Memorial Day, 1924

Considering my moniker on this blog, it should come as no surprise that I am a great fan of Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president of the United States. Admittedly, for a long time this appeal stemmed from the commendable pithiness of his pronouncements, and the wit he frequently employed in them. As an individual who is rather taciturn and fond of the driest bon mot, I feel an affinity for Silent Cal.

But recently, it is the content and not the style of the man’s public service that has drawn my admiration. Last July 4th in the Wall Street Journal, Leon Kass wrote about Coolidge’s address commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Kass’s piece illuminated the ideas of the 30th president and showed their relevance to our time. He is often written off as the ultimate laissez-faire leader, whose fanatical devotion to small government in a time of excess led to the Great Depression. Surely these critics never read Coolidge’s Independence Day oration, in which the same man who once said “the chief business of the American people is business” warns against a spirit of “pagan materialism,” I wonder if they would understand the message even if they did read it.

Fortunately, Coolidge took the opportunity offered by other national holidays to elucidate his ideal of American society. In 1924, Memorial Day still took place on May 30, the day set aside by the Grand Army of the Republic for decorating the graves of fallen comrades “with the choicest flowers of springtime.” That Memorial Day, the 30th president spoke to a crowd at Arlington National Cemetery on “Freedom and Its Obligations.” Coolidge began his address by rooting the day they observed in its historical context. Memorial Day arose as a way to pay tribute to the dead of the Civil War, so the president recounted the issues that led to the separation of the states and the conflict that ensured. Instead of limiting his discourse to the specifics of the Civil War, however, Coolidge recognized the larger questions that drove the conflict and survived to his day, and ours: “How can the Government govern and the people be free? How can organized society make and enforce laws and the individual remain independent?” Coolidge noted that even when individuals could be absolved of any responsibilities, they would naturally infringe on the rights of others, betraying their very independence. The solution, the president argues, is membership in a community, and deference to its best interests:

When each citizen submits himself to the authority of law he does not thereby decrease his independence or freedom, but rather increases it. By recognizing that he is a part of a larger body which is banded together for a common purpose, he becomes more than an individual, he rises to a new dignity of citizenship.

In the Roaring Twenties, an era of materialism and conspicuous consumption, of speakeasies, bootleggers, and gangsters, Coolidge was often noted for his values, old-fashioned even then, ones such as thrift and self-control. His Memorial Day speech attempted to show that those values were the ones necessary for the survival and the success of the nation, and the ones that inspired the men honored at Arlington:

Only one conclusion appears to me possible. We shall not promote our welfare by a narrow or shortsighted policy. We can gain nothing by any destruction of government or society. That action which in the long run is for the advantage of the individual, as it is for the support of our Union, is best summed up in a single word; renunciation. It is only by surrendering a certain amount of our liberty, only by taking on new duties and assuming new obligations, that we make that progress which we characterize as civilization.

In many ways, Coolidge’s words fell on deaf ears. The Twenties roared on until they rolled out of control. Nor is renunciation any more popular today as a bedrock of the republic. Merely look at the financial crisis of the last decade, in which American’s elite financiers and bankers refused to act responsibly when greater material goods were to be had, and the supposedly antagonistic Occupy Wall Street movement, which responds to Wall Street’s greed by demanding free stuff. Read the Memorial Day address from our current president, which mainly calls on Americans to honor veterans by showering them with material goods. Of course, there is nothing wrong with providing more goods and services to veterans, but if this is the totality of the nation’s gratitude, they should feel woefully disrespected. There is precious little talk in President Obama’s address about the larger meaning for which Americans go off to fight and die, and about the substantial moral obligations that all Americans have as citizens.

Perhaps I wade too much into gloom, however, on this Memorial Day. Almost ninety years after Coolidge spoke of “Freedom and Its Obligations,” we have had and continue to have fellow citizens who perceive their obligations and fulfill them, often at a heavy price. Let us give Silent Cal the last words today in honoring them. His eloquence was directed chiefly at those who fought to preserve the Union, but the words still do honor to the generations that came after:

It is the men and women whose actions between 1861 and 1865 gave us union and peace that we are   met here this day to commemorate. When we seek for the chief characteristic of those actions, we come back to the word which I have already uttered; renunciation. They gave up ease and home and safety and braved every impending danger and mortal peril that they might accomplish these ends. They thereby became in this Republic a body of citizens set apart and marked for every honor so long as our Nation shall endure. Here on this wooded eminence, overlooking the Capital of the country for which they fought, many of them repose, officers of high rank and privates mingling in a common dust, holding the common veneration of a grateful people. The heroes of other wars lie with them, and in a place of great preeminence lies one whose identity is unknown, save that he was a soldier of this Republic who fought that its ideals, its institutions, its liberties, might be perpetuated among men. A grateful country holds all these services as her most priceless heritage, to be cherished forevermore.

Thus be it always.