On a Risen Saviour

April 5, 2026April 5, 2026 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

Reflecting on this day eighty-five years ago, former President Calvin Coolidge wrote:

“So far reaching has been this event, so wide has become the realm of Christendom, that it would be difficult to find anywhere on earth a human being whose life has not been modified in some degree by the influence of the Christian religion. Outside the teachings of religion there is no answer to the problems of life. Our international and social relations cannot be solved by material forces. Armaments, wages, profits are not mere questions of quantity. They are questions of quality. Changing and fixing their amount will afford no final solution. What is needed is a change of mind, a change of attitude toward the use of these material things and toward each othert. The real problems of the world are not material, but spiritual.

“Easter teaches us the reality of the things that are unseen and the power of the spirit. A risen Saviour established a new faith in the world that showed the reason and authority of service and sacrifice.”

The Coolidges arriving at worship services in Washington (1926).

Quid quaeritis viventem cum mortuis? Non est hic; sed surrexit (‘Why seek you the living with the dead? He is not here, but is risen,’ from Luke 24.5-6, Vulgate)

On “Life”

March 17, 2026March 17, 2026 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

Without Irish-born Jim Lucey, whose shop on Gothic Street in Northampton, Massachusetts, frequently enjoyed the visit of young Calvin Coolidge, it is fair to say a very different, even quietly anonymous, life awaited the Amherst student. Without Lucey, craftsman, philosopher, and friend, Cal’s life would have been all the more meager. Most of us can identify such a force in our own life’s pathway but not all of them expressed their wisdom in poetry. Lucey, gifted with his island’s aoibh [eev], once wrote:

Look any old way you will;

Life is merely the thing we make it.

This is the truth about good or ill;

It all depends on how we take it.

…

Life is not a month or year;

Worth not merely one triumph splendid.

Many and strange are the pitfalls here

‘Til fame and the struggle for it are ended.

Luck can fatten the purse in a day,

But luck won’t teach us a thing worth learning

Wisdom is something day by day

We have to gain for ourselves by earning.

To read more, pick up a copy of Salient Cal’s America: Reappraising the Harding & Coolidge Era.

Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh!

On Presidents’ Day, 2026

February 16, 2026April 11, 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 April 15 at Bok Tower in Lake Wales. We look forward to seeing you there. 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.