The 'intensely' American president with an agenda like Trump's
'Silent Cal' was Trump's opposite in style and personality. Plus: A lesson for discouraged Democrats
It’s the 25th year of a new century.
A Republican takes the oath of office as president of the United States for his second term. He believes in cutting taxes, restricting immigration and using tariffs to protect American industries from foreign competition.
Government spending should be cut to the bone. Big international organizations should be viewed warily. And the U.S. should never be shy about proclaiming its virtues.
This president isn’t the one who’s going to be sworn in on January 20 this year. It’s the president whose inauguration took place 100 years ago: Calvin Coolidge.
As Mike Johnson noted Friday after being reelected House Speaker, it was Coolidge who declared in his inaugural address that year: “We believe that we can best serve our own country and most successfully discharge our obligations to humanity by continuing to be openly and candidly, intensely and scrupulously, American.”
He also declared that any excess taxes are “a species of legalized larceny” and said, “Under the helpful influences of restrictive immigration and a protective tariff, employment is plentiful, the rate of pay is high, and wage earners are in a state of contentment seldom before seen.”
Yes, there are striking similarities between the platform of the 30th president and Donald Trump’s agenda for his second term. And yes, both men took the health of America’s business community as their guiding stars. Both had strong-willed fathers and sought their approval throughout their rise.
But the comparison between the bombastic Trump and the man called “Silent Cal” stops there.
The two men couldn’t have been more different in outlook and temperament. It’s impossible to imagine that Coolidge would have talked of taking over Greenland and adding Canada to the U.S., or renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”
Here’s Trump, on X, at 12:22 am January 3:
Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World! This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership. The DOJ, FBI, and Democrat state and local prosecutors have not done their job. They are incompetent and corrupt, having spent all of their waking hours unlawfully attacking their political opponent, ME, rather than focusing on protecting Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself. Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to happen to our Country. The CIA must get involved, NOW, before it is too late. The USA is breaking down - A violent erosion of Safety, National Security, and Democracy is taking place all across our Nation. Only strength and powerful leadership will stop it. See you on January 20th. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Here's Coolidge, in his autobiography:
“The only way I know to drive evil from the country is by the constructive method of filling it with good. The country is better off tranquilly considering its blessings and merits, and earnestly striving to secure more of the, then it would be in nursing hostile bitterness about its deficiencies and faults.”
And in his inaugural address, reflecting on America’s recovery from the effects of World War I:
“No one can contemplate current conditions without finding much that is satisfying and still more that is encouraging…Already we have sufficiently rearranged our domestic affairs so that confidence has returned, business has revived, and we appear to be entering an era of prosperity which is gradually reaching into every part of the nation. Realizing that we can not live unto ourselves alone, we have contributed of our resources and our counsel to the relief of the suffering and the settlement of the disputes among the European nations. Because of what America is and what America has done, a firmer courage, a higher hope, inspires the heart of all humanity.”
Of course Coolidge had reason to praise the state of the nation then — he had been in office for a year and a half, having moved up from the vice presidency after the death of President Warren G. Harding.
It’s been four years since Trump was in the White House and it suits him to trash the state of the country now, if only so six months from now he can boast about how wonderful things are under his leadership. (In The New York Times, Peter Baker summed up all the ways in which Trump is inheriting a robust economy.)
At his inauguration, Coolidge revealed an idealistic streak that Trump lacks. He said, for example, “The physical configuration of the earth has separated us from all of the Old World, but the common brotherhood of man, the highest law of all our being, has united us by inseparable bonds with all humanity.”
Vermonter
Born on the Fourth of July to a farm family with deep roots in Vermont’s Green Mountains, the young Coolidge was a hard worker. At one of his press conferences as president, he recalled that his father once described him as being able to get more sap out of a maple tree than anyone else.
He was a shy but conscientious student at school and at Amherst College. As a country lawyer practicing in Northampton, Massachusetts, he grew active in Republican politics. Coolidge swiftly rose in government, serving as a mayor, state legislator, state senate president, lieutenant governor and governor of Massachusetts.
When police struck in Boston, he backed up the police commissioner who took action against the strikers and their leaders and wouldn’t let them return to their jobs. “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anyone, anywhere, at any time,” Coolidge insisted. His stance made him a national political figure for the first time. (In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan took a page from Coolidge’s book by firing air traffic controllers for striking.)
In 1920, Coolidge was selected as presidential candidate Warren G. Harding’s running mate. When Harding, whose administration had been engulfed in scandal, died suddenly of a heart attack in his third year in office, Coolidge was visiting his old family home in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. His father, a notary public, administered the oath of office to his son.
His side of the story
The word that comes to mind when assessing Coolidge is restraint. His autobiography is only a little more than 100 pages long and, while much is self-serving, he resists any temptation to settle scores with rivals or to illuminate the nastiest moments of a career in state and national politics.
Reading it now, the contrasts with Trump’s approach to politics are glaring.
On humility: “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.”
On negativity toward his rivals: He seems to have adopted a view similar to Thumper’s in Bambi: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.” Coolidge wrote, “Perhaps one of the reasons I have been a target for so little abuse is because I have tried to refrain from abusing other people. The words of the President have an enormous weight and ought not to be used indiscriminately. It would be exceedingly easy to set the country all by the ears and foment hatreds and jealousies, which, by destroying faith and confidence, would help nobody and harm everybody. The end would be the destruction of all progress.”
‘I have tried to refrain from abusing other people. The words of the President have an enormous weight and ought not to be used indiscriminately.’ — Calvin Coolidge
On the group Trump calls the “enemy of the people”: “One of my most pleasant memories,” Coolidge wrote, “will be the friendly relations which I have always had with the representatives of the press in Washington.”
On government spending: His father, he wrote, “had the strong New England trait of great repugnance at seeing anything wasted…Wealth comes from industry and the hard experience of human toil. To dissipate it in waste and extravagance is disloyalty to humanity.”
On selfishness: “A President should not only not be selfish, but he ought to avoid the appearance of selfishness. The people would not have confidence in a man that appeared to be grasping for office.”
On writing about himself: “I trust that in making this record of my own thoughts and feeling in relation to it, which necessarily bristles with the first personal pronoun, I shall not seem to be overestimating myself, but simply relating experiences which I hope may prove to be an encouragement to others in their struggles to improve their place in the world.”
Coolidge chose not to run for another term in 1928 and left the White House with his popularity intact the following March. But his sunny confidence in American business came under harsher scrutiny when the stock market crashed in October, 1929.
His biographer David Greenberg said Coolidge’s record “was neither substantial nor enduring. Too many problems, left unaddressed, mounted; too many causes languished unpursued. His constricted vision of his office crippled him.” But he credits Coolidge with being “a man whose presence in the White House offered sustenance and calm,” reflecting the mood of the era.
Coolidge and Trump
Coolidge had a gentle sense of humor and seemed to enjoy engaging in a give-and-take with reporters. He was the first president to make wide use of the emerging medium of radio. But it’s hard to envision someone as reticent as he was spending hours chatting about himself and his views on a podcast with Joe Rogan.
In his biography, Greenberg quotes H.L. Mencken as saying, “No august man of his station ever talked about himself less.” And Dorothy Parker. famously said, after she was told in 1933 that Coolidge had just died: “How could they tell?”
The Joe Rogan test is one that Donald Trump has aced. No one will ever call him Silent Don.
At 78, Trump isn’t going to step away from his personality, tactics, or instinct for survival. It’s brought him back to the White House against all odds. Still, if there’s ever any reconsideration at Mar-a-Lago, the biography of “Silent Cal” is worth examining. Even a slight course correction in the direction of Coolidge would be quite remarkable.
There are lessons for discouraged Democrats too in the Coolidge years.
Coolidge hoped to win the Republican nomination for president in 2020, but Harding emerged as the candidate. Coolidge got the vice presidential nomination and proved to be an effective campaigner for the ticket. The Republicans won in a landslide, racking up 404 electoral votes to 127 for the Democratic ticket headed by James M. Cox, governor of Ohio. But the political tide can shift.
The Democratic vice presidential candidate on that doomed ticket was a 38-year-old New Yorker who had served as assistant secretary of the US Navy:
The comparison of Silent Cal and the felon-elect was excellent. Every summer we spend a week on a lake in Vermont that isn’t far from the Coolidge historic site, which we have visited several times. If only Trump could learn to be as reticent as Coolidge.