Blogosaurus

I once thought about writing a screenplay called The Passion of Coolidge. Basically it would have been a satire on Dan Quayle, on the idea of a goofy idiot president who goes and does silly things (like pose, pokerfaced, in Indian garb) in order to distract the press and the country from whatever the White House didn't want to see in the news. (Remember that Coolidge succeeded the scandal-ridden Warren Harding, so there would have been a lot of that.)

Coolidge's image as Silent Cal has always been a mild figure of fun, and I was influenced further by the story that H.L. Mencken told of a Massachusetts reporter at the GOP convention telling him to bet on Governor Coolidge getting the veep slot under Harding in 1920, and then going straight to the presidency-- because Coolidge was the luckiest man the reporter had ever seen, and always got what he wanted. Forget talent, Mencken was saying, some men are just destined to be lucky and get everything easily that far superior men strive for and fail to achieve. (The luck ultimately extended to exiting the White House before getting blamed for the Depression-- Coolidge could have run for a second full term of his own in 1928, but left that to the infinitely more impressive, but as it turned out fatally unlucky, Herbert Hoover.)

As I did some research, however, the image of Coolidge as the bumbling lucky fool became hard to sustain, because the reality suggested a man with a dry and caustic sense of humor whose "Silent Cal" persona was the way he flew under the press's radar. In fact, his press conferences suggested a scathing contempt barely being held in check-- far from a Quayle, Coolidge was closer to a Rumsfeld. (A less charming Rumsfeld.) Then there was also a tragic element-- like Lincoln, who lost his beloved Willie while in the White House, or Franklin Pierce, whose son died in a train accident which his wife came to see as punishment for Pierce's ambition, Coolidge lost a son while he was president, to an infection which set in from an absurdly minor blister. In short, the more I learned, the less fun and satirizable Coolidge's story got.

Well, as this (subscriber-only) Atlantic piece reports, Coolidge's real story is not only not funny, one could well write The Tragedy of Coolidge-- a story of how one man's personal tragedy in the White House may have crippled him so completely that the course of the 20th century changed for the worse (much, much worse). The article stops short of suggesting it, but you have to wonder-- without that blister, would there have been a Great Depression? (The author says yes, Coolidge's policies would likely have been the same, but who knows?) And without the Great Depression, what else wouldn't have happened in the 20th century?

Pretty Irrelevant Addendum: Coolidge-era music is here. You notice how it's already not astounding that some guy, totally on his own, programs a 24-hour "radio station" of 20s dance-band music (not jazz, but the softer white peoples' stuff), something that radio professionals would find about as commercial as an all-ancient-Latin-speeches format. And the whole world (well, apart from Burma or North Korea) can listen to it. Like there's anything exceptional about any of that.