One hundred years ago this morning, Calvin Coolidge became president of the United States. The circumstances were unusual but somehow fitting. President Warren G. Harding had died suddenly the day before. Vacationing at a deliberately primitive abode in Plymouth Notch, Vt., Vice President Coolidge awoke and, by kerosene lamplight, was sworn in as president by his father John, a notary public and justice of the peace. Then, he returned to bed, taking a second oath in Washington the next day to resolve any procedural ambiguities.
In the latest issue of National Review, Amity Shlaes, author of Coolidge and the chairwoman of the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, has a lovely tribute to the reticent president marking the occasion. “Conservatives pigeonhole Coolidge as a kind of pre-Reagan, a Morning in America leader who demonstrated that slashing tax rates promotes both strong revenues and prosperity,” she writes. There’s truth to this perception, but it “fails to capture the scope of Coolidge’s achievement.” She continues:
In 1921, when Coolidge arrived in Washington as Warren Harding’s vice president, the progressive tide seemed unstoppable, as it does today. Yet Coolidge managed to halt that tide, even as he demonstrated that some of his own era’s tech novelties — airplanes, autos, and telephones — represented not threats but upgrades in the lives of consumers. And he managed all these glories through the deliberate application of conservative constitutionalism.
The whole thing is worth reading. To Shlaes’s account of Coolidge, I would add Paul Johnson’s. Coolidge features prominently in “The Last Arcadia,” a chapter in his magisterial history Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (1983) that details how America remained cheerfully immune to the devolving world situation in the 1920s. Here is a portion of Johnson’s description of Coolidge:
Coolidge was the most internally consistent and singleminded of modern American presidents. If Harding loved America as Arcadia, Coolidge was the best-equipped to preserve it as such. He came from the austere hills of Vermont, of the original Puritan New England stock, and was born over his father’s store. No public many carried into modern times more comprehensively the founding principles of Americanism: hard work, frugality, freedom of con-science, freedom from government, respect for serious culture (he went to Amherst, and was exceptionally well-read in classical and foreign literature and in history).
Johnson’s account debunks some of the popular misconceptions about Coolidge (as well as about Harding, arguably our most unfairly maligned president). Certainly Coolidge had his idiosyncrasies, but by American presidential standards, they were meager, charming. By placing Coolidge alongside such monstrous contemporaries of his as the ruling or soon-to-rule Mussolini, Lenin, and Hitler, moreover, Johnson’s Modern Times highlights how much of a blessing he truly was. The fact that the subsequent century has arguably been more welcoming to monsters than to Coolidges only reinforces how much we need the spirit of the latter today. Even in this country, where we have avoided monsters of that particular dictatorial mold, Coolidge’s example is seen as somehow archaic or obsolete; modern presidents must simply be different. I think this case is overstated. Coolidge is, as Shlaes puts it, a great example of a “a recent president who consistently and successfully applied the Founders’ principles in our modern high-tech polity.” And the idea that what Coolidge believed in and embodied might be obsolete is something the man himself refuted in a speech he gave on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
If it were true that our politics no longer welcomed someone like Coolidge, perhaps the problem would be not with Coolidge but with our politics.