A Massachusetts conservative
How Mitt Romney (and other GOP hopefuls) might take a cue from Calvin Coolidge, the last Bay State governor to make it to the White House
Well before Senator John F. Kerry went windsurfing in 2004, the failed presidential bids of Michael Dukakis and Paul Tsongas had all but doomed Massachusetts Democrats seeking the White House. In former governor Mitt Romney, however, a new kind of Bay State presidential aspirant is now taking the national stage: A conservative Republican who tacked to the center to get elected statewide and now courts the Christian right to win his party's nomination. If the "Massachusetts liberal" has become a national punch line, what of the "Massachusetts conservative"?
In fact, though he's not well remembered today, there was a Massachusetts conservative who not only won the presidency but enjoyed phenomenal popularity throughout his tenure: former governor Calvin Coolidge. Mitt Romney could do worse than to study his example.
The 30th president may strike some as an unlikely source of inspiration. His reputation today is that of the ineffectual "Silent Cal" -- the taciturn, hands-off executive who chomped a cigar while America spent and gambled its way into the Depression. Or he's remembered as the business-friendly exponent of "trickle-down" economics who embodied a fading set of Victorian values such as thrift, industry, and self-reliance that even during his tenure in the 1920s seemed a throwback to bygone times.
Indeed, in recent years, Coolidge's admirers have included mainly diehard conservatives, such as the columnist Robert Novak (who ranks him as his second favorite president), the folks at the Heritage Foundation (who recently screened the first ever Coolidge documentary), and -- no surprise -- Ronald Reagan, who cribbed from Coolidge's speeches and hung his portrait in the Cabinet Room.
The popular image of Coolidge -- of personal reticence and political restraint -- isn't wrong. Five-foot-nine and slender, with wispy sandy hair and a pallid complexion, Coolidge had bony features and a downturned line of a mouth that gave him an air of sternness.
Coolidge's restrained demeanor and personality also expressed a restrained philosophy of governance. He believed in a minimal federal state and a relatively inactive presidency. Deeply attached to his native 19th-century Vermont, he espoused its Yankee mores of piety and parsimony long after they had come to strike many Americans as anachronistic.
Yet to dismiss Coolidge as a vestige of olden days is to overlook his contributions to American politics. Coolidge in fact straddled two ages. Leading the nation during what the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd, authors of the pioneering sociological study "Middletown," called "one of the eras of greatest rapidity in change in the history of human institutions," Coolidge silently blessed the go-go consumption of the 1920s, even as he shared widespread fears about moral decay.
By epitomizing old-fashioned values -- showing that they could thrive amid the kinetic consumerism -- Coolidge sanctified the so-called "New Era." He offered the public, wrote Walter Lippmann, a "Puritanism de luxe, in which it is possible to praise all the classic virtues while continuing to enjoy all the modern conveniences."
Coolidge was wildly popular in his time and broke ground in self-consciously governing not just as the head of his party or the leader of a particular faction, but as president of all the people. His image -- as sensible and modest, upright and prudent, a uniter and not a divider -- allowed different political groups to see him as one of their own. In 2008, with voters newly wary of ideological zeal, such a Coolidgean strategy just might show the way to the GOP nomination -- and offer Republicans their best shot at holding the White House.
"The chief business of America is business," runs Coolidge's best known aphorism -- and to be sure, his appreciation of 20th-century novelties included, foremost, a respect for the fruits of capitalism. But Coolidge's embrace of modernity revealed itself in subtler ways, including a new style of politics and governance in which candidates were replacing parties as the focus of voters' loyalties.
In the 19th century, politicians ascended through service to their party machinery, voters identified much more deeply as Democrats or Republicans than they do today, and there were few independents. Congress, seen as the people's representatives, set the agenda in Washington more than the president. But in the new century, as Lippmann noted, decisions were being "made by the interaction, not of Congress and the executive, but of public opinion and the executive." Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson relied on their own outsized personalities as much as on partisan appeals. They ran for office -- and governed -- by appealing through the new mass media to the still-novel concept of public opinion (still then measured in primitive ways).
Coolidge, too, governed mainly through what Campbell Bascom Slemp, the conservative Virginia congressman whom the president hired as his chief aide, called "direct reliance upon the mass of the people." Holding the presidency when radio, newsreels, and photography were transforming political communication, the tremendously popular Coolidge -- despite his famous silence -- learned to speak directly to the public. According to his vice president, Charles Dawes, "The popularity of Coolidge is due to the fact that he, not [Congress], best understood the people and they him."
What Coolidge understood about the people in the 1920s was their aversion to ideological crusades. In politics as well as personality, he embodied a moderation that fit his age.
This moderation was in evidence from early on in his career, when he began ascending the ladder of Massachusetts state politics. As a legislator, lieutenant governor, and in his two years as governor, he leavened his trademark fiscal discipline with progressive elements that accommodated the popular desire for reform. He vetoed bills to raise legislators' salaries by 50 percent, to upgrade the Boston ferry, and to widen a South Boston thoroughfare. Yet he backed measures to improve working conditions, regulate landlords, fund reforestation projects, and control outdoor advertising. His greatest feat as governor -- restructuring the state government by consolidating more than 100 agencies into fewer than 20 -- married the efficiency of progressivism to small-government conservatism.
It was Coolidge's role in the 1919 Boston police strike that made him a national figure. When cops walked off the job one September night and rioting broke out -- causing much property damage and taking several lives -- Coolidge backed the police commissioner's decision to fire the strikers. "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time," he wrote to the labor leader Samuel Gompers. The message, cannily released to the press, was classic Coolidge, neatly articulating a common-sense wisdom with a tautness that made it ripe for repetition in newspapers, newsreels, and conversation.
Due to this stringent stand, many historians assumed Coolidge to be a troglodyte on labor issues. But earlier in his term he had helped placate Boston's aggrieved streetcar workers, and in 1912 as a state senator he had mediated a major textile strike in Lawrence. Even his stance on the police strike was widely deemed reasonable, shared by President Wilson, for one, whose said the officers' abdication of their "sacred and direct" duty amounted to "a crime against civilization."
After handily winning reelection in 1919 -- Massachusetts governors then served one-year terms -- Coolidge was hailed as a presidential candidate. Fueling the talk was journalist and public relations man Bruce Barton, a founder of the advertising firm BBD&O, who sculpted the governor's image as the quiet, common-sensical moderate. "The radicals and reactionaries fill the newspapers, but the great majority of Americans are neither radicals nor reactionaries," Barton wrote in Collier's, in the first of many paeans to Coolidge. "They are middle-of-the-road folks who own their own homes and work hard....Coolidge belongs with that crowd."
Barton promoted Coolidge at the 1920 Republican convention. Though his effort failed -- the handsome, undistinguished Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding got the nod on the tenth ballot -- a spontaneous outcry by floor delegates made Coolidge vice president virtually by acclamation. Whereas Harding was famously picked in the old manner, by power-brokers amid swirling cigar smoke, Coolidge acceded in the newer fashion -- by publicity and direct appeals.
When Harding died of a heart attack in August 1923, Coolidge was visiting his father's farmhouse in Plymouth Notch, Vt. -- a tiny hamlet nestled in the Green Mountains where he was raised. The news of the president's passing reached the farm after midnight, and Coolidge was sworn in as president -- by his father, a notary public -- in a small parlor by the glow of a kerosene lamp. Had Coolidge and Barton planned the scene, they couldn't have devised more propitious atmospherics: The spare, rural tableau exuded the New England virtues of simplicity, piety, and duty that Coolidge had long traded on in cultivating his image. The tone for his presidency was set.
Soon after taking over from the late Harding, Coolidge moved to contain the executive-branch corruption scandals -- soon to be lumped under the umbrella term "Teapot Dome" -- that were just surfacing. After some missteps, he named a bipartisan pair of special prosecutors, unloaded tainted Cabinet members, and voiced a pitch-perfect note of condemnation to reassure the public that justice was being done. In contrast to the stench of the Harding pols, Coolidge seemed a breath of fresh Vermont air.
But while Coolidge distanced himself from the sleaze of the so-called "Ohio Gang," he maintained his bona fides with the business world in other ways -- showing his ability to unify most of the diverse elements within the fractious GOP. With Wall Street, Coolidge stayed right by imposing few constraints on business, presiding over a new laxness at regulatory agencies, and, when additional agencies were called for -- such as the Federal Radio Commission, needed to oversee the rapidly growing broadcasting industry -- he blessed an emerging regime that favored the leading commercial networks.
Though many liberals viewed Coolidge as a stooge of business, he retained support from several of the GOP's Progressives -- the former acolytes of Roosevelt who continued to prefer enlightened government activism to raw laissez-faire. Coolidge walked a similar tightrope on cultural issues. On the one hand, he made known his distaste for the decadence of the youth culture and flouters of Prohibition, earning jeers from the era's "smart set." But his public stands on the day's moral controversies convinced most Americans that he was no zealot.
Coolidge shared none of the bigotry of the revived Ku Klux Klan -- though he never mustered a rousing denunciation of the noxious fraternity, even when 40,000 robed members marched by the White House in 1925. He spoke nobly about toleration and religious diversity in America -- even while signing into law immigration restrictions that kept out Southern and Eastern Europeans. He quietly opposed the prosecution of John Scopes for teaching evolution in a Tennessee school, and he supported anti-lynching laws, although he did so with such tepidness that they never passed. Overall Coolidge kept himself out of debilitating controversies, exuding an air of morality but not alienating voters with moralism.
It was a strength, not a weakness, that within his own party Coolidge occupied no clear niche. "He is not easy to classify as either a conservative or a progressive -- the two major lines of political division," noted Bascom Slemp. His personality, not his party or even his platform, commended him to voters. "I have not met anybody who is going to vote for the Republican Party," Barton said in 1924. "They are going to vote 'for Coolidge' or against him."
Clearly, 2008 is not 1924. Too much has changed -- in the nature of the parties, in the values of Americans, in the issues facing the country -- for Coolidge's model to provide any neat formula for presidential candidates today. But it's clear the Republicans will be seeking a new direction. The ideological adventures of the current administration seem to have discredited, with a majority of the public, the brand of hard-line conservatism espoused by George W. Bush in the last two presidential elections, the Newt Gingrich Congress of the 1990s, and even Ronald Reagan in the 1980s (though his genial and folksy -- not to say Coolidgean -- talk of traditional values still bestirs his many admirers).
GOP voters may be looking for a Coolidge-like figure who can espouse the party's traditional pro-business creed without evoking fears of corruption, someone who can project old-fashioned values without prompting anxieties about the power of religious conservatives. Thus John McCain burnishes a trans-partisan, good-government aura. Rudolph Giuliani styles himself a football coach for the nation. Even Romney, when he's not wooing the Christian right, trades on his pre-Big Dig reputation of can-do competence. For one of these men, the forsaken mantle of Calvin Coolidge is waiting to be taken up.
David Greenberg, a professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, is the author of "Calvin Coolidge," recently published by Henry Holt, and "Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image" (2003).
(Correction: Because of the mislabeling of a file photo, the caption accompanying a photograph of President Calvin Coolidge in Sunday's Ideas section identified the location incorrectly as the porch of his family home in Plymouth Notch, Vt. The photo shows Coolidge on the porch of his home at 21 Massasoit St. in Northampton, Mass.) 