Posted on 04/14/2022 4:23:23 AM PDT by Kaslin
Washington -- I see that President Calvin Coolidge is in the news, along with his sidekick Warren Gamaliel Harding. Warren was a mediocrity's mediocrity and was long held to be the worst president of modern times. That was until Jimmy Carter became president and then Barack Obama and now Joe Biden. After Joe's term, I think we shall retire the trophy.
Coolidge became president on Aug. 2, 1923, with the passing of Harding, who was thought to be in perfect health or at least not near death. Now Coolidge is about to be restored to his former stature as a leading practitioner of conservative values and Harding with him. I think restoring Harding is a bit of a stretch. He left in his wake a string of adulterous affairs and a trail of empty Bourbon bottles. I have that from Arthur Krock, the late bureau chief of The New York Times -- and by late, I mean he expired 48 years ago. He once told me that he and Warren "slayed a bottle of Bourbon" in Warren's room at the Willard Hotel during World War I. I have not forgotten. Warren was undoubtedly a lot of fun, I am sure, but I am not so certain that he was a practitioner of conservative values.
Coolidge was, for a certitude, and now a group of scholars led by Matthew Continetti is making an attempt to hold his presidency up as an exemplar for conservatives to rally around in this era of wanton spending and breathtaking inflation. Cal was for balanced budgets, limited spending and smaller government. If he knew about the course of spending's growth during the entire postwar period, he would keel over.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
BTTT
Woodrow Wilson was the worst President, IMO.
Harding was a good President, and it’s primarily because of HL Mencken (whom Tyrrell has long attempted to emulate) that he was considered a bad or incompetent president.
Harding reversed many of Wilson’s worst policies. He allowed black people & other minorities to be employed in the civil service again, and advocated civil rights broadly. He denationalized the rail system. He commuted the sentence of Eugene Debs. In contrast to later presidents, he didn’t try to commandeer the economy, and didn’t intervene to prevent deflation after WWI. As a result, the 1920-21 recession was sharp and short. It’s what the Great Depression could have been had the supposedly capable presidents Hoover & FDR taken a similar hands-off approach.
I’d put FDR on the worst president list too.
Roosevelt died and met Wilson; who said “I
blundered into it
Through honest error, and conscience cut me so deep that
I died
In the vain effort to prevent future wars. But you
Blew on the coal-bed, and when it kindled you deliberately
Sabotaged every fire-wall that even the men who denied
My hope had built. You have too much murder on your
hands. I will not
Speak of the lies and connivings. I cannot understand the
Mercy
That permits us to meet in the same heaven.—Or is this
my hell?”
“Wilson in Hell”, by Robinson Jeffers
Favorite Coolidge Anecdote:
That is the modus operandi for the Left. It is what they do. The same can be said of the treatment of Senator Joseph McCarthy by the likes of Edward Murrow and Drew Pearson which has been carried on by nearly ever single journalist since then.
So what? He also cured a depression, slashed Wilson's bloated federal budget, and presided over the start of one of the longest economic recoveries in history. I'll take Harding over any of his successors save Coolidge, Reagan and Trump.
Calvin Coolidge could not exist today.
His was the last administration of limited government, dispersed power and Constitutional Government - as the progressives had only just come into any power in the decade before, and the Federal Reserve had barely just started transforming our monetary system to serve them.
I’m still hung up on retiring the Worst President Trophy after Joe leaves office. By January 2025 we may not even have a country.
"It is often asserted that the world has made great progress since 1776, that new thoughts and new experiences have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. 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.
"If anyone wishes to deny their truth [of the Founders], the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers."
—Calvin Coolidge, on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, 1926
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