What Calvin Coolidge Got Right About America
Calvin Coolidge is a bit of a forgotten man. Our nation’s 30th president sits on a relatively quiet spot on the national timeline courtesy of preceding the dramatic upheavals of the Great Depression and WWII that tend to dominate the historical record. As such, he has no great triumphs or tragedies, scandals or large-scale projects to go down in the books. He tends to be glossed over in large part due to precisely this lack of splash.
Calvin Coolidge is, in a dozen interesting ways, the opposite of the typical modern president. As a bulwark of conservative tradition and an exemplarily humble commander in chief, it’s a shame that the political wisdom he espoused from his position as leader of the United States is largely ignored — lessons of the past shriveling up and slowly dying becoming little but whispers on the wind.
The Ebb of Progressivism
The 1920s were a golden age filled with all the good metrics: low unemployment, rising standard of living, thriving businesses, surging productivity and the like. Following WWI, conservative presidents such as Coolidge were especially careful to stem the trend of governmental centralization that had proved expedient during the war. Coolidge was turning the tide of progressivism that the former Democratic president Woodrow Wilson had urged for quite some time.
