Coolidge Sworn In: Vice President Becomes 30th President

By the light of a kerosene lamp in a Vermont farmhouse, a father swore in his own son as President of the United States. Calvin Coolidge received the oath of office from his father, John Calvin Coolidge Sr., a notary public and justice of the peace, at 2:47 a.m. on August 3, 1923, after word arrived that President Warren G. Harding had died suddenly in San Francisco. The setting — no electricity, no telephone, a rural home without modern amenities — seemed to belong to an earlier century, and it became one of the most iconic images of the American presidency. Harding's death came amid a western speaking tour and was officially attributed to a heart attack, though the exact cause remained debated for years since his wife refused to allow an autopsy. His administration was already being consumed by scandal. The Teapot Dome affair, involving the corrupt leasing of federal oil reserves by Interior Secretary Albert Fall, would soon become the largest government corruption scandal until Watergate. Harding died before the full scope of his administration's malfeasance became public. Coolidge was, in almost every way, Harding's opposite. Where Harding was gregarious and scandal-prone, Coolidge was laconic and scrupulously honest. His reputation for speaking as little as possible earned him the nickname "Silent Cal." A famous, possibly apocryphal story has a dinner guest telling Coolidge she had bet someone she could get more than two words out of him. "You lose," he supposedly replied. Coolidge's presidency coincided with the roaring economic expansion of the 1920s, and his philosophy of minimal government intervention and low taxes came to define the era. He won election in his own right in 1924 by a comfortable margin and chose not to run in 1928. The economic crash of 1929, just months after he left office, would cast a long shadow over his legacy of laissez-faire governance.