Comparatively little is known about the inner life of Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president of the United States. He was not disposed to idle chatter. As a child and as an adult, he had few friends. When vice-presidential duties took him to the Senate, he packed his lunch in a tin box and ate alone. He destroyed most of his personal papers. His memoir is short and unrevealing, although he all but confesses to having installed a donkey on the second floor of his school as a prank. Coolidge is perhaps most widely remembered as the butt of a few sharp jokes. Alice Roosevelt said that he looked “as if he had been weaned on a pickle.” When informed of his death, Dorothy Parker wondered how they could tell.

In a new biography, “Calvin Coolidge” (Times Books, 202 pages, $20), David Greenberg lays out the facts. John Calvin Coolidge was born in Vermont on Independence Day, 1872, and trained as a lawyer before entering politics. He pursued his career methodically, moving from Northampton councilman to Massachusetts governor before becoming President Harding’s vice president.

When Harding died of a heart attack in 1923, Coolidge’s father, a justice of the peace, swore him in at the family home in Plymouth Notch, Vt. It was the middle of the night. After the ceremony, Coolidge returned to bed. The years that followed were peaceful and prosperous. In 1928, he decided not to run for re-election. By the time the stock market crashed, nine months after President Hoover was inaugurated, Coolidge was tucked back in Massachusetts writing a syndicated newspaper column, “Calvin Coolidge Says.” He died in 1933 of a heart attack.

As Mr. Greenberg notes, Coolidge had a number of amusing eccentricities. He kept in the White House an electric horse, which he used for exercise. A typical presidential breakfast was a bowl of boiled wheat and rye, “which he sometimes ate while having his scalp massaged with Vaseline”— an an hedonist’s idea of luxury, no doubt. He broke out in hysterics in Los Angeles after seeing a trained bear on a rampage. He spent an unusual amount of time with the White House curtains. In 1924, after his nominee for attorney general was decisively rejected by the Senate, his bodyguard saw him “take a curtain cord from the Oval Office anteroom and absently tie it into knots.” In less tense times, he amused himself by ringing the White House doorbell and then scampering off to hide in the drapes.

Although he must have been a strange man, Coolidge’s public presence was a model of sobriety, piety, and discipline. He even forced himself to spend the occasional improving afternoon with a book. “Most Americans viewed him as levelheaded if not extraordinary, virtuous if not visionary — a man whose presence in the White House offered sustenance and calm,” writes Mr. Greenberg.

“Calvin Coolidge”is a slim book, and it does not offer any radically new interpretations of the president. It pays more attention to his interactions with the press than previous biographies. This is not surprising, given that Mr Greenberg is a professor of media studies at Rutgers University. Coolidge complained of the “perpetual clamor for public utterances” that came with the office. Nevertheless, he held regular press conferences and gamely cooperated with the crafting of his image. He appeared frequently in newsreels, doing odd chores at home in Vermont. Once, in South Dakota, he donned an Indian headdress.

The public apparently ate it up. But his reputation has since suffered. He has been dismissed by historians such as Irwin Unger, who wrote that he “slept away most of his five years in office.” Detractors consider him not just lazy but a stooge for business interests. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that “for Coolidge, business was more than business; it was a religion; and to it he committed all the passion of his arid nature.” (“Calvin Coolidge” is a part of the American Presidents series, which Mr. Schlesinger edits.)

That is overstating the case. He was not reflexively uncritical of commerce. In 1927, the Mississippi River flooded, killing hundreds of people, displacing more than a million, and causing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damage. Coolidge came under great pressure to provide direct federal aid. He resisted, largely because he thought that would provide more “wonderful prospects for the contractors,” as he put it, than help for the poor.

And he famously voiced moral suspicions about the country’s prosperity. On the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, he warned Americans against “sinking” into “pagan materialism.” Such a comment would be unimaginable today, when consumption is treated as a patriotic enterprise.

Mr. Greenberg argues that Coolidge took a hands-off approach for practical and philosophical reasons. Abstemious by nature, Coolidge did not think the federal government should insert itself into local issues, or, for that matter, international ones. “Four-fifths of all our troubles in this world would disappear,” he once remarked, “if only we would sit down and keep still.” This was also his strategy for dealing with visitors.”If you keep dead still,” he told Hoover, “they will run down in three or four minutes. If you even cough or smile they will start up all over again.” On another occasion, he offered even better odds: “If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.”

The idea that presidents should be neither seen nor heard is common enough, but not among sitting presidents. It made Coolidge something of a hero to small-government conservatives. Shortly after taking office, President Reagan noticed a portrait of President Truman in the White House Cabinet room. He had it replaced with a portrait of Coolidge. At the time, people were perplexed by the gesture. But in an era when Republicans are beset with troubles and social conservatism trumps the fiscal variety at every turn, contemplating Coolidge does not seem like such a bad idea.

Ms. Grieder writes for the Economist in Washington, D.C.