Over at The Imaginative Conservative, Bradley J. Birzer in his latest article has raised an excellent point, Are not Presidential Libraries, with all the cultural homage that surrounds them, treasonous to the spirit and nature of a Republic? One of former President Herbert Hoover’s most enduring marks on the culture, whose concern for his own legacy enjoyed thirty years to refurbish and rebuild it, the Presidential Library has become an elaborate monument to men, rather than to laws, as Mr. Birzer notes.

There is a reason Calvin Coolidge has no such tribute to his own greatness. He opposed it, even when his friends raised over $2 million, just as he prepared to leave the White House, for that very purpose. Coolidge thanked them and then gave the funds to the Clarke School for the Deaf, where Mrs. Coolidge had taught years before. Giving to the Clarke School continued a work both Coolidges believed in, a work of greater import and capable of accomplishing far more good than any palace to their own reputations. To this day, those in search of Mr. Coolidge’s legacy find him not in a massive mausoleum or enthroned in a polished, sleek, sprawling facility somewhere. Forbes Library, itself a bequest of a faithful public servant from Northampton, remains the only such local institution to house Presidential materials. Of course, the Library of Congress possesses a number of his papers from the White House years and there can be no match to the unassuming simplicity and quiet beauty of the Homestead in Plymouth Notch.

It was Coolidge who declared, “It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know 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…We draw our Presidents from the people. It is a wholesome thing for them to return to the people. I came from them. I wish to be one of them again.”

His legacy lives not in the Presidential Library system but in the the hills of his ancestors as much as in the hearts of many who still love him and respect his integrity, wry humor, ability, and the immortal wisdom of his political ideals. He was one of us rather than One above us. He responded when obligation called upon him, did what needed done, relinquished the mantel of power and returned to his farm. For that, if nothing else, he has our admiration and honor not for personal glory. Rather, he has our esteem for the dignity he reflected in good citizenship, exemplifying a responsibility we all must shoulder with like vigilance and endurance to remain a self-governing people, summoning a moral courage just as equal to our times as he was to his own.

Today, eighty-two years ago, the Nation lost its last surviving former President of that time. In recent years, the Presidency had worn heavily upon the men raised to its obligations. Roosevelt would face death in 1919. Harding had passed suddenly after two and a half years in office, followed by his wife the following year. Wilson would also pass in 1924. Only Taft and Coolidge would remain among former Chief Executives by 1929, leaving Cal alone in that most exclusive “Club” by the following March. The Presidency had been especially hard on Coolidge, who lost his youngest son and his father two years apart. As he would observe, “it costs a great deal to be President.”

Among the most worthwhile eulogies by those who knew him well, the words given by the Honorable Arthur P. Rugg, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, deserve mention here. Spoken at the Memorial Service held in Congress for the late President, January 6, 1933, Chief Justice Rugg had these reflections on the man:

“A great statesman is the product of heredity, endowment, education, and the times. Mr. Coolidge was the son of generations inured to toil and discipline amid the mute eloquence of mountain and valley, inspired by the strength and beauty of nature, trained by association with the keen-witted, honest, industrious inhabitants of the sparsely settled country. He typified the characteristics of the race from which he sprang. He was not given to emotion. He was shy. His path was steep; it could be scaled only by unyielding determination. In no small measure he had clearness of perception, retentiveness of memory, soundness of judgment. He applied these faculties with the greatest perseverance to whatever required his attention. Industry was his early training. It grew with his years. Thrift was the habit of his life. It was applied not alone to material affairs but to time, speech, energy. His intellectual resources were directed unwaveringly but without waste to the accomplishment of his main aims. He was not infrequently termed ‘silent.’ This was one aspect of the shrewdness of his nature. No one understood better than he that the unspoken thought never wounds, never harms, never needs to be modified or withdrawn. When speech was required, he never failed. His tastes and manner of living were simple. Many examples of his keen and kindly wit found their way into the common knowledge of his countrymen.

“His talents were extraordinary. His ability in statecraft was of the highest order. His vision of the needs of the country was wide, profound, unclouded. His opinion as to what could be accomplished was sure. His judgment was true. The power of his mind was capable of dealing with any exigency. There accompanied his every act a reserve force susceptible of coping successfully with a more extreme need. His humility and quiet may have obscured these great qualities to the unthinking. They were clear to those who knew him. They were sensed by the mass of the plain people and supported their confidence in him…

“The years of the twentieth century preceding his Presidency had seen much political agitation and change and had witnessed the upheaval of the Great War and the disillusionment following its close. The country needed an opportunity to readjust itself. The people wanted to attend to their own affairs. They were reassured to know that in the office of President was a man of rugged honesty, calmness, wisdom; who was reticent, modest, courageous, experienced; to whom no duty was trifling or obscure; who had broad sympathy and deep understanding of his fellow men. The depth and breadth of his nature, the acuteness of his mind, the soundness of his moral purpose, the resources of his wisdom were sufficient for every day and for any emergency. His capacity, his temperament, industry, simplicity were adapted to the times and to the work to be done.

“The people responded to his ability to discern their thoughts and needs. They looked to him, not for new and startling theories of government, economics, or politics but for expression of their inmost spiritual longings and aspirations. They were not disappointed. They could understand him. They thought of him as one of their own kin. They bestowed on him in steadily increasing measure deep, constant, unshaken confidence. They paid most illustrious honor, not so much to what he had done but to what he was. They showed thorough appreciation of his noble character. He was the incarnation of the ideal of the America of his day.

“These lines, which appealed to his own soul, may be the message of his life:

“O heart, be strong!

“Be radiant to do battle for the right;

“Hold high truth’s stainless flag, walk in the light,

“And bow not weakly to the rule of wrong.”

 

We miss you, Mr. Coolidge. America needs the example of your character and strength of your wisdom again.

It is often noted but rarely enters into meaningful consideration, especially at the political top, how massive spending bills and expansive legislative efforts — though filled with the best of intentions to help America’s “forgotten man,” as Amity Shlaes has termed it — actually lose the “little guy” in the shuffle of competing interests. Begun as a noble effort to rescue the common man from “Big” this or that, the end result usually leaves him or her paying the bill for everyone else. This is no less true with farm legislation or disaster relief than with any other object for government expenditures.

The year 1928 presented such a fight on both fronts against a President firmly committed to budget discipline and fiscal sanity. The Farm Bloc, repulsed by President Coolidge’s veto the previous year, were moving to present an amended bill retaining the heart of earlier incarnations, an equalization fee that would summon the government into agricultural market participation to a degree the country had not known before. The Mississippi River basin had flooded and the Midwest and South was immersed in a very real distress and loss. The rains had then proceeded to move north and deluge Vermont. Coolidge, criticized at the time for callous absence from the inundated areas, remained consistently distant on principle, even when the suffering came to his native state.

As the two most expensive domestic spending bills developed in Congress, it would be Coolidge who would stand unmoved as the best advocate of the “forgotten man.” Funding and returns on that funding should remain closest to those concerned, at the most individual and local level. As weeks turned to months, however, the cost of the flood control bill continued to grow, taking in an ever-widening sphere of participants. From what had begun as a $200 million endeavor the Senate, through the sponsorship of Senator Jones, debate had raised the total to over $1.5 billion, an incredibly unrealistic figure, proposing untold burdens on the people who work and pay across the country.

Through determined effort, meeting repeatedly with the legislators of both the House and Senate versions, Coolidge ensured the final cost had been hammered down to $325 million, a reduction of $1.175 billion from future taxes proposed to pay for such astronomical funds. President Coolidge would sign the Flood Control Act on May 15, 1928, only after an intense overhaul of its suggested price tag had been chopped and most of its contents presented an improved piece of legislation from where it had started out earlier in the year. However, to Coolidge’s disapproval, it retained a measure that set the precedent for the Government — drawn from the several States – to pay damages to victims of natural disasters, something it had never done for lack of justified liability. In years to come, it would become the basis for even more extensive internal improvement projects directed from Washington.

For now, however, Coolidge had waged this critical fight not for himself — he had made it plain he was not seeking office again — he was thinking of all those men, women and children destitute, their material goods ruined and their circumstances forever altered. If these folks were to be benefited by whatever would be agreed upon, the final result could not provide for the contractors, the manufacturers, the municipal and county authorities, or large developers first and leave those directly impacted out in the cold.

Confirming his dislike of where things were headed, Coolidge declared on April 10, 1928, “The flood control legislation is getting into a very unfortunate situation. I was afraid it would, when it became apparent that there was great reluctance on the part of Congress to have any local contribution. Of course, as soon as that policy is adopted, then it becomes a bestowal of favors on certain localities and naturally if one locality is to be favored, all the other localities in the United States think that they ought to come in under the same plan and have their floods taken care of. The bill, of course, is an entire reversal of the policy that has been pursued up to the present time, which was that of helping the locality…

“It almost seems to me as though the protection of the people and the property in the lower Mississippi that need protection has been somewhat lost sight of and it has become a scramble to take care of the railroads and the banks and the individuals that may have invested in levee bonds, and the great lumber concerns that own many thousands of acres in that locality, with wonderful prospects for the contractors…”

Meanwhile, the Congress had been piecing together a new McNary-Haugen farmer relief bill that would attempt to integrate some of Coolidge’s suggestions for improvement while retaining the essence of its most objectionable ingredients. Sent to the President’s desk in the midst of the fight over flood relief, Coolidge would veto the agriculture bill eight days after signing the Flood Control Act. On the surface this appears to be a contradiction. Why not veto both? The merits of these measures, to President Coolidge, rose or fell with the importance placed upon actually delivering the most good to those directly concerned. While the efforts Coolidge secured drastically improved Flood Control, he did not possess similar influence to make headway among the Farm Bloc regarding their approach to agricultural relief. With farm relief, Coolidge kept a confidence that better legislation could be reached while he did not hold the similar optimism for rescuing flood control from an already barely salvageable position. Time afforded by vetoing flood control provisions would only reopen the floodgates, so to speak, for a new explosion of petitioners. A veto of McNary-Haugen, on the other hand, stood a better chance of improving with time as some of the amendments inserted in the second version of the bill indicated. Coolidge held out for a better bill without the “equalization fee” and complex price-setting scheme. Attaching his veto to the second McNary-Haugen, Coolidge explained how central to his six objections was a concern that regular farming families, the supposed focus of the bill, were being forgotten in the cluster of interests for which new provisions were being promised.

Coolidge wrote,“[I}f the measure is enacted one would be led to wonder how long it would be before producers in other lines would clamor for similar ‘equalizing’ subsidies from the public coffers. The lobbies of Congress would be filled with emissaries from every momentarily distressed industry demanding similar relief of a burdensome surplus at the expense of the Treasury. Once we plunged into the futile sophistries of such a system of wholesale commercial doles for special groups of middlemen and distributors at the expense of farmers and other producers, it is difficult to see what the end might be.

“I have believed at all times that the only sound basis for further Federal Government action in behalf of agriculture would be to encourage its adequate organization to assist in building up marketing agencies and facilities in the control of the farmers themselves. I want to see them undertake, under their own management, the marketing of their products under such conditions as will enable them to bring about greater stability in prices and less waste in marketing, but entirely within unalterable economic laws. Such a program, supported by a strong protective tariff on farm products, is the best method of effecting a permanent cure of existing agricultural ills. Such a program is in accordance with the American tradition and the American ideal of reliance on and maintenance of private initiative and individual responsibility, and the duty of the Government is discharged when it has provided conditions under which the individual can achieve success.”

While everyone else was making a mad rush for the Public Treasury, it was Coolidge who was remembering the “little guy.”