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Calvin Coolidge was industrious, reserved and conservative both as a private citizen and as president. When it came to domestic affairs, he believed in a small and efficient government, and foreign affairs he was content to leave to the state department.
Coolidge spent his early boyhood years working in the family store and down on the farm. A good student, he graduated from Amherst in 1895, passed the bar and set up practice in Northhampton, Mass. He went on to win a number of local offices, including that of mayor. Voters seemed to be drawn to virtues of simplicity and incorruptibility, and in 1915 he was elected lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. Three years later he became governor.
Coolidge drew national attention in 1919 by decisively sending in the state militia on the second day to restore order to a Boston police strike.
This eventually led him to share the Republican ticket with Warren G. Harding. When Harding died on Aug. 2, 1923, Coolidge was vacationing in Vermont. At 2:47 a.m. on August 3, he was sworn in by his own father, a notary public, in the dining room of the family farm.
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