Coolidge’s Worthy Opponent
John W. Davis accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 1924
(West Virginia and Regional History Center)
By John W. Childs
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.
1924: Coolidge, Davis, and the High Tide of American Conservatism
by Garland S. Tucker III (Coolidge Press, 2024)
In 1924, Garland Tucker has written a splendid history of the last American presidential election to feature two conservative candidates. In that race, Calvin Coolidge won the presidency in his own right, after acceding to the office on Warren Harding’s death the previous year.
The election of 1924 was hardly a cliffhanger. Coolidge was expected to win, and he did so in a landslide. What makes 1924 an intriguing narrative is the character of the contestants, brilliantly depicted by Tucker. Coolidge we know pretty well: he is covered in several histories, particularly the magnificent biography by Amity Shlaes. He shines through as a man of exceptional integrity and a firm commitment to a set of guiding principles.
But it is Tucker’s description of John W. Davis, Coolidge’s opponent, that is most interesting, as Davis was previously so obscure. Davis won the Democratic nomination in 1924 as a compromise candidate on the convention’s 103rd ballot. Yet Davis, it became apparent, was one of the finest and most accomplished men ever to run for president.
Indeed, one has to wonder how history would have been different if Davis, not Franklin Roosevelt, had been the victorious Democratic presidential candidate in the key year of 1932.
“MOST PERFECT GENTLEMAN”
A skilled lawyer, Davis argued a record 140 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Davis came from West Virginia. His grandfather was a U.S. congressman; his father, the town lawyer; his mother, an education fanatic disguised as a traditional housewife. Davis credits his mother with instilling in him a love of knowledge and the discipline to pursue it with rigor and forethought. As it turned out, she was working with exceptional raw material.
In addition to a powerful and disciplined intellect, Davis was blessed with extraordinary personal charm, which won him friends and admirers, not to mention voters. Tucker has unearthed a number of observations about Davis’s winning ways, but two stand out both for what they say and for who said it:
“John W. Davis was the most perfect gentleman I have ever met.” —King George V
Judge Learned Hand commented: “I do not like to have John W. Davis come into my courtroom. I am so fascinated by his charm and eloquence that I always fear that I am going to decide in his favor irrespective of the merits of the case.”
High praise indeed from one of America’s leading legal lights. Such comments capture Davis’s personality so much more effectively than thousands of words of turgid prose could. Kudos to Tucker for the research effort to uncover these nuggets and the literary instinct to use them.
If Coolidge was that rare politician of few words, Davis was an equally rare breed of politician who never aspired to high office. Perhaps this is a characteristic of true conservatives! Davis was pushed by others who knew his qualifications, not driven by his own ambition. He became ambassador to England because those who knew him insisted he was the right man for the job, despite his initial reluctance and his lack of foreign service experience.
Davis, shown here with Winston Churchill, served as the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain
(West Virginia and Regional History Center)
NO TAINT FROM WALL STREET
While Davis was still ambassador, West Virginia Democrats urged him to run for president in 1920. He wrote in his diary, “I dread the burdens of the office; have never nursed any ambition for it; would certainly not refuse a nomination if it came my way; cannot become an active candidate.” Hardly a Trumpian, or even Bidenesque, lust for high office.
In 1924 some friends started Davis-for-president bureaus in West Virginia. When he protested, they retorted, “You’re not responsible for what your fool friends do.” To improve his chances, Davis was advised to leave his law firm and stop representing Wall Street clients. Davis rejected that idea in a carefully reasoned letter explaining why he would not abandon his partners and clients. Tucker writes that on seeing this response, Davis’s friend “recognized the character and integrity of the man he so admired.” Published in a newspaper, the letter produced a flood of positive comments. Character vanquished the perceived taint of Wall Street.
The procedural chaos of the 1924 Democratic National Convention did not result in a second-rate candidate. But it helps explain how the Democrats could nominate a bona fide conservative.
Ideologically there was very little to separate the Republican and Democratic standard bearers. As Davis gained support during the convention, the famous liberal William Jennings Bryan said he would not back a Davis candidacy. Bryan acknowledged that Davis was a man of fine character but added: “So is Mr. Coolidge. There is no difference between them.”
In accepting the nomination, Davis deplored bloc politics of the kind that later presidents would institutionalize. He described “a chaos of blocs and sections and classes and interests, each striving for its own advantage, careless of the welfare of the whole.” He pointed out the one place where Republicans were hurting the economy most—the tariff—and called for lower tariffs. He assailed big government’s penchant for creating bossy agencies that use power for “private revenge.” Finally, Davis, like Coolidge, called for lower taxes.
In the 1924 election, even a man of Davis’s substantial abilities and accomplishments could not come close. Rarely is an incumbent defeated in prosperous times, and Coolidge won easily.
Coolidge, unfortunately, died soon after he left office. In contrast, Davis’s life and career seemed to blossom after his run for president. He was the Davis in the prestigious law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell. Among other clients, he represented J.P. Morgan. He successfully guided the bank through the hostile Senate hearings probing its role in the stock market crash.
Davis suspected paternalistic government. “Fallible men when inducted into office are presumed to receive a mystic baptism of unselfish wisdom that fits them to administer the most intimate of their neighbors’ affairs,” he said in 1929. Small wonder, then, that in the 1930s Davis became a critic of the embodiment of paternalism, President Roosevelt. FDR’s massive expansion of the federal bureaucracy and his confiscatory tax policies were anathema to Davis’s Jeffersonian view of the Constitution’s promise to preserve individual freedom.
At age seventy-nine, Davis argued his final two cases before the Supreme Court and reached “the pinnacle of his appellate career,” Tucker writes. In the first case, Davis opposed President Harry Truman’s attempt to nationalize steel mills. With his superb grounding in the Constitution and the power of his logic, Davis convinced the Court that this was unconstitutional presidential overreach. He won 6–3.
Davis’s achievements are little remembered in part because his final case was Briggs v. Elliott, the South Carolina companion to Brown v. Board of Education. The South Carolina governor personally asked Davis to take the case. Davis’s emphasis, in keeping with the Constitution and legal precedent, was that education policy was reserved to the states. When the justices met briefly after the initial arguments, a slim majority appeared to agree with Davis, Tucker reports.
Before the case was resolved, however, Earl Warren became chief justice. Warren was eager “to put his stamp on the court,” Tucker writes, and overcame “the objections of several justices who were inclined to dissent until the very final discussions.” On May 17, 1954, Warren delivered a unanimous ruling that held states did not have the right to segregate their schools.
The ruling bothered Davis—“not because of his devotion to segregation,” Tucker writes, “but because he clearly foresaw the danger of the Court’s arbitrary loosening of those ‘chains of the Constitution’ that Jefferson saw as the necessary restraint on government.”
Looking beyond the segregation issue in the case, Davis was deeply concerned about what “judicial activism” would do to subvert the rule of constitutional law. The case indeed marked a major turning point in U.S. history. Precedent and Constitution be damned—under Warren, the Supreme Court would rule according to its perception of prevailing moral standards.
Davis died less than a year later at his favorite old-school golf club, Yeamans Hall near Charleston, South Carolina.
THE COOLIDGE-DAVIS LEGACY
In reflecting on the story of Calvin Coolidge and John W. Davis, one is struck by the similarity of their politics and governing philosophies.
In the 1928 election, Davis would have been a far more compatible successor to Coolidge than “Wonder Boy” Herbert Hoover. But perhaps the conservative mindset, valuing adherence to established tradition, put constraints on the leap of creativity that would have been necessary for Coolidge to recruit a Democrat as a successor.
And in another election, that of 1932, the Democratic Party settled on a candidate eager to intervene and experiment: Franklin Roosevelt of New York.
Too bad. Davis would have been far more likely to carry on the Coolidge legacy than Wonder Boy. And the Davis policy of restrained government might have changed the course of the Great Depression.
John W. Childs is the founder and chairman of J.W. Childs Associates, LP, a private equity and special situation investment firm.
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.