Born of the Fourth of July

Peter Schramm of the Ashbrook Center (who is retiring soon as Executive Director) writes on that great forgotten president of the last century, Calvin Coolidge.  Fortunately, in the last few years, Coolidge's presidency has begun to be restored, with thanks to a series of books that have contributed to the restoration of his good name, which was trampled by the New Deal historians.

Ashbrook’s own Steven Hayward gave Coolidge an A+ for his “principled constitutionalism” in the recently published volume,The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents from Wilson to Obama. Last month the accomplished Amity Shlaes published a biography, Coolidge, to worthy reviews. And this month Why Coolidge Matters: Leadership Lessons from America’s Most Underrated President appeared from the young scholar Charles C. Johnson. 

All of these books demonstrate that Calvin Coolidge was one of our more learned and cultured, and thoughtful and eloquent, presidents. They also make evident that Coolidge revered the Constitution and our institutions and habits of self-government. Coolidge said of the Constitution, “no other document devised by the hand of man ever brought so much progress and happiness to humanity. The good it has wrought can never be measured.” And he understood that a good civic education was the necessary condition of freedom: ”If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it.” In other words, we must think as our Founding Fathers thought.

And what Coolidge shared with Abraham Lincoln:

He also knew, as his hero Abraham Lincoln knew, that the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence was the solid ground upon which our constitutional government rests. We were not only establishing a new nation in 1776, but a new nation based on new principles of justice and liberty. Coolidge was eloquent on this point. There is a finality to the truths of the Declaration that is exceedingly restful, he said on the 150th anniversary of the great charter. Those progressives who want to move away from these principles, “are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.” In short, those who do not believe in natural rights are the real reactionaries.

This is not hyperbole to say that, next to Lincoln, Coolidge was the greatest interpreter of the natural rights philosophy which forms the bedrock of our nation.