Calvin Coolidge

Calvin Coolidge was fifty years trudging from his birthplace in Vermont to a place in Boston from which he started on his way to fame. Those fifty years in that part of the world known as Christendom-the West, from the early seventies of the last century to the mid years of the second decade in the new century were years of tremendous stress and change. It was for the most part peaceful change, social and economic and so, of course, political change.

Calvin Coolidge was born July 4, 1872, at Plymouth, Vermont. In that sentence lies the embryo biography of the man who governed America during a golden age. The time and the place were environing circumstances which as much as his blood, perhaps even more than his blood, determined the kind of a man the thirtieth President of the United States would be between 1923 and 1929. It is, therefore, essential to consider here and now this environment: first, July 4, 1872; second, Plymouth, Vermont.

Rails for the steam engines first had stretched across the continent, two thin gray lines less than ten years before Calvin Coolidge was born. And when he came to Plymouth, that Fourth of July 1872, literally tens of thousands of miles of rails were being pushed like the threads of a great spiderweb across the continent east and west, not once, not twice, but in a dozen places; then north and south and finally diagonally and crisscross. The railroad was dominating politics, engaging finance, distributing the products of industry far and wide, breaking the frontier and making a new age, a new America; a roaring, greedy America, noisily proclaiming its patriotism and denying the ancient gods of the fathers.

In Congress, in the legislatures and in the city councils of the towns these scoundrels, honestly abetted by sincere, high purposed men, were working their will with government. Bribery, ill-concealed, became conventional. During Calvin Coolidge's childhood, through his boyhood well into his youth, scandal burst upon scandal in Washington and in the state capitals in the cities, towns, and villages, as the steam giant ravaged the land.

So much for the time when Calvin Coolidge came into the world. Now for the place. Consider Vermont. All this turmoil that was the America of the decade that followed the Civil War, all this soot and ashes of corruption within the gilded sepulchre of the era, scarcely touched the soft green mountains of Vermont. There the old America lay peacefully basking in the ideals of its past. Vermont remained calm and sweet and lovely, like the interior of some cool museum preserving colonial life. Of course in the larger towns and cities some smudge of the shiny god of steam touched men here and there. But after the Civil War for a decade or two or three, back in the hills, in the hamlets, in country towns and in little white villages nestling in the valleys, life went on, unspoiled by the devastation of the times. Plymouth, Vermont, was one of the primitive villages, one of half a hundred exhibits in this social game preserve that is Vermont, where men and things retain even today some semblance of their pristine American quality. Here survive the last of the Puritans.

So we may say that Calvin Coolidge, who came into this world July 4, 1872, was born immediately after the Revolutionary War. Water wheels turned the little grist and saw mills that made the articles of sluggish barter which passed for commerce in that place. The New England farm was self-sufficient, a century after other American farms were becoming industrialized. On Vermont farms the food was grown, the clothing made, the togs and lumber hewn and sawed, and from year's end to year's end the outer world sent back little into this quiet Arcady resting under the spell of a day that long had gone. Only loggers and trappers had commerce with the outer world. Here the soldiers returned from the Great War of the Rebellion were repressed even in their boasting.