Taking over after President Warren Harding’s death, Coolidge set to work reducing federal taxes, expenses and personnel. As governor, he achieved national fame and the vice presidency by crushing the 1919 Boston police strike. Progressive at first, he steadily grew less so, backing William Howard Taft against Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. His celebrated New England reserve describes him accurately, but he was popular and flourished in Republican state politics. Raised in rural Vermont, Coolidge practiced law in Massachusetts. The author makes a convincing case, but readers who don’t share her conservative views may not agree that he was superior to FDR, whom she skewered in The Forgotten Man. President from 1923 to 1929, Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) is traditionally dismissed as an honorable mediocrity, but journalist Shlaes ( The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, 2007, etc.) argues that he was better than that.
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