NEW ENGLAND COMES BACK TO THE WHITE HOUSE
The election of 1920, which made Calvin Coolidge Vice-President, took to Washington the queerest political specimen ever elected to high office. Barrett Wendell, a high-caste Back-Bay Brahmin, described Coolidge in that day thus:
"A small, hatched-faced, colorless man, with a tight-shut, thin-lipped mouth; very chary of words, but with a gleam of understanding in his pretty keen eye."
President Harding called Vice-President Coolidge into the Cabinet meetings--perhaps through the prompting of some deep prescience. But never once in two years, except when some one asked a definite question of the Vice-President, did Coolidge open his mouth at a Cabinet meeting. He sat listening--just as he sat in his freshman class meetings, in the Northampton Republican city committee, in the joint committee of the Massachusetts assembly, and again as lieutenant governor in the governor's council. He was developing an near-minded man. His capacity for absorbing details without question must have been taxed in those days. Yet he came out of
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