Garland Tucker published an op-ed last month on the search for a modern-day Coolidge. He considers, in particular, the ties that bound Coolidge with another iconic president, Ronald Reagan.

As the 2012 election approaches, the stakes could not be higher. By most accounts, the Republicans hold that rare opportunity to un- seat an incumbent president. Whom they nominate will determine the outcome of the election and, if their nominee is elected, the success of the next four – or eight – years. While history can never precisely predict the future, it can – and should – be a guide.

The two most successful Republican presidents in the last century were Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan. There were striking similarities between these two men and their presidencies. Success for both was marked by significant reductions in income tax rates and domestic spending, strong economic growth in the private sector, re-election by huge margins, and the trust and affection of the American public.

Tucker, author of a great book on Coolidge, ends with some pointed advice for modern Republicans as they search for someone to lead the 2012 ticket:

Today, the country longs for a candidate of such character, vision, discipline, experience, common sense, civility and humor. If the GOP can nominate a candidate for 2012 in the Coolidge-Reagan mold, the party – and the country – will be well served.

David Pietrusza

C-Span has posted more video from the October symposium sponsored by the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation. In today’s episode, David Pietrusza speaks on Coolidge’s political philosophy.

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.

Two weeks before election day in 1924, Washington Star cartoonist Clifford Berryman took aim at the partisan competition over tax cuts.

In an era of buoyant revenues and restrained spending, lawmakers felt free to promise additional tax relief. Partisan divisions centered not on the desirability of tax cuts in general, but on their distribution in particular.

For the most part, Democrats were eager to raise income tax exemptions, thereby freeing more Americans from a tax widely considered a rich man’s burden. Republicans, by contrast, were more interested in cutting marginal rates for the income tax, while also arguing for elimination of the federal estate tax.

Find more on 1920s tax policy at the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts.

Slemp had served six terms in the House of Representatives, elected from Virginia’s 9th Congressional District. He had won the seat in 1907 after the incumbent — his father, Campbell Slemp — died in office. He held the seat until 1922, when he declined to run for reelection.

Slemp was a powerful figure in Virginia politics and a prominent member of the GOP establishment. Observers suggested that Coolidge chose him in a bid to shore up support within his own party. As William Allen White explained:

Slemp was the man whom President Coolidge needed, a liaison officer between the White House and the Republican organization in Congress and in the National Committee, a man “diligent in his business” who should stand before kings. From the Democratic press, from the independent press, from the Progressive group in Congress and out, a storm of protest rose over Slemp, but it beat vainly upon the White House. The new president knew exactly what he wanted and he had it.

As White suggested, Slemp’s nomination was not uncontroversial. But it proved useful for Coolidge, who relied on Slemp for the latter’s political acumen and connections.

Slemp served as secretary until March 1925, when he resigned after failing to win a Cabinet appointment from Coolidge. His successor, Everett Sanders of Indiana, was also a former congressman.

(All photos courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)