Average Genius

CALVIN COOLIDGE--Claude M. Fuess --Little, Brown ($4.75).

"In trying to anticipate the verdict of history, we can be sure that Calvin Coolidge will not be remembered as a great constructive President, like Washington and Jackson and Lincoln and Wilson. Nor does he belong with the weaklings, with Pierce and Buchanan and Grant and Harding. His place is with John Quincy Adams and Rutherford B. Hayes and Grover Cleveland--with strong Presidents who had a few great issues to settle but whose integrity and sterling character have made them stand out more for what they were than for what they did." Such, this week, was the "definitive" guess of Biographer Fuess, 55-year-old headmaster of Andover. Specifically, he admitted that Coolidge lacked "broad vision," originality, imagination. Such admissions testify to Biographer Fuess' fairness; they do not diminish one whit his great admiration for Coolidge.

A labor of love, Calvin Coolidge was six years a-writing. Biographer Fuess read the letters Coolidge wrote, from schooldays on, to his father and stepmother (Col. John Coolidge kept them in a big mahogany cigar humidor); Mrs. Coolidge gave him personal documents, answered questions; he was permitted to ransack the Coolidge file of Frank W. Stearns, Boston department store tycoon and Coolidge's political deus ex machina; he talked to dozens who knew Coolidge. For his labors, Biographer Fuess has assembled more facts than did his livelier rival, William Allen White, whose Coolidge biography, A Puritan in Babylon, was published in 1938.

And he has emerged with a staunch conviction that Coolidge was a "genius of the average." (It was this genius, he thinks, which led astray so many sophisticated observers -- they looked for the wrong signs, being familiar only with commoner and more spectacular varieties.)

Among the facts in Calvin Coolidge will be found the best pro-Coolidge account of the Boston Police Strike of 1919, which rocketed Governor Coolidge to national fame. Biographer Fuess traces the most detailed account of Coolidge's pre-Presidential career, his rise from clerk in the Northampton, Mass, law office of Judge Field ("an inscrutable little devil," said the Judge) to his nomination as Vice President in 1920. (Fuess contends that Coolidge would have got the Presidential nomination except for Senator Lodge's sabotage. Said the aristocratic Senator: "Nominate a man who lives in a two-family house! Never!".) Fuess carefully assembles all the crabbed Coolidge wisecracks on record. No biographer has been at greater pains to disprove Coolidge's reputed coldness, or to attest his personal and political integrity, his stubborn loyalty to democracy as Vermont Yankees knew it.

Result is a book that rescues Coolidge from more than one depression-inspired stigma; will certainly evoke a few nostalgic memories. But to call Calvin Coolidge a definitive biography is only a euphemism. Of no U. S. President has the definitive biography been written, including Washington, longest dead. Of Coolidge least of all--a President whose character baffled millions--is it likely that either the last fact or the last interpretation has been turned in.

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