Death of U.S. President sees Calvin Coolidge step into Oval office role
San Fancisco, 4 August 1923 - The United States has a new President following the sudden shocking death in San Francisco of Warren G. Harding.
President Harding was automatically succeeded by his Vice-President, Mr. Calvin Coolidge. Speaking in the Dáil, President William T. Cosgrave expressed sympathy to the Government and people of the United States on the ‘great loss they had sustained by the death of their President.’
Similar sentiments were expressed in Seanad Éireann where Sir Thomas Esmonde noted that President Harding was ‘the official head of that great nation with which our country has always been on the best terms of friendship, from the days of the War of Independence down to the present time and it was therefore only right and proper to convey to the people of the United States of America its deep sympathy with them in the national loss they have thereby sustained.’
Colonel Moore added that Ireland and America are united by ‘every bond of sympathy and blood.’ ‘America’, he continued, ‘received our people when they were starving and dying. They went there in thousands and built themselves up into a great nation. There is hardly a single family in the West or South of Ireland that has not got relatives or friends in America. Every village in Ireland almost gets letters from America every day, so that we are in constant communication with every part of America. Therefore, we feel very deeply everything that may strike at the Government or people of the United States.’
The Prime Minister of Northern Ireland has also extended his sympathies to Mrs. Harding. ‘The prayers of the people of Ulster’, he declared in a telegram, ‘are with you today in the terrible calamity which has befallen you and the nation by the death of your distinguished husband.’
Newsreel footage documenting the Life and death of Warren G. Harding
According to Reuters, President Harding died instantly and without warning in a San Francisco Hotel while conversing with members of his family at 7.30 pm on August 2nd. The President had become ill last week, the source of his illness had been attributed to food poisoning believed to have occurred on his return from Alaska and symptoms were considered by medics to be only temporary. Mr. Calvin Coolidge now becomes the sixth Vice-president to reach the highest political office in the U.S. owing to the death of a President.
Mr. Coolidge was informed of the news by telephone at the home of his father, an isolated farm at Plymouth, in the Green Mountains, Vermont. A statement issued by the new President noted that in President Harding, the ‘world has lost a great and good man.’ and that ‘It will be my purpose to carry out the policies which he has begun for the service of the American people and for meeting their responsibilities wherever they may arise.’
Mr. Coolidge has been described as a strong, silent man with a reputation for not making a mistake. He came to public prominence in 1919 when he helped quell the Boston Police Strike and the following year was suggested by Conservative Republicans as their choice for Presidency. Now that he holds the top office, no change in policy is expected.
The late President Harding (centre) pictured here with his Vice-President and now successor, Calvin Coolidge (on the left) (Image: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540)
[Editor's note: This is an article from Century Ireland, a fortnightly online newspaper, written from the perspective of a journalist 100 years ago, based on news reports of the time.]
