It’s common for American presidents to grow in our estimation over time. Decisions once deemed unwise can look wiser or prescient with the perspective of decades. Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ulysses S. Grant are among those presidents whose reputations have risen over the years.
One president is among the most deserving but least likely to enjoy a positive reputational upgrade, and that’s unfortunate. As we reached this month’s centennial of Calvin Coolidge’s accession to the presidency, upon the death of Warren G. Harding, a nation drowning in debt and in serious need of a cultural course correction could do much worse than to examine the life of the quiet man from Massachusetts.
We live in a time when the leadership of both parties, in the face of brutal arithmetic of which they cannot pretend to be less than fully aware, continues to drive the federal government and its safety net programs off a cliff of debt, at the bottom of which awaits not only an economic but also a social crisis.
Coolidge, who limited government employees to one pencil at a time, summed up his policy in 1924 as “I am for economy. After that I am for more economy. At this time and under these circumstances that is my conception of serving the people.”
Note the first two clauses: Coolidge was not a blinders-on ideologue. He endeavored to identify the right approach for the situation before him. In his day, he took that to mean reducing the national debt, and he did, by one-third. Would that we had him counting the pencils today.
Similarly, Coolidge is misremembered as a soulless, humorless materialist. The caricature was built on misquotes — he said not “The business of America is business” but “The chief business of the American people is business,” a crucial distinction. Forgotten are statements like “Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshiped.” His taciturnity masked a gentle wit, which prompted an amusing fiction about Coolidge that later came to be regarded as fact: To a dinner companion who had supposedly bet she could get him to say more than two words, he was said to have replied, “You lose.”
Coolidge presided over nearly six years of booming prosperity, although some debate continues about whether his policies contributed to the subsequent crash and depression. Where one wishes most for another Coolidge is where we are least likely to find one, in the realm of persona, style and personal conduct.
