Two Underrated Presidents
By Mitch Daniels
This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of the Coolidge Review.
Calvin Coolidge is misunderstood. He is misunderstood because historians have often misrepresented him. Historians who wanted to discredit the policies he had championed, who thought the nation needed to pursue a more statist approach to its national affairs. So his taciturnity was misread often as humorlessness.
His firm commitment to policies of economic freedom was misrepresented as some sort of soulless materialism. But this is the man who said, “Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshiped.” He always concerned himself with the bigger purposes and the more eternal things—the “things of the spirit,” as he said in another speech.
What we can learn from Coolidge are the elements of a potential countercultural moment in a nation that some of us think is in serious need of a cultural course correction. I can’t think of a style less in sync with the zeitgeist of today. Our most celebrated figures are often celebrated for their arrogance, for their performative characteristics. For now, at least, we live in a look-at-me, dance-in-the-end-zone world. How very different from Calvin Coolidge.
Modesty and Virtue
Calvin Coolidge’s humility was more than simply personal virtue. He understood that humility is essential to wisdom. The person who knows that he or she doesn’t know it all is more likely to learn and grow.
Coolidge knew that humility was essential to the protection of freedom, too. Those to whom high offices are entrusted need to have absorbed that they are not entitled to tell—or capable of telling—their fellow human beings how to live.
Coolidge’s fiscal policy was grounded in virtue, in a sense of stewardship of other people’s funds. That is a solemn duty.
Imagine, just to take one example, how Coolidge would react to the notion that we should cancel hundreds of billions of dollars of debt owed by people who freely incurred those obligations to pursue what they hoped would be a useful higher education. He would be appalled at the ethical aspects of this, the unfairness of rewarding people who don’t need it at the expense of those less fortunate. He would be deeply troubled by the moral implications of encouraging people to walk away from obligations they had undertaken, however wise or unwise those were.
Coolidge also would be horrified at the unconstitutionality of an executive branch arrogating to itself the ability to spend hundreds of billions of dollars at the stroke of a pen. The first article of the Constitution plants that responsibility firmly, unambiguously, in the legislative branch.
And of course, he could not comprehend a government that already has run up unimaginable bills, not for investment in the future but for consumption in the current day. History will see this as one of the least excusable actions of any government ever.
Grant and Coolidge
I don’t think it’s melodramatic to say we’re approaching one of those moments that threatens our free institutions and our way of life. This moment should not surprise us. History is full of failed experiments to move away from autocratic rule.
The moment should not completely dispirit us either. This country has been through such moments before and somehow found a way to come out well. We could use a Coolidge today—though perhaps one who could conform his taciturn style to the communication modes of the day. But one who would once again help the nation find a vocabulary of common purpose, of placing the future ahead of the present, one’s children and grandchildren ahead of one’s own interests today.
Again, this has happened before. Like Coolidge, Ulysses Grant has been badly misunderstood. Historians, especially southern historians eager to build the notion of the Lost Cause, misrepresented Grant for many years. His reputation has recovered somewhat in recent years, however.
I am struck by the parallels between Grant and Coolidge. Grant was once described as someone who could “be silent in several languages.” Who does that sound like?
Grant, like Coolidge, displayed a sly humor. Once someone said to Grant that the imperious Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner didn’t believe in the Bible. “No, I suppose not,” Grant said. “He didn’t write it.”
Grant was fiscally strict as well. He put this nation back on the gold standard after the greenback era of the Civil War.
My favorite description of Grant could just as easily apply to Coolidge. One Union officer recalled of General Grant, “There was no nonsense, no sentiment; only a plain businessman of the republic.”
Our thirtieth president embodied the no-nonsense businessman of the republic.
No Inevitabilities
So it looks like our country has some troubles. But we should never surrender to the idea that we can’t overcome those. Paul Johnson wrote, “There are no inevitabilities in history.” Even at the founding, those who created this nation recognized that freedom was an iffy prospect. The language on currency of the early republic said, “Exitus in dubio est.” That means, “The outcome is in doubt.”
The outcome will always be in doubt in this fragile experiment of letting free people, people of individual dignity, govern themselves and not submit to the dictates of despots. But one important point to remember about both Grant and Coolidge: nobody saw them coming, and yet when the nation needed these men most, they were there.
I think leaders like this will be there again.
Mitch Daniels has served as governor of Indiana and president of Purdue University.