Admirers of our 30th president, Calvin Coolidge, will be gathering at Plymouth Notch, Vermont tonight to mark the centenary of his swearing the presidential oath. It was a century ago that word reached the remote hamlet of President Harding’s death, leading an inaugural for the ages. It’s an opportunity to mark one of the most idiosyncratic transfers of presidential power — and to weigh the legacy of the man known as Silent Cal.

Coolidge, at the time the vice president, was visiting his father’s home at Plymouth Notch while Harding was on an extended trip to California. They hadn’t seen one another for weeks. The Vermont village lacked telephone service or even a telegraph wire. So it was the postmaster of a neighboring town who, not long after midnight on August 3, 1927, knocked on the door with the sad news from the Coast.

Coolidge’s father bounded up the stairs, calling out — by some accounts — “Mr. President, you betta get down here.” Coolidge père, a notary public, “administered the oath of office as Coolidge placed his hand on the family Bible, by” in the White House’s account, “the light of a kerosene lamp.” Coolidge then went back to bed. The press arrived in the morning. Coolidge’s father awaited them in his rocking chair on the porch.

“Colonel,” one reporter demanded, “Who said you could swear in your own son as president?”

“Well,” drawled Colonel Coolidge, “who said I couldn’t?”

The “homestead inaugural,” as the episode came to be called, set a tone for Coolidge’s presidency, which followed a period of tumult after America’s entry into World War I and the global shocks of its aftermath. Harding had vowed to restore “normalcy,” an ambition that was embraced by his successor. Yet it sells Coolidge short to say, as Al Smith did, that he was “distinguished for character more than for heroic achievement.”

Smith added that Coolidge’s “great task was to restore the dignity and prestige of the Presidency when it had reached the lowest ebb in our history.” Yet Coolidge also carried on the work begun by Harding on two critical fronts. First, by restoring the civil liberties that had been undermined by President Wilson, who stifled dissent during the war and launched a Red scare that prefigured the worst excesses of the McCarthy era.

Second, and more importantly, Coolidge, along with his treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, were pioneering slashers of taxes and spending on the part of the leviathan. It’s a combination no Republican president since has been able to replicate. Their work set the stage for the explosion of growth that characterized the decade. No wonder our Lawrence Kudlow says that “among supply-siders like me, Coolidge is a hero.”

Amity Shlaes, who wrote a biography of Coolidge and now chairs the Coolidge Foundation,* likes to point out that the 30th president was the first to leave with a budget smaller than the one with which he entered office. He created the conditions that made the 1920s roar — all by not trying to manage the economy. He has been called the Great Refrainer and one not given to a lot of palaver.

Coolidge’s reputation for being tight-lipped is embodied in the tale, recounted by the White House Historical Society, about “a society matron” who found herself seated next to Coolidge at dinner. In an effort to break the ice, she said that she’d “made a bet with my friends that I could get you to say at least three words this evening.” Coolidge’s reply: “You lose.” It’s an anecdote to savor in this age of more loquacious, less principled politicians.

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* The event tonight is co-hosted by the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation and the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development State Historic Sites. Miss Shlaes is married to the editor of the Sun.