Coolidge’s Wisdom and Dignity
Bruce Barton
By Bruce Barton
In 1935, two years after Calvin Coolidge’s death, Good Housekeeping magazine published “The Real Calvin Coolidge,” a series of firsthand accounts of the president written by the people who knew him best. The Coolidge Foundation republished these accounts as a series of booklets beginning in the 1980s.
The following piece comes from Bruce Barton, a journalist, a publicist, and an advertising executive. Like Coolidge, Barton was an alumnus of Amherst College. He got to know Coolidge when the latter served as governor of Massachusetts, and they became friends. Barton later served in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Four Coolidge characteristics and an incident to illustrate each one:
1. He had read history. Current problems presented themselves to his mind in light reflected from the past.
The winter of 1919–20 was a time of inflated prices, following the war; high rents and high living costs were producing unrest; all sorts of social panaceas were being promulgated. As we sat in his office in the State House in Boston one morning, he reached into a drawer of his desk and pulled out a faded old document and handed it over. It was an Act passed by the Selectmen of Belchertown, Massachusetts, in the inflationary period that followed the Revolutionary War. The Selectmen, disturbed by the protests of their constituents, decided to fix by law the prices at which the farmers from the surrounding country must sell their peas, beans, meat and potatoes in the Belchertown market. Heavy penalties were prescribed for any farmer who charged more. Of course the edict was completely futile.
Said Coolidge, “Isn’t it a strange thing that in every period of social unrest men have the notion that they can pass a law and suspend the operations of economic law?”
2. He had an innate and reliable wisdom about human nature.
After the Boston police strike [of 1919] the labor leaders held a conference with him in the Governor’s office. It was a closed meeting; no reports were published in the press. I happened to be with him a few days later, and I said,
“When those labor leaders are in your office and the door is locked, and they know there is no dictaphone in the room and that you can be trusted, what kind of fellows are they anyway?”
He answered: “You must never forget that a labor leader is first of all a political leader. He has about twenty fellows gunning for his job, and each of the twenty is promising to do more and get more for the members than he has been able to do or get. So he usually has to talk a lot more radically than he actually feels.”
3. He had a profound sense of the dignity of the office of President of the United States.
We were alone one day in the camp in the White Mountains where he and Mrs. Coolidge were spending the summer. He took me down in a car to his summer office, a little wooden building several miles from the camp.
As we started off I said, “I notice that even up here in the woods you always are served first at the table, always leave a room first, always get into the automobile first.”
“Yes,” he answered. “Those things seem unimportant to you and me, but they are important. They are little things that have to do with the ceremony of the Presidency. As far as I am concerned I propose, if I can, to pass that office on to my successor without the loss of one iota of its peculiar dignity.”
4. He had a very definite philosophy of the functions and technique of the Presidency.
That philosophy sounds strangely antique in these days when everything and everybody insist on an answer from the White House; but he never deviated from it.
Two years after his return to private life I spent a week-end with him at Northampton. We were sitting in his little library when he reached for the telephone to speak to his office downtown. When he was finished, I said:
“I can’t remember that I ever saw you use the telephone before. I was trying to think while you were talking, and I can’t recall whether you even had a telephone in your office at the White House.”
“No,” he said, “I didn’t. There was a phone in a booth in the outside hall that I could have used, but I never did.”
He smoked awhile in silence, and then said: “The President should not talk on the telephone. In the first place, you can’t be sure it is private, and, besides, it isn’t in keeping with the dignity of the office.”
Another silence, then: “The President shouldn’t do too much. And he shouldn’t know too much.”
I leaned forward. “What do you mean by that?” I asked. “That the President shouldn’t know too much.”
“The President can’t resign,” he answered. “If a member of the Cabinet makes a mistake and destroys his standing with the country, he can get out, or the President can ask him to get out. But if he has involved the President in the mistake, the President has to stay there to the end of his term, and to that extent the people’s faith in their Government has been diminished.
“So I constantly said to my Cabinet: ‘There are many things you gentlemen must not tell me. If you blunder, you can leave, or I can invite you to leave. But if you draw me into all your departmental decisions and something goes wrong, I must stay here. And by involving me you have lowered the faith of the people in their Government.’”
To read more remembrances of Coolidge, see The Real Calvin Coolidge.