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- 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). 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. 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. Coolidge chose not to run in 1928. Privately, his wife remarked to a friend that "Daddy thinks there is going to be a Depression." On January 5, 1933, he died of heart failure at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Though Coolidge was dismissed for years as a presidential lightweight, his reputation has grown in recent years. President Ronald Reagan retrieved Coolidge's portrait from storage and displayed it in the White House during his tenure in office, and a recent biography has provided a much more favorable view of Coolidge and his presidency than had previously been available. - Writer
- Additional Crew
Barry Conners (1882-1933)--actor, playwright, attorney and screenwriter--was born and raised in Oil City, PA, the son of a country doctor. Although he later graduated from law school, he never established a practice. Instead, he joined the theater as an actor with an eye to learning stagecraft well enough to become a playwright. For a time he was a song-and-dance man in vaudeville and he toured the country as an actor in various repertory groups. Sometime early in the century, he joined the so-called White Rats Movement ("Star" spelled backwards). The organization, which Ethel Barrymore's father Maurice Barrymore helped to form, aimed to improve conditions for actors who had fallen into the grip of a few monopolistic theatrical producers (primarily Charles Frohman's theatrical syndicate) who were controlling the business. The organization, a predecessor of the Actors Guild, was destroyed around World War I and Conners was blacklisted from work as an actor in the theater. He took a job as a hunting and fishing guide in the Lake Tahoe, Nevada, area and began writing plays. Subsequently several of his plays were produced in New York City in the 1920s, beginning with the off-Broadway production of "Mad Honeymoon." Among his other successful plays was "Hell's Bells," which in 1925 provided the Broadway debut of actress Shirley Booth and actor Humphrey Bogart. His other Broadway plays included "Applesauce," and "Unexpected Husbands." Following the success of "The Patsy," which starred William Randolph Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies. Seeing his chance to capitalize on his voice, Conners left Broadway for Hollywood as talkies swept the film industry at the end of the decade. He worked as a screenwriter for Fox Films for several years.
Conners died in a fire in his Los Angeles apartment building on Jan. 5, 1933. He was just 50 years old.