An Appeal for Inaction

President Donald Trump, not much of a student of American history, but quite the talker, has promised “a grand celebration” this year to shower the nation’s great achievements in an excess of superlatives on the country’s 250th birthday. The Declaration of Independence, per the White House, is “one of the most beautiful and important documents in history” and it launched “the greatest political journey in history.” 

Trump can be expected to use America 250 to reinforce his views about American triumphs and American exceptionalism, and to identify his own policies with these patriotic themes.

A century ago, President Calvin Coolidge, while not much of a talker, was a student of American history who also believed that historical interpretation could buttress his policy agenda. He also took advantage of the Declaration’s big 150th anniversary in 1926 to set forth a vision of the future that was, in his telling, rooted in the past.

Coolidge’s interest in history stretched back to his undergraduate days at Amherst College in the early 1890s. Coolidge recalled in his Autobiography (1929) that his most influential professor, Anson D. Marsh, taught that the Revolution was the triumph of citizens over tyranny. “The whole course was a thesis on good citizenship and good government,” Coolidge recalled. “Those who took it came to a clearer comprehension not only of their rights and liberties but of their duties and responsibilities.” 

Coolidge was also influenced by the mainstream historical literature of the day, such as George Bancroft’s History of the United States of America From the Discovery of the American Continent series, which blamed the British for their oppressive policies and praised the patriots for their courage and creativity. The Declaration of Independence, per Bancroft, was an “immortal state paper” that set forth “the truth and reality and unchangeableness of freedom, virtue and right.” John Fiske’s popular 1891 work The American Revolution argued that the “Declaration was the deliberate expression of the sober thought of the American people.”

Coolidge picked up on this veneration. His 1894 senior thesis was titled “The Principles Fought for in the American Revolution.” The colonists mostly wanted to be left alone, Coolidge wrote. 

The real object of resistance was to gain security from Parliamentary encroachments … the colonists were contending for the principle of a representative government of chartered rights and constitutional liberties. They were defending themselves against the military despotism of George III.

This notion of American liberty as freedom from government overreach prefaced Coolidge’s later approach to governance: government’s role was essential, but it needed to be kept restrained. 

Coolidge held to these principles when he became vice president in 1921. “Patriotism is easy to understand in America,” he explained in a Memorial Day 1923 speech on "The Destiny of America.” It springs from “government of the people; by the people, and for the people,” as Lincoln put it. “The authority of law here is not something which is imposed upon the people; it is the will of the people themselves.” Americans cling to their principles, particularly “a government of limited and defined powers, leaving the people supreme.” 

In August 1923, Coolidge ascended to the presidency following the death of Warren G. Harding. He would remain at the top of the GOP ticket in the following year’s presidential election. His Democratic challenger, John W. Davis, was also campaigning on a moderate platform of limited government, states’ rights, and aid to farmers. Republicans weren’t too concerned about the competition, recognizing many of the Democrats’ positions as pale versions of their own policies. 

Senator Robert M. La Follette, meantime, was pushing for a much different agenda as the presidential candidate of the start-up Progressive Party. It included public ownership of utilities, breaking up industrial monopolies, hiking the inheritance tax, and other far-reaching reforms. Coolidge clung to his vision of limited government. In a September speech, he invoked the founders to argue that Americans needed to resist calls in their own time to expand federal authority, telling his audience that “Ours … is a government of limited power.” Two months later, he would win the election handily, effectively ending the Progressive Party’s short-lived existence. 

In the wake of World War I several years earlier, the federal government had embarked on an aggressive campaign of repression and deportation that targeted communists, anarchists, and others on the left who were advocating for structural change. By the end of this First Red Scare, any real radical threat to conservative control had evaporated. But Coolidge continued to rally support for his own conservative program by demonizing anything to the left of it. He often turned to history to buttress his warnings about government overreach into the affairs of business and social life. He worked to trim the federal government, reduce taxes (particularly on the wealthy), and cut the national debt. 

He cited the 9th and 10th amendments to the Constitution that indicated that powers not explicitly given to the federal government were reserved to the states or to the people themselves. He was especially keen on states’ rights and wary of advancing federal authority at the states’ expense. “The states should not be induced by coercion or by favor to surrender the management of their own affairs,” he said in a May 15, 1926 address. “The Federal government ought to resist the tendency to be loaded up with duties which the States should perform. It does not follow that because something ought to be done the national government ought to do it.” 

His message was a good fit for the times. The nation was prosperous. National pride was high in the afterglow of the victory of World War I, with no foreign threats on the horizon. Consumer goods were flowing as never before, including new electric appliances such as vacuum cleaners and refrigerators. More than 17 million cars were on American roads in 1925 — more than twice as many as there had been at the start of the decade.

In all the easygoing abundance of the “Roaring Twenties,” though, problems were brewing, including overproduction in industry and agriculture, inflated stock prices, and a weak banking system. Coolidge and his administration mostly ignored these warnings. His informal campaign slogan — “Keep Cool with Coolidge” — conveyed a sense of serenity.

Congress appointed a commission early in 1926 to encourage sesquicentennial activities around the country, and provided limited funding for a grand Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written. The Exposition opened on May 31, 1926. Its programming revolved around the theme of “America Welcoming the World,” and featured exhibits from the federal government, 31 states, 19 nations, and several companies. There were patriotic pageants, musicals, and other educational and entertainment events.

On July 5, Coolidge delivered an Independence Day address at the new stadium that had been built for the exposition. (July 4 was a Sunday, at that time considered inappropriate for a presidential address. It was also the president’s birthday, which he wanted to celebrate in the White House.) The press covered his earlier speeches sparingly. But this would be Coolidge’s big opportunity to broadcast his views in a high-visibility venue. Some 35,000 people were present for the president’s speech, and it was reprinted or summarized in newspapers and broadcast to millions by radio, then a relatively novel communications technology. 

Coolidge was known for his brevity, but his July 5 speech, titled “The Inspiration of the Declaration of Independence,” was nearly 4,500 words long and took about 45 minutes to deliver. It was more like a university lecture than a celebratory address. But where the original Declaration had been a call to action, Coolidge’s speech was an appeal for inaction. The founding documents provided a sound basis for the Republic, according to Coolidge’s logic, and had stood the test of time. Because of their enduring value, there was no need for significant change now. The Revolution was “a movement of the people,” per Coolidge. The elites of the era, as the president explained, were often neutral or loyalists. 

At the same time, explained Coolidge — who frequently contrasted the noble uprising of the people of the past with the protests of his own time — the Revolution was “in no sense a rising of the oppressed and downtrodden.”

It brought no scum to the surface, for the reason that colonial society had developed no scum. The great body of the people were accustomed to privations, but they were free from depravity. If they had poverty, it was not of the hopeless kind that afflicts great cities, but the inspiring kind that marks the spirit of the pioneer.

And, he argued in one of the most striking passages in the speech, which pulled from the history he learned long ago from his mentor in college, the Revolution was conservative and “in no sense a radical movement but took on the dignity of a resistance to illegal usurpations that threatened their constitutional rights which from time immemorial had been guaranteed to them under the law of the land.” (He did concede that the Declaration’s framing of equality, one of the “cornerstones of American institutions,” was new, although he kept that part of his address brief.) 

Coolidge was determined to show that the founders were simply applying an understanding of rights that was well-ensconced in European political history. “It was the foundation of every popular attempt to depose an undesirable king,” he explained. “In their long struggle with the Stuarts the British people asserted the same principles, which finally culminated in the Bill of Rights deposing the last of that house and placing William and Mary on the throne.”

He finished by returning to a theme present in his earlier speeches: the Declaration shows the need to rest easy with the status quo and resist change in our own times.

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful … If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.

Independence Day is a time “to reaffirm and reestablish those old theories and principles which time and the unerring logic of events have demonstrated to be sound,” said the president. Americans should spurn “those who will seek for political preferment by clamoring for reform … very little of just criticism can attach to the theories and principles of our institutions.” 

Reactions to the speech were subdued. Time magazine reported that “the President spoke of ‘inalienable rights … idealism, destiny.’” The New York Times noted that the president did not mention current problems or future challenges. “His speech, devoted to a historic recital, avoided for the most part current topics and dealt entirely with the spirit of the day and its lessons for this generation.”

That was meant as criticism, but Coolidge might well have agreed. He had set out to put a conservative, complacent twist on America’s revolutionary document. America could enjoy its birthday with confidence about the future. 

Coolidge’s message was soothing but misleading. He spoke as if America had achieved a state of near-perfection at the outset, ignoring the Declaration’s unfulfilled promises in a nation that protected slavery and excluded women from the political process. The enormous inequalities that characterized Coolidge’s own time were also overlooked in the speech, as were weaknesses in the economy and looming threats abroad. Three years later, after Coolidge’s commerce secretary Herbert Hoover became president, the nation plunged into the Great Depression. Still, Coolidge’s views represented history as he had learned it and many Americans understood it. 

But a new generation of historians was reinterpreting the Revolution in more complex ways. Charles Howard McIlwain, in his 1923 book The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation, argued that the colonists were defending what they believed were their rights as Englishmen, including no taxation without representation, which the government in London was violating. 

Charles M. Andrews’ 1924 book The Colonial Background of the American Revolution presented the conflict as the inevitable clash between Britain, determined to enforce imperial governance and trade regulations, and America, where the people had grown used to governing through their own representative assemblies. In his 1925 American Historical Association presidential address, Andrews went further, portraying British officials caught in “a state of immobility,” unable or unwilling to accommodate changing conditions in America or their growing reliance on their own assemblies. 

J. Franklin Jameson’s 1926 book The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement claimed that the Revolution was not just a political revolt, but also a broadscale social transformation. That was a long way from Coolidge’s presentation of the Revolution as a conservative return to first principles.

The Black historian and civil rights leader W.E.B Du Bois, in his 1924 book The Gift of Black Folk: Negroes in the Making of America, argued that the Declaration’s assertion that “all men are created equal” was meant to include Black Americans, that the founders acknowledged that slavery was wrong, and that the Northern states quickly moved to abolish it. For Du Bois, July 4 was an occasion to keep demanding full racial equality and civil rights — to “strive for the rights which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget” as he had put it in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk.

Coolidge’s conservative vision was out of sync with many commentators of the day, who, like Du Bois, emphasized the work needed to fulfill the Declaration’s radical promises. Independence Day should not be a day of rest and smugness, argued a July 7, 1926 editorial in The Nation. “The Sesquicentennial Fourth of July is upon us, and all over the land sermons are being preached upon the text that America is the busiest, brightest, busiest country in the world … And yet there is a colossal indifference to the signs of rot within us.” The editorial pointed to recent revelations of corruption at high levels of government, and criticized the treatment of radicals who challenged the status quo. “We have grown to fear self-criticism. This is a good time to re-read the history of the days we are celebrating.” 

In the same issue of The Nation, historian and sometime political commentator Charles A. Beard wrote an essay entitled “The Great American Tradition: A Challenge for the Fourth of July.” He suggested that the World War I-era Sedition and Espionage Acts had contravened the promise of political liberty set forth in the Declaration. That is “a grave warning” and this Independence Day we should “pause and survey our conduct and prepare for the future.”

Historians continue to reinterpret the Revolution. So, too, do presidents. But the American people do as well. 

Throughout our history, many people have viewed the Declaration of Independence as a noble document. But they have also understood that the revolution was not yet finished — too many of the Declaration’s principles have remained unfulfilled.

Coolidge resisted any understanding of the past that diverged from the way he understood, interpreted, and presented it. Trump, following in Coolidge’s footsteps, means to eclipse historical interpretations of America’s founding that arrive at different conclusions about where the country originated and where it should head next.

The American people, heirs of the Revolution, can be counted on to form their own opinions.