A President Dabbles in the Stock Market
By Dean W. Ball
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.
Calvin Coolidge believed that presidents should not play in equities, but in those days presidents did have their own private investments and followed them more closely than is the practice today. So how did Coolidge invest his own money? And what do his investments tell us about his attitude toward markets?
Financial records at the Vermont Historical Society detail some of Coolidge’s personal transactions from 1915 to 1932, shedding light on these questions.
We do not know what share of Coolidge’s personal finances these documents represent, but what we can see suggests a man with conservative tendencies and an underlying faith in the American economy.
Throughout his presidency, Coolidge followed the conventional rules of investing. He purchased bonds and stocks of large, mostly industrial, firms, many of which are still familiar to Americans today: U.S. Steel, Mack Truck, Anaconda Copper, Goodyear, and, of course, Liberty Bonds. Coolidge liked networks: trolleys, trains, roads (Mack).
There are, nonetheless, some securities that stick out. In what will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with how public transit is funded in the United States today, Coolidge owned bonds issued by private firms that managed the bulk of the New York City subway system: the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation and the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. Such purchases remind us that in this period, investors like Coolidge expected the private sector to provide—with profits for investors and benefits for consumers—what we think of as a government responsibility today.
In 1929, shortly after his presidency concluded, Coolidge transferred many of his securities into the management of J.P. Morgan & Company. On September 5, only days removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s peak, Coolidge purchased three thousand shares of Standard Brands Incorporated, a company created that year via a merger of a half dozen smaller firms, including Fleischmann’s Yeast.
One might read into this a former president who saw a market correction coming and sought refuge in consumer goods companies, which seemed more likely to be resilient than other stocks. After all, groceries are not the first thing people stop buying in a downturn. But in the Standard Brands purchase Coolidge may also have followed the advice of his new wealth manager: J.P. Morgan had facilitated the merger.
In any case, the Standard Brands decision did not play out well for Coolidge. He sold the shares in April 1930 at a loss of more than 20 percent. Standard Brands continued to struggle over the next decade. Time magazine reported in March 1940 that the company’s stock had slumped from a Depression-era level of $37 per share to a new low of $5 in late 1939.
Early in the Depression, Coolidge also invested in electric utilities, such as the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey, Columbia Gas & Electric, and the Buffalo, Niagara & Eastern Power Corporation. These investments perhaps reflected a faith in the continued growth of a technology that had enriched so many Americans’ lives during his presidency. Around this time, Coolidge’s son John went to work for the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. If one wanted to read something into that decision, it was the Coolidge family bet that railroads were a big part of America’s future.
A record of Coolidge’s Standard Brands stock purchase and sale, showing a loss of more than 20 percent
PAYING THE BILLS
After the presidency, Coolidge turned down offers to work. For example, Charles Merrill, the founder of Merrill Lynch, approached the president about coming to his firm. According to Merrill’s biographer, Coolidge did not like the idea of working in an area he knew little about or of trading on his presidential credential.
But Coolidge did earn money working in an arena he rated his comparative advantage: writing. His handsome contract with McClure, a large newspaper syndicate, enabled the Coolidges to buy their first house, the Beeches, in Northampton, Massachusetts. In the past, the family had always rented. (Coolidge, one suspects, didn’t like the idea of a mortgage for two reasons: mortgages were debt, and owing money to a bank would render him beholden to the bank.) Sadly, Coolidge did not get many years to enjoy the Beeches. He died there in January 1933.
THE HUMAN SIDE OF COOLIDGE
Reviewing Coolidge’s investments underscores a point revealed by examining the president’s statements and actions late in his presidency: here was a man who did not endorse speculation and who did not foresee the magnitude of financial events to come. Looking at the postpresidential investments also shows the human side of Coolidge. Among the former president’s last financial correspondence is an exchange with the College of Agriculture at the University of Vermont seeking advice on improvements to the pasture in Plymouth.
Dean W. Ball, the Coolidge Foundation’s former executive director, is a research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center and a nonresident senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. He writes the Substack newsletter Hyperdimensional.
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.