On Presidents’ Day, 2026

February 16, 2026February 16, 2026 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

The Coolidges at Sanford being received by the officers of the Florida Citrus Growers Clearing House (Secretary A. W. Hanley; General manager J. Curtis Robinson [holding the crates of grapefruit]), joined by Sydney O. Chase (Chase & Company, citrus growers, storage & insurance), and Mrs. H. H. Williams of Boston, among others. Photo credit: Special and Area Studies Collections, University of Florida.

President Coolidge, an adept communicator and savvy manager of the press a century ago, is back to headlining the news. Roger Simmons over at the Orlando Sentinel has a piece out today on the visits of Presidents to central Florida, especially highlighting the February 1929 and January 1930 trips the Coolidges made to the Sunshine State. Mr. Simmons also contrasts the rivaling accounts between the favorable Morning Sentinel and the hostile Evening Reporter-Star of that first visit on the way to the dedication of Bok Tower in 1929. Even salient Cal still generates his partisan detractors. Political reporting is anything but a phenomenon of recent years.

*First Lady Grace Coolidge putting in one of the two palms at Bok Tower which the Presidential couple planted that day in February 1929.*

Also in the news, a statue loaned to Florida through the efforts of Secretary of State Cord Byrd, chairman of the state’s 250th Commission, is set to be dedicated on Independence Day at Bok Tower in Lake Wales. It is a fitting place to host the dedication, as Bok Tower has long been a firm friend of the Coolidges. It promises to be a momentous year of commemorations, bringing Coolidge’s place in America’s 250 years welcome central stage, highlighting the fact that he not only dedicated Bok’s iconic landmark and gardens but presided over the nation during its Sesquicentennial in 1926.

Tax attorney and wealth management professional Megan Gorman, founding partner of Chequers Financial Management, has a wonderfully untapped perspective on the Presidents in her excellent book, All the Presidents Money, with a great section on Coolidge’s legacy handling his own money. Her presentation at the Truman Presidential Library today (2-3pm CST) is well worth attending, if you have secured a seat!

Moreover, another project launched by former President Bush’s More Perfect initiative is underway called In Pursuit, led by Colleen Shogan, assembling a broad range of scholars, authors, and public figures with essays and academic reexamination challenging Americans to take inventory with a purposeful “debrief” of the last two and a half centuries. The forthcoming work is offered for every American to renew commitment to the nation’s continuously developing institutional framework and a rejuvenating civic responsibility to its “enduring principles” heading into the next 250 years. Partnering with 43 Presidential Libraries and institutions, In Pursuit is working through the Semiquincentennial year of America’s experiment in self-government to approach historical study through the lens of the Presidents and First Ladies. Naturally, the Coolidge Presidential Foundation is involved in the effort. Archivist Shogan and Ms. Amity Shlaes of the Presidential Foundation will be working on the studies relating to Grace and Calvin Coolidge.

Happy Presidents’ Day this Semiquincentennial Year, Coolidge Country!

On “Etiquette Is Civilization”

January 7, 2026 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

Jamie K. Wilson has written a profound piece at PJ Media that strikes a resonance with many of Calvin Coolidge’s observations on civilization, including this one from 1921:

Civilization is always on trial, testing out, not the power of material resources, but whether there be, in the heart of the people, that virtue and character which come from charity sufficient to maintain progress. When that charity fails, civilization, though it ‘speak with the tongues of men and of angels,’ is ‘become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.’ Its glory has departed. Its spirit has gone out. Its life is done.

And then, there is this one from 1922:

It is conceived that there can be a horizontal elevation of the standards of the nation, immediate and perceptible, by the simple device of new laws. This has never been the case in human experience. Progress is slow and the result of a long and arduous process of self-discipline. It is not conferred upon the people, it comes from the people. In a republic the law reflects rather than makes the standard of conduct and the state of public opinion. Real reform does not begin with a law, it ends with a law. The attempt to dragoon the body when the need is to convince the soul will end only in revolt.

Perhaps in our current existential dilemma over what anchors we should not have collectively cut and what moorings we can, if at all possible, salvage, we can rediscover that Cal was right all along:

Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness.

Perhaps the etiquette we have jettisoned demands a renewed public commitment if we are to survive. If we do not, the American experiment may just deserve the dustbin of history.