“I feel sure we shall carry the election by a good margin”

Calvin Coolidge writing his father about a week before the 1920 election: October 29, 1920.

Thanks to a stampede on the floor of the 1920 Republican National Convention, Coolidge was nominated for the vice presidency, while Senator Warren Harding received the presidential nod. Although Harding ran a “Front Porch Campaign” and traveled little, Coolidge says he has “been away and too busy to write.”

On October 14, the Boston Daily Globe reported on Coolidge’s departure from New York City, “Gov. Coolidge left this city yesterday for a week’s speaking tour through six border and Southern states. He is scheduled to return to Boston October 24.”

The Globe subsequently reported that the tour covered 2,000 miles. Coolidge made speeches in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland. At the end of the tour the Globe said that “associates of the Governor on the train make no concealment of their elation” about the success of the tour.