Ex Libris: Calvin Coolidge

Calvin Coolidge as 48th Governor of Massachusetts, circa 1919. Coolidge became the 30th President of the United States, serving from 1923 to 1929. Library of Congress. Public Domain

“Silent Cal” Coolidge (1872–1933) was renowned for his dry, laconic wit. One story has him sitting at formal dinner beside a woman who told him she had a bet that she could coax at least three words out of him. “You lose,” Coolidge responded. Though that tale is more likely legend than fact, Coolidge’s one-sentence announcement “I do not choose to run for president in 1928” sums up perfectly his often taciturn nature.

In his writing, he was equally frugal with his words. On leaving the White House, he penned his autobiography in three months. Praised by historian Craig Fehrman as “the forgotten classic of presidential writing,” Coolidge’s short account of a life filled with significant events is a model of economy in prose.

A strong shyness and a deep reserve in boyhood lingered throughout Coolidge’s life, doubtless contributing to his guarded public emotions. His small-town Vermont roots may have also played a part in this restraint. After discovering in high school that he had a knack for both public speaking and telling jokes, he worked in college while reading for the law to overcome his natural reticence.

Calvin Coolidge, as a student at Amherst College. Public Domain

And it was his reading which helped him to do so.

Boyhood Literary Influences

Education was a priority in the Coolidge household. Coolidge biographer Amity Shlaes points out that the first gift John and Victoria Coolidge bought for their toddler son was a set of blocks with letters and numbers on the sides.

Like others of their age, Coolidge’s parents were well-versed in Scripture, and his grandmother, Sarah, taught Calvin and his sister Abbie the Bible chapter by chapter. In their house, there were as well certain classics, poetry, the plays of Shakespeare, and works by Greek and Roman authors.

Calvin Coolidge grew up reading American history, such as "The Green Mountain Boys" by D.P. Thompson.

American history also figured into this education. Coolidge would later remember his grandmother reading to him from “The Green Mountain Boys,” a book about Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen. “Washington and His Generals” was another of the boy’s favorites. This account included a description of Washington leaving the office of president after two terms because he “pined for the rest of a quiet home.” Later, though eligible for another presidential term in addition to the six years he had served, Coolidge followed Washington’s example, leaving the White House to return to his home in Northampton, Massachusetts.

The Classics

Coolidge as City Solicitor of Northampton, Mass, in 1900. Library of Congress. Public Domain

When newlyweds Calvin and Grace Coolidge set up their first home, Coolidge brought with them a beloved oak bookshelf along with books and authors he would revisit throughout his lifetime: Dante, the Bible, poets like Milton, Longfellow, and Whittier, and dictionaries and grammars in five languages.

The influence of ancient writers on the man who became America’s 30th president was especially profound. Both the Black River Academy in Ludlow, Vermont, where Coolidge spent his high school years, and his alma mater Amherst College steeped their students in Latin and Greek classics. At Black River, seven of the 12 courses Coolidge took from his sophomore through his senior year were in these subjects, and, by graduation, he had made his way through authors like Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil.

At Amherst, Coolidge continued his study of Greek, reading Herodotus and Homer, and also took up German. In his 2019 article “Coolidge and the Classics,” Jim Ottaway Jr. reminds his readers that the classics once formed the core of study on many campuses, then notes the profound effect such a curriculum had on Coolidge’s writing style—“Coolidge’s spare rhetoric evoked the classics”—and on his way of thinking.

One of Coolidge’s contemporaries, writer and reporter Charles W. Thompson, classified “Coolidge’s speeches as ‘Attic Style,’ the simpler, clearer, and more fact-based oratory common in the time of Julius Caesar.”

The Book That Mattered Most

"Cicero Denounces Catiline," fresco by Cesare Maccari, 1882–1888. Public Domain

It’s difficult today to imagine a young man being gripped by such a book as Cicero’s “Orations,” but this is precisely what happened to Coolidge. Influenced in part by his budding interest in local and national American politics, Coolidge found in the “Orations” inspiration, insights, and wisdom for a lifetime. As Ottaway reports, Coolidge once wrote that this work of addresses had captured “my attention to such a degree that I translated some of them in later life.”

At his graduation from Black River Academy in 1890, Coolidge memorized and delivered a speech he’d written about the power of oratory. In this speech, as Shlaes tells us, he paid homage to Cicero and “the force of Cicero’s oratory,” which had deflected the plans of dictators and “made even Caesar tremble.” There is no little irony in the fact that this shy boy not only received praise from The Vermont Tribune for his speech, but that the topic he’d chosen was centered on public speaking.

Like John Adams, Coolidge had grown up in farmland and a New England village, knew his Bible, and had taken key lessons in statecraft from the Romans.

In these ways, Calvin Coolidge was likely the last of a breed.

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