To mark Abraham Lincoln’s Centennial the Lincoln penny replaced the old Indian head cent. This was our first “portrait” coin. All previous US coins had depicted or personified “Liberty.” Coincidentally, 1909 was the year Calvin Coolidge was elected Mayor of Northampton, Massachusetts. From that office 100 years ago he began a political journey that brought him to the highest office in the land. Based on political experience, Coolidge was certainly one of our best-prepared presidents. He would later write: “Without in any way being conscious of what I was doing I then became committed to a course that was to make me President of the Senate of Massachusetts and the Senate of the United States, the second officer of the Commonwealth and the country and the chief executive of a city, a state and a nation. . . On the first Monday of January 1910, I began a public career that was to continue until the first Monday of March, 1929, when it was to end of my own volition.”
Thus in his spare autobiographical prose Coolidge summarizes an extraordinary political career that took him from the office of Mayor to the office of the Presidency. Following the death of President Harding he served out that term and was elected to his own four-year term.
This record of steady progress from office to office is unique and unparalleled. Some of his contemporaries saw it as “Coolidge Luck.” Some saw the hand of Fate or Destiny. (The more devoted of Coolidge’s supporters often compared him to Lincoln.) Coolidge never engaged in such comparison but suggested: “Some Power that I little suspected in my student days took me in charge and carried me from the obscure neighborhood of Plymouth Notch to the occupancy of the White House.”
In Coolidge’s day it was well known that he shared the birth date of the country. The very first Fourth of July birthday little Cal could recall was his fourth – 1876 — our Centennial year. As president “Silent Cal” would be featured on a commemorative fifty-cent piece marking the nation’s 150th birthday or Sesquicentennial – this is the single instance of a living president appearing on a US coin. He and George Washington are shown in profile.
In the face of almost certain re:election Coolidge chooses not to run for a second term in 1928. Had he done so he would have been president for ten years. He believed that was too long. When the Coolidges leave Washington they return to the half of the two-family house in Northampton they had rented since 1907. The Stock Market Crash was nine months away and people still had change in their pockets. There, the Lincoln pennies were outnumbering the remaining “Red cents” or Indian head pennies in circulation. The Sesquicentennial half-dollar has always been a collectors’ item and can usually be found on eBay.
(Above italicized quotes from “The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge” 1929)