Looking Back

"Calvin Coolidge was an odd fish in the White House."

Begun and completed in the past tense was the article William Allen White of Emporia, Kan., wrote about President Coolidge in the August (1928) Plain Talk. Excerpts:

"He was peculiarly Yankee, a blue-bellied, Vermont Yankee to the core. He had exhibited absolutely no initiative. He had spoken no memorable phrase. ... He played no poker, drank no liquor, made few friends. And Mrs. Coolidge, who had come with him from the duplex apartment in Northampton, Massachusetts, for which they had been paying twenty-seven dollars a month all their married life, and who moved with him into one of Washington's rather grand but noisy hotels, had to work hard, those first seventeen Washington months of the Vice-Presidency, keeping him awake after bedtime in Northampton at nine-thirty. . . .

"Coolidge always knew more definitely what he did not want than what he wanted. His messages were often vague on the positive side but crystalline in their clarity about his dislikes and aversions. ... He is negation incarnate. As President, he bestraddled progress face backward. . . .

"Coolidge's plus quality was honesty; honesty backed by a kind of herd courage. Alone he is timid; with his crowd he is immovable, undaunted. And the picture which the millions saw across the gulf which separates a President from his people was the face of an honest man; so they idealized this picture and saw a man who saved their taxes; a man who was immovable amid clamor; a man who defied the mob; a man who beatified plutocracy by glorifying parsimony; a man who defied untoward events by ignoring them--him they saw as a hero and blinked his warts and scars. So in the white light that beats upon a throne the minor vices of a President sometimes at long range become his major virtues in the public eye."