The late Calvin Coolidge, one must say, was a better than average president of the United States. I think he should be ranked as above average, and if his times, the years from 1923 to 1929, had called upon him for a major effort, in foreign affairs or domestic, he possessed the intelligence and strength of character, and the ability to use them, that would have propelled him to near the top within the pantheon of American presidents. Unfortunately this is not where American historians and political scientists now place him. In the poll of thirty-two "jurors" arranged by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. in the New York Times for December 5, 1996, Coolidge came in as a failure-not even above average.

How to explain his present-day reputation, which to put the matter mildly is in the doldrums? I offer three explanations and, so to speak, throw them into the arena here, for my fellow panelists (who, admittedly, are more friendly to Coolidge than would be an ordinary group) to discuss, should they wish to do so.

For one thing, I hesitate to say it but most historians and political scientists don't read much about Coolidge and when they speak x cathedra, as they did in the Schlesinger poll their judgments can easily be in error. I think that if you rubbed most of them, the rubbing would reveal that they have not read a book on Coolidge since the journalistic volume by William Allen White-if indeed they read it carefully. White's book was very nicely written and published sixty years ago, with a title that caught attention but was so far from the truth as to be ludicrous: A Puritan in Babylon. I was a youngster in the 1920s-I advised my kindergarten teacher to vote for Hoover-and can testify that it was no era of Babylon. Nor was Coolidge a Puritan; all those folks had taken up residence around Boston, likely in the Back Bay, and they were the Brahmins. Coolidge was a Yankee from the back country of Vermont and later western Massachusetts.

A second reason why Coolidge has been misinterpreted and played down, consigned to the appalling group of failure presidents-Pierce, Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, U. S. Grant, Harding (mistake), Hoover (mistake), Nixon (no mistake)-is that when he was vice president he made himself inconspicuous, and this was itself an error. When he suddenly, on the night of August 2-3, 1923, became president, no one knew anything about him. Read the diary of the most prominent reporter in Washington at the time, Mark Sullivan, who in his diary for August 2 when Harding was dying in San Francisco related a fanciful account of a Harding mistress, and next day was looking for information, any information, about the new president. In the following week or so Sullivan was picking up stories about Coolidge and hardly knew what to write. At that juncture Coolidge himself began to oblige, with what might well have been a clever move on his part but I am not so sure. ne first of the newspaper stories drew him as a parsimonious Vermonter, and evidently the new president, seeking what later would be described as a niche, decided he might as well oblige. From the moment he became president, and I suspect from some time well before that, for Coolidge was not stupid and knew that Harding's health was poor and getting worse, he must have been eyeing the presidency and, if affairs came to such a pass, how he would be elected in his own right in 1924. For that grand purpose he needed to impress the American people in some way, and I believe he decided he would be known as Silent Cal. Of course, that was entirely untrue. To his biweekly press conferences he talked a blue streak, on and on. But he let the initial caricatures of parsimoniousness and silence continue unabated, and occasionally enlarged upon them. Matters have come to such a pass that an historian, that is, myself, has collected 263 Coolidge stories. (And I cannot get them published, four presses have turned them down, including the University Press of New England, whose accessions editor refuses to look at them.) Coolidge, and I return to the subject, allowed a drawing of himself as a cracker-barrel philosopher, and while it elected him in 1924 it did little for his reputation later.

Lastly the fashions among historians and political scientists have turned to subjects and periods far removed from the 1920s-save for a recent fine book by Robert Sobel, present in the audience today. My young colleagues in history departments have turned to gender studies, women's history, social history in general, psychohistory perhaps. In political science, word processors and computers are in, thought is out. This for the greatest political century in all of history. We need to recover the history of the Coolidge administration, if only to know how we got from there to here, and today's panel ought to be a good start.