Writing for Salon.com, Coolidge biographer David Greenberg, a professor of history at Rutgers, has noted Sarah Palin’s interest in Coolidge.

A reader who knew only the author and title of Sarah Palin’s new book, “America by Heart,” would in all likelihood be able to predict many of the delights contained within: self-justifying accounts of her behavior on the 2008 campaign, snarky jabs at President Obama, paeans to the Alaska grizzly. Rapturous words for Calvin Coolidge, however, would probably not be among the expected finds. And yet peppered through Palin’s new volume of ruminations lies a handful of admiring references to our 30th president. The oddity is worth pondering.

Obviously, Greenberg is no Palin fan. But he does display a cautious (if not uncritical) appreciation for Coolidge. “To most people today,” he points out, “Coolidge is little more than a cartoon. If he’s remembered at all, he’s the grim-faced ‘Silent Cal,’ the man said by Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice to have looked as though he had been weaned on a pickle.”

In fact, though, Coolidge was a president of real accomplishment, Greenberg contends. As evidence, he cites both the Dawes Plan for European debt relief and the federal government’s response to the 1927 Mississippi flood. (He also mentions, but does endorse, Coolidge’s economic policies.)

Greenberg points out that Palin’s interest in Coolidge hardly makes her unique, especially among Republicans.

For decades, since the arrival in power with Ronald Reagan of so-called movement conservatives, Coolidge has been a patron saint to the right — a symbol of patriotism and piety, of hard work and thrift, and not least of low taxes and minimal government. When Reagan moved into the White House in 1981, he removed the portraits of Thomas Jefferson and Harry Truman in the Cabinet Room and put up those of Dwight Eisenhower and Coolidge instead.

Greenberg explains the Coolidge boom as a two-part phenomenon:

Coolidge retains this mystique because he reconciled two different strains of conservatism and two different factions of the Republican Party. His approval of the decade’s kinetic capitalism pleased Chamber of Commerce types. But economic growth also has a way of unleashing cultural change, and Coolidge’s flinty New England virtue reassured traditionalists worried about moral decay during a time of the “new woman” and the “new Negro,” of the Scopes trial and jazz. “We were smack in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, with hip flasks, joy rides, and bathtub gin parties setting the social standards,” wrote Edmund Starling, Coolidge’s Secret Service agent and daily walking companion. “The president was the antithesis of all this and he despised it.”

At the same time, however, Coolidge was a remarkably modern president, especially when it came to public relations. As Greenberg relates:

Despite his reputation for silence, moreover, Coolidge was a skilled speechmaker — a prizewinning orator as a student and the last president to write most of his own remarks — and he excelled especially at the patriotic homilies that Sarah Palin seems to admire.

Overall, Greenberg’s take on Coolidge may not sit well with Silent Cal’s contemporary admirers (including many readers of  this blog, no doubt.) But Greenberg does show a willingness to take Coolidge seriously as a political figure — rather than treating him as some sort of nameless, faceless, do-nothing presidential potted plant. And that’s something we should all be grateful for.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., unfairly maligned presidential biographer

Seems that the folks at the National Review are eagerly awaiting Amity’s biography of Coolidge. In a list of “Best Presidential Biographies,” we find:

Calvin Coolidge, by Robert Sobel. Learn why so many conservatives admire Silent Cal. I’ve heard that Amity Schlaes is working on a Coolidge biography. It promises to become the standard. There’s also the out-of-print Coolidge and the Historians, by the late Thomas B. Silver. After reading it, you will never again trust another word written by Arthur Schlesinger. For something less conventional, try John Derbyshire’s outstanding novel, Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream.

I think we’re all eager to read Amity’s take on Coolidge. I plan to be first in line (at least as soon as Amazon offers a preorder link).

But I feel the need to offer some words in defense of Schlesinger. Say what you will about his treatment of Coolidge, it would be a tragedy if people decided to “never again trust another word” written by him. Sure, he was a New Deal fanboy (and a Kennedy fanboy, too, for that matter). And his work was not always dispassionate.

But then, neither is the work of any biographer. Show me a biography that doesn’t fall into the “pro” or “anti” camp for its subject, and I’ll show you a biography that no one wants to read. Passion and opinion are what animates historical writing. You don’t have to  agree with the opinions behind a book to still learn a lot from it.

As for Schlesinger, let me say (as someone who has spent way too much of his adult life reading about the New Deal), he did a fine job with Roosevelt. There are other New Deal books I like better, to be sure. But his are still great.

And if you just can’t stomach his FDR cheerleading, then let me suggest what may be Schlesinger’s best work: his biography of Andrew Jackson. Like the New Deal books, his Jackson bio is anything but evenhanded. Indeed, it’s really just a New Deal book in disguise. But it’s still a damn good book and an even better read.

Anybody want to take issue with this?

The Coolidge rehabilitation seems to be spreading, thanks in part to the publication of Why Coolidge Matters (which has gotten a rather remarkable amount of press). Here’s an item I ran across today:

The Vermont Republican is well known, perhaps, for what he didn’t do. In some history classes, he has been referred to as lazy, with some rumors even suggesting he was clinically depressed. But if you were to ask historians and family members of Coolidge what they think, the opinions and memories change dramatically. In fact, they are more like rebuttals to several decades worth of redicule by casual observers.

“Coolidge was our President during a time of peace and prosperity, between the two wars,” said Vermont Governor James H. Douglas (R). “He has a lot of offer the current American political scene. Fiscal responsibility, for example. He came at a time when our debt was quite high, when tax burdens were quite high, and he worked hard to reduce them.”

As one of the first radio presidents, Douglas claims President Coolidge was actually quite the conversationalist, connecting on levels to the American public in ways that are often overshadowed by historically great communicators like FDR and Ronald Reagan. A new book, “Why Coolidge Matters,” showcases some of the political victories and Presidential precedents set by Coolidge.

via 9NEWS.com | Colorado’s Online News Leader | Worst President ever, or simply misunderstood?.

Over at Townhall.com, David Stokes makes a nice point about the importance of context when evaluating political speech. Using the Shirley Sherrod episode as a contemporary hook, Stokes goes on to defend the honor and historical reputation of Calvin Coolidge.

In particular, Stokes bemoans the histriographical hegemony of Coolidge’s most famous quotation: “The business of America is business.”

In fact, as most readers of this blog probably know, that’s actually a misquote. What Coolidge actually said in his January 17, 1925 address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors was slightly different: “After all, the chief business of the American people is business.”

A quibble? Perhaps. But I think the distinction is important. The business of the American people is one thing, but the business of the American nation is something quite different. As individuals, we may all be chiefly concerned with “business”: our livelihood, wealth, and economic well-being. But as a nation, we are also concerned with something more: Much more, in fact.

The business quotation, as Stokes points out, has generally been ripped from its context — first by Coolidge contemporaries and later by critical historians. Coolidge’s speech was not, principally, about the role of business in American society. Rather, it focused on the importance of journalism in a free country.

In covering the speech, the New York Times got the story right: “Coolidge Declares Press Must Foster American Idealism,” the paper reported in its headline. Coolidge critics, by contrast, have generally gotten it wrong. Or at least only half right. To be sure, Coolidge spent some of the speech defending the role of wealth in a democratic society. But the principal burden of his address was a defense of  American idealism. As he noted near the end:

We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want very much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists. That is the only motive to which they ever give any strong and lasting reaction.

[Incidentally, Robert Sobel wrote a useful analysis of  Coolidge's "business of the American people" quotation, available online from the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation. While too critical of mainstream Coolidge historiography, the essay nicely challenges the easy caricature of Coolidge as a stooge of big business. ]

David Frum invokes Coolidge to challenge the notion that politics is all about messaging:

You know whose White House was really, really terrible at communications? Calvin Coolidge’s. “Silent Cal” notoriously refused to talk to anybody at all. The story goes that, when still governor of Massachusetts, he was seated at a dinner beside a Boston society woman who liltingly insisted: “Now governor: My husband has bet me $20 you wont say even three words to me. What do you answer to that?” Coolidge: “You lose.”

Coolidge won 382 electoral votes and 54 percent of the vote when he ran for re-election in 1924. Had he sought a third term in 1928, he would have won even more crushingly.

Why? The Coolidge boom.

A few thoughts:

1. Materialist interpretations of history and current politics seem to have carried the day in almost every corner of the commentariat. If the only issues in every election are the objective status of “peace” and “prosperity,” as Frum suggests, then there’s not much room left for ideas and political conviction.

Call me naive, but that sort of interpretation strikes me as simplistic, if pleasantly empirical. By positing that political outcomes can be deduced from empirical realities (i.e. the state of the economy), it reduces a confusing, maddening, and often incoherent political process to a set of nice firm metrics. Comforting, I suppose. And defensible, according to many political scientists. But I’m still dubious.

2. I’m also not persuaded by Frum’s invocation of the mythically silent Cal. After all, Coolidge wasn’t really so silent — he had plenty to say, if only on a limited number of occasions.

It’s fair to say, in fact, that far from being “terrible,” Coolidge was actually quite good at communications. Successful messaging requires that a president know when to talk and when to keep quiet. Over-exposure is a real threat for denizens of the White House. Coolidge, I think, understood that less was sometimes more.

3. More to the point, however, I’m not convinced that Coolidge’s 1920s communications strategy (which was, in some ways,  a throwback to nineteenth century White House messaging) is relevant today. We live in a very different world, especially when it comes to communications technology and mass media.

Coolidge may have been one of the first presidents to explore the utility of mass media, as historian David Greenberg has noted in his fine and admirably brief biography. The ostensibly Silent Cal was a progenitor, of sorts, for the Great Communicator himself, Ronald Reagan.

But while Coolidge’s career may hold lessons for modern politicians, it can’t tell them how to navigate the modern 24-7 news cycle. How would Coolidge have handled the unquenchable thirst of modern media outlets for news, commentary, and invective? We’ll never know.

And somehow, even if he figured out what to do with CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, I’m pretty sure that Coolidge would have found the notion of “social media” unintelligible.

And repulsive, if he ever figured it out.

My dog Hoover

Just in passing (and a few weeks late), I’d like to note Mona Charen’s column on Coolidge. Two unrelated thoughts occur:

1. I love the fact that Charen named her dog Coolidge. She and I apparently share a personality quirk: we name our pets for presidents. I call my dog Hoover (sorry, Amity — I know you’re not a fan, but I couldn’t resist the vacuum allusion for my hungry labrador). And my erstwhile cat (who ran away when we rudely moved from Washington to Charlottesville) was named Truman (sorry again). Next up? Eisenhower, I think.

2. Why are conservatives the only people writing about Coolidge? I know its naive, but I wish people would take history on its own terms, rather than always looking for a usable past. Sure, Coolidge has some obvious contemporary salience — I understand why many people would like to establish him as a mythic hero of sorts. But he’s also just plain old interesting, not least because he’s so under appreciated. It’s puzzling to me that liberals don’t pay more attention to him. Hell, they don’t even both to attack him. What’s with that?

As presidents go, Coolidge hasn’t gotten a lot of ink from historians. Sure, there are some biographies out there — and Amity’s in the works, of course. But for the most part, the literature is pretty thin. Among 20th century presidents, only Warren Harding can give Coolidge a run for his money in the “unexamined life” category.

The relative paucity of the Coolidge historiography extends beyond books to articles. But there have been at several important efforts to coordinate new Coolidge scholarship, including conferences at the Kennedy presidential library (papers here at the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation) and a 1995 symposium at the Library of Congress (papers published in 1998 but out of print now).

Coolidge buffs are well familiar with these essays, but I thought it might be useful to highlight them for people not in the know already. The Library of Congress volume is especially had to find. Or even turn up on a Google search unless you know what you’re after.

It’s important to point out that the most sustained effort to encourage Coolidge scholarship has come from the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation. They keep the flame alive.

Andrew Kostanecki of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation offers an audio commentary on Why Coolidge Matters Today.