CALVIN COOLIDGE, the self-effacing governor of Massachusetts, was elected vice president under Warren Harding in 1920. The Harding administration moved into the White House at the beginning of Prohibition, and was plagued by scandals, many still unresolved when Harding died in San Francisco at the end of a presidential tour to Alaska in the summer of 1923.

Whereas Harding had been the choice of the Republican Party bosses and Senate leaders, Coolidge won popular support from the floor of the Republican convention, despite party leaders. To the rank and file delegates, Coolidge seemed an honest, decent, intelligent-minded, and even energetic governor who had few connections with the “smoke-filled rooms and fat cat bankrolls” But in an age of machine politics, Coolidge himself had risen to prominence ...