Silent Cal

Welcome to SilentCal.com, a blog on the life and times of President Calvin Coolidge. Written by Amity Shlaes and Joe Thorndike, posts here will be broadly  historical, rooted in the words, pictures, and sounds of the Coolidge era. But they will also — at least occasionally — venture from the past to the present, exploring the legacy that Coolidge and his contemporaries bequeathed to later generations.

Amity and I will write a lot about politics, of course. But we also hope to situate the vibrant political debates of the 1920s in a broader social, economic, and cultural context. Indeed, the 1920s are probably better known for their pop culture than their politics (think flapper dresses, speakeasies, and the like). Understanding the decade means understanding all of it, including public policy.

Calvin Coolidge may be the most forgotten president of the twentieth century (although William Howard Taft and Warren Harding might give him a run for his money). But no politician is more central to our understanding of the 1920s. And that decade, in turn, is vital to the political and economic watershed that followed on its heels. For the past two years, the economic crisis has fostered renewed interest in the New Deal (and Amity’s book on the topic, The Forgotten Man). But to really grasp the events of the Great Depression, we have to first wrestle with the legacy of the Great Prosperity.

So let’s get on with it.