for president, was passed over as Warren G. Harding was nominated. The delegates, however, spontaneously selected Coolidge for vice president. That fall Harding and Coolidge won a landslide victory.
Vice President Coolidge presided over the Senate without flair or dash, sat quietly at cabinet meetings, and made rather unimpressive speeches over the country. By the summer of 1923 he had little enthusiasm for his job and had developed no power as a national political figure.
All that changed during the night of Aug. 2, 1923, when President Harding died. At 2:47 A.M., Coolidge was sworn in by his father in his rural Vermont home by the light of an oil lamp. The new President left for Washington a few hours later to take up his duties.
Coolidge set out to establish a working relationship with the leading members of the Harding administration, and he drew on many people for advice and help. The scandals of Harding's presidency, particularly the Teapot Dome oil affair, were coming to light, and Coolidge spent much of his time defending his party. His relations with Congress were unhappy, but he coped with scandal by prosecuting offenders, and, thanks to that, his integrity, and his self-possession, he retrieved public confidence in the White House.
He gained enough control over the Republican party to be nominated for president in June 1924. Coolidge also gained enough of the people's confidence to be easily elected over his major opposition, John W. Davis (Democrat) and Robert M. La Follette (Progressive). When Coolidge entered the campaign with a series of "nonpolitical" statements late that summer, it was as the apostle of prosperity, economy, and respectability. His opponents exhausted themselves with charges about the government's deficiencies, while the President received credit for his equanimity and the economic upturn. But 1924 was a sad year for Coolidge, for in July his younger son, Calvin, Jr., died of blood poisoning.
Coolidge was fairly successful in getting what he wanted during his full term as president. Heading the list were paring the national debt and reducing income taxes, so that there would be more money for consumer spending. Other measures included orderly growth of civil and military aviation, expansion of the services of the departments of Agriculture and Commerce, regulation of radio broadcasting, development of waterways, flood control, and encouragement of cooperative solutions to farm problems. Twice, he blocked enactment of the McNary-Haugen bill, which proposed to dump farm surpluses abroad in the hope of raising domestic market prices, because he objected to its price-fixing features and its cost.
In his search for world peace, which absorbed much of his time, Coolidge's course was unsteady. He supported American membership on the World Court, and then, when American participation on the court was rendered impossible by Senate amendments, naval disarmament. When the Geneva Naval Conference of 1927, which Coolidge sponsored, failed because of the refusal of France and Italy to participate and Anglo-American disagreement on what to disarm, the president was discouraged. He supported a multilateral declaration renouncing war as an instrument of national policy and agreeing to settle all disputes by pacific means. This was incorporated into international law through the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928.
Coolidge also restored diplomatic relations with Mexico. It seemed for a while, however, in 1927 that the good relations between the two countries might end again as a result of restrictions on foreign oil rights and on the Catholic church in Mexico, and because of the sharp disagreement over recognition of a new government in Nicaragua. Working largely through special representative Henry Stimson in Nicaragua and the new ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow, the Coolidge administration was able to settle the situation. This and other actions anticipated the Good Neighbor policy toward Latin America.
Other distinguishing features of Coolidge's foreign policy were America's insistence on elimination of the treaty rights of many foreign nations to intervene in Chinese affairs and its efforts to settle problems of German reparations to the World War I victors, chiefly through the Dawes Plan, which made reparations manageable for Germany. Regarding foreign debts to the United States government, there was no question of reducing them, but the administration substantially lowered the required interest rates.
As an administrator, Coolidge was most successful. He demanded and got efficient and economical performance in government operations. He was instrumental in releasing the remaining political prisoners convicted under the Sedition Act during the Wilson administration. He also helped by his appointments to raise the level of competence among diplomats and federal judges.
Coolidge declined to run for reelection. He retired in 1929 to Northampton, where he busied himself writing newspaper and magazine articles. He seldom took an active role in politics. His health declined rapidly, and on Jan. 5, 1933, he died of coronary thrombosis. He was buried in the family plot in Plymouth Notch, where the Coolidge homestead is operated as a museum by the state of Vermont.
