On August 2nd, 1923, President Warren G. Harding died in San Francisco at the Palace Hotel at 7.32 p.m.

He had been president for about two and a half years. At that exact moment, 3,000 miles away,

Vice President Calvin Coolidge, age 51, was visiting his family in Plymouth Notch, Vermont.

It was the site where he was born and where he lived as a boy.

The home had neither electricity nor telephone.

That night, a messenger rushed to the Coolidge home to inform him that President Harding was dead.

At 2.47 a.m. on the morning of August 3rd, Calvin Coolidge stood next to his wife, Grace,

his father John Calvin Sr., Congressman Porter Dale, a reporter, and a small group of observers.

As a notary public, John Calvin Sr. was qualified to administer

the constitutional oath of office to his son. Next to a kerosene lamp, Calvin Koolage repeated

the words of the oath. He was now the 30th president of the United States. Shortly thereafter,

the nation's new chief executive went to bed.

At 7.20 a.m. that morning, the new president was up and speaking with reporters. In a couple of hours,

he was on a train headed to Washington. Just before he left Vermont, Coolidge reflected on the momentous task ahead of him.

With a quiet sense of self-confidence, he said, quote, I believe I can swing it.

Calvin Coolidge was now leading a nation of more than a hundred million people, a nation that was the richest and most productive on Earth. It had been

just short of five years since the end of World War I, the worst cataclysm in human history

up until that point. In the wake of that conflict, America had entered the roaring 20s,

a time that saw continued economic, technological, and social change.

It was a dynamic era, one that saw the rise of modern appliances and industry.

It was the era when cars and radios became ubiquitous and where airplanes entered the popular consciousness.

Americans wanted to forget about the horrors of war

...