From the standpoint of historical contingency and hence eligibility for Mount Rushmore, Calvin Coolidge had the misfortune to govern in calm and quiet times. A. J. P Taylor famously wrote about pre-World War I Britain that a sensible, law-abiding citizen could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the federal government beyond the post office and the policeman. Such could be applied to the United States of the 1920s. Coolidge anticipated Taylor’s judgment himself in a 1926 speech, remarking that “If the Federal Government should go out of existence, the common run of people would not detect the difference in the affairs of their daily life for a considerable length of time.”
The absence of acute crisis in that decade prior to 1929 blinds us from giving due consideration to a stateman’s contribution precisely to those placid conditions we all cherish and hope to perpetuate. In the modern world, peace and prosperity ought to be considered high achievements of statesmen, rather than demanding that we bestow our highest esteem only for crisis management. The bias of historians and their readers who understandably prefer high drama will always discount the character, insights, and capacities of statesmen who govern in quiet times.
Thus we tend systematically to undervalue the contributions statesmen like Coolidge made to generating or perpetuating peace and prosperity.
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