10

A Contested Legacy

With Grace at his side, Calvin Coolidge rode to Union Station on the afternoon of March 4, 1929, under a dull gray Washington drizzle. For days the president had watched the preparation for Herbert Hoover’s inaugural festivities as if it were, in the words of White House usher Ike Hoover (no relation), “the building of a scaffold for his execution.” On Inauguration Day itself, Coolidge walked dutifully beside his successor in the ritual parade, then watched the swearing-in in the Senate chambers. By the afternoon, Coolidge was president no more. He and Grace boarded a Pullman car and headed back to New England—immensely admired, credited with having nourished good times, and even, in the eyes of some, revered for having midwifed the bounteous New Era.¹

The press deemed Coolidge’s presidency a success. Although some signs of looming danger had emerged in 1928, they were too few, too dim, and too easily eclipsed by the neon-bright shine of the stock market boom for the president or most other Americans to take heed. Few quarreled with the judgment that Coolidge had made in his final State of the Union message in December 1928. “No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of the Union, has met with a more pleasing prospect than that which appears at the present time,” he said. “In the domestic field there is tranquility and contentment … and the highest record of years of prosperity. In the foreign field there is peace, the goodwill which comes from mutual understanding.”²

Critics derided still Coolidge’s deference to business, his lack of ambition, and his passivity. Walter Lippmann mocked the president’s “genius for inactivity”: “Nobody has ever worked harder at inactivity, with such force of character, with such unremitting attention to detail, with such conscientious devotion to the task,” the influential columnist wrote. But a satisfied majority didn’t complain. Just as Coolidge’s asceticism and rectitude commended him to a public warily entering a new culture, so his reluctance to embark on visionary programs seemed to bespeak a healthy moderation. “People turned with relief and confidence” after the Progressive Era and the war, explained Bruce Bliven of the New Republic, “toward a man who clearly would never in his life do anything rash.” “While I don’t expect anything very astonishing from him,” added Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “I don’t want anything very astonishing.”³

 

 

Before Coolidge left office, he would enjoy a final year of “Coolidge Prosperity.” His last year as president, 1928, seemed to be the capstone atop a six-year run of growth—with the profits on Wall Street climbing so high and so fast that some now talked of the “Coolidge Market” as well. But beneath the good times, structural weaknesses lurked in the American economy, and even as the stock market soared, those underlying problems remained unsolved.

The first problem was that, late in Coolidge’s term, as investment was overheating into speculation, business activity was actually cooling. The housing market had begun to soften in 1926, sales of cars, appliances, and other durable goods flagged in 1927, and construction leveled off in 1928. The saturation of these industries boded ill, for the economy had become unduly reliant on sales of houses and cars. These sectors were the props of a house of cards, and their inability to bear more weight meant that when they collapsed, so would the whole economy.⁴

Inequality compounded the difficulty. Although Coolidge Prosperity had enriched many, wealth remained unevenly distributed. From 1923 to 1929, the share of income reaped by the topmost tier of Americans grew. Although business profits mounted, consumers saw little of the gains. According to a 1928 Brookings Institution report, more than half of American families remained near or below a subsistence level. Agriculture, coal, and textile workers suffered acutely. This maldistribution of wealth and income compounded the downturn in key economic sectors, because poorer Americans, including farmers and low-wage workers—many of whom still wanted to buy homes and cars and appliances in the decade’s later years—remained barred at the gates of the new economy. Unable to join in the consumption, they were also powerless to reinvigorate these tapped-out industries.⁵

The economic softening of the late 1920s drew little comment. Masking its ill effects was the bull market, which had been charging ahead with only minor setbacks since 1924. Although taken by laymen as a marker of economic strength, the stock market fever actually signaled that productive long-term investment opportunities were drying up. By late 1927, investment was giving way to trading that was clearly speculative, motivated not by the sound study of specific firms and underlying conditions but by the simple wish to turn a fast buck. Many companies, ignoring the rule that equates prudent management with modest payments to shareholders and substantial reinvestment of profits, fed the mania for increased dividends and capital gains. By early 1928 investors were playing the market entirely on expectations of additional increases—the classic definition of a bubble.⁶

Adding to the frenzy, stock trading, once the preserve of the wealthy, was now enticing the middle class. Although only perhaps one in a hundred Americans actually bought stocks, this percentage still meant that hordes of new investors were flooding the brokerage houses setting up shop across the country. Millions more followed the ticker tape as keenly as the major league box scores. Noninvestors made judgments about their futures based on the financial indices’ upward course, tying their fates to those of the rich, while those who did invest traded feverishly. In the first week of December 1927, more stock shares were bought and sold than in any other week in the annals of the New York exchange. New benchmarks were set the following March, June, and November. In 1928 some 1.1 billion shares were exchanged—an almost fivefold increase over 1923.

In March 1928, as Coolidge’s final year as president opened, the market paused for what seemed to be an imminent correction but then began to soar again. Led by radio and automobile stocks—the success stories of the 1920s—indices climbed skyward. On some days or weeks, gains defied imagination. Any pauses and slides, meanwhile—even big ones—soon gave way to new spikes.

A few Cassandras warned that what goes up must come down. William Z. Ripley, a Harvard economist, visited the White House in 1926 to point out that the growing number of stockholders in the market had little control over corporate decisions affecting their fates, but he concluded—to Coolidge’s relief—that the federal government could do nothing about it. In addition, several far-sighted journalists and economists fretted about the potential fallout from the decade’s widening inequality. The popular economists William Foster and Waddill Catchings published Business Without a Buyer (1927) and The Road to Plenty (1928), books that dissented from the gospel of productivity. Casting doubt on Say’s Law and the idea that supply created its own demand, the authors prescribed a proto-Keynesianism, arguing that the government should superintend the provision of adequate consumer income, especially when business production softened.

These and other doomsayers, of course, turned out to be generally correct—if not in all of their particulars—and in retrospect it’s easy to chide Americans for ignoring the red flags. It’s easy, too, to fault them for not learning from the decade’s previous orgies of glorified gambling—Charles Ponzi’s 1920 pyramid swindle or the fraud-ridden Florida real estate boom that finally ebbed in 1925 and 1926—in which get-rich-quick promises proved too good to be true. But if Foster and Catchings reached a popular audience with their tracts, even wider readerships were claimed by books and articles with titles like New Levels in the Stock Market, in which prophets of the New Era argued that a revolution in industry, trade, and finance had tamed the dreaded business cycle and that Wall Street’s climb need not end. These optimists foresaw a cornucopian future in which consumer spending would provide an ever-rising standard of living. The productivity of the age was obvious and undeniable; the dangerous maldistribution of its benefits was more easily tolerated or ignored.⁷

The market’s ascent clouded the thinking of politicians as well. Herbert Hoover accepted his party’s nomination to succeed Coolidge in 1928 by heralding the end of indigence. “We in America are nearer today to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land,” he declared. “The poorhouse is vanishing from among us.” More laconic, but as complacent, was Andrew Mellon. “There is no cause for worry,” the Treasury secretary declared. “The high tide of prosperity will continue.” Most Democrats, for their part, either shared the euphoria or feared mounting an assault on the popular Coolidge. They chose as their national committee chairman John Raskob, a General Motors executive who listed his occupation in Who’s Who as “capitalist,” wooed big business, and wrote a magazine article entitled “Everybody Ought to Be Rich,” which mapped a path to affluence for anyone game enough to play the market.⁸

For months, the market seemed to justify these hopes. In the fall of 1928, new pinnacles dwarfed those of the spring. After Coolidge passed the reins of power to Hoover in March 1929, share prices climbed still higher. That every drop was followed by a rebound assuaged many skeptics. Stories circulated of the broker’s valet who made $250,000, of the nurse who turned patients’ tips into $30,000, of the peddler who parlayed his $4,000 savings into sixty times that amount. The veracity of these tales was beside the point.⁹

The collapse began in September. Leading stocks starting losing value, some as much as 30 percent. Yet investors, having learned that dips provided opportunities to buy low, stood firm. This time, though, the slide continued. On October 24, Black Thursday, investors unloaded stocks en masse. After the market appeared to stabilize on Friday, the plunge continued with the start of trading the next week. The decline persisted for a fortnight, until on November 13 the market hit a low for the year. Industrial stocks had lost half their value. Some $100 billion in assets had vanished.

What made the crash truly horrific was the Depression that followed. Though economists generally believe that the crash didn’t directly cause the Depression, the events of late October and November 1929 clearly kneecapped the economy. Banks grew wary of lending and called in loans; over the next four years, nine thousand institutions would shutter their doors, draining the economy of money. Sapped of their confidence, corporations—which even before the crash had slowed the pace of new investment—tightened their belts further, shedding employees, lopping inventories, and deferring new spending. Cash-strapped consumers bought less, depleting the economy of ready money. There followed a prolonged period of unemployment, stagnant production, and privation that shattered millions of lives. So severe was the crisis that one-quarter to one-third of the labor force would be out of work by 1933. It would take until 1937 for production to regain its 1929 levels.

 

 

What was Coolidge’s role in this terrible shift from boom to bust? Standard accounts affix some blame to his policies. His laxity toward regulating business, on this view, led him to ignore calls for changes in the financial industry and to tolerate stock market speculation. His fiscal and monetary policies fueled the recklessness; he appeared to believe that benefits would trickle down to the masses in substantial volume, no matter what the distribution of income, wealth, economic power, or profitable investment opportunities. Meanwhile, his bungling of international trade and credit issues allowed the time bomb of European currency instability and competitive devaluation to tick on. “The administration took the narrow interest of business groups to be the national interest,” the historian William Leuchtenburg wrote, “and the result was catastrophe.”¹⁰

Others, however, shield Coolidge from personal responsibility, emphasizing the general popularity of his policies. Few people, after all, imagined that the props beneath the entire stock market were so frail; fewer still imagined that the bust that followed the boom would last so long or cut so deep. On this view, Coolidge stands guilty only of lacking clairvoyance—or at worst of sharing a too-high estimation of the cooperative spirit of American corporations. Even Coolidge’s harshest critics agree that the roots of the Depression lie deeper than any policies of one man. In The Great Crash, 1929, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that to assail Coolidge for his “superficial optimism” about the economy, as so many historians have done, is “grossly unfair.” Coolidge was hardly outside the mainstream thought of his day.¹¹

A series of Coolidge’s economic policies can thus be examined, with an eye not toward condemnation or exoneration—a fool’s game—but toward understanding the dominant thinking of his day. First, what is most plainly apparent in retrospect is that the stock market needed more regulation but the general prosperity of the 1920s, combined with Coolidge’s own predilections and the absence of precedent for such intervention, kept the president from imposing the needed controls. As a result, unwitting investors were left vulnerable to stockjobbers’ schemes to drive up prices—such as selling shares back and forth to one another to create the false impression of strong interest in a stock. After the crash, a congressional investigation exposed some of these secretive, self-serving practices, but such findings offered cold comfort to those who had lost their livelihoods.¹²

Moreover, while some of Wall Street’s unsavory practices were hatched behind closed doors, the most significant one occurred in full public view. Margin trading—buying stocks with a pittance of a down payment and a loan from one’s broker, then selling them at a profit soon thereafter—became a favorite ticket to riches. Like Ponzi’s scheme, it depended on the buyer not getting caught short when the bill came due. Here, some market watchers sounded warnings, urging the Federal Reserve banks to stop the loans to brokers that facilitated these deals. But Coolidge tolerated the banks’ loose lending. In January 1928, when brokers’ loans had reached a volume of $3.8 billion—$1 billion more than just a year before—a reporter asked the president if they had gotten out of control. Coolidge said no. The surge, he maintained, reflected the growing volume of bank deposits accruing and of new stocks being issued. The president’s comment surprised financiers and drew angry criticism. In the Senate, Robert La Follette Jr., carrying the Progressive flame for his late father, introduced a resolution calling on the Fed to restrain its banks, but he had no success.¹³

Beyond the regulation of Wall Street, there was the second and broader issue of the money supply. Then as now, presidents were not supposed to second-guess (much less influence) the Federal Reserve, and Coolidge raised no objections to the agency’s loose-money program. Unfortunately, the Fed pursued an unwise course. In 1927, as speculation was growing, it deferred to the wishes of European finance ministers and actually cut interest rates in the hope of inflating prices and equalizing trade imbalances. Then, when it did move to control trading, it was too tentative. Starting in January 1928, the Fed began to raise the discount rate, from 3.5 to 5 percent, in the hope of discouraging loans, and in February 1929, the board, weighing in on the brokers’ loans controversy, urged its own banks to “restrain the use … of Federal Reserve facilities in aid of the growth of speculative credit.” In response to these mild steps, the market stalled briefly—but then resumed its climb. A more forceful campaign against the speculative loans, including words from the president, might have helped check the practice, but neither the Fed nor Coolidge—already eyeing retirement—saw fit to intervene.¹⁴

Third, Coolidge promulgated a fiscal policy that encouraged speculation and ignored inequality. Coolidge’s tax cuts had given investors more dollars to feed the market, helping to push the healthy investment of the mid-1920s into the gambling that followed. A flat tax on capital gains encouraged investors to buy the rapidly appreciating stocks instead of bonds. And because corporations (thanks to lower taxes overall) were showing higher profits, they became more alluring to investors—an allure that in retrospect they clearly didn’t deserve. Finally, these fiscal policies exacerbated the uneven distribution of buying power that made the Depression so severe.

Fourth, addressing the problem of inequality would have meant taking on the farm crisis. As a group, farmers shared little in the prosperity of the 1920s, but Coolidge never saw eye to eye with the farm bloc on how to help their debt-strapped constituents. Many progressives embraced a panacea known as McNary-Haugenism—a proposal dating to 1921 that was taken up in 1924 by Senator Charles McNary of Oregon and Representative Gilbert Haugen of Iowa. The McNary-Haugen bill promised to relieve farmers by creating a federal board that would buy crop surpluses at a price that reflected the higher prewar ratio of farm prices to the general price index; it would then dump the crops on the world market at a loss or on the domestic market when prices had rebounded. After much struggle, a version passed Congress in 1926. But Coolidge vetoed it in 1927 and vetoed a second version in 1928. His reasons were many. The scheme would have encouraged farmers to grow more crop than the market would bear; its dumping provisions posed dangers for the international economy; it would have raised prices for consumers; and, to the president’s mind, it smacked of government management of markets and favored a minority group over the common good. But if Coolidge was correct to kill the bill, the reforms he proposed instead were insubstantial, and the hard times for farmers dragged on—with repercussions for the entire American economy.

A fifth factor that contributed to the Depression was the imbalance in global trade and credit, which wiser tariff and currency policies might have helped remedy. This problem began with the European debt issues that the Dawes Plan was supposed to have solved. But despite some short-term improvements in the European economies in the middle of the decade, in 1928 Germany was still crippled by its reparations, and the Allies still owed large sums to the United States. Lower tariffs would have helped European nations sell their goods in the United States, but Coolidge supported high imposts as a means to help American business. The result was bad news all around—a burden on foreign economies, a risk for American banks, and, as it turned out, a recipe for trade-wrecking international retaliation.

Finally, the demise of the gold standard in international trade contributed to the global financial problem. By the 1920s, many European nations had abandoned the gold standard, allowing their currencies to float in value. But the United States had not; American creditors still insisted on being paid in dollars or gold. This discrepancy led debtor nations to pay up in gold, creating an influx of gold bullion into the United States—an accumulation that fueled the explosion of credit that underlay the feverish American speculation of the last years of the decade.

All these policies played some part in bringing about the economic crisis of the 1930s. To what degree American economic policy, conducted differently, could have produced a different outcome is unknowable, and any president surely would have failed to do all that was necessary to avert some serious trouble. But Coolidge’s naive faith in the gospel of productivity and the benevolence of business—as well as his excessive reliance on others to make his policies—deterred him even from asking the questions that might have mitigated the misfortune. His robust popularity confirmed the reality of the prosperity that bore his name, and the prosperity confirmed for him the wisdom of his philosophy. As he set off for Northampton in March 1929, he had no inkling of the disasters that loomed just seven months off.

 

 

As Coolidge began his retirement years in Northampton, he remained an object of popular affection. Well-wishers and hand-shakers greeted him everywhere. Reporters peered in his car window; one tried to enter his bathroom while he was showering. Tourists paraded by the duplex home on Massasoit Street to which he had returned. Coolidge didn’t like the attention, and in 1930 he bought a large house on the outskirts of town called The Beeches.

It was an uncharacteristic indulgence; for the most part Coolidge lived simply. Friends and colleagues from Frank Stearns to Edmund Starling came to visit, but the former president returned to Washington only once, at Hoover’s invitation, to celebrate the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty in July 1929—and at the day’s end he took the night train home. He traveled little. “I get so much newspaper reaction if I go anywhere that the only place I am safe is at home,” he explained to his former secretary Ted Clark. Coolidge took just one major trip in his post-presidential years, to Florida, New Orleans, and the West. In California Will Hays arranged a tour of the movie studios and William Randolph Hearst hosted the former president at his San Simeon castle.¹⁵

Coolidge also stayed out of politics. “I am trying,” he wrote to Chief Justice Taft, “to avoid making speeches or attending public gatherings.” He abstained from Republican Party affairs and sought no platform as an elder statesman. Some of his friends, including Harlan Fiske Stone, had encouraged him to run for the Senate, but Coolidge believed it wouldn’t be proper for a former president to do so. He spurned offers to cash in on his celebrity by promoting products, such as his trademark cigars. “Whatever influence I might have came to me because of the position I have held, and to use that influence in any competitive field would be unfair … . These people are trying to hire not Calvin Coolidge but a former president of the United States.” Albert Lasker, the advertising mogul and Republican public relations adviser, offered $75,000 to use Grace Coolidge’s name in a promotional contest, but the former president declined on her behalf.¹⁶

Coolidge’s withdrawal wasn’t absolute. He took on a few ceremonial duties, such as serving on a national committee to study transportation problems. He assumed the honorary leadership of the Harding Memorial Association and the presidency of the American Antiquarian Society—though with his long-standing amateur interest in the American past, the latter was more a labor of love than of public service. For work, he accepted a relatively uncontroversial position with New York Life Insurance. Apart from the occasional trip to New York City for that job, he worked out of the same office in Northampton he had used years before.

To the extent that Coolidge remained a public presence, it was largely as a writer. His autobiography, published in late 1929, just after the crash, brought him a large advance. Although trumpeted in newspaper ads as “The greatest American autobiography since BEN FRANKLIN,” the book provoked some harsh reviews. Spare in style and superficial in analysis, brightened by only a few flashes of wit and emotion, it was notable mainly for certifying Coolidge’s aversion to self-disclosure. It scarcely dealt with policy issues and dished precious little gossip.¹⁷

The following July, in a cushy deal with his friend Hearst, the former president began writing a daily syndicated column with the resolutely unpretentious title “Calvin Coolidge Says” (in some papers titled “Thinking Things Over with Calvin Coolidge”). The column offered plainspoken, tepid, and bromidic commentary on public affairs. Roughly a hundred newspapers carried the column, paying record sums for it, and it earned the president close to $200,000 (more than $2 million in 2006 dollars)—and drew the kind of rebukes for trading on his service that he otherwise scrupulously avoided. In any event, Coolidge found the writing taxing and quit after a year.

The Depression furthered Coolidge’s withdrawal from public life. Hoover, headstrong and self-confident, didn’t seek his predecessor’s advice. The snub irritated Coolidge. As Grace later confided, he lacked confidence in Hoover’s leadership, in the manner that “all former presidents think the country is going to the dogs when another man ‘takes over.’” But Coolidge was hard-pressed to offer any bright ideas of his own. He struggled to understand how his wise policies were now scorned as myopic or injurious. In his newspaper column, he maintained in his naive way that optimism and pluck could vanquish the hard times.¹⁸ He sometimes rose to defend his administration’s economic policies, which were now coming under fire as the Depression deepened, though he did so without gusto. Privately, he conceded, as Ted Clark told Bruce Barton, that “matters would [not] have been entirely different had he, Coolidge, been in office.” Charles Andrews, an Amherst professor and friend of the president’s, maintained that Coolidge came to regret his inaction in the face of the stock market bubble.¹⁹

In fact, noted Andrews, the president was gloomier about the chances of a recovery than his public pronouncements suggested. “In other periods of depression,” Coolidge told the professor, “it has always been possible to see some things which were solid and upon which you could base hope, but as I look back I see nothing to give ground for hope, nothing of man. But there is still religion, which is the same as yesterday, today, and forever.” The recourse to religion provided Coolidge with an escape from his sadness, as it did for many who suffered. Indeed, a good number of Americans still venerated the former president for his simple piety, and some urged him to run for president in 1932 or 1936.²⁰

Yet for all his loyal admirers, Coolidge was coming increasingly to be seen as a relic from a bygone era. The view that he had been derelict in tackling burgeoning problems caught hold. “Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored,” cracked H. L. Mencken, rehearsing the lore about the president’s napping. Many liberals had long assailed Coolidge’s economics, but now they claimed vindication. In the New Republic, Matthew Josephson mocked the conceits of the New Era, playing back to Coolidge his declaration that the United States “had entered the charmed circle of diminished expenditures, diminishing tax rates, and increasing profits.” Coolidge’s foreign policy, too, was judged with new harshness for its shortsightedness, while his passive conception of the presidential office was rapidly deemed antiquated. “He tackled few [problems] and settled none of them. Not a word came out of him on the subject of Prohibition,” continued Mencken. “Not once did he challenge the speculative lunacy that finally brought the nation to bankruptcy. And all he could be induced to do about the foreign debts was to hand the nuisance on to poor Hoover … . That this normalcy was itself full of dangers did not occur to anyone.”²¹

By the summer of 1932, just three and half years after leaving office, Coolidge’s health began to decline. Only sixty years old, he complained of bronchitis, asthma, and indigestion. He turned down an invitation to open the Olympic Games, held that summer in Los Angeles, citing his physical condition. He refused to stump for Hoover in the fall campaign, apart from delivering one speech in Madison Square Garden in October and a radio talk from The Beeches on election eve—neither of which did anything to forestall Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide victory. As 1933 approached, Coolidge’s friends received notes in which he bemoaned his listlessness. “I find I am more and more worn out,” he wrote to Starling. Ted Clark described him as “very much worried and greatly depressed.”²²

On January 5, Coolidge left his Northampton office in mid-morning, telling his secretary he was going home to rest. When Grace Coolidge went up to his room to fetch him for lunch, she found him lying on his back in his dressing area. He had suffered a fatal heart attack.

The outpouring of grief that followed showed that if Coolidge was becoming a token of a lost age, that age still evoked fondness and nostalgia as well as regret. President Hoover ordered thirty days of public mourning. The funeral was held in Northampton two days later on a gray, drizzling Saturday. The pallbearers included Stearns and Butler. From Washington came, among others, the Hoovers, Charles Evans Hughes (now chief justice), Associate Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, Henry Stimson (now secretary of state), and Eleanor Roosevelt—the wife of the president-elect. The ceremony, at the Coolidges’ redbrick Congregational church, lasted a mere twenty minutes. A hearse drove the president’s coffin to Plymouth Notch, where Coolidge was buried.

The timing of Coolidge’s death had a certain poignancy. Marking the end of an era, it occurred just two months before Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office to implement the radical economic changes—Coolidge had privately called them “socialistic”—of the New Deal. In December 1932, just a month after FDR’s election, Coolidge himself had conceded that times had changed, perhaps irreversibly. “We are in a new era to which I do not belong,” he lamented to a friend, “and it would not be possible for me to adjust to it.”²³

 

 

Like spectators at a Greek tragedy, contemporary readers of Coolidge’s story know how the drama will end. They can only watch with anger, anguish, or pity as he ineluctably pursues the policies that seemed so wise then and so foolish later on. For this reason, as well as for personal ones, Coolidge seems today to be at bottom a sad figure.

The loss of family members had early on predisposed Calvin Coolidge toward fatalism and sorrow. Those deep wounds didn’t stop him from developing friendships, ambition, or a dry sense of humor. But they reinforced a shyness that would always distance him from others, confining him behind psychological barriers he could never fully surmount. The cruel death of Calvin Jr. etched a permanent scar; adding to his grief, the president’s father died in March 1926, just shy of eighty-one—depriving Coolidge’s frequent visits to his native Plymouth of their customary comfort. When the former president retreated there in retirement, he was often seen visiting the family plot.

His temperament and heartbreaks aside, the sadness that friends detected when they paid call on Coolidge—less moroseness than melancholy—seems also to have been a grieving for the lost glory of his presidency. For years afterward, Coolidge seemed fixed in time during a naive era of a restrained presidency and an unrestrained faith in business. Soon Franklin Roosevelt would transform the relationship of the federal government to the economy and of the White House to policy making. Among myriad other consequences, the new expectations of the American president—expectations of activism and far-sighted vision—would make it seem that history had passed Calvin Coolidge by.

For two generations, the historical shifts of the 1930s and 1940s made Coolidge a near-triviality. To the contemporary scholar of his presidency, however, those shifts make rendering any clean verdict a challenge; it requires a kind of bifocal vision to see his policies from the vantage of both his own day and ours. After all, to judge Coolidge only by the standards that his countrymen used is to risk solipsism—denying a role for the perspective that time and change can afford. To extol Coolidge because he was popular or because he presided over real prosperity is not so much wrong as it is incomplete.

On the other hand, to evaluate Coolidge solely by the standards of the post—New Deal era is to risk anachronism—holding him accountable for not being ahead of his time. The dismal rankings assigned to him by historians in the presidential ratings game seem, on this view, not so much unfair as irrelevant. Like his fellow basement dwellers Hoover and Harding, Coolidge was a creature of his times. To fault Coolidge for not knowing the lessons of the Depression and the New Deal is ahistorical and to assume that those lessons represent history’s final verdict is dangerous. The recrudescent conservatism of the late twentieth century has already given new appeal in some quarters to Coolidge’s philosophy—and has reopened debates about the wisdom of his policies that were once considered closed.

This, then, is the dilemma of Coolidge—and of the 1920s—as seen by history. The optimism of the age that overrode anxieties about the exploding consumer economy; the reassurances Coolidge gave to a public uncertain about its takeoff into modernity; the disregard for politics and government when business seemed to be forging a New Era—all these tendencies defined the decade and gave it its heady rush. It is fair enough to pronounce them, in hindsight, the tokens of a self-satisfied people and leadership. But latter-day retrospection should not come at the expense of appreciating how people experienced the culture of their day—or what President Coolidge, as a symbol as well as a political actor, meant to his public.

Coolidge has typically been stereotyped as a throwback to the nineteenth century. But that analysis, while accurate in capturing his attachment to the rural values and old-fashioned tastes of his upbringing, isn’t fully satisfying. Confining Coolidge to the culture of an earlier America can’t account for the ways he ushered the country into the modern age.

Coolidge was the first president whom more than a sliver of the public could see and hear with any frequency—and thus come to feel as if they knew intimately. One survey ranked him first among “the most photographed persons on earth outside of movieland.” The image America saw of Coolidge, moreover, was not one promulgated naively, as the president’s purposeful reliance on the leading public relations men of his day showed.²⁴

The result of this unprecedented exposure for an American president was more than familiarity; it was the foundation of a modern presidential style. “Repeatedly he has utilized this instrumentality [of radio] to give the people his views simultaneously in all parts of the country,” noted Bascom Slemp in 1926. “It may, in part, account for the unanimity of sentiment now prevailing on public issues.” Believing in a single, common good, Coolidge conceived of himself—by virtue of his office as well as his views—as representative of the public as a whole; deeming members of Congress captive to special interests, he sought to lead by going over their heads. Thus, if he fared poorly in the presidential duty to get a program through Congress, he was eminently successful in fulfilling the other function of the presidency—to be a representative symbol and visible embodiment of the people. When former senator Chauncey Depew of New York said of Coolidge, “We’ve got a leader for a president,” he was referring not to his legislative achievements but to his symbolic power.²⁵

Because of this modern approach to governance—and his faith in the New Era—it is more helpful to see Coolidge as a bridge between two epochs than to label him a vestige of Victorianism. “The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” said the novelist Willa Cather, revising Virginia Woolf’s aphorism about human character changing on or about December 1910. The exact date aside—for there is no exact date—America was in transition in these years, and it needed leaders to express its ambivalent disposition. Coolidge deployed twentieth-century methods to promote nineteenth-century values—and used nineteenth-century values to soothe the apprehension caused by twentieth-century dislocations. Straddling the two eras, he spoke for a nation in flux.²⁶

Moreover, the ideas Coolidge stood for and the people he spoke for turned out not to be as obsolescent as they later seemed. The liberal consensus of the midcentury years, presumed by many to be permanent, was itself a creature of a particular historical moment, and even as Coolidge was fading from memory, people like Ronald Reagan embraced the ideals he personified. As big government in its time fell into disrepute, much as Coolidge’s small government had a generation before, Coolidge’s axioms regained favor.

Even upon Coolidge’s death, the argument for his rehabilitation was already being made—ironically, by no less than H. L. Mencken, whose nihilism always contained as much conservative scorn for government as liberal disdain for cultural reaction. “We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas,” Mencken wrote, citing the failures of Wilson and Hoover. “With a world saver preceding him (I count out Harding as a mere hallucination) and a Wonder Boy following him, [Coolidge] begins to seem, in retrospect, an extremely comfortable and even praiseworthy citizen … . 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.” For legions of Americans who did seek a government pared to its simplest terms, Coolidge’s virtues and attitudes would return a half century after his passing as inspiration—even if many of the foot soldiers of the New Right had little memory or even historical knowledge of the man himself. As Coolidge’s attitudes gained influence again under Reagan and his Republican successors, and Silent Cal’s virtues took on a nostalgic glow, these legatees would derive no small sense of triumph—even as their triumph meant that the tailings and limitations of Calvin Coolidge’s presidency would also have to be discovered anew.²⁷