Does history repeat itself?
George Santayana, a Spanish philosopher, famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Well … we may wish we were condemned to repeat the past of nearly 100 years ago, when a soft-spoken, mild-mannered president shocked the nation by announcing he was not going to run for reelection, despite opinion polls showing he was quite popular.
But even if that isn’t possible, history does contain some important lessons of which we should be aware. Instead of repeating, history may at times turn itself inside out and provide us with an opposite, negative image of a familiar tale.
Still, if we can’t remember what originally happened, we might not appreciate how far we have strayed.
Today’s world is one of instant certainty. It is dominated by roaring, ignorant masses, each member of which is equipped with his or her own keyboard bullhorn and internet conduit. It’s a world where politicians tend to revel in bellicosity, hubris and loud insults.
But a century ago, at the dawn of radio and the mass electronic marketplace, things were 180 degrees different.
On Aug. 2, 1923, Calvin Coolidge became the president of the United States after the death of Warren G. Harding. Coolidge was a man of few words. When he was vice president, he earned the nickname of “Silent Cal.”
One story goes that a dinner guest once told him she had bet someone she could get more than two words out of him, to which he answered simply, “You lose.” Coolidge denied the conversation had taken place, but it remains one of his most popular attributions.
However, Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, the Washington socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth, did once describe him as looking “precisely as though he had been weaned on a pickle.” And he did once sit through a nine-inning major league baseball game without saying a word, other than to give his wife the time when she asked.
So, what does this have to do with today?
On Aug. 2, 1927, Coolidge shocked the nation by announcing he would not seek reelection.
Last Sunday, President Joe Biden did this by posting a simple one-page letter to social media. Old Cal would have appreciated that, except that he would have found it too wordy.
Coolidge made his announcement by inviting reporters into his temporary office in South Dakota, where he had come to witness the groundbreaking for what became known as the presidential busts on Mount Rushmore.
He handed each reporter a typewritten letter that said, “I do not choose to run for president in nineteen twenty eight.” He didn’t elaborate.
An Associated Press report that day said, “Immediately after issuing his statement the president put on his hat and overcoat and, smiling broadly, apparently at the consternation he had caused among his newspaper friends, walked with … a White House guest to his automobile.”
End of story — except for the lessons we need to learn.
Historian Amity Shlaes, who wrote a biography of Coolidge, and Matthew Denhart, president of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, co-wrote an essay about these for the Coolidge Review.
Why would someone reject the chance for an almost certain reelection? Was the president keeping some horrible health problem secret?
No, they wrote, the only health he worried about was the nation’s.
“In fact, Coolidge’s decision to walk away from Rushmore and his decision to walk away from the presidency were linked,” they said. “They came out of his own conviction, one different from the sculptor’s.
“In the Coolidge conviction, the power of America lay not in great men but in great institutions, institutions in turn built on their own bedrock, the rock of principle.
“Because of those institutions, American citizens enjoyed rights and freedoms, he wrote, that made them the ‘peer of kings.’ Such people were best governed by principles, not potentates. The continued success of the nation depended on the popular commitment to those principles and institutions, not to men.”
The sculptor of Rushmore, Gutzon Borglum, told the audience at the groundbreaking that perhaps one day he would carve Coolidge’s face on the mountain. But Coolidge wanted none of that.
“Like Washington, who doubtless would have bridled at the sight of himself on the skyline, Coolidge believed presidents were there to preside, not rule,” Shlaes and Denhart wrote. “Modesty in a president was wisest.”
Or, as an account published by Voice of America noted, Coolidge’s own autobiography said “he was never interested in power or fame and was ready to be ‘relieved of the pretensions and delusions of public life.’”
Too many Americans today take those pretensions and delusions far too seriously. Too many don’t value the need to preside, not rule.
They forget the past and, at the least, are condemned to foolishness.