Nicknamed “Silent Cal” for his shy, taciturn personality, Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) was sworn in as president of the United States in 1923 following the death of President Warren G. Harding (1865–1923). Reelected to a full term in 1924, Coolidge presided over the economic boom of the Roaring Twenties and left office just before the stock market crash of 1929 that would trigger the Great Depression.
Coolidge was born in Vermont and later moved to Massachusetts, where he was elected governor in 1918. As governor, the Republican Coolidge received acclaim for quashing a 1919 strike by Boston police officers. Nationally famous after breaking the strike, Coolidge was chosen as Harding’s running mate on the Republican ticket in the 1920 election.
Harding’s death in 1923, as he returned from a vacation in Alaska, ended a scandal-plagued administration. Indeed, Coolidge’s first task in the White House was to undo the damage of his predecessor, a job for which he was well suited. In contrast to the pokerplaying, tobacco-chewing Harding, who had associated with a gang of disreputable characters, Coolidge’s image as an upstanding New Englander helped restore public confidence in the presidency.
In office, Coolidge governed as a conservative, vetoing several spending proposals he considered excessive and avoiding government interference with the economy. Coolidge’s hands-off approach to the economy, combined with his actions during the Boston police strike and a legendary quotation that the “business of America is business,” have led to his reputation as a pro–big business, antilabor stalwart. Although Coolidge certainly shared the antiunion views of many of his fellow Republicans, he was a pragmatist above all else, governing with a light touch.
After the tragic death of his son in 1924 following an injury in a tennis game, Coolidge became distraught and gradually lost his passion for politics. The presidency, he remarked, suddenly seemed inconsequential after such a loss. Coolidge decided not to seek another term, issuing a typically terse one-sentence statement to the press: “I do not choose to run for President in 1928.” He handed off the presidency to Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) and returned to Massachusetts, just in time to miss the cataclysm of the Great Depression.
1. When President Harding died in office, Coolidge was visiting his family in Vermont. He was administered the presidential oath of office by his father, a notary, at 2:47 a.m. before returning to Washington, DC.
2. Coolidge was buried in his hometown of Plymouth Notch, Vermont, where his family’s homestead has been re-created for tourists.
3. Coolidge is the only president born on the Fourth of July.
The Allied invasion of Normandy on the northern coast of France the morning of June 6, 1944, was the largest amphibious military assault of World War II (1939–1941) and the beginning of the end of Nazi tyranny in Europe. Directed by the American general Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), the D-day invasion involved troops from a dozen countries and about 5,000 boats, the largest war armada ever assembled. Allied casualties on the five Normandy landing beaches were heavy, but the Germans were caught off guard and could not repulse the invasion. From Normandy, the Allies quickly attacked the Nazis across the rest of France and marched triumphantly down the Champs-Élysées in Paris less than three months later, on August 26, 1944.
The Allies had begun planning an invasion of continental Europe in 1942. The logistics of getting enough troops and equipment across the stormy English Channel were daunting.
Eisenhower originally scheduled D-day for June 5 but postponed the invasion because of bad weather. Although German intelligence warned that an attack was imminent, Nazi leaders did not believe the Allies would actually attempt an invasion on June 6 because of stormy weather and high winds.
Eisenhower and his staff had selected five beachheads for the landing forces and given them code names. The Americans were given the responsibility for Omaha and Utah beaches. Despite landing in the wrong place on Utah beach, the invasion there went relatively smoothly. Omaha, however, was another story. The cloudy weather made it difficult for Allied bombers to provide air support, and the soldiers defending the beach were among the German army’s best. Within a few hours, American casualties at Omaha beach totaled about 2,000 troops killed or wounded.
After seizing the coast on June 6, the battle moved inland, to the farmhouses, country lanes, and quiet hedgerows of the Normandy region of France. Over the next several weeks of brutal combat, the Allies established air and ground superiority in the region, allowing thousands more Allied troops and equipment to land in France. Within a year of the D-day landing, Hitler was dead and the war in Europe was over.
1. The D-day invasion was a massive logistical undertaking, and not just for the combat forces. In anticipation of the invasion, the US Army hired and secretly trained 4,500 new cooks to prepare food for the troops once they reached France.
2. The underground French Resistance, according to US Army estimates, amounted to more than 200,000 partisans in 1944 and played a crucial role in sabotaging the Germans. By the day after D-day, the Resistance had cut twenty-six French railroad lines, severely impairing Germany’s ability to rush more troops to Normandy.
3. The German general responsible for the Normandy defenses, Erwin Rommel (1891–1944), committed suicide later that year after he was implicated in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler.
With thirty-nine simple words, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution extended full voting rights to women. The amendment, ratified in 1920, was the culmination of decades of agitation for equal rights by feminist groups that began with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.
The amendment, in its entirety, proclaimed:
The right of citizens in the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Prior to the passage of the amendment, twenty-eight states had already granted voting rights to women. Wyoming—the Equality State—entered the union in 1890 with equal voting rights, the first state to enfranchise women. Illinois became the first state east of the Mississippi River to extend suffrage to women, which it did in 1913. By 1919, most western states and New York had also enfranchised women. Several big states, however, including Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, refused.
The fate of the constitutional amendment was uncertain until the last minute. As recently as 1915, the US House of Representatives had defeated a similar proposal. The support of President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), who campaigned for the amendment beginning in 1918, proved crucial to its passage.
Both the House and the US Senate approved the amendment in 1919, and the states rushed to ratify it in time for women to participate in the 1920 presidential election.
By the time of the amendment’s passage, many of the founders of the women’s rights movement—including Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), and Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)—were dead. In just seventy years, though, their movement had turned the notion of women’s suffrage from a laughingstock into reality. As Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947), another suffragist leader, said, “When a just cause reaches its flood tide, whatever stands in the way must fall before its overwhelming power.”
1. Catt formed the League of Women Voters in 1920 to help educate newly enfranchised American women about politics.
2. Beer companies and saloon owners were the biggest political opponent of women’s suffrage, fearing that women would vote for bans on alcohol. As it turned out, Prohibition was approved in 1919 without women’s votes.
3. In news accounts of the time, the Nineteenth Amendment was referred to as the “Anthony amendment,” a testament to the lasting influence of Susan B. Anthony, who had died thirteen years earlier.
A deadly fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in downtown New York City on March 25, 1911, killed 146 garment workers and prompted the passage of several workplace safety laws in the early twentieth century. The fire, a seminal event in the history of American labor, still ranks among the nation’s worst industrial disasters.
Located on the top three floors of a ten-story building next to Washington Square, the Triangle factory was a sweatshop that employed mostly young immigrant Jewish and Italian women to sew cotton shirts. On the day of the fire, the sweatshop’s owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, had barricaded the doors shut to prevent theft. When the fire broke out, sparked by a cigarette tossed onto a pile of cloth, the women on the ninth floor found themselves trapped in an inferno. Unable to use the building’s rickety fire escape, many leapt out the ninth-floor windows to their death.
Pictures and accounts of the devastating tragedy traumatized New York and led to an immediate public outcry. Families of the victims demanded justice, but a jury eventually acquitted Blanck and Harris of wrongdoing at trial. The State of New York launched an investigation into the garment industry and eventually proposed a long list of workplace safety reforms—including a ban on smoking in factories, regular fire drills, and mandotory installation of sprinklers—many of which became law. Other states also tightened their safety laws in response to the carnage.
Triangle was hardly the only sweatshop in New York, and the fire hastened the unionization of the garment industry and the American workforce in general. The fire is still commemorated in New York every year on March 25.
1. The building, at 23-29 Washington Place, is now part of the campus of New York University.
2. Although acquitted in their criminal trial, Blanck and Harris lost a civil case and were forced to pay compensation of $75 per victim to the families.
3. Prior to the fire, Triangle Shirtwaist was already notorious for its opposition to unions; the company had refused to sign a collective bargaining agreement after a strike in 1910, even after many other garment companies acceded to union demands.
Erected in just over a year, the 103-story Empire State Building was the tallest skyscraper in the world when it opened in 1931, a distinction it would hold for four decades. Located in midtown Manhattan, the giant edifice is one of the best-known buildings in the world and one of the most distinctive features of New York City’s iconic skyline.
A milestone of efficient construction, the building was finished in record time. Its frame—58,000 tons of steel rising 1,250 feet into the sky—took only twenty-three weeks to complete. On average, about four and a half stories per week were added to the structure, which cost a total of $24.7 million.
Coming during the Great Depression, the project was a welcome source of employment for the city’s workforce and an uplifting accomplishment for the nation as a whole. As the author E. B. White (1899–1985) wrote, the Empire State Building “managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the Depression.” On May 1, 1931, President Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) officially opened the building by turning on its lights for the first time.
The art deco–style skyscraper immediately became an international icon. It made one of its first and most famous movie appearances two years later in the blockbuster film King Kong. It has featured in countless movies since—including a King Kong remake in 2005—often as the target of disgruntled or misunderstood aliens.
Despite its immense popularity, the building was never a great commercial success. At the time of its construction, a docking station for zeppelins was built atop the structure, but it was never used. With the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in 2001, the Empire State Building regained its status as the city’s tallest building, and about four million tourists visit its observation deck every year.
1. Counting its spire, the building is 1,454 feet tall.
2. The building did not have air-conditioning until 1950.
3. More than three tons of garbage are generated by the Empire State Building’s occupants every day.
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) lived a double life. Beginning in 1916, he worked as an executive at the Hartford Insurance Company by day, eventually becoming a senior vice president for fidelity and surety claims at the large Connecticut firm. By night, he was one of the leading modernist poets in the United States, eventually winning a Pulitzer Prize for the dazzling, idiosyncratic poems he wrote in his spare time. The two careers virtually never intersected; during his lifetime, Stevens feared that too much publicity for his poetry would hamper his business career. His abstract poems, for their part, certainly never discussed insurance.
Stevens was born in Pennsylvania and attended Harvard, where he first tried his hand at poetry. However, his literary career did not flourish until much later in life. As a late bloomer—and in many other respects—Stevens defied the conventional expectations for poets. His personal life was unspectacular and, apart from one drunken brawl with Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) in Key West, produced little controversy. He mostly led the quiet, bourgeois life of an insurance executive and disdained the bohemian pretensions of the literary scene. He distrusted left-wing politics and was often uncomfortable among fellow writers.
His work, however, has been of lasting influence on twentieth-century poets. Like T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), Stevens wrote in an abstract, enigmatic style that can be difficult to decode. Unlike Eliot, however, Stevens wrote poems that are often upbeat, even joyful in tone. Stevens bent and shaped the English language into new forms; in one famous poem, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” (1923), apparently set at a fairground, he writes of a “roller of big cigars” whipping “in kitchen cups concupiscent curds.”
In addition to “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” some of Stevens’s best-known works include “Sunday Morning” (1923), “Anecdote of the Jar” (1923), and the long poem Auroras of Autumn (1950), which is considered his masterpiece by some critics. Stevens’s poems, especially “Sunday Morning” and Auroras of Autumn, address themes of death, nature, and the spiritual uncertainties of an increasingly post-Christian society.
1. Stevens worked briefly as a reporter after his college graduation, covering politics for the New York Tribune.
2. Stevens hated reading poetry aloud and once explained, “I am not a troubadour and I think the public reading of poetry is something particularly ghastly.”
3. He learned he had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 while at a Hartford hospital; he died three months later.
Master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) directed dozens of hit Hollywood thrillers, including the classic films Strangers on a Train (1951), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963), among the scariest and most gut-churning movies in American cinema.
Born in England, Hitchcock made several successful movies in his home country—including Blackmail (1929; the first British feature film with sound), The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), and The Lady Vanishes (1938)—before moving to Hollywood in 1939. His first American film, Rebecca (1940), was a noirish adaptation of the 1938 mystery novel by the British writer Daphne Du Maurier (1907–1989) that earned him the first of his five Academy Award nominations (though he never won the Oscar).
For the most part, Hitchcock’s films were psychologically intense but never especially violent. As a director, he disdained gore for its own sake. Instead, Hitchcock built layer upon layer of suspense by depicting the swirling fears and dangers that drove his characters to the brink of disaster.
To build suspense, Hitchcock’s movies often used a notorious plot device he called a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin, according to Hitchcock, is the object everyone in a movie wants. For instance, in North by Northwest, all the main characters are chasing a stash of secret microfilm. The audience never learns what’s on the microfilm—or why anyone wants it in the first place—but its existence provides a justification for an otherwise improbable plot. Never overly troubled by the plausibility of his movies, Hitchcock turned to this basic plot structure repeatedly with great success.
One of the most recognizable personas in Hollywood history—the New York Times described the baldish, 300-pound director as a “pixieish gargoyle”—Hitchcock and his dark, sinister films remain extremely powerful influences on makers of horror and action movies.
1. Hitchcock gave himself a small, nonspeaking cameo in most of the films he directed. For instance, in Strangers on a Train, he is seen boarding the train carrying a musical instrument.
2. Although Hitchcock became an American citizen in 1955, he was given an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II (1926–) in 1980, shortly before his death.
3. Alfred Hitchcock lives on in syndicated television as well as film. His half-hour Alfred Hitchcock Presents mystery series originally aired from 1955 to 1962 and then was expanded into The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, which ran from 1962 to 1965.