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On Being Worthy of Freedom

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Apprehensions over the future have always remained an ever-present concern for a wise and circumspect people. When Americans stop being concerned for the next generation, it will be because we are no longer free individuals. The prospects for freedom stand in greater doubt than perhaps they have for many years, but a lack of confidence in our system is only new to us, not to generations of Americans who came before us.

Any one of the hardships overcome by prior generations could have halted the experiment of self-government in its tracks. It has certainly had no shortage of critics who proclaimed “failure” and “defeat” only to be proven flatly wrong time and time again. Inequity and unfairness have been present in human history from the outset, but neither has had the power to prevent individuals of determination from accomplishing truly great things despite it. Our time is hardly the first to ask, “who is worthy of freedom?”

The Progressive Era produced an almost overwhelming array of reasons to change the way this country was established. It would answer our question with pessimism: the people were ultimately not to be trusted with freedom. It was an intelligent few who merited such power. Coolidge knew, on the other hand, freedom was safest in the hands of the people.

The charge that our system was both too wild and too unequal, compared to the “enlightened” societies of Europe, led to calls for regulation of human behavior on a scale never before known. The pursuit began to implement an efficient and intelligent approach to government that would mitigate risk, remove inequities and shepherd the people to progress.

These activists, predisposed to intense skepticism about capitalist systems, trusted government implicitly with greater and greater control. Enamored with a lopsided admiration for methods foreign to American ideals of law and liberty, these generally middle class intellectuals failed to appreciate the remarkable nature of our constitutional system. They overlooked the careful balance worked out by the Framers, infusing a disastrous measure of good intentions with a reckless accumulation of new laws.

They entrusted government with the power to supply the shortfalls of human nature with legislation. Each effort undervalued, even ignored, the unquantifiable worth of freedom. Government, endeavoring to be “smart” and “humane,” hurt those it proclaimed to help by robbing them of the dignity of free will, the moral judgment of those given sovereignty in our system.

Ours is a history of accomplishment and success because people were recognized not as subjects in service to the State but individuals whose value comes from a Divine Creator. Made in the image of God, it logically follows that the dreams, aspirations and abilities to create, construct and succeed are within every person’s power. It is that power now being denied our young people as unrealistic and unattainable. This is nothing more than the latest incarnation of those who denied Edison could harness light, the Wrights could fly and Ford could mobilize America.

The avoidable tragedy of all this is that it literally destroys the wholesome yearnings of millions for something better than marginal existence. Instead, the young are told to be content with mediocrity, cease the pursuit of success, and consign all future faith and hopes to Washington’s management. No less self-deluded than the Progressives of Coolidge’s day, this operation dehumanizes humanity. History proclaims it will ultimately fail but the cost to countless lives in the process can never be known.

Coolidge, grappling with these problems, said in 1923,

[T}he motive power of progress and reform has not come from the high and mighty but from the mass of the people…It is not the quantity of knowledge that is the chief glory of man…It is in the moral power to know the truth and respond to it, to resist evil and hold to that which is good, that is to be found the real dignity and worth, the chief strength, the chief greatness. This power, even in the humblest and the most unlettered, rises to a height which cannot be measured, which cannot be analyzed. It is this strength of the people which can never be ignored. Of course it would be folly to argue that the people cannot make political mistakes. They can and do make grave mistakes. They know it; they pay the penalty. But compared with the mistakes which have been made by every kind of autocracy they are unimportant…

…Unless the people struggle to help themselves, no one else will or can help them. It is out of such struggle that there comes the strongest evidence of their true independence and nobility, and there is struck off a rough and incomplete economic justice, and there develops a strong and rugged national character. It represents a spirit for which there could be no substitute. It justifies the claim that they are worthy to be free…

     …Civilization and freedom have come because they are an achievement, and it is human nature to achieve. Nothing else gives any permanent satisfaction. But most of all there is need of religion. From that source alone came freedom. Nothing else touches the soul of man. Nothing else justifies faith in the people.

Like the generation who saw beyond the narrow confines of subsistence imposed upon it by king and Parliament, it is time to refuse to participate in a supervised decline. Being taught to doubt our own judgment is merely a prelude to forfeiting the ability to make our own choices, to strive, to fail, to triumph — in short, to live free. If we are to be worthy of that freedom, we cannot surrender to this latest effort — however organized it is — to train out the moral ideals and intangible dreams of people.

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On Books and the Pursuit of Learning

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This bookplate was designed by Timothy Cole in 1929 and features an intricate bell-shaped system of roots in which the Plymouth Homestead is depicted in Vermont. The scene includes both of Coolidge's famous white collies, Rob Roy and Prudence Prim. In the foreground, a fishing rod leans against a tree beside a basket, both accessories of his many fishing trips. The flag unfurls on either side of a portrait of George Washington, framing the simple scene above Coolidge's name.

This bookplate was designed by Timothy Cole in 1929 and features an intricate bell-shaped system of roots in which is depicted the Plymouth Homestead in Vermont. The scene includes both of Coolidge’s famous white collies, Rob Roy and Prudence Prim. In the foreground, a fishing rod leans against a tree beside a basket, both accessories of his many fishing trips. The flag unfurls on either side of a portrait of George Washington, framing the simple scene above Coolidge’s name.

What a man reads and the quality of books in his library says as much as any other witness could about his character. From youth, he translated Cicero’s Pro Archia Poeta, the defense of the poet Archias’ citizenship against false accusations. As a man, he translated Dante’s Inferno from Italian. He reveled in the wisdom imparted by the great texts of civilization. In “Calvin Coolidge: At Home in Northampton,” Susan Lewis Well, the author of that excellent little book, recounts:

     Coolidge read before falling asleep at night, and Grace told of the pile of books that were on his bedside table never to be disturbed. The Bible was always there plus the Letters, Lectures, and Addresses of Charles Edward Garman…and two paperback volumes of Paradise Lost. Even when traveling, Coolidge carried the two copies of Milton’s classic.

     Mrs. Coolidge remembered that his library was housed in one small five-shelved oak bookcase ‘with a sateen curtain in front.’ His collection numbered about one hundred books including his college texts plus a leather-bound set of Shakespeare’s plays, three Kipling novels, and a set of Hawthorne’s works. Grace admitted that he seldom bought a book, although friends and writers gave him volumes until they numbered about five thousand by the time his presidential term was over.

The exponential growth of his library was not the only outcome due to the generosity of friends. One of the greatest of friends, Frank W. Stearns, commissioned the design of a bookplate in 1926 for Coolidge’s personal library. By 1928, Stearns had finally secured Sidney L. Smith, a renowned engraver, to complete the task. Smith drew the original work with two panels, the lower window featured the signing of the Mayflower compact in 1620 while the upper window depicted the Homestead at Plymouth. Sadly, Smith fell ill and passed away the following year before cutting the design in copper for replication.

     Stearns, undeterred, approached Timothy Cole, a very successful craftsman from New York City who specialized in the almost “lost art” of wood engraving. Cole, building on the design of Smith, completed the distinct work shown above.

In a fascinating survey of the personal libraries of the Presidents, well-known collector and a devoted Antiquarian like President Coolidge, Abraham S. W. Rosenbach said this about the thirtieth president in 1934:

     Calvin Coolidge will probably go down in history as one of the wisest of the Presidents. He had the reputation of being extremely cautious and I have a presentation copy of his Life, by William Allen White which seems to corroborate this statement. It bears on the fly-leaf in the President’s writing: ‘Without recourse, Calvin Coolidge.’

Characteristically, Coolidge says more in two words than most of us say in paragraphs. Employing this legal phrase, Coolidge is refusing any responsibility or endorsement of White’s work. A wise position to take, as time only makes more evident where White’s book is concerned.

Mr. Rosenbach continues, however,

     Mr. Coolidge was interested in the news of the world. He read of the sale in London of the original manuscript of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ which I had purchased. On my return from abroad in May, 1928, the President asked me to lunch at the White House and to bring with me the manuscript. I found that ‘Alice in Wonderland’ was one of his favorite books, that he was interested in Shakespeare, that he liked to own good editions. He asked me details of the first publication of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and I tried to explain to him that the first edition, issued in 1865, not being altogether to [Lewis] Carroll’s liking, was suppressed. ‘Suppressed,’ said the President, ‘I did not know there was anything off-color in Alice!’

Rosenbach wraps up his presentation on Coolidge by noting the collection the President accumulated during the White House years would find a welcome home back in Northampton, all forty cases worth (an estimated 4,000 volumes). The built-in bookcases Coolidge would discover upon moving into “The Beeches” enabled him to unpack and organize his vast collection of literary treasures. Not the relentless purchaser that President Jefferson was, Coolidge steadied his love for great books with his abiding sense of economy [from the Greek, oikonomia]. His discernment of human nature came from his grounding in classical literature. It was his informed taste combined with the generosity of friends and citizens across America that made this wise man’s library.

On those Roaring Twenties

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Historian Paul Johnson

 

It is fitting that those who helped drive the Reagan Revolution forward humbly credit their inspiration to the shy, quiet man from Vermont, Calvin Coolidge. In a very real way he bequeathed the essential recipe for the successes of the 1980s. While the ingredients were not precisely followed in every respect, especially concerning the payment of debt, the principles contained such power that even Congressional spending could not slow it down.

President Reagan’s combination of political saavy, biting wit, unassuming competence and ability to cut through the complex and see the simple essence of an issue derived not merely from his life’s experiences, they found inspiration from his study of Coolidge. Reagan, after all, like several of the men and women who comprised his team of “revolutionaries,” first came to understand the world during the Coolidge Era and in the years shortly thereafter. The lessons “Silent Cal” taught in both word and action left abiding impressions on future Secretaries of the Treasury (Donald T. Regan) and Defense (Caspar Weinberger) and future Attorney General Edwin Meese III, along with many others.

Two scholars, in particular, were returning to Coolidge’s record in order to reassess his very real achievements. In 1982, Thomas B. Silver, in Coolidge and the Historians, would lead this effort and unearth most of the shoddy and partisan reporting against the thirtieth president and the 1920s. In 1984, Paul Johnson, in the sixth chapter of his Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, would roll back the shroud thrown over not only the genuine triumphs of the Roaring Twenties but also the legacy of Mr. Coolidge. As Mr. Johnson would reflect on this reserved and disciplined leader, he would not only find him to be “the most internally consistent and single-minded of modern American presidents” but he, like all of history’s great men, was not an intellectual. To Mr. Johnson, that is a very good thing because “[a]n intellectual is somebody who thinks ideas are more important than people.” Wilson and Hoover approached the world this way while Coolidge, and Reagan, did not. To Coolidge and Reagan, people were the preeminent focus of their policies. The “smartest ones in the room” miss that all-too-obvious truth. People were genuinely benefited by Coolidge’s leadership.

Johnson could accurately survey the Twenties not as an aberration of gross materialism or empty gains but as an unprecedented prosperity that was both “very widespread and very solid” (p.223). “It was,” Johnson corrects, a prosperity “more widely distributed than had been possible in any community of this size before, and it involved the acquisition, by tens of millions, of the elements of economic security which had hitherto been denied them throughout the whole of history. The growth was spectacular.”

As a direct result of Coolidge prosperity, national income jumped from $59.4 to $87.2 billion in eight years, with real per capita income climbing from $522 to $716. Millions of workers purchased insurance for the first time, a phenomenon of a healthy economy Obama is deliberately ignoring. Savings quadrupled during the decade. Ownership in fifty stocks or more reveals the vast majority were not “the rich,” but housekeepers, clerks, factory workers, merchants, electricians, mechanics and foremen. Union membership plummeted from just over 4 million at the outset of the 1920s to 2.5 million by 1932. As small and large businesses succeeded, people were able to provide holidays with pay, insurance coverage and pensions as well as other benefits, giving substance to Coolidge’s dictum that “large profits mean large payrolls” thereby making “collective action superfluous,” as Johnson observes (p.225). Home ownership skyrocketed to 11 million families by 1924.

Perhaps the most obvious index of prosperity could be seen in automobile ownership. What began as a novelty for just over 1 million Americans in 1914 (with less than 570,000 produced annually) exploded into 26 million owners with over 5.6 million autos produced annually by 1929. Air travel was fast becoming the normal mode for “regular” folks and classes were rapidly dissolving from upward mobility. In 1920 a meager $10 million was spent on radios. By 1929 that figure had surpassed $411 million, which was itself small compared to the $2.4 billion spent on electronic devices as a whole in the Twenties.

These years were not, as some would claim later, removed from an appreciation of the past. The expansion of education is “[p]erhaps the most important single development of the age” (Johnson 225). Spending on education increased four times what it was in 1910, from $426 million to $2.3 billion. But unlike today’s habit of throwing money at the problem, it brought results. Illiteracy actually went down over fifty-percent. A “persistent devotion to the classics,” with David Copperfield at the head of the list, defined the decade. Culture was reaching the homes of those who had once been the least connected Americans through reading clubs, youth orchestras and “historical conservation” movements that would restore sites like Colonial Williamsburg.

“The truth is the Twenties was the most fortunate decade in American history, even more fortunate than the equally prosperous 1950s decade, because in the Twenties the national cohesion brought about by relative affluence, the sudden cultural density and the expressive originality of ‘Americanism’ were new and exciting” (p.226).

The problem, as Mr. Johnson concludes, with the expansion of the Twenties was not that it was “philistine or socially immoral. The trouble was that it was transient. Had it endured, carrying with it in its train the less robust but still (at that time) striving economies of Europe, a global political transformation must have followed which would have rolled back the new forces of totalitarian compulsion, with their ruinous belief in social engineering, and gradually replaced them with a relationship between government and enterprise closer to that which Coolidge outlined…” More of the same policies would have prevented much of what followed in the 1930s and beyond. “[M]odern times would have” indeed “been vastly different and immeasurably happier.” The purpose served by Coolidge “minding his own business,” as he put March 1, 1929, was perhaps more a forecast of his successors than an introspection. If only Hoover had been listening more carefully. The downturn in 1929 would certainly have more closely resembled the depression of 1921 and, with the Harding-Coolidge recipe of “masterful inactivity,” have spared millions of lives the terrible suffering and avoidable loss brought on by Hoover’s spending and Roosevelt’s “New Deal.”