Calvin Coolidge is in or he’s out. Sometimes, Americans admire his kind of president, sometimes not. He believed in small, low-tax government that minded the Constitution. Things easily go off-track, he said, when somebody in the White House gets the notion he’s a “great man.” Left-wing elitists have always despised Coolidge but the country fared well on his watch, 1923-1929. Living standards went up, armies stayed put. Cars, radios, indoor plumbing and paved roads proliferated, as did elegant homes, hotels and office skyscrapers. True, the stock market crashed six months after Coolidge left office. Then came the Depression. Many believe he should have seen it coming better, and sounded alarms against the easy bank credit that inflated the Wall Street bubble. He died before Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal came in but believed his own successor, Herbert Hoover, a fellow Republican, hindered a natural recovery with too much “socialistic” tinkering. Despite the image of “Silent Cal” (which he shrewdly cultivated) Coolidge was a fluent orator who wrote his own speeches. Brevity hit the mark, he thought. But it was a tad too brief to complacently assert, “The chief business of America is business.” His national reputation stemmed from the Boston police strike of 1919. “There is no right to strike against the public safety by any body, any time, any where,” he declared as governor — and fired every cop who stayed off the job. Ronald Reagan dealt likewise with air traffic controllers 62 years later. Today’s governors and mayors probably wouldn’t dare. They’ve given public employee unions virtual veto power over sound budgeting. The best place to get a handle on Calvin Coolidge is not Washington, D.C., but tiny Plymouth Notch, Vt. Born there in 1872, he often returned to help with farm chores, even as vice president. On one such visit, his father, a notary, famously swore him in as president by lamplight in the parlor the night Warren Harding died. The homestead and village are a state historic site now. There’s a general store, museum, tool-stocked barns, a coffee shop, and a gem of a country church. Open April to mid-November, the scene sweetly captures a bygone era. Thank the president’s late son, John, for that. (A younger son, Calvin Jr., died in the White House of an infection easily treatable 20 years later. “When he went the power and the glory of the presidency went with him,” the 30th president’s son wrote in a brief, surprisingly readable autobiography.) John Coolidge, a retired businessman, donated several buildings and a forested hill opposite the village to the state. A ski resort was eying the hill. “We’d have been all condominiums,” a docent said. In the village cemetery, Calvin Coolidge lies with generations of his kin under the sparest of stones. His name and dates are on it but not the word “president.”

---

Copyright ©2026— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)

---