Thinking Cal Coolidge: An Inquiry into the Roots of His Intellectual Life

The image of Calvin Coolidge created by critics and hostile historians would seem to foreclose the possibility of thinking that Coolidge displayed a significant intellectual life. Most historians have embraced the notion that President Coolidge was bereft of intellectual power and certainly not possessed of organized ideas that could be used in the public square. The opposite is true. Calvin Coolidge was, indeed, a sophisticated thinker and writer, a characteristic ignored or unknown to textbook writers. Perhaps, Coolidge was "silent Cal," but he was also reading and writing and "thinking Cal." Calvin Coolidge was an extraordinary ordinary man-just right for the presidency in the 1920s. Perhaps, such a man is once again needed in the presidency as the 21st century unfolds.