What Presidential Rankings Get Wrong
By Steven F. Hayward
This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of the Coolidge Review.
When Ronald Reagan put Calvin Coolidge’s portrait up in the White House Cabinet Room, taking down a painting of Thomas Jefferson, the outrage in the media was deafening.
Historians typically treated Coolidge with disdain as well. When I was in college, as my contemporary history professor went through the run-up to the Great Depression, the only thing he said of Coolidge was, “If you took the Washington Monument and dug a commensurate hole in the ground, that would be a fitting monument for Calvin Coolidge’s contributions to America.” That was it. No argument, no specifics, nothing to substantiate this view.
In the years since, historians have revisited Coolidge. Thomas B. Silver made an important contribution in the early 1980s with his book Coolidge and the Historians. Paul Johnson got a lot of the story right in Modern Times and A History of the American People. The restoration culminated in Amity Shlaes’s spectacular biography, Coolidge.
Of course, Coolidge still achieves middling marks in most presidential rankings. He has that reputation as Silent Cal. This is a superficial take. Coolidge was not silent at all. He gave more press conferences than any other president and used the radio well. But his taciturn nature remains legendary. It makes for fun reading.
Still, I have always thought historians who disliked Coolidge had a secondary purpose to attaching the Silent Cal label to him: they hoped you would ignore what he said—because if you read it, you might be persuaded by it.
Take the 1922 speech Vice President Coolidge gave before the American Bar Association. Coolidge wrote his own speeches, and that address is a brilliant and prescient analysis of what today we call the administrative state and why it can’t give us effective government. When you read it, you realize he is contesting all the premises of Woodrow Wilson and the early administrative state before that term came into use.
When you look at how Coolidge fares in presidential rankings and at some of the presidents who rate highly, you realize we need a new standard for assessing our chief executives.
The Wisdom of Restraint
Think about the presidents who regularly top the rankings. The first tier is typically George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, in some order. Then there’s a close second tier that includes Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and perhaps Ronald Reagan.
You’ll notice some commonalities among those presidents. Most governed in times of crisis, usually a war or some foreign policy crisis or a domestic crisis like the Great Depression. Some, like the two Roosevelts, changed the presidency itself.
These factors make perfect sense for conventional history. Historians like drama and great crises. Although many of us believe Franklin Roosevelt did almost everything wrong, he still ranks among the great presidents. In fact, the most recent Siena College Research Institute ranking put FDR at number one. Why? Because FDR was on the scene for both the Great Depression and World War II. To the degree historians think he got us through those crises, they rank him very highly.
But that is, I think, the wrong way to go about assessing presidents. Coolidge had the misfortune, from the conventional point of view, of governing during quiet times. Plus, he didn’t get in the way. Presidential restraint does not earn high marks from most historians.
It should, though. Many good books could be written about how politicians and especially regulators will see some favorable trend happening and then try to get in front of the parade and screw it all up. I’ll give just a couple of examples.
First, we could have had cell phones at least fifteen years earlier than we got them. The delay occurred because hidebound federal government regulations prevented the market from emerging.
My favorite story is one that almost no one knows. In the late 1970s—about halfway between today and the age of Coolidge—the fax machine was starting to be commercialized. The fax was slow and clunky and expensive. Still, you could see that it was going to change the way offices work.
Then the U.S. Postal Service went to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and said, in effect: By law, we have a monopoly on the transmission of all first-class mail. These fax machines are going to be transmitting mail. Therefore, FCC, you need to restrict fax machines to being installed only in post offices.
That’s right, the Postal Service wanted to make you go to a post office to send a fax, and make someone on the other end go to a post office to pick up that fax.
The 1970s was a time of heavy regulation, but fortunately, the FCC said no to the Postal Service. Can you imagine what would have happened had the FCC agreed to prevent fax machines from being sold commercially? Such regulation would have quashed the rollout of that technology.
Instead, fax machines were everywhere in the 1980s and 1990s, becoming an important time-saving communication technology.
A Model Statesman
The point is, Coolidge’s restraint counts as an achievement of its own. Most historians won’t treat it fairly, though.
Why? Because it doesn’t have the drama of a crisis, of some massive federal intervention that may or may not have been effective.
Coolidge was the last of our presidents in the model of the Founders. Every other president since him, in both parties, has been in the activist mold of Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson to one degree or another.
And so Coolidge was the last of the statesmen who would have fit comfortably alongside Jefferson and Madison. We could use more presidents with that disposition.
If we think about what we want in our statesmen, what qualities of character, what depth of insight about our Constitution and how our society works, we would say we want more leaders like Coolidge.
Steven F. Hayward is a resident scholar at the University of California–Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and a fellow of the Law and Policy Program at Berkeley Law. He is the author of the two-volume chronicle The Age of Reagan.