Calvin Coolidge and the Power of Kroll

This summer I’m working as a caretaker and docent at the Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Vermont; Coolidge is one of two American Presidents born in Vermont and is the one more closely associated with the state, although his political base was in Western Massachusetts (which is culturally, economically, and demographically tied to Vermont and has a closely linked political history). He was a small-government right-winger of the old school, albeit one of the least racist Presidents of the first half of the twentieth century; he is known as a man of few words, “Silent Cal,” although he was capable of holding forth at length in settings like formal speeches and the writing of his autobiography. The autobiography is very good; Coolidge is one of about half a dozen Presidents whom it’s possible to assess as a capital-W Writer, along with the Adamses, Jefferson, Lincoln, Grant, and arguably Obama. (Other countries have these as well; isn’t it interesting, and revealing, that although the Academie Francaise has had plenty of former Presidents of France on it, the two Writers who have held that office in living memory, De Gaulle and Mitterrand, were not among them?)