4 November: Calvin Coolidge

On this date in 1924 Calvin Coolidge was elected 30th US president. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. His full name was John Calvin Coolidge: John for his father and Calvin after John Calvin, a founder of the Congregational church which the family belonged to. He was born in born in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, on July 4, 1872, making him the only US President to be born on Independence Day.
2. His First Lady was Grace Anna Goodhue, a teacher at a school for the deaf, who he married in 1905. It was a case of opposites attract. Grace was talkative and social, Calvin was stoic and serious.
3. In fact, Coolidge had quite a reputation for not saying a lot. In interviews, he'd often simply answer "Yes" or "No", which earned him the nickname, Silent Cal. There's a legend in which a woman at a dinner party made a bet that she could get at least three words out of him during the course of the evening. He turned to her and said, "You lose." Another brief statement he was famous for was in 1928 when he announced, “I do not choose to run for President in 1928.”
4. He graduated with honours from Amherst College in 1895, then earned his law degree. After passing the bar, he opened a law firm in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1898, and was elected to the town's city council. This stimulated his interest in politics and in 1918 he was elected as State Governor.
5. As Governor, he took a hard line with the police when they went on strike, which made him popular with voters. A year after that he was nominated as the candidate for Vice-President alongside Warren G. Harding.
6. Warren G. Harding died in office in 1923. At the time, Coolidge was in Vermont visiting his family home, which didn't have Electricity or a telephone, so a messenger had to call on the house in the middle of the night to tell Coolidge he was President. There followed a unique occurrence in which the new President was sworn in by his father, who happened to be a notary public.
7. He was elected President at the next election in 1924, despite a somewhat subdued campaign thanks to his 16 year old son tragically dying of an infected blister.
8. What did he do as President? Some would argue, not a lot. He was quoted as saying he spent most of his time “avoiding the big problems” and minimised government interference in business. This made him popular with businessmen but critics would later suggest that his stem the stock market speculation boom in the 1920s was a contributing factor the Great Depression. He was big on civil rights; he refused to appoint known members of the Ku Klux Klan to office, appointed African Americans to government positions and advocated for anti-lynching laws. In 1924, he signed the Indian Citizenship Act, granting full citizenship to all Native Americans and permitting them to retain tribal land rights. Grace, meanwhile, worked to raise awareness of deafness. She invited Helen Keller to the White House and raised $2 million for the Clarke School for the Deaf.
9. Coolidge was an animal lover. He was once sent a live Raccoon which the sender suggested he should kill and eat for Thanksgiving dinner. He didn't, keeping it as a pet instead and naming it Rebecca Raccoon. Rebecca wasn't popular with White House staff because she'd tear up the furniture. She was eventually donated to a zoo.
10. Aside from a state forest, a mountain, a dam, several bridges and schools, Coolidge has a biological phenomenon named after him. The Coolidge effect in which if a new female is introduced into a group of animals, the males will want to mate with her, even if they'd already satisfied themselves with the existing females. This seems a strange thing to name after a man who was only married once and wasn't known for having affairs. It arose from a story from when Coolidge and his wife visited a farm and were being shown the chicken coop. Grace noticed that one rooster seemed especially randy. She asked her guide how often that happened and was told, "Dozens of times a day." Mrs. Coolidge said, "Tell that to the President when he comes by." The guide obliged, and the President asked, "Same hen every time?" The reply was, "Oh, no, Mr. President, a different hen every time." President: "Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge."

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