“I Do Not Choose to Run for President”
By Amity Shlaes and Matthew Denhart
President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he would not seek reelection. Nearly a century earlier, another president, Calvin Coolidge, made a similar announcement.
In many ways, the circumstances of their statements differed. Biden waited until 107 days before the general election, whereas Coolidge made his announcement almost a full year earlier in the cycle. Biden was dogged by low approval ratings and, at age eighty-one, concerns about his age and ability. Coolidge remained overwhelmingly popular; many Americans urged the fifty-five-year-old president to run for another term.
But Coolidge and Biden shared the experience of family tragedy. Biden lost his first wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972, and then, in 2015, his son Beau died of brain cancer. Coolidge, meanwhile, lost his sixteen-year-old son, Calvin Jr., to blood poisoning.
In this excerpt from their introduction to The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge, Amity Shlaes and Matthew Denhart recount Coolidge’s surprise decision not to run again in 1928.
Presidents loom over America, and so must their monuments. That was the conviction of the sculptor Gutzon Borglum as he laid his dynamite at Mount Rushmore in the summer of 1927. At Rushmore, Borglum would blast and hack at the mountain until it yielded up the visages of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt—each face sixty feet tall.
The president at the time, Calvin Coolidge, happened to be in South Dakota and rode up the mountain on a horse named Mistletoe to preside at the groundbreaking of Borglum’s gargantuan project. The sculptor, elated, and doubtless aiming to please the president, told the crowd that one day a mega-bust of Coolidge could join those of his four predecessors in the granite.
“This colossus is our mark,” Borglum later said, the mark of a great civilization built by great men. But Coolidge wanted no colossus. The film footage from the groundbreaking ceremony shows the thirtieth president duly delivering remarks—and then turning off from the scene, rather too quickly.
The reporters present guessed that the fifty-five-year-old chief executive was worried about another matter. Coolidge had come to the presidency in 1923 upon the death of Warren Harding. Americans had given him a resounding victory when he ran for office on his own in 1924. Polls suggested Coolidge remained overwhelmingly popular leading up to 1928. Now, therefore, his fellow politicians and his party were pressuring Coolidge to announce he would run again.
A few days before his ride up Rushmore, Coolidge had sought to end the election discussion. The president asked his deputy to type up and hand out a statement to the reporters in attendance at the Summer White House, a temporary office in the high school at Rapid City. The statement was a single line: “I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty eight.”
The statement had not halted the pressure. The pressmen could not believe what they read and commenced pestering Coolidge, following him everywhere, even between the pines up to Rushmore. What leader turns his back on a guaranteed reelection? Surely, Coolidge did not mean what he wrote. Perhaps the president would reverse his position in a few days—a call from Republican leadership to South Dakota might change his mind. Or perhaps, the pressmen speculated, Coolidge suffered from some unannounced and grave malady—poor health could be the reason for Coolidge’s unexpected retreat.
The reason for Coolidge’s decision not to run was indeed health—not the president’s health but the health of our democracy. In fact, Coolidge’s decision to walk away from Rushmore and his decision to walk away from the presidency were linked. They came out of his own conviction, one different from the sculptor’s.
In the Coolidge conviction, the power of America lay not in great men but in great institutions, institutions in turn built on their own bedrock, the rock of principle. Because of those institutions, American citizens enjoyed rights and freedoms, he wrote, that made them the “peer of kings.” Such people were best governed by principles, not potentates. The continued success of the nation depended on the popular commitment to those principles and institutions, not to men. “The progress of America has been due to the spirit of the people,” Coolidge said at Rushmore.
Hero worship might make Americans forget that laws mattered more than men. Like Washington, who doubtless would have bridled at the sight of himself on the skyline, Coolidge believed presidents were there to preside, not rule. Modesty in a president was wisest.
Amity Shlaes is the author of Coolidge, The Forgotten Man, and Great Society, among other books. She chairs the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation.
Matthew Denhart is president of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation.
This essay is excerpted from the introduction to The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge.