White House gossip

by Edna M. Colman

Almost immediately, the young lawyer got into civic and political activities. He soon was president of the Nantucket Bank, and, in 1899, was elected to the City Council of Northampton, and the next year was chosen city solicitor. He became clerk of the county court in 1904. In 1905, his romance with Miss Grace A. Goodhue, of Burlington, Vt., culminated in their marriage.

Gossip has put forth various versions of the romance of President Coolidge and his wife. One of the stories given much repetition tells that, when Mr. Coolidge called upon one occasion, he found Miss Grace away from home. As her return was expected momentarily, he decided to wait. In the course of his conversation with her father the young man announced that he dropped in to say that he had concluded that Grace and he were going to be married. When her father inquired what Grace thought about it, Mr. Coolidge is reported to have replied that he “had not spoken to her about it yet.”

Mr. Coolidge was twice mayor of Northampton, and in 1907 was a member of the Massachusetts Legislature, going to the State Senate in 1912 and serving until 1915, including two terms as president of that body. The lieutenant governorship of the state came to him in 1916, and in 1918 he found himself elected Governor.

When he called the Massachusetts Senate to order in 1914, he made the shortest speech of acceptance on record in the annals of that body. It contained forty-two words and received state-wide attention and stamped him as timber for further political service. This speech has been regarded as a classic in Massachusetts statecraft, for it embodies the Coolidge Creed—“Do the Day’s Work” and “Be Brief.”

In 1917, he was elected to the governorship by a majority of seventeen thousand, but after the great Boston police strike, which gave him national recognition, and out of which grew the slogan, “law and order,” he was reëlected in 1919 by more than one hundred and twenty-five thousand majority, the largest vote ever given a candidate for that office in that state.

The gist of his platform in his gubernatorial race, in which he won such a sweeping victory, was as follows:

“Do the day’s work. If it be to protect the rights of the weak, whoever objects, do it. If it be to help a powerful corporation, do that. Expect to be called a stand-patter, but don’t be a stand-patter. Expect to be called a demagogue, but don’t be a demagogue. Don’t hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don’t hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table. Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong. Don’t hurry to legislate. Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation.”

People who insist that the President is cold, taciturn, devoid of feeling and sentiment, have never seen him take from his pocket a slim little silver case, which he always carries, and open it to gaze upon the face of the mother who left him years ago.

The President and his wife are both of the Congregational faith and regular attendants of the First Church in Washington.

Mrs. Coolidge, from the first moment she appeared in Washington as wife of the Vice President, made friends, and her popularity has never ceased increasing. She is so youthful looking that it is hard to credit her with being the mother of the tall son, John, to whom she now has to look up, for he is rapidly topping his father in height.