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?)

It’s an interesting job, a nice combination of traipsing around wet fields opening and closing barn doors, keeping my cool while attempting to operate a newfangled cash register, and discovering and disseminating technical minutiae about rural New England’s social and economic history. It is also acquainting me more with Calvin Coolidge the man, as one would expect. Coolidge has quotes like “the chief business of America is business” and “I tip my hat to security.” It is a subject of politicized and polarized debate among historians to this day whether his policies helped cause the Great Depression, and if so, how much of it was his own fault. And yet reading Coolidge’s writings in the Year of Whom Many Consider Our Lord Twenty Twentyfive, what sticks out is the difference in assumptions and philosophy between Coolidge’s rightism and what we see in America today.

Here, for example, is Coolidge on his choice not to run for a second full term:

It is difficult to conceive how one man can successfully serve the country for a term of more than eight years….longer than any other man has had it—too long!

(Franklin Delano Roosevelt would of course break this record barely a decade later; Coolidge was dead by that point, but it doesn’t take a genius to guess that he probably would have disapproved of FDR’s third and fourth terms, ethically as well as for policy reasons.)

Here he is on foreign affairs:

The country is in the midst of an era of prosperity more extensive and of peace more permanent than it has ever before experienced. But, having reached this position, we should not fail to comprehend that it can easily be lost. It needs more effort for its support than the less exalted places of the world. We shall not be permitted to take our case, but shall continue to be required to spend our days in unremitting toil. The actions of the Government must command the confidence of the country. Without this, our prosperity would be lost. We must extend to other countries the largest measure of generosity, moderation, and patience. In addition to dealing justly, we can well afford to walk humbly.

Here he is (from the same document, his sixth and last State of the Union) on civic virtue:

The end of government is to keep open the opportunity for a more abundant life. Peace and prosperity are not finalities; they are only methods. It is too easy under their influence for a nation to become selfish and degenerate. This test has come to the United States. Our country has been provided with the resources with which it can enlarge its intellectual, moral, and spiritual life. The issue is in the hands of the people. Our faith in man and God is the justification for the belief in our continuing success.

Here he is on state and federal power:

Yet the State governments deal with far more various and more intimate concerns of the people than does the National Government. All the operations of the minor civil divisions, parishes, wards, school districts, towns, cities, counties, and the like, are dependencies of the State. The maintenance of order through police, the general business of enforcing law, is left to the States. So is education. Property is held and transferred on terms fixed by the States. In short, the structure of social and business relationship is built chiefly about the laws of the States. It depends upon the exercise by the States of that vastly greater share of Government power which resides in them, to the exclusion of the Federal Government….Such is the real distribution of duties, responsibilities, and expenses. Yet people are given to thinking and speaking of the National Government as “the Government.” They demand more from it than it was ever intended to provide; and yet in the same breath they complain that Federal authority is stretching itself over areas which do not concern it.

And here, of course, is Coolidge on the State of Vermont:

Vermont is a state I love. I could not look upon the peaks of Ascutney, Killington, Mansfield, and Equinox without being moved in a way that no other scene could move me. It was here that I first saw the light of day; here I received my bride; here my dead lie pillowed on the loving breast of our everlasting hills. I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all, because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the union and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.

Reading passages like these in Coolidge’s writing, one has to ask: why? How did we get here? Coolidge’s failings as President, and there were many, were sins of omission, inaction, ideologically-determined passivity: not reining in his evil Treasury Secretary, not insisting on federal action against the violent Southern racism that he genuinely opposed, not giving more serious thought to whether the 1924 immigration restrictions were themselves racist, not, not, not. The current sins of Coolidge’s party, and of the American right-wing tradition in which he is a key figure, are sins of agitated, fretful, hyper-aggressive action. People get dragged out of school or church and mailed to El Salvador, reporters get shot in the street, soldiers get handpicked for events of state based on their political opinions. No silence, no dry wit, no self-control, no sense that there are things the state just shouldn’t do to—or for—its citizens.

How the American right evolved from Coolidge’s genuine restraint and self-control to what we see now is one of those things that is difficult to understand in toto even though every individual step—even the final leap into Trumpism—makes sense. The first key point is that many of Coolidge’s virtues were personal, rather than general features of the American right or the Republican Party of the 1920s. They were not shared either by his predecessor or by his successor. The second key point, or at least the second point that I would like to especially highlight (the times being evil), is the current very strong position of “law and order” within the Republican and rightist worldview.

“Law and order” interpreted literally is obviously a very good thing (American leftists’ strange tendency to measure their views against specifically anarchist moral canons even if they’re not anarchists notwithstanding), but in practice it psychologically means a paranoid obsession with control and politically means a yen for cracking skulls for the sake of skulls being seen to have been cracked. “Law and order is when you brutalize protesters, and the more protesters you brutalize, the more lawful and orderly it is.” This is a tendency that has long been a frankly extremist point of Republican politics even in periods in which the party has been moderate otherwise. It tends to make the whole party look and feel more extreme in periods in which it is emphasized. It also, unfortunately, tends to be popular with the public, at least at first. One big, beautiful exception to the latter took place in the summer and early autumn months of 2020, in the anti-racism and anti-police protests after the murder of George Floyd; the current situation, as of this writing in the early summer of 2025, is among other things the apex (I hope) of the backlash to that movement’s excesses. Someone like the disgraced Minneapolis police union leader Bob Kroll, who fought tooth and nail against attempts to do anything about the cops who killed Floyd even as individuals, exerts much sway over the current situation, even though from beyond the political and professional grave. (Or maybe not; now he is under consideration for US Marshal.)

In addition to subjects like Vermont, institutions, and federal power, Calvin Coolidge also had a well-known set of remarks about police unions. Showing a firm hand as Governor of Massachusetts during a police strike in Boston in 1919 made him a national figure; this was a key moment in his methodical but rapid political rise (in 1911, a small-city mayor; in 1921, Vice President). “There is no right to strike against the public safety, anywhere, anytime”—thus, a conservative politician in a time when the interests of a police union wouldn’t have been seen as dramatically distinct from those of organized labor more generally. Coolidge likely thought that most strikes were “against the public safety,” and certainly many of his most impassioned supporters and admirers did and still do. Yet now many on the left do see police unions in particular as something different even from other public-sector unions, because they tend to create a self-protecting state within a state among people who already have casual access to high-powered firearms. Samuel Gompers was unenthusiastic about this strike and eventually advised the policemen to return to work because he thought it was damaging the cause of labor in body politic at large; today, he might well have plenty of other reasons to boot for siding with Governor Coolidge.

Much more comes to my mind as well, like the Republican Party’s increasingly overt post-Nixon embrace of the Southern racism that Coolidge abhorred; the current regime’s preference for appointing executive branch officials as Dantescan punishments for the organs of state that they lead; and the sheer malicious stupidity of today’s iteration of the longstanding Republican distaste for the professionalized federal bureaucracy. The last point admittedly does not work for a compare-and-contrast with Coolidge, because he did not like the professionalized federal bureaucracy very much either; Andrew Mellon, the aforementioned evil Treasury Secretary, did not quite cut a proto-Muskian figure, but that is only because Musk’s particular form of half-baked cruelty is so thoroughly characteristic of our own times. Even so, it remains illuminating, and to a point even inspiring, to remind ourselves what it looks like when even a very conservative President does not believe that he is, or act as if he is, a king.

I ended the above paragraph the way I did in reference, of course, to our current President, and the “No Kings” rallies against him that are happening (or, in some cases, were supposed to happen) on the day I finish writing this and publish it online. I am doing that right now, and there is one last thing that I would like to clarify before, or as, I do: our current President is also an illegitimate President, our current usurper, even though we voted for him. This is not for any finicky procedural reason, but because an avowed opponent of liberal democracy has no moral right to hold a position of public trust in a liberal-democratic country, and no power in the holding of that position that patriots have any moral duty to respect. After all, as Calvin Coolidge once said, “It is a great advantage to a President, and a source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man. When a man begins to feel that he is the only one who can lead in this republic, he is guilty of treason to the spirit of our institutions.” So true, Silent Cal!