“One of the Saddest Stories in the History of the Presidency”
By the Editors
This article is adapted from a piece that appears in the Summer 2024 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of the print issue.
Handling grief is hard, and hardest of all is the grief of losing a child.
Such grief has befallen four presidents while they occupied the White House. In 1800, John and Abigail Adams lost son Charles at the age of thirty. Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln grieved the death of eleven-year-old Willie in 1862. In 1963, Patrick Kennedy, the son of John and Jacqueline Kennedy, died just two days after his birth.
And a century ago—on July 7, 1924—Calvin and Grace Coolidge lost their sixteen-year-old son, Calvin Jr.
Presidential historian David Priess has called it “one of the saddest stories in the history of the presidency.”
In early July, the White House housekeeper noticed that Calvin Jr. had a limp. When she asked what was wrong, the boy assured her it was just a blister on his toe. He had sustained it while playing tennis on the White House grounds.
But soon thereafter, Calvin Jr. withdrew to his room, feeling ill. His temperature spiked. Streaks running up his legs signaled spreading infection. The president’s son had developed sepsis.
As word of his condition spread, citizens held vigil outside the White House. But neither their prayers nor the ministrations of doctors could rescue Calvin Jr. Within a week of the injury, he was dead.
“Deaths from sepsis unfortunately were quite common in Coolidge’s time,” notes Jared Rhoads, a health researcher (and the Coolidge Foundation’s longtime debate director). Rhoads writes: “Antibiotics could have easily treated the infection that killed Calvin Jr. But in 1924 Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin was still four years away.”
When Calvin Jr. died, on July 7, the Democrats were two weeks into a bruising political convention. The party was desperate to land on a nominee to challenge President Coolidge in that fall’s presidential election.
At 10:50 that night, after another failed ballot—the Democrats’ eighty-fourth—the convention chairman stepped to the microphone at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. He announced that Calvin Jr. had died.
“A low, prolonged moan, almost a sob,” filled Madison Square Garden, the New York Times reported. “Rancor ceased and a wave of common sympathy swept the vast audience.”
Millions listening to the convention on the radio learned of Calvin Jr.’s death from this announcement. “Thus,” the Times noted, “the first response of sympathy that found its way to the stricken parents was evoked by this announcement…[at] a convention gathered to nominate an opposing candidate for the Presidency.”
Partisan politics ceased, at least for the moment. The outpouring of sympathy suggested “the nearness of the White House to every American home,” the Times reported. Just as the American people’s sorrows were the president’s, “in an especial sense his grief is also theirs.”
Grief and Perseverance
This tragedy claimed an intelligent, witty young man. The previous summer, when Coolidge became president upon Warren Harding’s death, Calvin Jr. was working in a tobacco field. One of the other workers told him, “If my father was president, I would not work in a tobacco field.” Without skipping a beat, Calvin Jr. replied, “If my father were your father, you would.”
Calvin Jr.’s death devastated the Coolidge family. Writing in his Autobiography five years later, President Coolidge recalled, “When he went the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him.”
John T. Lambert, a political reporter who had gotten to know Coolidge well in Massachusetts, went to visit the president soon after Calvin Jr.’s death. When Lambert expressed his condolences, President Coolidge said: “You know, I sit here thinking of it, and I just can’t believe it has happened. I can’t believe it has happened.” Tears ran down the president’s cheeks, Lambert later recalled. Coolidge “wept unafraid, unashamed.”
But the Coolidges persevered. Grace Coolidge wore white for the mourning period, not black. She urged the president to carry on.
In the Autobiography, Coolidge wrote, “Sustained by the great outpouring of sympathy from all over the nation, my wife and I bowed to the Supreme Will and with such courage as we had went on in the discharge of our duties.”
Mrs. Coolidge’s religious faith enabled her to endure this tragedy. On the fifth anniversary of their son’s death, she wrote a poem to him, “Open Door.” The poem begins, “You, my son / Have shown me God.”
A few years later, in a letter to her son John, she recalled the day of Calvin Jr.’s death. Describing the boy’s delirium, she wrote: “For a long time, he seemed to be on a horse leading a [cavalry] charge in battle. He called out, ‘Come on, come on, help, help!’ And, for a time, he thought he was sitting backwards on his horse and asked us to turn him around. Father put his arms under him and tried to persuade him that he had turned him but he thought he was still wrong side around. Finally, he relaxed and called out, ‘We surrender, we surrender!’ Dr. Boone said, ‘Never surrender, Calvin.’ He answered only, ‘Yes.’ And some how I was glad that he had gone down, still fighting.”
She told John, “I have written all this down for you, this morning, because I want you to know that death seems to me a very natural, even a very beautiful transition, a passing from life here, interesting though it is, into a more abundant life.”
Read a political reporter’s firsthand account of President Coolidge’s grief after the death of Calvin Jr.