Back in America, the Republicans were deadlocked in their effort to pick a presidential candidate for the upcoming elections of 1920, and finally settled on the supreme nice guy, Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio, as a compromise candidate.  He campaigned on the idea that as president he would do everything possible to promote a "return to normalcy" of life in America.  With all of the wartime disruption of life and the post war political agitation that seemed to abound everywhere, this idea of a "return to normalcy" was so compelling to the American voter that in the November elections, Harding received a huge 60 percent of the popular vote – against the Democratic candidate James Cox's mere 34 percent of the popular vote, the most lopsided presidential vote in American history.

As president, Harding surrounded himself with a set of personal advisors (drawn mostly from his home state of Ohio) to help him manage the federal budget and continue to advance social reforms in favor of American women, immigrants and Blacks.

But when it came to the personal behavior of many of these "Ohio Gang" advisors, Harding seemed to exercise little or no control.  The results were embarrassing to the president (it would have been even more embarrassing had he lived a few more years to see his friends get what was due them)!  In fact, Harding died as a result of a heart attack he experienced following a trip across the country in which he had set out to give answer to the growing rumors about the corruption of his presidential team.

One of the most outrageous examples of the corruption of the Harding Administration was the behavior of Harding's secretary of the interior, the elderly Albert Fall.  He had secretly leased public oil lands to private companies for his own profit.  Most scandalous were the Elk Reserve lease to Edward Doheny and the Teapot Dome Reserve lease to Harry Sinclair, earning Fall $105,000 and $304,000 respectively.  This all came to light several years after the end of the Harding Administration as a result of investigations led by Senator Thomas Walsh (Montana).

Then there was Harry M. Daugherty, Harding's Attorney General, or top cop, in charge of the Department of Justice. Daugherty earned the nickname "The Fixer" for his role in arranging connections, such as the one that led to the Teapot Dome scandal.  But there were others, including the corrupt Assistant Attorney General, Jess Smith, who committed suicide (or was he murdered?) when it was apparent that a Congressional investigation on corruption in the Justice Department was closing in on him (Smith's death occurred just before Harding's ill-fated trip).

Calvin Coolidge was Harding's vice president – though not part of the corrupt Ohio Gang (nor was Harding's secretary of commerce, and future president, Herbert Hoover).  Upon Harding's death in 1923 Coolidge was automatically elevated to the U.S. presidency.

To almost the same extreme that Harding was the picture of loose personal standards, Coolidge was the opposite: the picture of authentic Puritan morality!

Coolidge grew up in Vermont, a descendant of a long line of Coolidges who had migrated to Massachusetts with the very first Puritans in 1630, and whose genealogy included officers of the American War of Independence and members of the Vermont House of Representatives.  His ancestors tended to be farmers – very active in local politics.

Coolidge graduated as an honor student from Amherst College and then went on to clerk and study law in a Massachusetts law firm, eventually being admitted to the bar and setting up his own practice in Northampton, Massachusetts.  He married a Vermont school teacher, Grace, and the two of them built a diplomatic marriage, reflective of the quiet and cautious way they both approached life.

He soon entered politics and performed decently in the elective offices he pursued, first as representative to the Massachusetts state assembly (the General Court), then as mayor of Northampton, then as state Senator, where he became noted for his moderately progressive positions on a number of issues.  In 1915 he was elected Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts and then in 1918 the state's Governor.  He conducted himself as a moderate-progressive, and a reluctant spender of the state treasury – nothing that would have brought any particular notice to him nationally.

What brought him to national attention was the 1919 Boston police strike over the issue of a police union, pitting the state against the rising power of the labor unions.  Coolidge took a strong position in support of the Boston mayor, calling out the national guard and answering the union that "there is no right to strike against the public safety by anyone, anywhere, any time."  That indeed brought Coolidge national attention, at a time that America was undergoing a serious Red Scare.

And thus it was that in the Republican National Convention in which Harding was nominated as the party's presidential candidate, Coolidge was chosen as Harding's vice-presidential running mate.  And from there – with Harding's unexpected death in 1923 – Coolidge found himself in the White House as the nation's president.

As president his attitude conformed nicely to the old adage: "the government that governs least governs best."  Although Coolidge was deeply supportive of civil rights for Blacks (speaking out on their behalf in a time of extensive KKK activity across the nation, and appointing them to Federal positions) and Indians (pushing for full American citizenship of all American Indians), when it came to government programs and spending he was strongly opposed.  He worked to cut back federal spending and move the budget to a balance instead of a spending deficit.  As far as he was concerned the business of business was not the business of the government, but instead a matter of the private or capitalist sector (which was doing quite well during his presidency).

In 1924 he was returned to the White House on his own merits. He did quite well in the vote despite his very low-key candidacy (low key in great part due to the death of his sixteen-year-old son that July) and despite a third-party run of Progressive politician La Follette, which the Democratic Party opposition hoped would split the Republican vote and give the Democrats the victory – much as Teddy Roosevelt's third-party run opened the way for the Democratic candidate Wilson to gain the presidency in 1912 on a mere plurality rather than a clear majority of the votes.  But given the hugely upbeat mood of the country during the Roaring Twenties, Coolidge actually received 54 percent of the popular vote and 72 percent of the electoral vote.

He finished out his four years in office with no major programs of note (he believed that those matters belonged to the states, not the federal government) and no scandals.  As there were no major foreign policy issues burning at the time, American foreign policy during his presidency was also quite low key. But that was the way Americans wanted things.  They had other things personally to focus on, like getting rich fast.

And in 1928, as his term approached a close, Coolidge made it clear that he would not take on another term, although many expected him to do so.  He was tired and ready to go home.  Little did he know that by doing so he saved himself from being the one identified as "responsible" for the country’s economic catastrophe, the Great Depression.