Silent Cal’s loud patriotism

A century ago, a president marked America’s 150th anniversary, albeit with much less fanfare than the current occupant of the White House marked the 250th. Derided as taciturn and boring by his critics and by many historians, Calvin Coolidge had much to say about the nation’s founding ideals.

Born less than a decade after the Civil War and assuming office in the aftermath of World War I, the former vice president and governor of Massachusetts was circumspect about the fragility of the experiment in human government he was tasked with stewarding. In a speech in Philadelphia marking the sesquicentennial, Coolidge was nevertheless bullish on America:

Although a century and a half measured in comparison with the length of human experience is but a short time, yet measured in the life of governments and nations it ranks as a very respectable period. Certainly enough time has elapsed to demonstrate with a great deal of thoroughness the value of our institutions and their dependability as rules for the regulation of human conduct and the advancement of civilization. They have been in existence long enough to become very well seasoned. They have met, and met successfully, the test of experience

Coolidge revered the Founders, particularly George Washington, of whom he said, “The clearness of his intellect, the soundness of his judgment, the wisdom of his counsel, the disinterested patriotism of his actions, are constantly revealed to us with a new and compelling force. The reverence for his memory continues to increase.”

Coolidge was a conservative, which to him meant an unyielding fealty to the principles of the Declaration and Constitution, which he felt needed no improvement. He was often labeled “Silent Cal” for his philosophy that a president should use his words sparingly and for his aversion to expanded executive power. Coolidge, who served as vice president under Warren Harding, assumed office when Harding died suddenly. Coolidge was sworn into office in the middle of the night in a tiny town in Vermont, in the bedroom of his childhood home, by his father, who was a notary public. After taking the oath, he went back to bed.

After the tumult of World War I and the expansionist progressive policies of Woodrow Wilson, Coolidge’s restraint was a breath of fresh air. When he left office in 1928, he was asked his most important accomplishment. He answered, “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.” Would that leaders in both parties today might consider Coolidge’s limited view of government, a philosophy admired by Ronald Reagan, who would hang the 30th president’s image in his Oval Office.

A century later, the America Coolidge presided over looks very different. We’ve defeated the Nazis and won the Cold War. We enjoy prosperity and liberty that is still the envy of the world. We are an engine of innovation in this new digital age.

Yet we’d be wise to listen to Calvin Coolidge, not merely for his wise and prudent approach to government, but for his belief in the Christian moral presuppositions that he felt were the foundation of American liberty. Of the Declaration, he wrote:

In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man—these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.

As we mark our 250th anniversary, many are debating the place of Christianity in the American experiment. Some, weary of modernism, are dissatisfied with the Constitutional order and long for an established church of some sort. Others insist that America is a strictly secular nation and would push Christianity to the margins. Coolidge would rebuke both approaches, pointing us to the wisdom of the Founders who neither desired a state church nor envisioned a naked public square.

Our rights, Coolidge wisely understood, are precious but are not handed out to us by a fickle government. They are given to us by God. But if we forget the source of our liberty, the entire project will erode. Liberty becomes license. Freedom gives way to expressive individualism. Shared moral norms are subsumed by tribalism and competing ideologies.

Like the America Coolidge addressed in 1926, we in 2026 are stewards of an inheritance we are tasked with preserving. This requires moral and spiritual renewal. And it requires a reaffirmed commitment to our founding ideals:

Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken.