OPINION:
He’s come down to us as a caricature: “Silent Cal,” a sour, skinflint, do-nothing president from an age of indolence.
The reality is light-years removed from this cardboard character.
On Aug. 2, it will be 100 years since the beginning of Calvin Coolidge’s presidency.
He was helping out on the family farm in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, when word reached then-Vice President Coolidge that his predecessor, Warren G. Harding, had died.
The oath of office was administered by his father, a notary, by the light of a kerosene lamp in the family parlor. It seems to symbolize the man’s simplicity.
As president and as a man, he stood for hard work, economy, personal responsibility and integrity.
Unlike politicians of our time, with big mouths and egos to match, Coolidge was quiet, thoughtful.
“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,” Coolidge observed.
He produced balanced budgets, reduced the national debt by one-third and cut the top tax rate to 25%. Coolidge called overtaxation “legalized larceny.”
He and his treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, invented supply-side economics almost 60 years before Ronald Reagan, who called him “one of our most underrated presidents.”
Coolidge didn’t lead the nation into war or through an economic crisis. He mostly got out of the way and let individuals and businesses succeed on their own.
At the start of his administration, only 35% of American homes had electricity. By 1929, fully two-thirds did — progress fueled by government inaction.
At a time when the Ku Klux Klan reached its heyday, he embraced Catholics, Jews and Black Americans. He judged people by their character, not their race or religion.
In 1924, speaking to more than 100,000 Catholics of the Holy Name Society, Coolidge praised its work, which was, he said, “to impress upon people the necessity for reverence. … This is a beginning of a proper conception of ourselves, of our relationship to each other and our relationship to our Creator.”
Coolidge was a moralist.
At the laying of a cornerstone for the Jewish Community Center in Washington, after commending the contributions of Jewish patriots, he approvingly quoted historian William H. Lecky’s observation that “Hebraic mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy.”
In a commencement speech at Howard University, Coolidge declared, “The colored people have repeatedly proved their devotion to the high ideals of our country.”
In his first message to Congress, he requested an appropriation to help establish a medical school at the university.
When he received a letter protesting the Republicans’ nomination of a Black dentist from New York for Congress, he spurned “the suggestion of denying any measure of their full political rights to such a great group of our population.”
Coolidge is criticized for not stopping the wild speculation of the 1920s and for cutting military spending.
While he believed in economy and responsibility, he didn’t think it was the role of a president to force his personal philosophy on the country.
Coolidge’s laissez-faire economics didn’t create the Great Depression. The interventionism of Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt prolonged it.
The nation wasn’t ready for military expansion on the heels of what many saw as an unnecessary war in which more than 100,000 Americans died in less than two years. Besides, in 1923-28, the storm clouds over Europe and Asia were barely visible.
Still, prudent Yankee that he was, Coolidge believed the nation must be prepared for any contingency. Toward the end of his administration, he presided over an increase in defense spending for the Navy and air defense.
When he ran for reelection in 1924, he received more votes than the other two major party candidates (Democratic and Socialist) combined.
In 1928, at the height of his popularity, he refused to seek another term. It was never about him but the nation he was destined to lead.
Coolidge seems a quaint figure in our era of mega-deficits, loan forgiveness and the hubris that government can control the climate.
He sensed what was coming. Before his death in January 1933, he confided to an old friend, “I feel I no longer fit in with these times.”
This was before the New Deal, the Great Society and “Bidenomics.”
We should see Calvin Coolidge as a light that shines dimly from the past but one that — if we’re worthy — could guide us to the future.
• Don Feder is a columnist for The Washington Times.
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