ONE book about a man should be enough for a writer. Yet this is my second
book about Calvin Coolidge. The first was comparatively a short story, a
biographical sketch written during the first year of his occupancy of the
White House. That book, in the nature of things, could not interpret his
life nor relate him to his times.

He lived in the White House during the six most prosperous years and
most portentous that the country had seen since the Civil War. They were
the years of the great boom. After those years came the deluge. And Calvin
Coolidge represented a phase of those times, probably their dominant
ideals. This study of the period from 1923 to 1929, with some account of
the relation of President Coolidge to his times, is justification for a new
story.

The narrative of Calvin Coolidge's preparation for the White House is
a necessary preliminary. His whole life from the time he left college until
he came down the mountain from Plymouth to take the train for Wash-
ington as successor to President Harding, was one continuous political
preparation for the task ahead of him. No other President in our day and
time has had such close, such continuous and such successful relations with
the electorate as Calvin Coolidge had. He knew the people--their tricks
and their manners, their strength and their weaknesses. He knew how
demagogues could fool them and how honest men could win or lose them:
two most important things for a man to know in politics if he retains his
faith. Mr. Coolidge retained his faith to the end. Perhaps his faith was
futile. It was not based upon a deep knowledge of various environing
realities of his country and of Christendom. He may have lived in a dream
world. But at least he lived as nobly as any man could live, equipped as
Calvin Coolidge was for his task.

When a man starts to write a story, whether his story is buttressed by
historical research or by fictional imaginings, he has a hypothesis to prove,
a moral to point. My hypothesis is this: That in the strange, turbulent
years that brought an era to a dose a man lived in the White House and
led the American people who was a perfect throwback to the more primi-
tive days of the Republic, a survival of a spiritual race that has almost passed

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