Birth of a Smear
The release of the pro–Ku Klux Klan film The Birth of a Nation revealed crucial differences between Calvin Coolidge and Woodrow Wilson
By the Editors
Calvin Coolidge has suffered more than his share of unfair characterizations. One of the most troubling involves his record on civil rights.
A National Book Award–winning author provides a recent example. The writer suggests that President Coolidge was a lazy bigot who emboldened the Ku Klux Klan.
The simplest response to this claim would be to say that the writer indulges in presentism—that is, he judges historical figures by our standards today. The presentism argument is true. But today’s standards hold that a decent portrait of a past figure should include all the facts, which the author’s picture of Coolidge does not.
The Author’s Charges
In April 2023, author Timothy Egan released his book A Fever in the Heartland. This history of the Ku Klux Klan’s resurgence in the 1920s became a New York Times bestseller.
Calvin Coolidge plays only a small part in Egan’s narrative. The Klan, after all, was more closely associated with the Democratic Party than with the Party of Lincoln. Egan points out that the Klan constituted the “most powerful single bloc” at the Democrats’ 1924 convention—“nearly a third of all delegates.” But what Egan does, and does not, say about Coolidge effectively convicts the president.
The author finds his most damning piece of evidence in a 1921 article for Good Housekeeping. Vice President–Elect Coolidge wrote, “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.”
This line rightly disturbs today’s readers. It suggests that Coolidge was not immune to the influence of the bigotry or even the “scientific racism” so prevalent in his era.
Egan notes that Coolidge’s article carried the headline “Whose Country Is This?” Then he says, “The Klan couldn’t have framed it better.”
That cutting remark is one of several that Egan aims at Coolidge. The author writes of the 1924 presidential campaign, “Coolidge, the new president, had not spoken out against the Klan, implying by his trademark silence that he would make no trouble.”
The reality, however, was that Coolidge often fought for civil rights. In fact, former Baltimore mayor and former Coolidge Foundation trustee Kurt Schmoke calls Coolidge “one of the country’s early civil rights pioneers.”
In 1922, while Coolidge was still vice president, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed an anti-lynching bill. But Senate Democrats killed the bill by launching a filibuster.
When he became president, Coolidge made it clear where he stood. In his first message to Congress as president, delivered in 1923, he called on the legislature to “exercise all its powers of prevention and punishment against the hideous crime of lynching.”
Coolidge declared that the constitutional rights of black Americans “are just as sacred as those of any other citizen.” He added, “It is both a public and a private duty to protect those rights.”
In the same message, the ordinarily frugal Coolidge called for a $500,000 federal appropriation to support medical training at historically black Howard University. Schmoke writes: “Coolidge’s efforts matched both his commitment to civil rights and to education as a means of social uplift for African Americans. Coolidge’s $500,000 foundation helped improve medical care and health outcomes for African Americans.”
During the 1924 election year, President Coolidge spoke at Howard’s commencement ceremony. This itself was a deliberate political choice: Coolidge became the first president to give the commencement address at Howard, according to the university. “Racial hostility, ancient tradition, and social prejudice are not to be eliminated immediately or easily,” Coolidge acknowledged. But he said that black Americans “shall prove worthy of the fullest measure of opportunity.”
Coolidge also saluted black Americans for having “repeatedly proved their devotion to the high ideals of our country.” The president showcased African Americans’ record in World War I: “They gave their services in the war with the same patriotism and readiness that other citizens did…. The propaganda of prejudice and hatred which sought to keep the colored men from supporting the national cause completely failed. The black man showed himself the same kind of citizen, moved by the same kind of patriotism, as the white man.”
During the campaign summer of 1924, a man named Charles Gardner wrote President Coolidge to complain that the Republican Party might nominate a black man for a congressional seat in New York.
The president issued a bracing response. Coolidge said he was “amazed to receive such a letter.” Noting the noble service of black Americans during the Great War, he wrote:
They took their places wherever assigned in defense of the nation of which they are just as truly citizens as are any others. The suggestion of denying any measure of their full political rights to such a great group of our population as the colored people is one which, however it might be received in some other quarters, could not possibly be permitted by one who feels a responsibility for living up to the traditions and maintaining the principles of the Republican Party. Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or color. I have taken my oath to support that Constitution. It is the source of your rights and my rights. I propose to regard it, and administer it, as the source of the rights of all the people, whatever their belief or race.
The Chicago Defender, a major African American newspaper, did not miss the importance of Coolidge’s action. The paper ran this front-page headline: “Cal Coolidge Tells Kluxer When to Stop.”
Shortly thereafter, Coolidge wrote a letter of support to the president of the National Negro Business League, Robert R. Moton. A New York Times headline noted, “President Again Declares His Intention to Safeguard [Black Americans’] Constitutional Rights.”
Coolidge wrote these letters—and made sure to publish them—in August 1924. This is the period when Egan alleges that the president signaled he would “make no trouble” for the Klan.
Coolidge concluded, “Divine Providence has not bestowed upon any race a monopoly of patriotism and character.”
“We Are All Now in the Same Boat”
In A Fever in the Heartland, Egan also insists that President Coolidge “had neither the energy nor the stomach to take a stand” against the Ku Klux Klan when it marched on Washington, D.C., in August 1925.
Egan ignores a speech the president gave less than two months after the Klan’s march. Speaking to the American Legion in Omaha, Nebraska, Coolidge delivered the address “Toleration and Liberalism.” In it, he called for unity among Americans, whatever their ethnic background. “Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of to-day is real and genuine,” said Coolidge. “No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.”
Coolidge went further still. America could achieve “harmony and tranquillity,” the president said, only when we “all realize that there are true Americans who did not happen to be born in our section of the country, who do not attend our place of religious worship, who are not of our racial stock, or who are not proficient in our language.” The president elaborated:
If we are to create on this continent a free Republic and an enlightened civilization that will be capable of reflecting the true greatness and glory of mankind, it will be necessary to regard these differences as accidental and unessential. We shall have to look beyond the outward manifestations of race and creed.
Coolidge concluded, “Divine Providence has not bestowed upon any race a monopoly of patriotism and character.”
Schmoke calls Coolidge’s Omaha speech a “pointed rebuke to the Klan.” Yet this address, one of the most enlightened of the age, rates no mention in Egan’s book.
In 1926, Coolidge delivered a speech honoring the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The president emphasized the rights of all Americans. “If all men are created equal, that is final,” he said. “If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.”
Calvin Coolidge had advanced in his thinking since he wrote that Good Housekeeping article. As Amity Shlaes writes in her biography: “Coolidge no longer spoke in the racialist tones of the unfortunate articles he had written as vice president. His position now was that he did not like to judge people by their race or creed.”
Opposing Stances on The Birth of a Nation
Lawrence Reed, president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education, writes, “On equal rights, [Coolidge] was ahead of his time and much of the country, and way ahead of the other major political party.”
Egan does acknowledge the record in the same period of that other party, Democrats. It’s a record that would be impossible to ignore.
Egan observes, for example, that President Woodrow Wilson became the “most powerful fan” of the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. The movie lionized the Ku Klux Klan. Egan calls it “the most effective and long-lasting source of racial propaganda in American history.”
Wilson showed the film in the White House. But the president didn’t simply celebrate The Birth of a Nation. He also contributed to it.
As a silent film, The Birth of a Nation relied on title cards to tell the Klan’s supposedly heroic story. Director D. W. Griffith featured three title cards quoting from Wilson’s book A History of the American People. Here is a sample passage from Wilson’s history:
The white men of the South were aroused by a mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by means fair or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes…. Every country-side wished to have its own Ku Klux…, until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, an “Invisible Empire of the South.”
The information on Coolidge from this period suggests that whatever views he held or had held about intermarriage, in practice he supported civil rights. Released when he was still a Massachusetts politician, The Birth of a Nation offered Coolidge an early opportunity to display that support.
In 1915, Coolidge served as president of the Massachusetts Senate. The legislature considered a bill to have the Board of Censors review The Birth of a Nation and potentially keep the film out of theaters. The bill lacked one vote in the Senate. “It suddenly seemed as if the bill might get derailed,” writes Dick Lehr in his account of the fight over Griffith’s film. “But that was when Senate president Calvin Coolidge came to the rescue.”
Lehr calls the scene “a moment of high legislative drama.” Coolidge hadn’t cast a vote all year, but he shouted to the clerk to call his name “once he realized the direction of the roll call.” Coolidge issued the deciding vote to send The Birth of a Nation before the Board of Censors. Those leading the protests against the film were “jubilant,” Lehr reports, “while The Birth of a Nation lobbyists were crestfallen.”
Coolidge vs. Wilson
President Wilson’s dubious record on race included overseeing “the resegregation of the federal workforce in Washington,” as Egan notes. President Coolidge opposed such discrimination. John G. Sargent, Coolidge’s attorney general, remembered that “the President was much troubled by the insistent discrimination by white employees against the colored people employed in the Department—such, for instance, as insistence that they would not work in the same room, at the same kind of work.”
According to Sargent’s account, President Coolidge told his cabinet: “It seems a terrible thing for persons of intelligence, of education, of real character—as we know many colored people are—to be deprived of a chance to work because they happen to be born with a different colored skin. I think you ought to find a way to give them an even chance.”
In A Fever in the Heartland, Egan writes of Wilson, “His was a loathsome soul about race, like much of the country he nudged into the global American Century.” The author provides no such qualifier or context for Coolidge.
In one case, Egan compares Coolidge to Wilson on race relations—unfavorably so. He notes that both presidents met with NAACP leader James W. Johnson. Egan acknowledges that Johnson “despised” Wilson and “found him stiff and hypocritical in person.” But Coolidge “was colder still,” Egan claims.
Johnson, in his autobiography, does recount an awkward meeting with Coolidge. He concludes that the president “knew absolutely nothing about the colored people.” But did Coolidge make an even worse impression than Wilson? That seems hard to believe. Johnson writes that his “dislike and distrust” of Wilson “came nearer to constituting keen hatred for an individual than anything I have ever felt.”
And given all Coolidge did, it seems just as hard to believe that Coolidge “knew absolutely nothing about” black Americans.
Coolidge’s forceful calls to prevent and punish lynching look all the more remarkable given that such legislation would not pass for another century.
“Bigotry Is Only Another Name for Slavery”
Perhaps the essential fallacy of Egan is that he equates absence of condemnation of the Klan with bigotry. That’s far from the case for Coolidge. Coolidge sought to universalize, and therefore he emphasized the rights of African Americans in the context of rights of all Americans.
President Coolidge pushed for federal anti-lynching legislation. His forceful calls to prevent and punish lynching look all the more remarkable given that such legislation would not pass for another century. Even without legislation, the number of lynchings in the United States dropped significantly during Coolidge’s presidency.
Coolidge also signed the law that made all Native Americans citizens for the first time.
To reduce Calvin Coolidge to bigot is to ignore this history. It is also to ignore Coolidge’s wisdom about “the principle of broadest tolerance.” America’s institutions, the president said, should guarantee “the full right to liberty and equality before the law without distinction of race or creed.”
President Coolidge concluded:
Bigotry is only another name for slavery. It reduces to serfdom not only those against whom it is directed, but also those who seek to apply it. An enlarged freedom can only be secured by the application of the golden rule. No other utterance ever presented such a practical rule of life.
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