Introduction

When Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States in November 1980, he pledged to restore certain old-fashioned values to public life: patriotism and piety, hard work and thrift. To underscore the point, one of the first changes he made on entering the White House in January was to take down the portraits of Thomas Jefferson and Harry Truman in the Cabinet Room and put up those of Dwight Eisenhower and Calvin Coolidge.¹

Reagan’s choice of the genial, avuncular Eisenhower most Americans could understand, if not necessarily endorse. In contrast, the exaltation of Coolidge appeared, at best, idiosyncratic. President from 1923, when he acceded to the office upon the sudden death of Warren Harding, until 1929, when he retired after forswearing a second full term, Coolidge was enormously popular throughout his tenure—an icon of his era every bit as much as Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, or Charlie Chaplin. Yet by 1981 the long-departed Yankee Republican figured only marginally in the history books and even less so in the nation’s collective memory. Coolidge’s popular reputation, such as it was, had hardened into a cartoon—one that endures today.

Coolidge has become the grim-faced “Silent Cal”—Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice made famous the judgment that he looked “as if he had been weaned on a pickle”—and a consummately passive president. “His ideal day,” mocked his contemporary H. L. Mencken, “is one on which nothing whatever happens.” He is still remembered as he was seen by the “smart set” of the 1920s—intellectuals and writers like Mencken, Walter Lippmann, and William Allen White—who berated him as a mediocrity and a stooge of the business class. In popular culture, Coolidge survived not in weighty biographies but tucked away in novels such as Nathanael West’s 1934 gem, A Cool Million, which parodies Coolidge as the former president Shagpoke Whipple, whose Horatio Alger-style platitudes, in the desperation of the Depression, curdle into fascism. With his nineteenth-century regard for individual integrity, esteem for business, and taste for small government, Coolidge has stood distant and indistinct across the chasm introduced into history by the New Deal and World War II.²

Yet to Ronald Reagan, who was a teenager during Coolidge’s presidency, Silent Cal remained a hero, “one of our most underrated presidents.” Throughout his two terms in office, Reagan perused Coolidge speeches and biographies; after his 1985 cancer surgery, Reagan was seen in his recovery room reading a book about Silent Cal. His staff brought to the White House the conservative writer Thomas Silver, whose 1982 book Coolidge and the Historians argued that liberal scholars had given Coolidge a bum rap. Reagan agreed. “I happen to be an admirer of Silent Cal and believe he has been badly treated by history,” Reagan told a correspondent. “I’ve done considerable reading and researching of his presidency. He served his country well and accomplished much.” More important, Reagan drew on Coolidge’s homilies for his own statements, and in 1981, when he fired striking air traffic controllers, he took inspiration from Coolidge’s tough line in 1919 against striking Boston policemen.³

Other Reaganites similarly found a model in the neglected president. Wall Street Journal editorialist Jude Wanniski, the apostle of supply-side economics, viewed Coolidge as an unsung prophet. The columnist Robert Novak ranked Coolidge as his second favorite American leader—after Reagan, of course—and the Republican consultant Roger Stone hosted annual celebrations of the former president on July 4, which happened to be Silent Cal’s birthday. In September 2006, the conservative Heritage Foundation hosted an evening entitled “Coolidge: A Life for Our Time,” featuring a premiere screening of “the first film ever made of the personal and political life of Calvin Coolidge.” Nonetheless, amid all the scholarly attention devoted of late to the founders of post-World War II conservatism, Coolidge and the avatars of the conservative prewar years have remained largely overlooked.⁴

Foremost among Coolidge’s achievements, for Reagan and his followers, were the economic policies he pursued, which helped maintain a robust prosperity for his five and a half years in office—but also contributed to the crash and Great Depression that followed. Reagan remembered only the upside. “He cut the taxes four times,” Reagan said in 1981 of Silent Cal. “We had probably the greatest growth and prosperity that we’ve ever known. And I have taken heed of that, because if he did nothing, maybe that’s the answer [for] the federal government.” Coolidge also succeeded in doing something that Reagan could not: he paid down the federal debt substantially—the last president to do so until Bill Clinton.⁵

To Reagan and his supporters, Coolidge represented an ideal. They shared with him not just a belief in small government but also its flip side: a faith in a mythic America in which hardworking, God-fearing neighbors buffered one another from hardship. Both men felt confident that private virtue could check the threat of moral decay brought on by modern changes. Where Reagan pined for the small towns of the 1920s, Coolidge waxed nostalgic for the nineteenth-century Vermont of his youth, a world of McGuffey’s Readers and toil on the farm, Congregationalist churches and town meetings. Less a censorious Puritan than a pious man of sentimental faith, Coolidge shunned the era’s new secularism as well as its resurgent fundamentalism; he saw religion as a source of virtue, not of division, oppression, or intellectual limitation.⁶

Business, likewise, was for him benign, not predatory. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Progressive Era reforms had countered some of the worst depredations of the unfettered capitalism of the Gilded Age. By the 1920s, a view was emerging that capitalists’ new sense of social responsibility would preclude the need for aggressive federal intervention in the marketplace. Coolidge shared this view. A believer in the regnant economic orthodoxy of Say’s Law—the notion, propounded by the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, that supply creates its own demand—Coolidge held that industrial productivity, by generating prosperity, would serve the general good. Indeed, he equated the public interest not with some consensus brokered to satisfy competing social factions but with something close to the needs of industry itself. He wanted, as he once said, “to encourage business, not merely for its own sake but because that is the surest method of administering to the common good.”⁷

Coolidge famously summarized this philosophy in his January 1925 declaration to the American Society of Newspaper Editors: “The chief business of America is business.” Although sometimes caricatured as a sign of Coolidge’s obeisance to corporations, the statement actually contained a more subtle though still pro-business message. No apologist for raw laissez-faire, Coolidge believed that public-spiritedness was needed to counter the corrupting temptations of the profit motive. He was reminding the editors that they had to remain high-minded if the commercially driven newspaper business was to benefit the public. “The chief ideal of the American people,” he explained, “is idealism.” And Coolidge’s economic outlook was indeed idealistic.⁸

 

 

Besides sharing an idealized image of America, Ronald Reagan resembled Calvin Coolidge in another important sense. For all his paeans to an idyllic past, Reagan was decidedly forward-looking in several respects: his delight in a consumer society, his use of communications media to advance his goals, and his conception of presidential leadership. The same was true of Coolidge.

Although the fires of political progressivism cooled in the 1920s, social change and modernization continued. The sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd called the decade “one of the eras of greatest rapidity in change in the history of human institutions.” America was plunging headlong into modernity, with its whirligig of jazz and speakeasies, Model Ts and skyscrapers, movies and radios, liberated women and the “New Negro.” The consumer economy was enshrining a habit of self-definition based on pleasure, leisure, and personal choice, displacing an older ethic of ascetic living and pride in one’s craft. Sitting aloof from it all in Washington, with his woolen suits, Victorian mores, and disapproving grimace, the dour Coolidge seemed to many a world apart. “We were smack in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, with hip flasks, joy rides, and bathtub gin parties setting the social standards,” wrote Edmund Starling, Coolidge’s Secret Service agent and daily walking companion. “The president was the antithesis of all this and he despised it.”⁹

But the president was no reactionary. He did not seek to stand athwart history yelling stop. If he helped mute public enthusiasm for activist government, he didn’t significantly roll back the gains of the Progressive Era any more than Eisenhower undid the New Deal or Reagan repealed the Great Society. And if he frowned upon the culture of the 1920s, he smiled contentedly at the rising living standards that made it all possible. Indeed, like his friends Henry Ford, the automaker who clung to ideals of an agrarian past while championing cutting-edge business practices, and Bruce Barton, the adman who reconciled the Christian ideal of salvation with the consumer culture’s imperative to spend and enjoy, Calvin Coolidge bridged the zeitgeists of two eras. His modern aspects, though under-appreciated, are as significant as his traditional ones.¹⁰

Coolidge hailed an economy of unprecedented dynamism—what observers were calling the “New Era.” As automation spelled the end of artisanal and skilled labor jobs (and as work became less a calling than a form of employment), shorter workweeks, increased leisure time, and rising living standards ushered in a new ethic of consumption. Productive and socially responsible industries, it was hoped—aided by technology and efficient management methods—would deliver material comfort to a growing number of citizens. Americans now placed their increasingly plentiful choices about what to buy for their homes, their families, and themselves at the center of their identity. Spending and buying became a form of freedom under capitalism and a ticket to the good life. F. Scott Fitzgerald would call it “the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.” Others called it the Coolidge Prosperity.¹¹

Notwithstanding his largely top-down conception of political economy, Coolidge took pride in the middle class’s acquisition of new amenities and its apparent attainment of the good life. He welcomed the go-go consumption even as he shared widespread fears about moral decay. Indeed, it was precisely by epitomizing old-fashioned values—by demonstrating that they could survive amid the new consumerism—that Coolidge was able to cheer on the New Era. He offered the public, Lippmann wrote, a “Puritanism de luxe, in which it is possible to praise all the classic virtues while continuing to enjoy all the modern conveniences.”¹²

Coolidge accommodated himself to a different aspect of modernity by speaking directly to the public to galvanize popular opinion behind his presidency. “Decisions in the modern state tend to be made by the interaction, not of Congress and the executive, but of public opinion and the executive,” Lippmann noted in 1920. “Government tends to operate by the impact of controlled opinion upon administration.” Like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson before him, Coolidge governed mainly in this fashion, through what his aide Campbell Bascom Slemp called “direct reliance upon the mass of the people.” As his vice president, Charles Dawes, explained, “The popularity of Coolidge … is due to the fact that he, not [Congress], best understood the people and they him.”¹³

Coolidge’s frequent public appeals helped him maintain his popularity. His addresses were less finely reasoned arguments than reassuring homilies, but they disposed people to feel positively about him and the country. Indeed, for a supposedly silent man, many of the highlights of his life centered on speaking. He won praise for the valedictories he delivered to his high school and college classes, and the key piece of campaign literature in his gubernatorial and presidential bids was a collection of his speeches called Have Faith in Massachusetts. As president, he pioneered the use of radio to broadcast major addresses, in which his high-pitched New England twang, however unimpressive it might have been in a large hall, pleased living-room listeners with its lack of pretension.

At first blush Coolidge’s reticence and the weight he placed on speaking seem contradictory. In fact, they help explain each other. Coolidge succeeded as a communicator precisely because he labored over his speeches, chose his words carefully, and kept his comments simple. “Above all, be brief,” he said in his inaugural address to the Massachusetts state senate as president of the body—advice he heeded himself. As president, he would prove a welcome contrast to his bombastic predecessor, Harding, whose typical speech the Democratic politician William McAdoo described as “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.” Coolidge also indulged the White House press corps, which was growing in size and influence. He held 520 presidential press conferences, meeting with reporters more regularly than any chief executive before or since.¹⁴

Presaging the Hollywood stagecraft of Reagan’s White House, Coolidge also made use of newsreels, happily posing for cameras filming him performing chores at his Vermont homestead. The leading public relations men of his day—Bruce Barton, a close and trusted friend, and Edward Bernays, an occasional adviser—came to the White House bearing advice and schemes. Coolidge understood public relations not tactically but strategically, as a means for resting his presidency on broad popular support—making him, in this sense, a truly modern president.

 

 

Notwithstanding Coolidge’s frequent public comments, and the care that went into forging his “Silent Cal” image, his taciturnity was no myth: Coolidge was fiercely unrevealing about his personal thoughts and feelings. His speeches and press conferences, however copious, fail to shed much light on the inner man. According to one scholar’s analysis of twenty-two Coolidge speeches, the president used the word I only once in some 52,094 words. “What Coolidge thinks of himself I daresay will never be known,” wrote Mencken. “His self-revelations have been so few and so wary that it is even difficult to guess. No august man of his station ever talked about himself less.” Even in private conversations, Coolidge kept his guard up. In a rare moment of self-disclosure, he once said that his inveterate shyness predated even the deaths of his mother and his sister, both of whom passed away when he was a boy.¹⁵

This interiority, which gave rise to talk of the “Coolidge enigma,” has long frustrated biographers. “In common with everyone else at Washington, I have been eager to pluck out the heart of Mr. Coolidge’s mystery, to discover what sort of a man he is, to establish a basis for appraisal,” wrote Edward Lowry in the New Republic magazine in 1921, shortly after Coolidge became vice president. “All in vain, for he has revealed nothing, disclosed nothing.” In the record handed down to later generations, he remains isolated, remote. Even the best biographies contain few examples of interactions with friends and aides, sustained glimpses of his social life, or evidence of his private thoughts. Though his wife, Grace, appears in some accounts, his two sons are nearly invisible. In Coolidge’s own autobiography, he mentions them four times apiece.¹⁶

Coolidge’s silence itself has to be appreciated as a telltale expression of his restrained character. “His outward reticence and aloofness,” wrote Edmund Starling, perceptively, “were part of a protective shell.” This reserve was evident to everyone who met him. Five feet nine inches tall, slender, with wispy sandy hair and a pallid complexion, Coolidge was moderately handsome but not imposing. He had fine, bony features, a strong cleft chin, pale blue eyes, and a thin downturned line of a mouth that gave him an undeniable air of sternness. “He was splendidly null,” wrote a friend from his lawyering days in Northampton, Massachusetts, before he rose to be governor, “apparently deficient in red corpuscles, with a peaked, wire-drawn expression.” Arizona congressman Lewis Douglas described him as looking “much like a wooden Indian except more tired-looking.” The plain demeanor and upright bearing seemed to reflect his deep-rooted rectitude and modesty.¹⁷

Described as “an eloquent listener,” one who “could be silent in five languages,” Coolidge never overcame his shyness. His fondness for cigars, a signature trait noted by many White House visitors, suggested a man who liked having his mouth stuffed so he didn’t have to speak; the journalist Bruce Bliven recalled an interview in which the president, in response to each question, would “tilt his head back, holding his long thin Yankee stogie at the angle of an anti-aircraft gun, and think.” “Life was largely a mental experience” for him, Starling wrote. Stories and wry comments about Coolidge’s taciturnity are legendary. One of the best known concerns the writer Dorothy Parker’s reaction to his death, in 1933. Informed of Coolidge’s passing, the Algonquin Table wit didn’t miss a beat: “How could they tell?” she asked.¹⁸

Coolidge’s muteness is especially striking because he chose an extrovert’s profession. But even in the world of politics he found justifications, both philosophical and tactical, for his reticence. “The words of the president have an enormous weight and ought not to be used indiscriminately,” he wrote in his autobiography, which is short and unrevealing. In dealing with callers, Coolidge told his successor, Herbert Hoover, silence truly is golden: “If you keep dead still, they will run down in three or four minutes. If you even cough or smile they will start up all over again.” To the financier Bernard Baruch, he gave similar counsel. “Well, Baruch, many times I say only ’yes’ or ‘no’ to people. Even this is too much. It winds them up for twenty minutes or more.” The silence redounded to his benefit. Coolidge’s reserve impressed the public as the hallmark of a safe, steady leader. It allowed different citizens to project onto him their own commonsense wisdom.¹⁹

Coolidge could be chatty on occasion. Though hardly a natural conversationalist, he charmed guests. One visitor, Cordell Hull, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee (and later Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s secretary of state), reported that in a meeting he had with Coolidge, the president “talked freely and easily … and was as affable as I could have wished.” To conclude, moreover, that because Coolidge was stiff he was also humorless is a mistake. Indeed, the instances of Coolidge’s comic instinct sometimes crowd out serious discussions of his policies. One of his wife’s favorite tales was that of the hostess who, aware of the president’s reputation for pithiness, beseeched him at an event, “I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you.” Coolidge’s reply: “You lose.” As Will Rogers noted, “Mr. Coolidge had a more subtle humor than almost any public man I ever met.”²⁰ In public and private, Coolidge honed an underappreciated wit whose soul truly was its brevity.^a

Coolidge’s restraint surfaced in other ways, too. Intellectually, he was smart but never daring; Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler, who admired Coolidge, charged that he was “wholly lacking in imagination,” a harsh but not inaccurate assessment. Socially, he was withdrawn; serving as vice president when the office’s main duty was to lead the Senate, “he made no friends among the Senators,” wrote Oswald Garrison Villard in the Nation, “and ate his lunch from a tin box in a corner of a committee room.” Even in lighter moments, Coolidge remained poker-faced. “He never smiled when he was telling a joke or making a witty remark,” noted Starling.²¹

Coolidge matched this economy of speech with an economy of money—not just in the policies he promulgated but in his personal habits. He pared back opulent White House dinner menus and made cheese sandwiches for his bodyguard when they went on afternoon walks—grousing, perhaps in jest, that “I have to furnish the cheese.” Never an ideologue—he was too unreflective to fall prey to the seductions of an all-encompassing theory—Coolidge built his belief system on the Victorian virtues he had imbibed in his youth. Of course, teaching a boy that waste is a moral wrong, as Coolidge’s father did, need not turn him into a fiscal conservative; but in Coolidge’s case, private and public parsimony shared common roots in the New England soil.²²

They were connected, too, to Coolidge’s hands-off, solitary style of governing. “Coolidge had no cabinet of any kind,” said White House usher Irwin “Ike” Hoover, “he went [at] it alone in all things.” He convened no brainstorming groups or bull sessions in his White House to float ideas, run through hypotheticals, or hear out policy options. Instead, he simply delegated decisions to trusted subordinates. His first “rule of action,” he wrote, was “never do … anything that someone else can do for you.” He handed Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon the reins of economic policy; Secretaries of State Charles Evans Hughes and Frank Kellogg drove foreign policy; and Herbert Hoover at Commerce grabbed control of as many new projects as he could. Coolidge rarely overrode or questioned their decisions.²³

Notwithstanding this relative isolation, Coolidge had aides to whom he turned. He commanded deep loyalty from a team of old hands from Massachusetts, such as the businessmen Frank Stearns and William Butler, and from fellow Amherst graduates like the financier Dwight Morrow and the attorney Harlan Fiske Stone. Chief Justice William Howard Taft, the former president, also gave counsel, as did senior staffers such as Bascom Slemp, the White House secretary (the equivalent in those days of chief of staff); Everett Sanders, Slemp’s successor; and Edward “Ted” Clark, Coolidge’s personal secretary. These colleagues did not form a bustling, dynamic White House. They tended, rather, to reinforce the president’s traditional ideas and cautious leadership style. In the main (though not to a man) members of a well-to-do WASP elite, they were conservative but not reactionary, rather like Coolidge himself.

 

 

In Coolidge’s personality lay the fundaments of how he would govern as president. Sparing in words, money, and effort, he was also, in the end, sparing in vision, without great aspirations for his presidency. Compared to the activist Theodore Roosevelt, the visionary Woodrow Wilson, or even the flamboyant Warren Harding, Coolidge was unambitious—lacking an ennobling idea of how to improve the country or even much of a positive program. In this regard, to be sure, he was hardly out of step with his times; only after the New Deal would Americans demand sweeping programs from their leaders. Hewing to earlier norms, Coolidge thought that the federal government shouldn’t do anything that state or local government—or, better yet, the private sphere—could handle. “If the federal government were to go out of existence,” he once said, “the common run of people would not detect the difference.” He maintained that “the states are the sheet anchors of our institutions.”²⁴

If this judgment was defensible in the nineteenth century, by the 1920s it was becoming obsolete. The first decades of the new century had transformed the role of the federal government and the presidency. Progressive Era reforms had made Washington responsible for a host of new realms of commerce and industry. America’s rise to global stature carried unavoidable commitments. Roosevelt and Wilson had arrogated power to the White House; even under Harding the office had grown, with the landmark 1921 Budget Act tasking the president with setting a policy agenda and accounting for its costs. The president was now an indispensable actor in keeping the country affluent, strong, and just. Whatever his ideology, that duty could not be abdicated. Coolidge, who embraced the flowering of modernity in other respects, didn’t understand this new reality.

The limited conception of government’s role had the effect of serving business above all. In important ways Coolidge’s economic philosophy did resemble the old laissez-faire doctrine: he favored regulating business lightly, cutting taxes, containing federal expenditures, and using budget surpluses to reduce the debt. In other respects, however—such as his support for high tariffs on imports—Coolidge’s policies might be more accurately called Hamiltonian, with government purposefully promoting the interests of private manufacturers and finance. Indeed, Coolidge described Hamilton’s economic creed as central to the Republican Party of the 1920s: “The party now in power … is representative of those policies which were adopted under the lead of Alexander Hamilton,” he said. “This doctrine our party … still applies to the business regulations of this republic, not that business may be hampered but that it may be free, not that it may be restricted but that it may expand.” Whereas Coolidge regarded the claims of minority groups—immigrants or workers, veterans or African-Americans—as distinct from, and secondary to, the well-being of the majority, he saw the needs of business (for whom, ironically, the term “special interests” had originally been coined) as largely congruent to that of the public as a whole. “I have been greatly pleased to observe,” Coolidge noted, “that the attitude of the Chamber of Commerce very accurately reflects that of public opinion generally.” After all, unleashing corporate productivity would shower bounty on all of society. And in the short term, events appeared to validate his policies, as the flurry of consumption in the 1920s—and, later in the decade, a spiral of stock-market speculation—goosed the economy and gave the decade its heady rush.²⁵

Coolidge’s narrow conception of his role as president also led him to stay largely on the sidelines of the decade’s culture wars. Although not a temperance crusader, he accepted Prohibition without fuss and let it be known that (unlike Harding) he obeyed the law. He shared none of the bigotry of the revived Ku Klux Klan, yet he never managed to summon a rousing denunciation of that noxious fraternity. He laudably commuted the sentences of members of the Industrial Workers of the World still languishing in jails for their World War I dissent, but he declined to intervene on behalf of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the anarchist immigrants sentenced to death for murder in Massachusetts, deeming their case a state affair. When contentious social issues did become federal matters, Coolidge typically adopted a moderate conservative stance. He endorsed antilynching laws but didn’t fight hard for them, and, in one of his most consequential acts as president, he signed a 1924 law that severely limited immigration, especially from ethnic groups deemed undesirable.²⁶

Diffidence and moderation similarly colored Coolidge’s foreign policy. Neither a Wilsonian internationalist nor a defiant isolationist, he supported efforts to work with Europe and Japan to build a more peaceful future, though in most cases he pressed his cause too lightly, or adopted goals too ephemeral, to yield lasting gains. He avoided the League of Nations debate, backed down in his efforts to get the United States to join the World Court, and failed to build on Harding’s arms limitations treaties. The major agreements he did strike—the 1924 Dawes Plan addressing European debt and the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact promising to “outlaw war”—were hailed in their day but turned out to be toothless once Europe’s crises worsened. Just as the Depression would occasion recriminations about Coolidge’s economic agenda, so the resumption of hostilities abroad in the 1930s would discredit international policies that had once seemed the essence of wisdom.

Coolidge’s record, in sum, was neither substantial nor enduring. Too many problems, left unaddressed, mounted; too many causes languished unpursued. His constricted vision of his office crippled him.

And yet, as Coolidge knew, a president’s achievement does not lie merely in the laws and policies he implements. What also counts is how a president gauges, guides, and gives expression to the mood of the people he leads. Here is where Coolidge’s success lies. Most Americans viewed him as levelheaded if not extraordinary, virtuous if not visionary—a man whose presence in the White House offered sustenance and calm. Embodying the cherished ideals of a fading order while giving silent benediction to the ethos of a new age, Coolidge was a transitional president at a transitional time. In his anxious acceptance of the era’s ballyhoo and roar, in the quiet pleasure he took in beholding the fruits of American industry, in the solitary sadness he felt in trying to treasure a lost world—in all these ways he reflected and defined the 1920s. To understand that critical decade, then, it is necessary to reckon with Calvin Coolidge, the thirtieth president of the United States.