The Coolidges visiting the grave of their youngest son, 1928.

While there will always be abundant supplies of anxiety, countless reasons for concern and innumerable threats to life’s fragile thread, occasions like what has recently come home to us carry the reminder that life consists of more than the abundance of our possessions. We are forced to reckon face to face with realities that do not usually corral our attention with so much intensity. If neglected, they surface now and again upon our consciousness, but usually suffer our disregard in silence. Ultimately, we are all brought to behold eternity. The luxury of postponing that indefinitely has been increasingly taken away as what often distracted us cannot so easily be shoved aside and dismissed. We are discovering in our midst an imposing presence in perhaps an inescapable measure, that we live not by material forces but spiritual ones. Priorities, through no choice of our own, have been reshuffled and yet an opportunity rests before us. We can make good use of the time, as so many have encouraged us to do, whether it be through the high calling of selfless service (as Richard Shadyac with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has requested), the sharing of good news out there (taken up by John Krasinki’s SGN reports) or a return to the focus on God, who hears from heaven and heals (as Hulk Hogan has encouraged be done). It is all part of the same work, the work of the spirit. All are ministering to spiritual needs. Material forces alone will never equal them.

If there was one preeminent principle around which all else orbited in the actions and outlook of Calvin Coolidge throughout his life, it was that truth: the supreme power of the things of the spirit. He expressed it in nearly every public utterance with an incredible variety and range of expression. It remained never far from his thoughts. It was continually a clarion to strengthen our connection to things eternal, resisting every attempt that would weaken the redemptive and restorative might they hold. Success and affluence would deny and disparage them but against them, he knew, the gates of Hell will never prevail.

As he prepared this speech in the fall of 1928 for those about to gather in Washington for the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, he turned his thoughts not to any one group but to all who see mission work in its truest sense: a summons to prepare ourselves first and then go out in service wherever we are — especially here at home — with the talents we hold and the light meant to shine in each of us. The mission field, then, is not some remote post “out there” but right here in our midst…ever close at hand and within occasion to act, whoever we are and whatever we do for a living. If we would see deficiencies furnished, shortfalls supplied and gaps met, we are the ones to meet them starting right where we are. Whatever our job title, our training or our affiliation, we are missionaries. We do not need to be medical professionals or emergency responders to shine the light in the dark corners around us. It is not a job for “someone else” to perform while we sit back and complain about dysfunctional conditions and inept people. There is too much to do in our own backyards to warrant that.

Coolidge brings us back to that enduring lesson: We meet crisis and resolve problems not by  expecting overwhelming material resources to meet every need we might anticipate. After all, as Coolidge said elsewhere, “Man has a spiritual nature” that can leave stomach well-fed, body well-clothed, and health well-cared for but still leave a life devoid of fulfillment, love or light. For those, nothing material will ever be enough. Only a deeper, and continually refilling, well of spiritual investment can keep them in ample stock for every situation, whether they are seen or unforeseeable.

President Coolidge addressing those gathered before the Washington National Cathedral, October 10, 1928. Photo credit: Library of Congress.

Coolidge ascended the stairs to his place at the podium before Washington’s National Cathedral and spoke:

As we look over the world we see that there are almost whole continents in some areas still to be reached and large masses of people everywhere still to be given the advantages of modern civilization. While it is well for us to look abroad and carry to other people a knowledge of our faith, we should not forget that our success in that direction will be largely measured by what we do at home. The light which we shed for others will depend upon the intensity of the flame which we create for ourselves. The ability to help others to see comes from the clearness of our own vision. The greatest service that we can possibly perform for the world is to perfect our own moral progress. If we can do that, we need have no fear concerning the helpful influence we shall supply to others.

The most casual survey of our own country reveals the existence of conditions which require constantly increasing efforts for their redress. The problem of the training of the youth of the Nation is one that is now and will be forever recurring. In spite of our great school system, our secondary institution, our colleges,and our universities, many of our young people are still growing up with the most meager advantages of education. There are large settlements of people in our great centers of population still living under foreign conditions. Although they are dwellers within our borders, they have never yet really come into the United States. We have provided by our institutions for a genuine method of self-government, but there are many of our people who, through indifference or inability, are not receiving the full benefits of such a system. In the midst of a high productive capacity and constantly expanding material resources there are yet those who, through ignorance or misfortune, are not able to participate to the extent of their deserts in our economic progress. The forces of evil are constantly manifest and their opportunities for activity enlarge with the increasing complexities of our modern modes of life.

The officers of our governmental agencies are constantly alive to these problems and through legislation and administration are alert to meet their demands. But those who have given these subjects much thought are constantly reminded that an additional element is needed, if they are to meet with the desired success. The advancement of knowledge, the increase in science, the growth and distribution of wealth, the enactment of laws, while they may all be commendable or even necessary in themselves, do not alone met the problem of human existence or furnish a sufficient foundation for human progress. Man is more than all these. He requires the inspiration of a higher motive to meet the demands of a spiritual nature. They might furnish a partial explanation of an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon. They fail utterly to account for a Hampden or a Cromwell, a Washington or a Lincoln, or for the long list of sacrificing missionaries, saints, and martyrs who have devoted their lives to the higher cause of humanity. Organized government and organized society have done much and can do much.Their efforts will always be necessary, but without the inspiration of faith, without devotion to religion, they are inadequate to serve the needs of mankind. It is in that direction that we must look for the permanent sources of the ministrations of charity, the kindness of brotherly love, and the renunciation of consecrated lives.

Our country is thoroughly committed to a life of action. We expect our people to put forth great energy and great effort in perfecting the material structure of our national life, in enlarging our production, in increasing our commerce, in strengthening our agriculture, in improving our transportation, in organizing our finances. But all these things will never be done for their own sake. They are not an end in themselves. They are but a means to a nobler character and a higher life. Unless that motive is provided from some other source, these activities inevitably lead back to the conclusion that the end justifies the means and that might right. We are not seeking an increased material welfare that leads to materialism; we are seeking an increased devotion to duty that leads to spiritual life. Such an effort would be in vain, unless our Nation as a whole continued in its devotion to religion.

We can not remind ourselves too often that our right to be free, the support of our principles of justice, our obligations to each other in our domestic affairs, and our duty to humanity abroad, the confidence in each other necessary to support our social and economic relations, and finally the fabric of our Government itself, all rest on religion. Its importance can not be stressed too often or emphasized too much. If the bonds of our religious convictions become loosened, the guaranties which have been erected for the protection of life and liberty and all the vast body of rights that lie between are gone. The debt which this country owes to the men and women down through the ages who have been teaching and are teaching to-day the cause of righteousness is beyond all estimation. So long as the great body of our people continue to be inspired by their example, and to be faithful to their precepts, our institutions will remain secure and our civilization will continue in its increase of material and spiritual welfare.

Former President Coolidge, in motion, heading to his next destination: Lakeside Inn in Mount Dora, Florida (1930).

As usual, “the experts” in crisis mode reveal to us who they are and what they think. Often, it is done unconsciously. One of those catchphrases gathering currency is the notion that the economy, usually with the passage of some legislation or political initiative, can simply be “reopened” and resume right where it left off. As if we are all voluntarily able to hit the pause button on the various matters of life and with the wave of a wand every store will reopen, all personnel will come back, every last dollar of wages will continue as before, the same levels of production and consumption will return, and market trends will resume where they stood. It will be be like nothing happened. Or so “reopening” the economy assumes.

The economy is treated, as technocrats often do so, as an inanimate, even static, object…something that is difficult to find anywhere in nature but, conveniently, exists in their conception of the economy — not prone to contraction or expansion, nor to constant changes of human valuation, the ever-moving factors of life and time. Experts have removed all those messy, inconvenient things that get in the way of the plan. Or so they talk as if such can be or has been accomplished. Talked about like some abstract entity, we are catching a glimpse of how ignorant, intentional or not, technocrats are about that most unpredictable of things called the “real world,” and the very living thing in it we know as the marketplace. It is not some asset in clean containment conditions somewhere being fine-tuned and perfected by experts in white lab coats who control its every move and ensure it responds perfectly to the plan of a given model or spreadsheet.

In truth, it is driven by no one single authority or hand at all, comprised as it is by millions of human valuations, sudden whims, careful decisions, interests, wants, needs, and so many unquantifiable resources that simply defy Linnaean order. All of it will never be entirely understood, let alone clinically measured, classified, and quantified according to a system of workable priority, importance or objective value handed down from any central office anywhere. Every time an economy is looked upon this way, it leads to even more avoidable suffering. There will be enough and has been enough without adding technocratic stupidity to the mix.

Someone has written that this is a voluntary closure of the economy. As if we are all holding our breath for a little while just to take things up exactly as before when the situation clears. Only one problem, the conditions we face today are not going to remain the same tomorrow. Life isn’t a Marvel Comics hero, who can enter and exit suspended animation with ease. It alters by the hour, if not the moment. Businesses will not all reopen and be at the same optimal levels of output and payroll they were to please commercial reports. Jobs are not abstract numbers stuck in the upward position. Wages are not frozen things that can be kept under ice somewhere until an economist or politician needs them for a talking point. The economy is a dynamic, ever-shifting, continually fighting creature who defies the attempt to tame it. It doesn’t know what “static conditions” even mean. They don’t exist. Not everyone will walk right back into the same job, the same pay, the same situation that was there before the upheaval. These things will keep changing and we will witness a very different economy driven by different values that have not been put in a cyrogenic chamber to arrest physics or halt alteration. What will be there when this is all over will not be the same as existed before because life itself doesn’t stop however much we wish we could legislate or regulate it so. No agency, Governor, President or Congress can change that.

Calvin Coolidge weighed in on this many times, but this excerpt from his July 29, 1930 column on economics and price fixing seems especially apt today. He was no fool but neither did he suffer fools without some deserved rebuke, so for April Fools’ Day read what he said:

It is not possible to repeal the law of supply and demand, of cause and effect, or of action and reaction. Value is a matter of opinion. An act of Congress has small jurisdiction over what men think. 

When the consumer buys a product it goes out of the market and disappears. When private or public agents buy to fix an arbitrary price the product is still in the market, every consumer knows it and waits for the resale. The price can be held only as a local or temporary expedient which usually makes matters worse. But because all of us are bigger than some of us, not even the United States Treasury is powerful enough to put an arbitrary price on the great world staples with any permanent success. 

So, before we entertain notions of “reopening” a “static” economy, remember it hasn’t and it won’t stay where we left it…like a well-trained pet rock. Consider, too, what Cal once asked, as he held an old parchment from the 1780s issued by the Selectmen of Belchertown, Massachusetts, when they attempted to maintain a “static” economy for themselves, “Isn’t it a strange thing that in every period of social unrest, men have the notion that they can pass a law and suspend the operations of economic law?”

Indeed, it is.

Of infinitely more substance and quality than the 1998 Will Ferrell movie, or the SNL skit that inspired it, comes Calvin Coolidge’s thoughts on heroes, what they say about ourselves and the importance of keeping reverence.

(Caution: Now that you’re going to look up the Roxbury routine…don’t waste those precious moments of life you’ll never get back. You have been warned. Now, of course, you will look it up anyway).

Through all our “advancement” we never get far without an enduring reverence for moral courage and ongoing humility toward those who exemplify it, whether in war or peace, in calm or crisis.

Before those gathered in Roxbury at the Historical Society in 1918, Coolidge said:

Reverence is the measure not of others but of ourselves…The heroes and holidays of a people which fascinate their soul reveal what they hold are the realities of life and mark out a line beyond which they will not retreat, but at which they will stand to overcome or die…

There has been much talk in recent years of the survival of the fittest and of efficiency. We are beginning to hear of the development of the super-man and the claim that he has of right dominion over the rest of his inferiors on earth. This philosophy denies the doctrine of equality and holds that government is not based on consent but on compulsion. It holds that the weak must serve the strong, which is the law of slavery, it applies the law of the animal world to mankind and puts science above morals. This sounds the call to the jungle. It is not an advance to the morning but a retreat to night. It is not the light of human reason but the darkness of the wisdom of the serpent.