John Calvin Coolidge was the first and only U.S. President to have been born on the Fourth of July, in 1874. Born on this day, he was also the only President to have had the oath of office administered by his father, a justice of the peace, who swore him in when the Coolidges received word of President Warren G. Harding's death.
Coolidge's reputation has been that of an unfeeling and lazy man, unaware of what was going on in the country and who dawdled while the United States drifted toward the Great Depression. However, history does not really support this caricature of a man who was actually a highly intelligent and complex individual.
Despite being self-contained and terse, Coolidge was an extremely intelligent man and a fine scholar. His wedding gift to his wife, Grace Goodhue, was his own translation of Dante Alighieri's "Inferno". A week after the wedding, Coolidge also presented his wife with 52 pairs of his socks that needed mending.
Some have argued that Coolidge was the best-prepared candidate ever to become President, having worked his way through a succession of elective political offices until he wound up as the Vice President under Harding, attaining the presidency when Harding died in office in August of 1923.
Coolidge was a laissez-faire proponent, believing, like Jefferson, that the government governs best which governs least. In July of 1924, his son, Calvin Jr., died of blood poisoning. The younger Coolidge, like his mother, was an outgoing and gregarious boy, and his death affected his father deeply.
Although some historians have characterized Coolidge's behavior in office as marked by laziness or indolence, it seems now that it was almost certainly a deep depression brought about by the death of his son. Coolidge chose not to run in 1928. Privately, his wife remarked to a friend that "Daddy thinks there is going to be a Depression."
On January 5, 1933, he died of heart failure at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts. Though Coolidge was dismissed for years as a presidential lightweight, his reputation has grown in recent years. President Ronald Reagan retrieved Coolidge's portrait from storage and displayed it in the White House during his tenure in office, and a recent biography has provided a much more favorable view of Coolidge and his presidency than had previously been available.
