The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge

No doubt it was the police strike of Boston that brought me into national prominence. That furnished the occasion and I took advantage of the opportunity. I was ready to meet the emergency. Just what lay behind that event I was never able to learn. Sometimes I have mistrusted that it was a design to injure me politically; if so it was only to recoil upon the perpetrators, for it increased my political power many fold. Still there was a day or two when the event hung in the balance, when the Police Commissioner of Boston, Edwin U. Curtis, was apparently cast aside discredited, and my efforts to give him any support indicated my own undoing. But I soon had him reinstated, and there was a strong expression of public opinion in our favor.

The year 1919 had not produced much on the positive side of our political life. President Wilson had returned from the peace conference at Paris determined to have the United States join the League of Nations as established in the final Treaty of Versailles. He found opposition in the Senate both within and without his own party. In attempting to gain the approval of the country he had made his trip across the continent and returned a broken man never to regain his strength. For eight years he had so dominated his party that it had not produced anyone else with a marked ability for leadership. During these months the contest was raging in the Senate over the peace treaty, but as a result it had put the leadership of our party in a negative position, which never appeals to the popular imagination, and besides in the country many Republicans favored a ratification of the treaty with adequate reservations. Many of the Senators on our side cast their vote for that proposal, which would have prevailed but for the opposition of the regular administration Democrats. In this confusion no dominant popular figure emerged in the Congress, but many ambitions became apparent.