If ever there was a lady as aptly named for her most enduring quality, it was Grace Coolidge. There was a Grace worthy of remembrance. There may be a time and season for a Boudicca or a Joan d’Arc but Grace never loses style. If there is one quality we could all use more of in 2020, it would be more Grace.

Prudence Prim dressed for the garden party.

Mrs. Coolidge at the Homestead, Plymouth Notch.

Mrs. Coolidge at work on one of her many projects.

Many of us never did enjoy mathematical word problems when we were younger (Like “If Joe is accelerating in a bus at 25 miles per hour heading west and Bernard is on a bike heading north at 5 miles an hour, who will get to Milwaukee first?” or “If Michael spends $500 million on political ads and the total U. S. population is 327 million, how many times does each American see one of those ads every hour?”), but we still learned somehow to comprehend basic division and multiplication. Some, unfortunately, still retain influence who not only think they know numbers in fresh, impressive ways but like sharing their profoundly wrong answers with the rest of the class. After all, what’s a billion or trillion these days? The only difference between $1.53 per American and the $327 trillion needed to make MSNBC’s math work is only a few more zeroes, right? Mere impersonal abstractions which only come in handy in political repartee. The clumsy attempt recently at MSNBC to score ideological points in the “rich people don’t care about the rest of us” column reminds “the rest of us” that this is why we need a lot more Calvin Coolidge. There was a guy who knew math. He loved numbers. Every election tally dutifully preserved in Coolidge’s Autobiography attests to his admiration for the score, the count, the total. For him budgets were exciting possibilities not for their dry tedium but because they save real people in real ways. He freely admitted, budgets were

A sort of obsession with me. I believe in budgets. I want other people to believe in them. I have had a small one to run my own home; and besides that, I am the head of the organization that makes the greatest of all budgets–that of the United States Government. Do you wonder, then, that at times I dream of balance sheets and sinking funds, and deficits, and tax rates, and all the rest?

“Yes,” Cal went on, “I regard a good budget as among the noblest monuments of virtue.” He was the last President to maintain a deficit-free budget every year of his tenure. One third of the national debt, including an enormous chunk of interest payments, actually went away under Coolidge, an accomplishment no President since has come close to replicating. He didn’t achieve it by enormous slices into one or two places either, but every little bit (even down to what sounds cute to us now: using pencils down to the end, exhausting erasers, recycling paperclips, and reusing file folders) added up to a mighty sum. The hydra of non-discretionary spending was in its infancy and there was no line item veto but Coolidge and his department heads hacked away what would be billions in materials that are today thrown down the waste bin without even batting an eye. He understood that behind the spreadsheets and statistics were living, breathing, working people. They were the ones who paid every time taxes came due and the biggest tax was and remains government spending. Every dollar spent came out of labor performed to produce it and left life all the poorer when it was wasted. He comprehended that it was effortless for Congress to appropriate millions, even billions to one thing after another — including, at times, the same billions to different ends. That kind of shell game approach to expenditures could go on and on but it was a downright betrayal of the trust reposed in public service and those who engaged in it were morally repugnant to him because they mortgaged the future against the present, bargaining on people’s working years and their very lives. More precisely, they gambled away the money both worked for already and yet to be worked for in exchange for votes. It perpetuated a system well-suited to attract and insulate the worst qualities in public office, those who got what they could get from others, including those who sent them there. It taught indifference in the electorate too, incentivizing the endless pursuit of current benefits of one nature or another, whatever the cost levied on children and grandchildren later.

Public service was not a game, Coolidge once said, nor were “governments…founded upon an association for public plunder but on the cooperation of men wherein each is seeking to do his duty.” Nor did he believe journalism was a game for the purpose of demonstrating who could deliver the cleverest ideological retort or political smackdown. Those who presume to report on politics seem to be in that game first and foremost. It is certainly not in the business of journalism. Meanwhile, real neglect in government slips right past them, seeking advantages over rendering selfless service that turn, just as Coolidge condemned, public office into a private profit scheme. Even as one of the most experienced office holders in Presidential history, Coolidge never ceased to be amazed at how complacent people are while permitting themselves

To be plundered by extravagant governmental expenditure under the pretense of taxing the rich to help the poor. The poor are not helped but hurt. Taxes have to be collected by the rich before they are paid. They are collected from all the people. A higher tax means real wages are lower. The cost of living is higher. The chance to work is less. Every home is burdened. Its value is decreased. The quality of the food, clothing and shelter of the children is reduced.

While most people suffer in silence, “those who demand appropriations inspire all the fear.” He knew that the very first second the very first dollar had to leave comfortable abstraction for existence in the real world, it required someone’s work to pay for it.

Some argue that since the economic pie keeps getting bigger decade after decade and Chicken Little’s prophecy of doom has not occurred, we need not be too distressed about the debts and liabilities column. Reagan’s priority of tax cuts over debt and spending reductions seems to have been a satisfactory compromise. But is it? Economic growth is a great thing and the alternative is not malaise, touting the moral virtue of returning to the cave and the campfire. But how much larger would the pie be if we started earnestly addressing debt and devaluation? How much better and, dare we say, larger would the ingredients of the pie be if we were to take it seriously? The debt has only ever always gotten bigger since dropping Coolidge’s mathematical regimen and though we wring our hands over it from time to time, we have become, like the old frog being boiled by degrees, comfortable that it can keep moving in one direction with no dire consequences. Economic resilience will always cancel out the liabilities, outpace the spending, and stay ahead of the risks, we assure ourselves. In other words, we feel Reagan’s Compromise is the winning horse not Coolidge’s Obsession. Cal’s experience taught him that costs can be deferred for a time but they can never be dodged altogether. Nations can postpone it easier than individuals but no one can repeal the law of cause and effect. Like the chicken that attempts to roost higher than it can afford descends (with fewer feathers) to a place in the pecking order it can maintain, we will find the price for borrowing time doesn’t get cheaper. Even nature displays that everything costs something.

The “haste” which Coolidge showed in reducing the debt first then attending to tax cuts brought criticism. He stood by his actions, however, explaining in his daily column on February 18, 1931,

We still have a small body of thought that considers the national debt has been reduced too fast. It is claimed that the surplus should have been applied to a reduction of taxes. By the same reasoning it would be proven that taxes should be kept down and money borrowed to meet running expenses. It was great saving to the taxpayers to reduce the debt when the value of the dollar was low. It takes about twice as much cotton, corn, wheat, copper and other materials now to make the same payments as it did two or three years ago.

If it is argued that liquidation of the debt disturbed financial conditions one answer to that is that for every dollar the national debt was reduced state and local governments increased their debts over a dollar.

Besides these reasons any one who knows the enormous pressure on the Congress by organized minorities knows that if the revenues had not been used to reduce the debt they would have gone into additional expenditures rather than tax reduction. Great interest charges have been eliminated. Sound finance calls for payment of debt and makes the revenues of each year meet the expenditures.

Until the leadership comes along or until the chickens come home to roost that brings our lackadaisical attitude toward America’s math problem into an imperative, we’ll keep rearranging the deck chairs and taking on water. Until we resume asking, as Coolidge incessantly did, “How much will it cost and who will pay for it?” we cannot blame the people we vote for, we can only blame ourselves for electing them. Ultimately, it isn’t MSNBC’s problem or the misallocation of rich people’s money, it’s how comfortable we are living as if cost were no issue since someone else will always be there to foot the bill. That someone else is already poorer just trying to keep up. Consoling this silent sufferer with the Orwellian appeal that we are not actually taking from you — as we diminish your income and sap your purchasing power — but from that wonderfully convenient category “the rich,” will not end your misery, it will multiply it. But then, basic math like that seems to be a lost skill these days. I’ll take Coolidge’s math over MSNBC’s any day.

Interest has been generated of late, with still a dominance of septuagenarians among Presidential candidates, in the history of age and the Office. We offer the following statistical walk back through not only Presidential ages but a glimpse into the often full fields of candidates through the years. A closer look never fails to give us perspective.

Of the 39 instances in which a “seasoned” candidate (either Presidential or Vice Presidential) has campaigned for office, it is fair to conclude that Ronald Reagan’s success made it “cool,” one of The Gipper’s unintended influences on politics and the Presidency.

Of the first 12 instances (candidates between 1808-1948), seven were Vice Presidential candidates or incumbents. One third party candidate for President, 85-year old Peter Cooper (of the Greenback Party), became the first “grand old man” to run for President, teamed with 62-year old Samuel Fenton Cary in 1876. Van Buren, at still a youthful 65, had been the first ex-President to run again, heading the Free Soil Party in 1848. Fillmore would be the second former President, not counted here because he remained a baby. comparatively, at 56. 71-year old William Eustis, was voted for in the fractured election of 1824, being given a courteous nod on the ballot but otherwise was not a serious contender in a race that had four younger possibilities (J. Q. Adams, Andrew Jackson, William Crawford, and Henry Clay, all in their fifties save the last who was forty-seven). The remaining two were, like Pete Cooper, Presidential candidates. The elections of 1840 and 1844, well after the collapse of the Federalist Party (which ran formally for the last time in 1816), were the first to see a major party run Presidential candidates older than Washington had been when he retired (age 65): William H. Harrison, who would go on to win in 1840 over the younger Van Buren, and Henry Clay, who would go on to lose in 1844 to the even younger Polk, both Harrison and Clay age 67.

Jackson had retired in 1837 just short of age 70, surpassing Monroe as the oldest to retire from the Presidency up to that point. Buchanan would be next, retiring at 69, followed by Truman at 67. Eisenhower, leaving office in 1961 at age 70, would mark the first occasion of a Presidential septuagenarian. Only Reagan would surpass that mark at 77, and no President after Bush Sr. has yet left younger than he, at 68 years.

Unless a Vice Presidential candidate (from George Clinton, who died in office in 1812 at age 73, 74-year old Allen G. Turman in 1888 or 80-year old Henry G. Davis, who failed to win election with 52- year old Alton Parker against 46-year old TR and 52-year old Charles Fairbanks in 1904), no one after 69-year old “Fighting Bob” LaFollette’s disparaging effort in 1924 attempted to run for President until Reagan at age 69 tried and won in 1980, an office that typically went to candidates in their fifties. Even there, one of the oldest tickets was in 1944, with 62-year old FDR and 60-year old Truman topped in 1948 with 64-year old Truman and 70-year Alben Barkley. One of the widest contrasts in both tickets may be 2008, when 71-year old John McCain and 44-year old Sarah Palin ran against 47-year old Barack Obama and 65-year old Joe Biden. Biden would join septuagenarian Vice Presidents with reelection in 2012. He is now the favored septuagenarian to carry the Democrat Party banner in 2020. Candidate Biden is on his way to surpassing his duration as a Senator with the time he has spent as part of a Presidential ticket. He has virtually surpassed Bob Dole in that regard. At the same time, the track record for older Vice Presidents is an established one, usually done to strengthen support behind the ticket or attract notoriety for a younger, relatively less known, less experienced name at the top. As sometimes becomes apparent, it can even reach counterproductive proportions if a certain candidate lacks the stamina to campaign energetically or some other quality. Poor Vice Presidents, they seem, at times strongly bound by the same force that operates between brides and bridesmaids. It is not exactly true that “Once a Vice President, never a President,” as eight separate occasions prove it can be done and, in the case of some, handled very well. But, back to the campaign trail. Naturally, reelection campaigns have far less trouble there and greater ease in coalescing around the incumbent, with only a few notable exceptions (the Adamses, Benjamin Harrison, Ford, Carter, and Bush Sr., to name a few). Those were due to other reasons devolving on the Presidents directly, not so much the Vice Presidential candidates who ran with them.

Note: The Democrats in 1840 marked the one time a national party declined to nominate a Vice Presidential candidate to run with incumbent Martin Van Buren. His ticket of one is thus not counted in the numbers above. He would go on to lose to the Whig ticket, “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” It is interesting to note that while the win-lose ratio is virtually even, the difference for those campaigns which ran a younger Presidential candidate and their subsequent win or loss is pronounced.

It also sometimes reveals, like in the Gilded Age, what can happen when one major party’s leadership languishes outside the Presidency for long enough, its foremost names are all old men by the time opportunity appears. After Lincoln, no Democrat attained the White House until 1884, a drought of twenty-four years. After the failure of 37-year old George McClellan and 39-year old George Pendleton to overcome Lincoln in 1864, subsequent results seemed only to confirm the Democrats’ hopeless situation: the loss of 58-year old Horatio Seymour to 46-year old Grant in 1868, 61-year old Horace Greeley to 50-year old Grant in 1872, and 62-year old Sam Tilden to 54-year old Hayes in the dubious 1876 election. The record for the youngest Chief Executive has had its ups and downs too (and is not a “race” at all), with the current trend not likely to break TR’s all-time record of 42, unchallenged since 1901. JFK came closest in 1961 but the odds are against the lone Presidential candidate under seventy in 2020.

The passing of the old men of the Democrat party found 47-year old Cleveland gave them the winning combination they had long sought. Of course, Cleveland slightly messes with the statistics here since he had to go and win a second term non-consecutively, giving us actually an even count overall between Presidents above the average age and below it. There has been no uninterrupted trend to out-youth the “other side” between the major parties but there have been periods of ebb and flow when the trend went toward older, hopefully wiser, leadership and away from the youngsters then back again. Candidates are very often attempts to mirror each other and thus tap into a winning combination. The effort to contrast is no less pervasive but for all the work to look different, similarities abound. As the Jeffersonians annihilated the Federalists, paving the way for the 1824 realignment and the Jacksonians, Whigs sought to capitalize on what the Democrats were doing and vice versa. The Republicans and Democrats, at times, do the same. Jackson’s presence (in his own way following in Washington’s appeal) would keep kindled the lure for an old soldier to lead and thus the Whigs sought out Harrison, Taylor and Scott as the Republicans later would with Grant to Eisenhower. It would manifest in the aftermath of the War that, though ended in 1865, doesn’t show any signs of concluding, as Republicans sought to capitalize on Grant’s appeal, with that series of Union soldiers: Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and McKinley. The Democrats would fare less successfully with their own poorly timed and badly executed renditions: George McClellan and Winfield Scott Hancock. Still later, conscientious attorney John W. Davis would be nominated to out-Coolidge Coolidge, Wendell Willkie would be chosen to out-FDR FDR, and Adlai Stevenson II to out-Ike Ike. When does that ever work, when the real deal is on the ballot?

Since 1980, only one presidential election cycle (2004) lacked a candidate (either President or Vice President) who was older than 67 years of age. The remaining nine, including 2020, now see a growing company of septuagenarians or those who will soon join them. Eighty-nine year old Mike Gravel has now entered the Harold Stassen League of “Never Quit Trying.” If God grants him four more years, we are confident Mr. Gravel will be back to break candidacy records into the 90s. Reagan broke his own record, of course, in 1984 and until 2016, no other septuagenarian proved successful at winning the White House. A candidate at 57 in 1968 and again in 1976, at age 65, Reagan seemed to find everything come together at age 69. We remember his joke in 1984 about Mondale’s youth and inexperience, all the more comical given that the Democrat opponent that year was, at age 56, on the upper range of the conventional spectrum for successful candidates. Reagan, once again, shattered that record. Moreover, given that average lifespans have lengthened since the beginning of the twentieth century, we could argue that the sixty-year olds of yesteryear were the septuagenarians of the current time.

All this simply adds up to what we already know instinctively, that no age range is, of itself, suspect. We have had plenty of reasons to doubt the boy Presidents as we have the grandfathers. Both, at times, have not been any more a safeguard to the errors of judgment, lack of character, or basic competence needed to lead well. Reagan demonstrated the septuagenarian could do just fine but he, like the youngsters among our Presidents, did not do everything he set out to do. Neither did FDR, who essentially grew up with the Presidency, nor Eisenhower who, like Truman, came to it as a grandfather. Likewise, the young men were not all perfect either. TR’s ego was often his own worst enemy and had he listened more than carried that big stick, he might not have blundered in the Brownsville Affair (not to mention the 1912 election). We will always rally to the defense of our favorite Presidents but perhaps this election cycle is a reminder of one who came in as one of those younger Chief Executives, one who was elected to national office one hundred years ago at the age of 48. He would defeat FDR that year for the Vice Presidency and orchestrate his remarkable political triumph in 1924 at age 51, winning later that year what usually is an impossible scenario: a three-way race for Vice Presidential successors. Only TR had done it and it would be TR who would join the ranks of unsuccessful attempts to make a comeback to the Presidency, following Van Buren, Fillmore, Hoover, Carter, and Bush Sr. TR never could stand being out of any gathering. Yet, it was the quietly industrious Coolidge who would succeed in ways his contemporaries in the Office did not. But, perhaps, most importantly, he encourages us continually to exercise care with the vote we possess. We are never, as his fan President Reagan put it, more than one generation away from freedom’s extinction. That is why studying Cal provides ample reward. He never fails to give us a lasting insight into what is the right or wise thing to do. After all, it was Coolidge who said, “Nothing is more dangerous to good government than great power in improper hands.” That remains, whatever the candidate’s age, credentials, or political affiliation, true for all times and all places.

Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States (1923-1929)