A Depression Even More Depressing
Otis Skinner (Wikimedia Commons)
By Otis Skinner
Otis Skinner (1858–1942) was a popular stage actor and a friend of Calvin Coolidge. Mrs. Coolidge remembered, “Whenever the President learned that Mr. Skinner was playing in Washington, he had an invitation sent to him to come to the White House for luncheon.” Skinner and Coolidge became summer neighbors when the actor bought a home in Woodstock, Vermont, only twelve miles from the Coolidges’ place in Plymouth Notch.
Skinner contributed the following piece to “The Real Calvin Coolidge,” a series of firsthand accounts of the president that Good Housekeeping magazine published after Coolidge’s death in 1933. The Coolidge Foundation republished these accounts as a series of booklets beginning in the 1980s.
Not the least among the qualities of the many-sided Calvin Coolidge was his Yankee wit and quiet humor. It lay side by side with his patriotism.
His idealism and love for his native state were not so widely known, but they found impulsive utterance in his impromptu Bennington speech at the time of the disastrous Vermont floods—words that rank in simple tenderness with Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg.
About two years ago in Woodstock, Dr. Malcolm Goodridge of New York delivered an address on the National Economy League and the abuses of the bonus bills at Washington. During his address he quoted twice from President Coolidge’s utterances: once while in office, from his message vetoing the bonus, and the other from a letter to Admiral Byrd. The meeting took place in one of our village churches not generally used for secular occasions. Each one of the Coolidge quotations was received with a ripple of applause.
While the audience was emerging from the sacred edifice, a virtuous lady protestingly remarked to my wife, “Mrs. Skinner, I don’t like to hear applause in a church!”
The following day we went to Plymouth, and I told Mr. Coolidge about the applause for his sentiments and the criticism of the conscientious lady.
“No,” he commented quickly, “I suppose ’twould have been better if they’d said, ‘Amen.’ ”
When the last presidential campaign was agitating the country, the Coolidges were luncheon guests at one of our Woodstock summer homes. In discussing the coming election Mrs. Skinner cried out: “Oh, Mr. Coolidge, I wish it were you that we were to vote for in November! It would be the end of this horrible depression.”
The blue Coolidge eye twinkled. “It would be the beginning of mine,” he said.
To read more remembrances of Coolidge, see The Real Calvin Coolidge.