Coolidge and the Cure for Our Unrestful Politics
By George F. Will
The following is adapted from the keynote speech George F. Will delivered at the Coolidge Foundation’s Winter Gala at New York City’s Union League Club on December 4, 2024.
I am in the company tonight, as we all are, of the Coolidge Scholars and Senators. One of the reasons I go to a baseball park is to be around people who can do things I can’t do, and there’s no way I could ever have been a Coolidge Scholar. I salute them all for giving us a wonderful bit of excellence.
I want to talk a bit about the man we’re here to honor, but before I talk about the man, I want to talk about a woman.
We live in a president-centric country. Alas, that’s not what Calvin Coolidge wanted, and it’s not what we had when we had Coolidge. But today we define everything by the president at the center of the solar system around which everything else revolves. Therefore, it is extraordinarily important how we understand our presidents, and we have seen biographers—non-academics usually, which is interesting—change the way we think about presidents and hence the way we think about our future. As George Orwell wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” We’ve seen this with David McCullough rehabilitating John Adams. We’ve seen it with Ron Chernow rehabilitating President Grant. But, most importantly, we’ve seen it with Amity Shlaes bringing back Calvin Coolidge.
He was, as she said, our Great Refrainer, with an aptitude for brevity, as when he said, “Inflation is repudiation.” Three words, that’s all you need to say. His sixty-seven months at the helm of this country were something that will never be repeated again. That is, he left the government smaller than when he entered it. He famously became vice president and then president because of fifteen words: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” I think a more telling and beautiful sample of the Coolidge spirit were the thirteen words he spoke about his younger son, who suffered a lingering, agonizing death in the White House: “When he was suffering he begged me to help him. I could not.”
This is an antidote to the confessional culture in which we live, the absolute eloquence of reticence. A song by Alison Krauss and Union Station includes the lyric “You say it best when you say nothing at all.” That’s the Coolidge approach. Hilary Mantel, who has written wonderful historical novels, says the following, and it’s relevant to what Amity has accomplished: “History is what people are trying to hide from you, not what they are trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through a landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury.”
Amity disinterred a buried reputation. She is an intellectual archaeologist. She conducted a heroic excavation of part of American history that the great and the good wanted to be buried. Her biography of Coolidge is, of course, a work of history, but it is also a historic act, because it changed the way we think about an important moment in our history.
Learning from Coolidge
Now, I have two points I want to make tonight about Calvin Coolidge that are very germane to our current conditions. First, he is the opposite of what we’ve come to accept as normal: the rhetorical presidency. And second, this man known for his reticence gave one of the half dozen best speeches ever given by an American president, a speech that, if adhered to, if taken seriously, would be the decisive antidote to wokeness.
First, about the rhetorical presidency. Somewhere in this club where we are tonight, there is a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt. The club is very proud of the fact that he used to do some of his political planning and plotting here. I’m not sure I’d advertise that, but that’s just me.
Roosevelt was the first president regularly filmed, the harbinger of the age of mass communication. Prior to him, and most especially prior to the root of all evil—I refer, of course, to Woodrow Wilson—most presidential communication was written and addressed to the legislative branch. It was in writing, where you do deliberative reasoning, that presidents addressed those who exist to give us mediated democracy, “to refine and enlarge the public views,” in James Madison’s words.
Consider the average number of public speeches given by the first seven presidents to audiences other than Congress: Washington annually gave three; Adams, one; the loquacious Jefferson, five; the sainted Madison, zero; Monroe, five; John Quincy Adams, one; and Andrew Jackson, the so-called populist, the man of people, gave one a year. When Andrew Johnson was impeached after the Civil War, one of the articles of impeachment said that the president did “make and deliver with a loud voice certain intemperate, inflammatory, and scandalous harangues…unbecoming the Chief Magistrate of the United States.”
Yes, those were the days. Half of the unofficial public speeches to general audiences given in the nineteenth century were given by Rutherford Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley. That’s because a technology, railroads, had come along, and presidents could move around the country making themselves ubiquitous. But even when they did, they went out to be seen and to see; they said that it would be improper to talk about divisive issues. McKinley gave no speech that mentioned the sinking, the blowing up, the whatever did happen to the USS Maine in Havana Harbor.
All this began to change with Woodrow Wilson, acting under the theory that there could be no such thing as too much Woodrow Wilson. He decided to deliver the State of the Union address in person. Thomas Jefferson had stopped that. He thought it was monarchical to stand above the legislature and declaim. Besides, he did not like the sound of his voice, which made him an unusual politician.
Wilson started the spectacle that has now become the grotesque State of the Union circus that we see every year. That is because the modern rhetorical presidency wants to lead and shape and mold public opinion. I will remind you that the word leader or leaders appears fourteen times in the Federalist Papers, thirteen times as a disparagement and once as referring to the leaders of the Revolution.
The change accelerated with radio and then with television, which is a slave to a superficial news-gathering instrument, the camera, and therefore much adored by politicians, who benefit from superficiality. But before television, there was radio, and on election night 1920, the night that Calvin Coolidge was elected vice president and put on the path to the presidency, people in western Pennsylvania heard the following, crackling through the ether, barely discernible: “This is KDKA of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We shall now broadcast the election returns…. We’d appreciate it if anyone hearing this broadcast would communicate with us, as we are very anxious to know how far the broadcast is reaching and how it is being received.”
Something new had happened. Before the internet, and more than television, radio is what changed the presidency and changed American history. Radio offered a kind of intimacy when Franklin Roosevelt, only a week into his presidency, gave his first fireside chat. He began with two words: “My friends.” Try to imagine George Washington saying to a hundred million strangers, “My friends.” It’s preposterous. Americans didn’t want presidents to be our friends. They wanted them to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. A novel idea, a humble but essential mission.
If, as progressives tell us, human beings are merely creatures that take the impress of whatever culture they find themselves situated in, then control of the culture is everything. Politics suddenly acquires an illimitable jurisdiction.
The Coolidge Antidote
Fortunately, Calvin Coolidge was not always silent. He husbanded his wisdom and his rhetoric and gave one of the great speeches in presidential history in 1926 on the sesquicentennial of the Declaration of Independence.
The most neglected word in the Declaration is secure. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…that to secure these rights, governments are instituted…” Not to give us our rights, but to secure our preexisting rights. First come rights, then comes government.
The most important word in what Coolidge said was restful. Politics has become the opposite of restful in our country. The American people are not angry with one another; the American people are exhausted and embarrassed by our public life. They have been severed from the finality that Coolidge detected in the Declaration. “If all men are created equal, that is final,” he said. “If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final…. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.” And he said, “About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful.”
Here is why this matters, and why it is the key to ending the nonsense about wokeness and the culture wars that have convulsed our country.
If there is a fixed human nature, then there are natural rights, rights essential to the flourishing of people with this nature. But if, as the progressives tell us, human nature is a fiction, a premodern superstition; if human beings are infinitely malleable; if they are merely creatures that take the impress of whatever culture they find themselves situated in—if that is the case, then control of the culture is everything. Politics suddenly acquires an illimitable jurisdiction. Politics must be everything and everywhere because it is shaping the malleable human creatures.
The stakes of politics then could not be higher. It is incumbent upon politics and government to control everything that is said, heard, read, thought, or taught, and that is why things become like either Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge or the average American campus today. This is why Woodrow Wilson said, “I am perfectly sure that the state has got to control everything that everybody needs and uses.” That is why Wilson said during his wartime semi-fascism—there’s no other polite way to say it—that his aim was to “mobilize the mind of America.”
This is the progressive consciousness project. This is why free speech now has become something to be feared, because it interferes with the mobilization of the American mind. This is what gives us uncircumscribed politics, unlimited coercion, because being on the right side of history requires that malleable human beings take the impress of a culture that the right political forces shape and dictate. Curating consciousness is never finished, and it requires existential threats to justify the constant curating of consciousness. The threat can be systemic racism, it can be climate apocalypse, it can be anything. When Silicon Valley Bank, the seventeenth-largest bank in the United States, got into trouble from its own mistakes, a United States senator urged regulators to silence on social media any criticism of the banking system because that would destabilize banks and bring an existential crisis in the financial system.
In 1981, I gave the Godkin Lectures at Harvard, and these became the book Statecraft as Soulcraft, read by dozens. The subtitle of the book was What Government Does—not what government should do, not what government ought to do, but what government cannot help but do. Government necessarily shapes the soul of its citizens by what it encourages, subsidizes, criminalizes, discourages. It communicates values all the time. It is unavoidable. Any regime does this. A great example in my lifetime is the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The government said if people will just sit at a lunch counter together, go swimming together, go to school together, it is going to be good for their souls. They may not like it, but it is good. We need to do this. That was soulcraft, and it worked. But soulcraft has to be limited.
We saw how unlimited this can be when the Biden administration, using the CDC, the FBI, and other federal agencies, pressured social media to curate the nation’s consciousness. The Biden administration’s consciousness project aimed to protect the American people from inconvenient thoughts, many of them about the pandemic, many of them true, as we now know. This is what happens when, as progressives believe, history is a proper noun like France—capital-H History, with the arc of History bending toward this or that. We can blame Marx for that, or we can blame Hegel for Marx. But the real winner in all this is Lenin, Wilson’s contemporary almost exactly, and I daresay Wilson’s soulmate. I will paraphrase what Lenin said: We need in politics a vanguard of the enlightened that will drag people along, however reluctant they are, to a higher consciousness. We will purge them of false consciousness.
So far as I can tell, that is exactly what progressives are doing in their woke campaigns—purging us of what they consider false consciousness. The result in national politics is the surveillance state of China. On a smaller scale, it is the average American campus these days, and this is driven by the vaulting ambition that you have in politics when you cut yourself off from the finalities that Coolidge talked about. When you cut yourself off from the restful understanding that human nature is a given, you get the sort of claim Trotsky made in the 1924 book Literature and Revolution. After the revolution, said Trotsky, “man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.”
That’s laughable, but it’s not funny, because hundreds of millions of people have died at the hands of those who would drag them to a higher consciousness. This goal begets fanaticism, because it is beyond refutation. If you have the unrestful idea that human beings take the impress of the culture that surrounds them, then conquest and control of the culture is a political duty. That is not restful, and it can’t be refuted, because there are no standards left to refute it with.
In 1964, when I was a graduate student at Oxford, Oxford University Press published the third and final volume of Isaac Deutscher’s worshipful biography of Trotsky. Oxford’s student Marxist club decided to have a tea to celebrate Deutscher, and I trotted round. In the course of his remarks, Deutscher said, “Proof of Trotsky’s farsightedness is that none of his predictions have come true yet.”
Think about that. This is the kind of fanaticism insulated from refutation and evidence that you get when you have the unrestful politics of the consciousness project. Such fanaticism results when people, to protect their own consciousness and fight other people’s consciousness, hunker down in their intellectual silos, embracing their confirmation bias, listening only to what makes them feel good. This makes us stupid, because as Kipling said, “What do they know of England who only England know?” If you know only your own arguments, you do not know your own arguments. Now, what Coolidge understood and what all wise people understand is that the ultimate conservative message reduced to two words is: Nothing lasts. History is, after all, the study of ruins.
“This, Too, Shall Pass Away”
But as Amity has shown, it is possible to reverse that. It is possible to have revivals. It is possible to understand that if we can just go back to a restful politics, a circumscribed politics, by ruling out of bounds the consciousness project, we can prosper. In 1859, with war clouds lowering over the country, Abraham Lincoln spoke at the precursor to the Wisconsin State Fair. He said, “An Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations.” When the wise men came back, the proposition they had was, “And this, too, shall pass away.”
Lincoln said, “How chastening in the hour of pride!—how consoling in the depths of affliction!” And yet, he said, the proposition need not be true, because if we Americans cultivate the moral and intellectual life within us as prodigiously as we cultivate the physical world around us, we can endure. Indeed, we did.
Restful. That is what that message was.
When Earl Weaver was the Hall of Fame manager of the Baltimore Orioles, he was a short, irascible, dyspeptic, Napoleonic little figure. And when he was out of sorts, as he usually was by the third inning, he was the scourge of American League umpires. He would come barreling out of the dugout, stick his chin into the chest of a much larger umpire, and at the top of his lungs shout, “Are you going to get any better or is this it?”
Things are going to get better. The unrestful politics of our time, which results from ignoring what Calvin Coolidge said about the finality of the Declaration of Independence, has brought us stormy weather. Which shall pass.
Mark Twain and his good friend William Dean Howells, the novelist, once decided to go for a morning walk and were dismayed to see that there was a downpour. Howells said to Twain, “Do you think it will stop?” Twain answered, “It always has.”
Wokeness will stop when we get back to the restful politics that rejects the consciousness project. It will stop when the Coolidge Scholars radiate through our society and people rediscover the eloquence of reticence, the marvelous economy of words on the part of Calvin Coolidge, which we are here to celebrate tonight. And I thank you for letting me be a part of this.
George F. Will is a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He is the author of many books, including the New York Times bestseller The Conservative Sensibility. This essay is adapted from his keynote address at the Coolidge Foundation’s 2024 Winter Gala.