Calvin Coolidge

He was the last "true blue" conservative to win the Republican nomination until Barry Goldwater in 1964.

Pictured on the $5.00 US postage stamp in the Presidential Series, issued 17 November 1938.

When he died in 1933, he left his entire estate, valued at $700,000, entirely to his wife Grace.

Coolidge chose not to run in 1928. Privately, his wife remarked to a friend that "Daddy thinks there is going to be a Depression.

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.

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.

2 sons - John Coolidge (1906-2000) and Calvin Coolidge Jr. (1908-1924)

Though three U. S. Presidents have died on the Fourth of July, John Calvin Coolidge was the first and only one to have been born on that date, in 1874. He is 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 is 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. Yet history doesn't really support this caricature of a man who actually was a highly intelligent and complex individual. Though 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, ever the practical New Englander, also presented his wife with 52 pairs of his socks that needed mending).