FIRST ADMINISTRATION OF CALVIN
COOLIDGE
August 3, 1923, to March 4, 1925
THE death of President Harding in San Francisco, coming so swiftly and unexpectedly on the evening of August 2, 1923, at 7:30, stunned all of his immediate party, none more so than his friend and secretary George Christian, who immediately flashed the news of the national calamity to Vice President Coolidge, vacationing in a little Vermont house, the home of his father, John C. Coolidge.
Just at midnight a messenger arrived and roused the elder Coolidge, and to this gray-haired father was given the duty of awakening his son to apprize him of the fact that fate had ordained him to assume the reins of government just fallen from the lifeless hands of his friend and chief.
By the time Vice President and Mrs. Coolidge had dressed and gotten downstairs, the newspaper men were arriving, and, shortly after, Mr. Coolidge’s secretary came. Within an hour, a telephone had been installed, the house adjoining secured for use, connection with the White House established to get the exact phraseology of the presidential oath of office, and a message of condolence sent to Mrs. Harding.
At 2:47 A. M., August 3d, the simplest inaugural in American history was enacted. In the dim lamplight, with scarce half a dozen witnesses, Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as President by his father, a notary public, taking the oath on the old, well-worn family Bible.
History was in the making by the minute in the eventful twenty-four hours that spanned August 2d and 3d. Without an instant’s warning the life record of Warren Harding had been marked “Finis,” and Calvin Coolidge, tossing hay and farming until bedtime in a smock made twenty years before by his grandmother, had scarce gotten well into his first sleep before he was summoned to pick up the mantle of his chief, step from a salary of twelve thousand to one of seventy-five thousand, move at once from a tiny lamplit farmhouse into the Executive Mansion, and from the paths of peace and serenity into a seething maelstrom of duties, to be buffeted between the rocks of the political torrent and the shoals of social quicksands.
The movements of President Coolidge in taking up his new prodigious burden were characteristic of the typical New England gentleman. Without haste and without displaying in the least degree the intense emotion that must have been surging through him, he made his brief inaugural address to be sent broadcast to a sorrowing, anxious nation:
“Reports have reached me, which I fear are correct, that President Harding is gone. The world has lost a good man. I mourn his loss. He was my chief and my friend.
“It will be my purpose to carry out the policies which he had begun, for the service of the American people and for the meeting of their responsibilities wherever they may arise.