The first time Calvin Coolidge stepped into the White House was not in 1923, as President; it was not even in 1921 as Vice President or in 1920, as a candidate for office. It was technically not even at this occasion on March 4, 1919, when Cal — a wartime state governor of one of the most populous, important states in the country — presided at the Conference of Governors and mayors, held at the Executive Mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It seems his first visit to the White House occurred in 1916. Yet, as presiding officer at this meeting of Governors and mayors at the Wilson White House, Coolidge addressed two central questions: 

1. What should be done about returning soldiers to peacetime employment? 
2. What should be done to return business and the economy to a peacetime basis? 

Following our own experience with a year of mammoth upheavals, his reflections on what should be done bear a new reading. This is especially so with the differences that very much exist between the now preceding administration and its successor. There was no real benefit to be had for the country to continue to operate in campaign mode when so much of the work of returning to a governance of peace needed full focus. 

Governor Coolidge would observe that in his own state, most of the problem could be resolved by people doing what they needed to do, taking care of themselves. “Of the ten per cent who apply for situations many are placed, the only difficulty being with those who have been engaged in building industries, unskilled and office help.” 

“The readjustment may be expected to be more difficult, but up to the present time there is no indication that it is working any very great hardship.” As was Cal’s way, he did not bother with anecdotal hearsay or politicized pandering but with hard numbers and statistical data. The facts showed that opportunities were trending upward not the reverse. 

“Our factories are running on short time but are keeping in their employment substantially all of their people. The retail trade is extremely good, indicating no lack of money to buy what the people desire.” In Massachusetts, he would notice, “the building trade is yet at a standstill.” 

“The question before us is what to do to start business generally on a peace basis. Of course the first thing to do is to make peace with those with whom we have been at war. Everything is waiting for that. There are other questions pending. One of the things that would be helpful is an immediate and generous settlement of all war claims, both formal and informal contracts. Hundreds of millions are tied up awaiting such settlements. The question of the price of food is one that is fundamental…It is my strong belief that the government should withdraw from any attempt at fixing prices and let business operate according to the law of supply and demand so far as domestic commerce is concerned.

“There ought to be protection from unreasonable foreign competition…Not merely for the purpose of lowering prices should this be done, but in order that business may understand that all prices are on a natural and not an artificial basis. Until our business does understand this it cannot go forward. This is not to be viewed from a point of local prejudice but as a national question, the decision of which will work by action and reaction for the benefit of all the people of the nation.

“Just as soon as these fundamental difficulties are adjusted there is more likely to be a scarcity of labor than an over-supply of it. In the first place, we are to have in the army and navy nearly half a million men. Our casualty list will take at least 100,000 through death and disability. The loss from the epidemic which has been raging in our country is not yet known, but runs into the hundreds of thousands. Before the war we had an immigration each of from 1,200,000 to nearly 2,000,000. The last four years this has dropped down to a very small figure. There will be as a result of the war a great shortage of man power abroad. 

“There was never so much work to be done in the world as at the present time. There was never so much money in America. Where there is power to purchase there will be a demand to be supplied. The only thing that is lacking is an organization of our industries to produce and to supply the market and a conviction that prices and conditions are on a natural and not an artificial basis. 

“If the commerce and industry of the country is to conduct itself rather than to be conducted by the government, it is time for it to begin such operation at once. It is time for it to assert itself and to display that courage and enterprise which has been the basis of our wonderful development. It must be under government or under its own control. It cannot have two masters. The sooner it asserts its independence, the sooner we shall start again on a normal basis for prosperity.”

Before the Twentieth Amendment changed Inauguration Day from its original March 4th to the current January 20th of the year following Presidential & Vice Presidential elections, incoming administrations delivered their addresses and took their constitutionally prescribed oaths on the fourth of this month. This changed in January 1937. Three more pairs of Presidential-Vice Presidential tickets would observe the original day after the one that took place yesterday one hundred years ago (Coolidge-Charles G. Dawes, Herbert Hoover-Charles Curtis, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt-John N. Garner). It was the the fourth preceding duo (Warren G. Harding & Calvin Coolidge) who took the oath and delivered their inaugural addresses in 1921. 

Coolidge, on the occasion of his oath, administered by friend and outgoing Vice President Thomas R. Marshall in the Senate Chamber, reflected deeply upon the institution of our branches of government, especially its bicameral National Legislature, the importance of having both bodies of deliberation, representing not only the people but also the States. The States were not, in his view, mere formulaic arms of the federal will. They were sovereigns in their own sacrosanct spheres. To Coolidge, both houses of Congress were genuinely vital safeguards to our constitutional system. 

Coolidge expressed it this way: 

“Five generations ago there was revealed to the people of this nation a new relationship between man and man, which they declared and proclaimed in the American Constitution. Therein they recognized a legislature empowered to express the will of the people in law, a judiciary required to determine and state such law, and an executive charged with securing obedience to the law, all holding their office, not by reason of some superior force, but through the duly determined conscience of their countrymen. 

“To the House, close to the heart of the nation, renewing its whole membership by frequent elections, representing directly the people, reflecting their common purpose, has been granted a full measure of the power of legislation and exclusive authority to originate taxation. To the Senate, renewing its membership by degrees, representing in part the sovereign States, has been granted not only a full measure of the power of legislation, but, if possible, far more important functions. 

“To it is entrusted the duty of review, that to negotiations there may be added ratification, and to appointment approval. Buts its greatest function of all, too little mentioned and too little understood, whether exercised in legislating or reviewing, is the preservation of liberty. Not merely the rights of the majority, they little need protection, but the rights of the minority, from whatever source they may be assailed. The great object for us to seek here, for the Constitution identifies the vice-presidency with the Senate, is to continue to make this chamber, as it was intended by the fathers, the citadel of liberty. An enormous power is here conferred, capable of much good or ill, open, it may be, to abuse, but necessary, wholly and absolutely necessary, to secure the required result. 

“Whatever its faults, whatever its human imperfections, there is no legislative body in history that has used its powers with more wisdom and discretion, more uniformly for the execution of the public will, or more in harmony with the spirit of the authority of the people which has created it, than the United States Senate. I take up the duties which the people have assigned me under the Constitution, which we can neither enlarge nor diminish, of presiding over this Senate, agreeably to its rules and regulations, deeply conscious that it will continue to function in harmony with its high traditions as a great deliberative body, without passion and without fear, unmoved by clamor, but most sensitive to the right, the stronghold of government according to law, that the vision of past generations may be more and more the reality of generations yet to come.”