Since it is President’s Day, I thought I might as well post up my prepared remarks presented last Friday in Washington at the Coolidge Foundation conference that marked the centennial of Calvin Coolidge’s ascension to the White House following the death of Warren Harding. Amity Shlaes, Coolidge’s best biographer, challenged me to make the case that Coolidge belongs on Mount Rushmore, which I was only too happy to accept. As usual I departed substantially from my prepared text here, as is my usual practice in conference settings, but I forgot to record it as I had intended for use as a podcast. (C-SPAN recorded the event, but I don’t think it has aired yet.)
Anyway, here goes the prepared text:
Coolidge: Last of the Founders’ Presidents
Remarks Prepared for “Coolidge and the American Project: The Mount Rushmore Test”
Library of Congress, February 17, 2023
There is something grossly defective about how we rank-order our presidents that ought to be blindingly obvious, yet isn’t. And the case of Coolidge helps us focus our thinking about what kind of qualities we should want in a president.
Leaving George Washington aside because of his sui generis status, all of the customary rankings of the greatest presidents that typically list Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and—lately—Ronald Reagan in the top tier, along with the close second tier that includes Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, perhaps Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt too, have one thing in common that drives their historical reputation: they served at a time of extraordinary crisis—typically a war, or some other extreme circumstance such as an economic calamity. In FDR’s case, both. Or, they contributed to fundamental changes in the nature of the presidency itself, which is the case with Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt.
From the relative standpoint of being on the scene at historically consequential moments that loom large in our memory, this makes perfect sense. But from a deeper point of view about what is most needful for republican government, this purely historical bias does us a disservice. Do we really want crisis moments to be the primary or sole determinant of our estimation of the qualities and capacities of our chief magistrate?
From the standpoint of historical contingency and hence eligibility for Mount Rushmore, Calvin Coolidge had the misfortune to govern in calm and quiet times. A. J. P Taylor famously wrote about pre-World War I Britain that a sensible, law-abiding citizen could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the federal government beyond the post office and the policeman. Such could be applied to the United States of the 1920s. Coolidge anticipated Taylor’s judgment himself in a 1926 speech, remarking that “If the Federal Government should go out of existence, the common run of people would not detect the difference in the affairs of their daily life for a considerable length of time.”
The absence of acute crisis in that decade prior to 1929 blinds us from giving due consideration to a stateman’s contribution precisely to those placid conditions we all cherish and hope to perpetuate. In the modern world, peace and prosperity ought to be considered high achievements of statesmen, rather than demanding that we bestow our highest esteem only for crisis management. The bias of historians and their readers who understandably prefer high drama will always discount the character, insights, and capacities of statesmen who govern in quiet times.
Thus we tend systematically to undervalue the contributions statesmen like Coolidge made to generating or perpetuating peace and prosperity. (For one thing, staying out of the way, as Coolidge did, should not go unappreciated. The temptations for most politicians is to see something good happening and trying to lead the parade when no such “leadership” is necessary or helpful.)
The case for Coolidge’s greatness, then, depends on a close examination of his insights and character, from which, I argue, there emerges a man of high small-r republican sensibility. In contrast to all modern presidents of both parties who, since Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, are expected to be activist visionaries, expected to mobilize the might and reach of the federal government to solve virtually all of our problems (such as, we learned last week, resort fees and snafus at Ticketmaster), Coolidge can be regarded as the last of the presidents who sought to administer the office of the president as the Founders intended. He was, in other words, the final president faithful to the founders’ generation, both in deeds and in his understanding of how a president should conduct himself.
My own opinion is that Coolidge would have been supremely able in a crisis, but counterfactuals can never be demonstrated. We can dilate his profound grasp of constitutional principles at leisure, but equally compelling in the case in favor of Coolidge’s unappreciated greatness are three of my favorite thoughts of his that display his republican sensibility, which I will share seriatim to close:
“It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man. When a man begins to feel that he is the only one who can lead in this republic, he is guilty of treason to the spirit of our institutions.”
“It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness. They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation which sooner or later impairs their judgment. They are in grave danger of becoming careless and arrogant.”
“A sound and wise statesmanship which recognizes and attempts to abide by its limitations will undoubtedly find itself displaced by that type of public official who promises much, talks much, legislates much, expends much, but accomplishes little.”
We could use presidents today who have this disposition. If the United States had a Mount Rushmore for intrinsic republican greatness, Coolidge would deserve to go up first.
Chaser:
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