Keeping Cool with Coolidge

In The American Spectator, Ryan L. Cole writes that mister, we could use a man like Silent Cal again:

Today Coolidge lies buried in a tiny Vermont village just a short distance from the house where he was born and raised. A humble headstone marks his final resting place; the word “president” is nowhere to be found on the simple marker. On the occasion of Coolidge’s death, H.L. Mencken said, “Should the day ever dawn, when Jefferson’s warnings are heeded at last, and we reduce government to its simplest terms, it may very well happen that Calvin’s bones now resting inconspicuously in the Vermont granite will come to be revered as those of a man who really did the nation some service.” Given the results of our recent election, the arrival of that day seems unlikely.

As Cole writes, Coolidge “had no interest in saving or rescuing the American people — he possessed, what is today, an uncommon faith they could take care of that themselves.”

Cole writes that when shortly before Coolidge died on this date in 1933, he was quoted as saying, “I feel I no longer fit in with these times.” Imagine how he would have felt witnessing 2008: “The Year Americans Rejected Self-Reliance.”