Puritan in the Cabinet Room

By Hugh Sidey

With his flinty stare, red hair, high collar and striped trousers, Calvin Coolidge is now an established presence in the Cabinet Room, a quiet patron of supply-side economics. He is on the wall in oils, along with Lincoln and Eisenhower. When Coolidge appeared on the morning of Ronald Reagan's Inauguration, some of the staff members were startled. "There's been an error," suggested one aide, believing a workman had mistaken the Vermonter for Jefferson or maybe McKinley. No, the report came back, the President wants Coolidge, the cutter of taxes and debt, the man who squandered few words and less money.

When Secretary of the Treasury Donald Regan spied Coolidge in such an exalted position, he kidded the boss. Regan's father, a park police officer, went out on strike in sympathy with the Boston police who walked off the job in 1919. The elder Regan lost his job when the strike was squelched with help from Governor Coolidge. "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anytime, anywhere," declared Coolidge. Those 15 words made him a national hero and helped make him President.

Regan, properly instructed by Reagan, went back to the books and dug out the economic history of Coolidge's White House years. Regan polished up some nuggets from Andrew Mellon, the Secretary of the Treasury of those exuberant days. One of them: "If the spirit of business adventure is killed, this country will cease to hold the foremost position in the world." That is the stuff to swell a supply-sider's heart.

Skeptics have abounded from the start. Coolidge has never been heroic history. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. keeps reminding readers that Coolidge was noted for sleeping twelve hours a day. Schlesinger, who served John Kennedy, knew of no other President who spent that much time in bed sleeping.

The White House had a dickens of a time finding the new painting of Cal. His official portrait hangs in the East Foyer. Charles Hopkinson painted it in 1932 for $4,000 but accepted $2,500 when a committee of Senators said that was all they could raise. Coolidge would have loved the hard bargain. In any event, that portrait could not be moved and there was not another one around. The official portrait was about all that was left of the Coolidge days, save a couple of pieces of undistinguished cherry bedroom furniture and an old Pullman menu from a trip on the Chicago & North Western Railway listing two broiled lamb chops at 80-c-, Coolidge's kind of fare. The White House curator sent off to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass., for another portrait of Coolidge. It was painted by Frank O. Salisbury in 1934, and a few of the wrinkles and the drooping mouth were softened on order of the 30th President's wife and admiring friends.

This romantic Coolidge may have gained a little stature in the past ten months. Thomas B. Silver has suggested in the American Scholar that Coolidge has been victimized in part by Schlesinger's own bias. "Imagine that the next five years are characterized by peace, national calm, unprecedented inflation-free prosperity, and rigid executive integrity," writes Silver, suggesting that was the nature of the Coolidge era. Surely that is the man Ronald Reagan sees when he glances at the Cabinet Room wall, and the man Ronald Reagan wants to be.

The debate about Coolidge will go on. The verbal sketches in William Allen White's 1938 biography A Puritan in Babylon still loom large in public memory: "Flinty-faced, sugar-cured and hickory-smoked, the wordless Yankee joss sitting cross-legged in the, cosmos"; the world was "running madly extravagant"; Coolidge "stood, blinking at the tidal forces he could not fathom." If Reagan's economics fail, historians may say the same about him. If supply-side succeeds in some fashion, Reagan will not only give himself a boost in history but win a few more years of White House tenure for the Yankee joss.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.