July 6, 1923 - Union of Soviet Socialist Republics form.

September 7, 1923 - Interpol forms in Vienna.

January 24, 1924 - The Russian city of St. Petersburg was renamed Leningrad in honor of the late revolutionary leader.

May 10, 1924 - J. Edgar Hoover became FBI director; had been the acting director for several months; remained in power for 48 years; first became involved in law enforcement as a special assistant to the attorney general, overseeing the mass roundups and deportations of suspected communists during the Red Scare abuses of the late 1910s. After taking over the FBI in 1924, Hoover began secretly monitoring any activities that did not conform to his American ideal; success at legitimate crime fighting was modest; 1972 - right before the beginning of the Watergate scandal, Hoover's corruption became known (illegally infiltrating and spying on the American Civil Liberties Union, collected damaging information on the personal lives of civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr.).

May 15, 1924 - The U.S. Congress instituted immigration quotas.

May 26, 1924 - President Calvin Coolidge signs into law the Comprehensive Immigration Act (Johnson Act), the most stringent immigration policy up to that time in the nation’s history; reflected the desire of Americans to isolate themselves from the world after fighting the terrible First World War in Europe, a war that exacerbated growing fears of the spread of communist ideas. It also reflected the pervasiveness of racial discrimination in American society at the time. Under the new law, immigration remained open to those with a college education and/or special skills, but entry was denied to Mexicans, and disproportionately to Eastern and Southern Europeans and Japanese. At the same time, the legislation allowed for more immigration from Northern European nations such as Britain, Ireland and Scandinavian countries. A quota was set that limited immigration to two percent of any given nation’s residents already in the U.S. as of 1890, a provision designed to maintain America’s largely Northern European racial composition. 1927 - the "two percent rule" was eliminated and a cap of 150,000 total immigrants annually was established; government viewed the American law as an insult, and protested by declaring May 26 a national day of humiliation in Japan. The law fanned anti-American sentiment in Japan.

June 2, 1924 - Congress passed Indian Citizen Act of 1924 (Snyder Act), granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States. The law attempted to finalize Indian assimilation into white culture while permitting Indians to retain some of their tribal traditions; skirted the issue of tribal sovereignty. 

June 15, 1924 - J. Edgar Hoover assumed leadership of the FBI.

August 11, 1924 - First newsreel pictures of presidential candidates were taken.

October 15, 1924 - President Coolidge declares Statue of Liberty a national monument.

November 4, 1924 - Calvin Coolidge was elected 30th President of the United States.

November 26, 1924 - Mongolian People's Republic proclaimed.

January 21, 1925 – Rep. Butler introduces legislation in the Tennessee House of Representatives calling for a ban on the teaching of evolution; March 21, 1925 - The Butler Act became state law in Tennessee; prohibited "the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof ... that it shall be unlawful ... to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." July 1925 - John Scopes became a willing defendant in the "Scopes Monkey Trial." which received world attention as the statute was tested.

February 12, 1925 - Congress approves first federal arbitration law.

March 2, 1925 - State and federal highway officials developed a nationwide route-numbering system and adopted the familiar US shield-shaped numbered marker.

March 4, 1925 -- President Coolidge's inauguration broadcast live on 21 radio stations.

March 23, 1925 - Austin Peay, Governor of Tennessee, signed a statute, made the Butler Act state law;  forbade "the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State..."

April 1, 1925 - Executive Order transferred The Patent Office from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Commerce in accordance with the Act of February 14, 1903.

May 5, 1925 - John T. Scopes was arrested in Dayton, TN for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution, violated a state law passed in March against teaching "theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." May 25, 1925 - Scopes was indicted. July 10, 1925 - trial began. William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic presidential candidate and a fundamentalist hero, volunteered to assist the prosecution. Soon after, the great attorney Clarence Darrow agreed to join the ACLU in the defense, and the stage was set for one of the most famous trials in U.S. history. Judge Raulston destroyed the defense's strategy by ruling that expert scientific testimony on evolution was inadmissible--on the grounds that it was Scopes who was on trial, not the law he had violated. Darrow changed his tactics and as his sole witness called Bryan in an attempt to discredit his literal interpretation of the Bible. In a searching examination, Bryan was subjected to severe ridicule and forced to make ignorant and contradictory statements to the amusement of the crowd. On July 21 - in his closing speech, Darrow asked the jury to return a verdict of guilty in order that the case might be appealed. Under Tennessee law, Bryan was thereby denied the opportunity to deliver the closing speech he had been preparing for weeks. After eight minutes of deliberation, the jury returned with a guilty verdict, and Raulston ordered Scopes to pay a fine of $100, the minimum the law allowed. Although Bryan had won the case, he had been publicly humiliated and his fundamentalist beliefs had been disgraced. 1927 - Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the Monkey Trial verdict on a technicality but left the constitutional issues unresolved; 1968 - U.S. Supreme Court overturned a similar Arkansas law on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment.

July 18, 1925 - Seven months after being released from Landsberg jail, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler publishes the first volume of his personal manifesto, Mein Kampf, "My Struggle"; a bitter and turgid narrative filled with anti-Semitic outpourings, disdain for morality, worship of power, and the blueprints for his plan of Nazi world domination. The autobiographical work soon became the bible of Germany's Nazi Party.

February 25, 1926 - Francisco Franco becomes General of Spain.

April 29, 1926 - The U.S. and France sealed a deal that eventually wiped away sixty percent of the French debt. France, who owed the U.S. in the neighborhood of $4 billion, also agreed to a sixty-two-year term, at 1.6 percent interest, for the repayment of its debt.

May 20, 1926 - President Coolidge signed the Railway Labor Act; laid basis for National Mediation Board.

July 2, 1926 - The U.S. Army Air Corps was created.

July 9, 1926 - Chiang Kai-shek appointed to national-revolutionary supreme commander.

October 9, 1926 - Bureau of Labor Statistics (Department of Labor) publishes bulletin No. 420, "Handbook of American Trade Unions," its first directory of U.S. labor organizations.

December 25, 1926 - Hirohito became emperor of Japan, succeeding his father, Emperor Yoshihito.

1927 - The Bureau of Chemistry is reorganized into two separate entities. Regulatory functions are located in the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration, and non-regulatory research is located in the Bureau of Chemistry and Soils. 1930 - name of the agency changed to the Food and Drug Administration under an agricultural appropriations act.

January 25, 1927 - In a speech titled "The Press Under a Free Government" delivered to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, DC Calvin Coolidge said: "After all, the chief business of the American people is business." This has often been shortened to: "The business of America is business." Critics often associate the comment with crass desire for money, materialism and elitism. Coolidge was really talking about idealism.

February 23, 1927 - Presdient Calvin Coolidge signed the Radio Act of 1927 into law; transferred most of responsibility for radio to newly created Federal Radio Commission; five-person FRC given power to grant, deny licenses, assign frequencies and power levels for each licensee; divided country into five geographical zones (each represented by one of five Commissioners); February 26, 1927 - Radio Division of the Department of Commerce created in the Office of the Secretary; 1928 - issued first noncommercial TV license; some powers transferred to Department of Commerce. July 20, 1932 - Radio Division abolished, its functions transferred to Federal Radio Commission; June 19, 1934 - President franklinn D. Roosevelt signed the Communications Act: of 1934 into law; abolished Federal Radio Commission, transferred jurisidiction over radio licensing to new Federal Communications Commission; new FCC largely took over operations and precedents of FRC; January 3, 1996 - Congress amended, repealed sections of Communications Act of 1934 with new Telecommunications Act of 1996; first major overhaul of American telecommunications policy in nearly 62 years.

April 12, 1927 - General Chiang Kai-shek begins counter revolution in Shanghai.

April 30, 1927 - Federal Industrial Institute for Women, the first women's federal prison, opens in Alderson, WV. All women serving federal sentences of more than a year were to be brought here.

August 1, 1927 - People's Liberation Army of China founded; world's largest standing army with more than 2.25 million members.

October 4, 1927 - Sculpting begins on the face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills National Forest of South Dakota; brainchild of a South Dakota historian named Doane Robinson who was looking for a way to attract more tourists to his state. He hired a sculptor named Gutzon Borglum to carve the faces into the mountain. It would take another 12 years for the impressive granite images of four of America’s most revered and beloved presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt--to be completed. 1934 - Washington’s face was the first to be completed; 1936 - Jefferson’s was dedicated -with  President Franklin Roosevelt in attendance; 1937 - Lincoln’s was completed; 1939 - Teddy Roosevelt’s face was completed. The project, which cost $1 million, was funded primarily by the federal government.

November 12, 1927 - Josef Stalin became the undisputed ruler of the Soviet Union as Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party.

November 12, 1927 - Japan was admitted to the League of Nations.

January 11, 1928 - Soviet leader Joseph Stalin deported Leon Trotsky (original name was Lev Davidovich Bronshtein), a leader of the Bolshevik revolution and early architect of the Soviet state, to Alma-Ata in remote Soviet Central Asia. He lived there in internal exile for a year before being banished from the USSR forever by Stalin.

June 14, 1928 - The Republican National Convention nominated Herbert Hoover for president.

June 24, 1928 - The Republican National Convention nominated Herbert Hoover for president on the first ballot.

June 28, 1928 - New York Gov. Alfred E. Smith was nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention in Houston.

August 27, 1928 - Fifteen nations signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed in Paris, outlawing war and providing for the peaceful settlement of disputes. Forty-seven other countries eventually signed the pact.

September 27, 1928 - The United States said it was recognizing the Nationalist Chinese government.

October 6, 1928 - Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek becomes president of China.

October 22, 1928 - Republican presidential nominee Herbert Hoover spoke of the ''American system of rugged individualism'' in a speech at New York's Madison Square Garden.

November 6, 1928 - Republican Herbert Hoover was elected president; beat Alfred E. Smith.

November 10, 1928 - Two years after the death of his father, Michinomiya Hirohito is enthroned as the 124th Japanese monarch in an imperial line dating back to 660 B.C. Presided over one of the most turbulent eras in his nation's history. From rapid military expansion beginning in 1931 to the crushing defeat of Japan by Allied forces in 1945. Under U.S. occupation and postwar reconstruction, Hirohito was formally stripped of his powers and forced to renounce his alleged divinity, but he remained his country's official figurehead until his death in 1989. He was the longest-reigning monarch in Japanese history. 

December 11, 1928 - Police in Buenos Aires thwarted an attempt on the life of American President-elect Herbert Hoover.

December 21, 1928 - President Calvin Coolidge signed the Boulder Canyon Project Act, which intended to dam the fourteen hundred mile Colorado River and distribute its water for use in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.

January 2, 1929 - The United States and Canada reached an agreement to preserve Niagara Falls.

January 17, 1929 - The Kellogg-Briand pact was ratified by the President; agreement renounced war as an instrument of national policy (peaceful settlement of international disputes); August 27, 1928 - signed in Paris.

February 11, 1929 - The Lateran Treaty was signed, with Italy recognizing the independence and sovereignty of Vatican City.

February 26, 1929 - President Calvin Coolidge signed a measure establishing Grand Teton National Park; original boundaries included just the Teton mountain range and several lakes. Total acreage of the park increased under Franklin Roosevelt in 1943 and again by an act of Congress in 1950. Today, the park consists of more than 300,000 acres.

March 2, 1929 - Congress creates Court of Customs and Patent Appeals.

March 2, 1929 - Congress passed the Jones Act, the last gasp of Prohibition; strengthened the federal penalties for bootlegging; within five years the country rejected Prohibition, repealed the Eighteenth Amendment.

Hendrik Booraem (1994). The Provincial: Calvin Coolidge and His World, 1885-1895. (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 271 p.). Coolidge, Calvin, 1872-1933 --Knowledge and learning; Coolidge, Calvin, 1872-1933 --Childhood and youth; Presidents--United States--Biography.

Robert H. Ferrell (1998). The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge. (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 244 p.). Coolidge, Calvin, 1872-1933; United States--Politics and government--1923-1929.

Claude Moore Fuess (1976). Calvin Coolidge; The Man from Vermont. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 522 p. [orig. pub. 1940]). Coolidge, Calvin, 1872-1933.

David Greenberg (2006). Calvin Coolidge. (New York, NY: Times Books. Professor of History and Media Studies (Rutgers University). Coolidge, Calvin, 1872-1933.; Presidents--United States--Biography; United States--Politics and government--1923-1929. Austere president presided over the Roaring Twenties, conservatism masked an innovative approach to national leadership.

Stephen J. Kneeshaw (1991). In Pursuit of Peace: The American Reaction to the Kellogg-Briand Pact, 1928-1929. (New York, NY: Garland, 242 p.). Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) --Public opinion; Public opinion--United States; United States--Foreign relations--1923-1929--Public opinion.

Donald R. McCoy (1967). Calvin Coolidge; The Quiet President. (New York. NY: Macmillan, 472 p.). Coolidge, Calvin, 1872-1933; Presidents -- United States -- Biography; United States -- Politics and government -- 1923-1929.

Robert K. Murray (1976). The 103rd Ballot: Democrats and the Disaster in Madison Square Garden. (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 336 p.). Democratic National Convention (1924 : New York, N.Y.); United States--Politics and government--1923-1929.

Robert Sobel (1998). Coolidge: An American Enigma. (Washington, DC: Regnery Pub., 462 p.). Academic (Hofstra University). Coolidge, Calvin, 1872-1933; Presidents--United States--Biography; United States--Politics and government--1923-1929.

William Allen White (1924). Politics: The Citizen's Business. (New York, NY: Macmillan, 330 p.). Republican Party. National Convention, 18th, Cleveland, 1924; Democratic National Convention (1924 : New York, N.Y.); United States--Politics and government--1923-1929.

--- (1925). Calvin Coolidge, The Man Who Is President. (New York, NY: Macmillan, 252 p.). Coolidge, Calvin, 1872-1933.

--- (1986). A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge. (Norwalk, CT: Easton Press, 460 p. (orig. pub. 1938)). Editor, Emporia (KS) Gazette. Coolidge, Calvin, 1872-1933. Series: The Library of the presidents.

Robert A. Woods (1924). The Preparation of Calvin Coolidge; An Interpretation. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 283 p.). Coolidge, Calvin, 1872-1933.

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LINKS

Calvin Coolidge: 30th President of the United States http://www.calvin-coolidge.org/                                                  Sponsored by the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation, this site contains important historical material about the president who garnered the sobriquet "Silent Cal." Along with a variety of galleries featuring rotating exhibits of visual material related to President Coolidge, there is an archive of his speeches ranging from his time as governor of Massachusetts to his time as President. There is also a section offering a chronology of his life and a research section outlining the location of various important primary materials. Perhaps the most engaging part of the site is a section titled "Ask the President," where visitors can ask Jim Cooke, a professional actor who has played Coolidge in a one-man play since 1985, questions about the President's life. All of the most recent responses are posted on the site, and Mr. Cooke answers the questions in the first person with candor and eloquence. Anyone seeking information about President Coolidge or for students seeking to learn about his life will find this site quite useful.

Calvin Coolidge Presdiential Library and Museum http://www.forbeslibrary.org/coolidge/coolidge.shtml                      The Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library & Museum contains materials documenting the private life of Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933), beginning with his birth and formative years in Vermont, his student days at Amherst College, and his years as a young lawyer in Northampton. Exhibits and manuscripts, written and pictorial, cover his political career from Northampton to Boston to the White House and his post-presidential years as a Northampton resident. The Collection also includes materials of a similar nature related to the life of Grace Goodhue Coolidge (1879-1957).

John W. Davis Campaign Museum                                                 www.johnwdavis.org/                                                                                                          A virtual museum of the 1924 presidential campaign of John W. Davis (defeated in a landslide by President Calvin Coolidge who had taken office upon the death of the popular Warren G. Harding).