The end of the Great War was the defining national experience of Coolidge’s generation. It shaped the future in countless ways and left an abiding mark and enduring memory on all who lived to see it and witness its conclusion. While Coolidge himself would not live to see the Second Conflagration barely twenty years later, it was the Great War that ominously reminded everyone that all had forever changed. The Second War was not merely prompted by a generation who had forgotten that fact but rather it was provoked by those who never really understood the Great War’s cost. Those still living who had experienced that War and strove to avoid yet another one, were cast aside and disregarded in the reckless enthusiasm of envy, hatred, and the love of power.

Of the Great War’s profound impression on Coolidge, he would later write, “What the end of the four years of carnage meant those who remember it will never forget and those who do not can never be told.”

This day we remember September 11 of fifteen years ago, a day that changed everything forever. We are reminded that while the Great War’s end came with immense relief and even joy, the same flippancy toward its costs, and an erosion of its remembrance is happening with the passage of time toward 9-11. “Those who remember it will never forget and those who do not can never be told.” It is human nature to regard history as starting with one’s birth but it is a tendency we surrender to at our peril.

May this day – remembering most of all whom and what have been lost – always give us sincere pause and humble reflection. May we never forget the enormous and irreplaceable price it still exacts.

 

In the news this past week we hear that historian Steven Hayward will start teaching at UC Berkley this fall. We wish him the very best. It is sure to deliver the “challenge” Mr. Hayward seeks over the next three years. With his name in the news, it is worth highlighting his 2012 book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama. Scholar Hayward, in assessing every President’s record since 1913, recognizes only one in modern time has earned the highest measure of excellence: Calvin Coolidge. Hayward’s reasons deserve serious consideration, especially as we stand poised to vote for the 45th President in just two over months.

Coolidge’s legacy is used to long periods of exile from the public sphere. It looks as if what he did and said might undergo another period of official hostility come January 2017. That is hardly new and Cal will endure whoever reigns next from the White House. His simple yet thoroughly cutting-edge approach to Executive authority will continue to speak to us now and those yet to grow into an appreciation of him. Despite the best efforts to forever silence him, no one has succeeded and nothing ever will. His practical wisdom, firm grasp of eternal essentials, and his astounding success as a courageous and principled voice in the darkest of times will never be extinguished. Mr. Coolidge will press on, furnishing an abiding example prepared for the time when we are brave enough and mature enough to receive it.

Reflecting on the events that transpired between August 2 – 3, 1923, Calvin Coolidge would write this six years later:

“Had I been chosen for the first place, I could have accepted it only with a great deal of trepidation, but when the events of August, 1923, bestowed upon me the Presidential office, I felt at once that power had been given me to administer it. This was not any feeling of exclusiveness. While I felt qualified to serve, I was also well aware that there were many others who were better qualified. It would be my province to get the benefit of their opinions and advice. It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that 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…

“On the night of August 2, 1923, I was awakened by my father coming up the stairs calling my name. I noticed that his voice trembled. As the only times I had ever observed that before were when death had visited our family, I knew that something of the gravest nature had occurred.

“His emotion was partly due to the knowledge that a man whom he had met and liked was gone, partly to the feeling that must possess all of our citizens when the life of their President is taken from them.

“But he must have been moved also by the thought of the many sacrifices he had made to place me where I was, the twenty-five mile drives in storms and in zero weather over our mountain roads to carry me to the academy and all the tenderness and care he had lavished upon me in the thirty-eight years since the death of my mother in the hope that I might sometime rise to a position of importance, which he now saw realized.

“He had been the first to address me as President of the United States. it was the culmination of the lifelong desire of a father for the success of his son.

“He placed in my hands an official report and told me that President Harding had just passed away. My wife and I at once dressed.

“Before leaving the room I knelt down and, with the same with which I have since approached the altar of the church, asked God to bless the American people and give me power to serve them.

“My first thought was to express my sympathy for those who had been bereaved and after that was done to attempt to reassure the country with the knowledge that I proposed no sweeping displacement of the men then in office and that there were to be no violent changes in the administration of affairs. As soon as I had dispatched a telegram to Mrs. Harding, I therefore issued a short public statement declaratory of that purpose.

“Meantime, I had been examining the Constitution to determine what might be necessary for qualifying by taking the oath of office. It is not clear that any additional oath is required beyond what is taken by the Vice-President when he is sworn into office. It is the same form as that taken by the President.

“Having found this form in the Constitution I had it set up on the typewriter and the oath was administered by my father in his capacity as a notary public, an office he had held for a great many years.

“The oath was taken in what we always called the sitting room by the light of the kerosene lamp [at 2:47am, the morning of August 3, 1923], which was the most modern form of lighting that had then reached the neighborhood. The Bible which had belonged to my mother lay on the table at my hand. It was not officially used, as it is not the practice in Vermont or Massachusetts to use a Bible in connection with the administration of an oath.

“Besides my father and myself, there were present my wife, Senator [at the time, U.S. Representative Porter H.] Dale, who happened to be stopping a few miles away, my stenographer [Erwin C. Geisser], and my chauffeur [Joseph N. McInerney].

“The picture of this scene has been painted with historical accuracy by an artist named Keller, who went to Plymouth for that purpose. Although the likenesses are not good, everything in relation to the painting is correct.

“Where succession to the highest office in the land is by inheritance or appointment, no doubt there have been kings who have participated in the induction of their sons into their office, but in republics where the succession comes by an election I do not know of any other case in history where a father has administered to his son the qualifying oath of office which made him the chief magistrate of a nation. It seemed a simple and natural thing to do at the time, but I can now realize something of the dramatic force of the event” — excerpt from The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge pp.172-177