Rebirth of Cool Cal

John J. Miller from the December 1998 issue

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As much as Coolidge disliked high taxes, he considered a large national debt an even greater evil. Retiring it was "the predominant necessity of the country," he said, "the very largest internal improvement... possible to conceive." During his presidency, the debt shrank more than 20 percent, from $22.3 billion to $17.6 billion.

This animus toward debt grew out of Coolidge's personal frugality, which was legendary. When enemies tried to smear Coolidge by linking him to the Harding administration's corrupt Teapot Dome scheme, the simple and obvious fact that he didn't live in high style served as a ready witness. Early in his career, Coolidge refused to accept a salary higher than the one his office received on election day. He didn't own a home until after he was president. For most of his political career he rented a seven-room duplex in Northampton, Massachusetts, moving out of it only when his quasi-celebrity status as an ex-president drove him to seek more privacy. Coolidge wasn't a scrooge; he just believed in living honestly and within his means. When a cosmetics company approached the former president about having his wife, Grace, give an endorsement for a large sum, Coolidge wrote back, Sorry, she doesn't use your product. The novelist Charles McCarry tells an old family story about Coolidge as ex-president. On a summer day, Coolidge borrowed a match from McCarry's grandfather in Northampton. That fall, they bumped into each other again on Main Street. Coolidge said, "Hello, Will, here's the match I owe you," and handed a brand-new kitchen match to an astonished recipient.

Coolidge learned these virtues growing up in the remote hamlet of Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Two presidents have died on Independence Day (Adams and Jefferson), but Coolidge is the only one to have been born on it: July 4, 1872. His storekeeping father sacrificed much to put his single son through Black River Academy and Amherst College, and then to send remittances as Coolidge studied for the bar and set up his law office in Northampton. Sobel reports that Coolidge even received this financial assistance at the age of 34, following his marriage and the birth of his first son--something that must have gnawed at the man who once remarked, "Anybody who is not capable of supporting himself is not fit for self-government."

Coolidge won 19 of 20 races for public office, starting with an 1898 campaign
for the Northampton City Council. He worked his way up the political ladder in Massachusetts with a striking deliberateness, moving first into the state legislature, next heading the state senate, then becoming lieutenant governor, and finally rising to governor. Like many Republicans during these years, Coolidge was something of a Progressive, supporting minimum wage laws, a six-day work week, women's suffrage, and the direct election of senators. Part of this was sincere --few political figures were immune to the Progressive bug in the first part of the century--but much of it also grew from Coolidge's impulse to win broad constituencies. Before there were Reagan Democrats, notes Sobel, there were Coolidge Democrats. Moreover, Coolidge wanted to repair the breach in the GOP that erupted in 1912 when Theodore Roosevelt bolted the party and helped Woodrow Wilson win an election with only a plurality of the vote.

Coolidge had stuck with the doomed incumbent, President William Howard Taft, but held no grudges. He could mix with Progressives and occasionally might even govern like one. At bottom, however, he was the last Republican president to hark back to the party's pre-Progressive roots in any significant way. All his life Coolidge was a consummate party builder, even reaching across racial lines when it wasn't a popular thing to do: In an unusual political decision for a president in 1924, he gave the commencement address to the all-black Howard University.

In 1920, the GOP tapped Gov. Coolidge to run for vice president alongside Ohio Sen. Warren Harding. Coolidge had risen to national prominence a year earlier for his handling of a police strike in Boston, when he forthrightly supported firing the strikers. "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime," he declared, in words that made him almost a household name. The Harding-Coolidge ticket went on to beat Democrats James Cox and FDR. Wags called the 1920 race a "kangaroo election" because the hind legs (vice presidential candidates Coolidge and Roosevelt) were stronger than the front ones.

Coolidge was a serendipitous choice. Republican Party bosses probably would have dumped him for another candidate in 1924 (a common practice at the time). Instead, he became an accidental president and then easily won an election in his own right. (He would have coasted to victory again in 1928, but decided to retire instead.) As a man of uncommon moral character, Coolidge appeared on the national scene at precisely the right moment. The ethics of his immediate predecessor, Warren Harding, are best described as Clintonesque: a reckless personal life compounded by a bevy of home-state friends who conspired to enrich themselves at public expense. Harding was enormously popular when he died, but postmortem revelations about his personal life and the behavior of his political appointees might have done lasting damage to the office of the presidency if it hadn't been for Coolidge's confident and careful leadership.

Despite all of this, Nathan Miller ranks Coolidge the seventh-worst president in his entertaining but unreliable book Star-Spangled Men: America's Ten Worst Presidents. His chief allegation against Coolidge is that he "did less work than any other American president in history"--i.e., he didn't create some big government program as his legacy. He also accuses Coolidge of not preventing the Depression, which would strike less than a year after he left office. There's some fairness to this charge--in 1928, Coolidge made the unfortunate statement that he "wouldn't happen to know anything about" how the Federal Reserve Board sets interest rates--but quite a bit of unfairness, too. Economic historians today still aren't entirely sure what caused the Depression and what might have been done to prevent it. Why must Coolidge shoulder the blame for not predicting what the so-called experts still can't figure out nearly 70 years later?

But Miller's errors are even more egregious. He denigrates Coolidge as a man who did not possess "a wide-ranging mind," but several pages later acknowledges that Coolidge translated Dante's Inferno into English. It makes one wonder how Miller spends his own free time. Certainly not studying Coolidge's own writings and speeches: Miller misquotes one of his target's best-known remarks, recasting the statement "The chief business of the American people is business" as "The business of America is business." He seems entirely ignorant of what the speech was really about--the importance of a free press--and totally unaware of the moral context in which Coolidge framed his remarks. In the same talk, he said: "It is only those who do not understand our people, who believe our national life is entirely absorbed by material motives. We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things we want much more," including peace, honor, charity, and idealism. Miller's scholarly sloppiness is inexcusable, but hardly uncommon. As Thomas Silver revealed in his 1982 book Coolidge and the Historians, the 30th president has received fundamentally unfair treatment almost from the day he left office.

Historian Richard Norton Smith says presidents who are rated as outstanding tend to be those who supplied great conflict and drama; whether they actually advanced the interests of their country is a secondary concern. The famously quiet Coolidge certainly wasn't a dramatic figure. He had none of the delusions of grandeur that have afflicted so many other presidents, and may have been the humblest person ever to occupy the office. He performed his job sensibly and well. A neighbor once remarked that "Calvin never takes a chance and strikes out, and never hits a home run. A base hit is his limit. He'll make that every time." But like a shortstop who hits .300, always puts the ball in play, and doesn't make many errors, he's a valuable veteran, if often overlooked.

When Coolidge died in 1933, some of his severest critics reflected on his time in office with a fondness they didn't have for him when he served. The poison-penned H.L. Mencken wrote these generous words: "He begins to seem, in retrospect, an extremely comfortable and even praiseworthy citizen. His failings are forgotten; the country remembers only the grateful fact that he let it alone. Well, there are worse epitaphs for a statesman. If the day ever comes when Jefferson's warnings are heeded at last, and we reduce government to its simplest terms, it may very well happen that Cal's bones now resting inconspicuously in the Vermont granite will come to be revered as those of a man who really did the nation some service." The new books by Sobel and Ferrell should encourage the sort of re-evaluation that Mencken had in mind. It's about time.