“It is senseless to boast of our liberty when we find that to so shocking an extent it is merely the liberty to go ill-governed. It is time to take warning that neither the liberties we prize nor the system under which we claim them are safe while such conditions exist.
“We shall not correct admitted and grave defects if we hesitate to recognize them. We must be frank with ourselves. We ought to be our own harshest critics. We can afford to be, for in spite of everything we still have a balance of prosperity, of general welfare, of secure freedom, and of righteous purpose, that gives us assurance of leadership among the nations.
“What America needs is to hold to its ancient and well-charted course.
“Our country was conceived in the theory of local self-government. It has been dedicated by long practice to that wise and beneficent policy. It is the foundation principle of our system of liberty. It makes the largest promise to the freedom and development of the individual. Its preservation is worth all the effort and all the sacrifice that it may cost” — President Calvin Coolidge, Arlington National Cemetery, May 30, 1925.
morality
On Belief in God
Long before Jefferson’s “wall of separation” was reinterpreted to mean a systematic removal of public expression of Christian faith, Robert A. Woods eloquently summarizes the faith Calvin Coolidge held firmly in God. He was not afraid to praise God yet a deep sense of humility kept him from flaunting his devotion and reliance on Him. He would never utilize religion as a tool to gain votes. His convictions were his own but he also knew they were grounded in reason. The strength to bear the responsibilities of office, including the deaths of his son and father, came from an Almighty Creator. As Woods would say,
“Any attempt to understand President Coolidge will go far amiss which does not take the fullest account of the great power of religious faith which has been continuous and increasing in his life. Beginning with his early nurture, greatly strengthened and broadened at Amherst, rising steadily as the responsibilities of life so steadily and so broadly increased — his faith in God with its correlative of faith in men, his sense of sustaining and uplifting spiritual realities, is, in modern terms, not less real to him and not less definite in its command and its reenforcement to righteousness than it was to the Puritans of old. He told an interviewer: ‘I have found that when a man does right, he is increasingly supported. I believe in God.’ There were some at least in the great audience that listened to his address at the dinner of the National Republican Club in New York City who understood him when, at its close, he paused and almost startled his audience with the words of the psalm: ‘He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.’
“It too often seems in our public affairs that ‘belief and loyalty have passed away, and only the cant and false echo of them remain; and all solemnity has become pageantry.’ Whatever else may be set down as the final estimate of Calvin Coolidge, he will be among those leaders of the people whose reliance upon divine guidance is a part of the very fabric of their being. With a mind so clear, so free of pretence, this means not only a constant and vital constraint to righteous judgment, but as constant an aspiration toward a more righteous and more human order of the common life” (“The Preparation of Calvin Coolidge,” 1924, pp.234-5).
On the Individual
It was on Memorial Day in Northampton, 1923, that Vice President Coolidge said,
“…[I]f our republic is to be maintained and improved it will be through the efforts and character of the individual. It will be, first of all, because of the influences which exist in the home, for it is the ideals which prevail in the home life which make up the strength of the nation. The homely virtues must continue to be cultivated. The real dignity, the real nobility of work must be cherished. It is only through industry that there is any hope for individual development. The viciousness of waste and the value of thrift must continue to be learned and understood. Civilization rests on conservation. To these there must be added religion, education, and obedience to law. These are the foundation of all character in the individual and all hope in the nation.”
When Coolidge spoke of conservation here, he was speaking of its broad sense, the preservation of not merely material resources but moral ones. If the Republic is to continue, it will be due to the moral resources of the individual, not the powers of Government. He was no libertarian nor sympathetic to objectivism, both notions that would have struck him as self-defeating and short-sighted. He knew the individual was not liberated from public responsibilities to his or her neighbor. He also knew the government had a clear role to legislate and demand obedience to law. No man was absolutely free in the exercise of one’s rights or duties. Such was a responsibility to each other as we live together in society. His outlook was rooted in a far more resilient foundation, the example of service set by Christ.
It is the individual with the real power to uphold the soundness of our future. It was the deep reservoir of an individual’s moral capital that make civilization possible, the value of whom is bestowed by God, nurtured by the instructions of the home, instilled with virtues like thrift, strengthened by religious faith, and developed with an informed mind that retains reverence for the supremacy of the law upon all people. It was the individual that would keep Benjamin Franklin’s warning from fulfillment. A Republic, with duty-minded individuals such as Coolidge describes (as opposed to the self-centered or hedonistic) would find faithful men and women through whom to entrust its legacy to the next generation. Devoid of such individuals, no civilization is secure.
The Importance of the Obvious 