It is 2026. If you look back exactly a century, you land in 1926. The world was vibrating with jazz, the smell of cheap gin from speakeasies, and a booming stock market that felt like it would never, ever crash. But at the center of all that noise was a man who barely spoke.
Calvin Coolidge was the man in the Oval Office.
Most people today have a fuzzy image of the 1920s. We think of flappers and Great Gatsby parties. We don’t usually think about "Silent Cal," the Vermont-born lawyer who somehow became the face of the Roaring Twenties. It’s a bit of a paradox. You had this incredibly loud, transformative decade led by a guy who supposedly once told a dinner guest, "You lose," after she bet she could get more than two words out of him.
Whether that story is 100% true or just a DC legend doesn't really matter. It captures the vibe. Coolidge was the 30th President of the United States, and in 1926, he was at the absolute peak of his power.
Why 1926 was the "Coolidge Year"
By 1926, Coolidge had been in office for about three years. He didn't get there the traditional way. He was Vice President under Warren G. Harding and took the oath by the light of a kerosene lamp in his father’s house after Harding died suddenly in 1923.
By the time 100 years ago rolled around, he had already won a massive landslide election in his own right. Americans loved him. Why? Because the economy was screaming.
The "Coolidge Prosperity" wasn't just a campaign slogan; it was reality for millions of people moving into cities and buying their first cars. In 1926, the Revenue Act was signed. This was peak Coolidge. He basically slashed taxes, especially for the wealthy and corporations, believing that if the government just got out of the way, the country would thrive. He was the original "small government" guy long before the modern era of politics.
He didn't believe the President should be a celebrity. Honestly, he thought the government should be nearly invisible.
📖 Related: Why Fox Has a Problem: The Identity Crisis at the Top of Cable News
The strange silence of the 30th President
People often ask who was president 100 years ago and expect to hear about a dynamic, table-pounding leader. Coolidge was the opposite. He took naps. He spent time sitting on the porch. He once said, "The words of a President have an enormous weight and ought not to be used indiscriminately."
Think about that for a second.
Compare that to the 24-hour news cycle and the social media blasts we live with in 2026. It’s almost impossible to imagine a leader today who thinks saying less is better. But back then, his silence was seen as a sign of stability. The country had just come out of the chaos of World War I and the scandals of the Harding administration (like Teapot Dome). Coolidge was the "clean" guy. He was boring, and boring was exactly what people wanted.
Life in America while Coolidge held the reins
If you walked down a street in 1926, things would look familiar but weirdly distorted. Henry Ford’s Model T was everywhere, but the Model A was just about to make its debut. Radios were the "internet" of the day. Families would huddle around a massive wooden box to hear the same programs, creating the first real "national" culture.
Coolidge was actually the first "Radio President."
He realized that even if he didn't like talking to reporters, he could talk directly to the people. His voice was high-pitched and had a sharp New England twang, but it came across as honest. In 1926, he used the radio to talk about the budget. Imagine a President today getting millions of people to tune in to a broadcast specifically about federal spending. He made it work.
The dark side of the 1920s
It wasn't all jazz and tax cuts, though. 1926 was a complicated year. While the cities were booming, the farmers were hurting. This is the nuance people miss when they talk about who was president 100 years ago.
👉 See also: The CIA Stars on the Wall: What the Memorial Really Represents
Coolidge twice vetoed the McNary-Haugen Farm Relief Bill. He thought price supports were unconstitutional and bad for the soul of the country. He basically told the farmers to figure it out on their own. This created a massive rift between the rural heartland and the urban elite that, honestly, we are still dealing with a century later.
Also, the 1920s saw the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan and incredibly restrictive immigration laws. Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924, which basically shut the door on most of the world for decades. He wasn't a screaming firebrand about it, but he presided over a time of intense "America First" sentiment.
The tragedy that changed the man
There’s a reason Coolidge was so withdrawn, and it wasn't just his Vermont upbringing.
In 1924, his younger son, Calvin Jr., died of blood poisoning after getting a blister while playing tennis on the White House grounds. He was only 16. In 1926, Coolidge was still a man in deep mourning. He wrote in his autobiography that when his son died, "the power and glory of the Presidency went with him."
When you look at photos of him from 100 years ago, he looks tired. His eyes are heavy. He was performing his duties, but the joy—if he ever had much—was gone.
A different kind of leadership
We tend to rank presidents based on how much they did. How many laws did they pass? How many wars did they win?
Coolidge is hard to rank because his whole philosophy was based on not doing things. He famously said, "It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones." He used the veto like a surgeon’s scalpel. He presided over a period of massive technological growth—Lindbergh would fly across the Atlantic just a year later in 1927—but he stayed out of the way.
✨ Don't miss: Passive Resistance Explained: Why It Is Way More Than Just Standing Still
Lessons from 1926 for the year 2026
It’s easy to dismiss a guy like Coolidge as a relic. A "do-nothing" president who let the seeds of the Great Depression grow. Critics argue that his refusal to regulate the stock market in 1926 led directly to the 1929 crash. They’re probably right, at least partially.
But there’s also something to be said for his restraint.
He didn't think he was the smartest person in the room. He didn't think the government had an answer for every human problem. In an era where we expect the government to fix everything from the weather to our personal happiness, Coolidge’s 100-year-old perspective is a bit of a cold shower.
What you should take away from the Coolidge era:
- Silence is power: You don't always have to win the news cycle to be effective.
- Economic cycles are brutal: The same policies that created the wealth of 1926 contributed to the poverty of 1932.
- The Presidency is a human office: Behind the policy decisions was a grieving father trying to hold a country together while his own world had fallen apart.
If you want to dig deeper into this, don't just read a textbook. Look at the letters Coolidge wrote to his father during his presidency. Look at the transcripts of his radio addresses from 1926. You’ll see a man who was deeply committed to a very specific, very traditional idea of what America should be. He wasn't a "great" man in the way Lincoln or FDR were, but he was exactly the man the 1920s asked for.
To understand 1926, you have to understand that Americans weren't looking for a savior. They were looking for a steward. Calvin Coolidge was the ultimate steward. He kept the lights on, kept the budget balanced, and mostly kept his mouth shut.
For more on how the 1920s shaped the modern world, check out the archives at the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation or read Amity Shlaes’ biography Coolidge. It challenges a lot of the standard "pro-New Deal" history we all learned in school.
Next Steps for History Buffs:
Check your local library or digital archives for newspapers dated precisely 100 years ago today. You'll find that while Coolidge was the headline, the real story was the massive shift in how ordinary people were living—buying radios, driving cars, and moving away from the farm for good. Understanding that shift is the key to understanding why Coolidge's "hands-off" approach worked for as long as it did.