Mixing Rural Charm and High-Octane Scholarship in Coolidge Land

Vermont’s Coolidge Foundation funds merit-based scholarships and a national debate competition aimed at young people.

E arlier this week, I wrote about Coolidge Land, the President Calvin Coolidge Historic Site in Plymouth Notch in Vermont. I focused mostly on the core buildings, all with deep Coolidge associations and preserved mostly as he knew them.

I’ll write today on the development of the Coolidge Foundation’s unusual mission. Libraries and research centers devoted to presidents since JFK are opulent affairs. The Obama presidential center in Chicago, for instance, is expected to cost about $900 million, nearly double its initial estimate. Financed by the federal government and private donors, these libraries tend to be temples, but also, housing as they do millions of presidential papers, they’re archives for scholars. The Nixon Library in Whittier in Southern California is unusual. It’s an archive and research center but also owns Nixon’s childhood home.

These archives are administered by the National Archives and Records Administration, a federal agency. A formula for preservation and access seems to be set in place now, though as recently as Nixon, a big legal fight unfolded over what he could take with him when he resigned in 1974.

Things were far more haphazard in Coolidge’s day and before. The Library of Congress owns about 180,000 Coolidge documents, almost all from his presidential reign and mostly routine correspondence with the public.

Coolidge Land in Plymouth Notch was never an archive. Coolidge took a chunk of documents with him — mostly personal but also political material — but he seems to have destroyed them. There was plenty of precedent for this among his predecessors. Still, was Coolidge not only reticent but secretive? Possibly. He kept his own counsel, to be sure. “I’ve never been hurt by something I did not say,” he noted, and he evidently didn’t want a paper trail, either.

The Coolidge historic site is owned and run by the State of Vermont, which, over the years, acquired nearly all the old buildings in Plymouth Notch. These include the Old Homestead, where Coolidge grew up and where he was sworn in as president on August 3, 1923, at 2:47 a.m., a few hours after he learned that Harding had died. Coolidge and his wife, Grace, were vacationing at his father’s home. Coolidge’s father bought the house in 1876. It stayed in the immediate Coolidge family until Grace died in 1957, and in true, frugal Vermont fashion, next to nothing had changed since the 1880s.

The site also owns the general store, which Coolidge’s father ran. This building was also the post office, a dance hall, and the Summer White House. Attached to it is the house where Coolidge was born. The site owns an old cheese factory from 1890 that still makes cheese, barns, what used to be an old inn, a building that was once a tearoom, and old tourist cabins built in the late ’20s for the first wave of Coolidge aficionados.

The Coolidge Foundation was established by Coolidge’s son John, with other Coolidge fans, in 1960 to promote a sound understanding of Coolidge. The foundation was given the old Union Christian Church, across the road from the Old Homestead, in 1970. It dates from 1840, with a lovely Craftsman Gothic interior from around 1900.

So, by 1970, between the foundation and the State of Vermont, a Coolidge time capsule existed. Coolidge had died nearly 40 years earlier. He was remembered as Silent Cal and the presidential prelude to the stock market crash in 1929, only months after he left office, and the Great Depression. The keepers of the flame were local volunteers. Northern New England tourism was strong then, so visitors came during the summer to see both a remnant of old Vermont and an unusually authentic presidential site.

What else could be done with it? Archives were thin. Good Coolidge material existed in the archives of people who worked with him, but the archives were in multiple locations. The foundation owned next to nothing. How to make a scholarly mission with so little, and in a mountain hamlet with more cows than people? Coolidge, by the by, is the last president not to get a federally funded library and research center.

It’s a good case study on building a donor and volunteer base, the revival of a presidential reputation, and a focus, both savvy and dogged, on the education of young people.

First of all, the Coolidge site and the foundation aren’t political. The foundation is a nonprofit organization. The site is concerned with infrastructure, tourism, and 200 acres of land. Coolidge’s revival — and rehabilitation — might have started with President Reagan putting his portrait in the White House Cabinet Room, but over the decades Coolidge has seemed both conservative and ecumenical. Vermonters, in a state where conservatives are few and far between, see him as their only president. Chester Arthur was supposedly born in Vermont. Many think he was actually born in Canada, making him ineligible to be president, but, beyond that, he became a New Yorker through and through and part of the Roscoe Conkling machine.

Yes, Coolidge’s political career was in Massachusetts. One of his famous speeches is “Have Faith in Massachusetts,” a very big ask indeed, but another is “Vermont Is a State I Love,” a moment of passion on his part. His pro-civil-rights stands, quirkiness, integrity, reticence, modesty, and humility attract all comers, tax-and-budget cutter that he was.

It’s true, though, that many Coolidge fans share his political philosophy, and in these days of soaring federal debt and relentless inflation, we need more of Coolidge. At the end of the day, he’s about substance, not sparkle.

The first surge of visibility for Coolidge, after the Reagan era, came mostly from people paying attention to him for his personal qualities. In the ’90s, as a foundation staff developed, lots of new historical research also happened, mostly low-hanging but overlooked material. Over the past few years, Coolidge’s speeches, veto messages, proclamations, and also press conferences were added to the website. No president before or since has given more press conferences than Coolidge.

In 2010, the historic site opened what I think is a perfect visitor center, vastly expanding a tiny visitor center from 1974. I’ve been to lots of visitor centers for historic sites, and most look like airports. Sometimes they overwhelm the history they’re supposed to facilitate, and often they’re obviously political pork. The Coolidge visitor center is visually attractive and looks like a rugged old Vermont building. It has an introductory gallery that makes us want to know more, not less, and supplements the historic buildings, which are steps from the visitor center. It has a space for rotating shows, too.

It cost $2.7 million, mostly from the State of Vermont and appropriated in a bipartisan push but with not insubstantial private fundraising. A far cry from Obama’s $900 million pyramid, or George W. Bush’s $250 million opus.

Robert Sobel’s Coolidge: An American Enigma, from 1998, and especially Amity Shlaes’s Coolidge, from 2013, are overdue, great biographies. Was this bound to happen? Presidents are often reevaluated, but the intact, unusual site in Plymouth Notch and the work of the foundation helped. Coolidge’s autobiography, the best since Grant’s, was released with annotations in 2021. Shlaes chairs the Coolidge Foundation board. A respected, well-connected scholar, she’s developed a high-powered group of trustees.

Coolidge, like most New England Yankees, valued education. Plymouth Notch made him, but Amherst College gave him a solid intellectual foundation, mentors aside from his father, and essential connections. Most presidential sites glorify either the dead or the egoist. In seeking a signature program, the Coolidge Foundation landed on scholarships.

Since 2016, it has each year funded three, four, or five, depending on fundraising, four-year, full-freight undergraduate scholarships at any accredited college or university in the country. It’s one of America’s most generous and competitive undergraduate awards. Around 27,000 high schoolers have applied, with 27 of the big scholarships awarded. More modest scholarships have gone to about 650 semi-finalists, who are called Coolidge Senators.

The foundation’s not rich. It has raised around $9 million since 2016 to support these scholarships.

The program aims at two failures in the American education system. The first is the wretched quality of American history instruction, especially of Coolidge’s era. Each applicant reads Coolidge’s autobiography and writes two essays on aspects of Coolidge’s values and leadership. There are many other factors, to be sure, starting with academic performance but also humility, service, and an interest in public policy. Finalists come to Plymouth to meet with the judges, and, significantly, to get to know the site.

Second, the program contests the fading primacy of academic merit and depth in higher education. I can’t imagine a Coolidge scholar shouting down a campus speaker. They don’t seem to have a rude, rancorous bone in their bodies. They’re too busy excelling.

The foundation is very good at building and sustaining community among all the scholarship winners, including the finalists. Over time, a unique, Coolidge-acculturated, high-achieving cohort will grow to a critical mass.

Another foundation program is the Coolidge Cup, a debating prize given each year since 2013. More than 47,000 high schoolers have debated in rounds all over the country, culminating in a debate extravaganza among finalists in Plymouth around July 4, Coolidge’s birthday. Topics cover issues such as the dual mandate of the Federal Reserve, rather than whether or not men can menstruate. Debaters work with topic experts and debate coaches to develop pro and con sides of a given bone of contention. They use logic, facts, and rhetoric rather than scream their stupid heads off, since, for starters, these kids are neither stupid nor screamers. There’s a declamation component, too, which I think is very nifty.

Like the scholarships, the debates are rooted in the life of Coolidge — he was a superb college debater — but they place Coolidge in the modern world of future leaders.

The 100th anniversary of Coolidge’s ascent to the presidency is this coming August 2 and 3 in Plymouth Notch. It’ll be the culmination of months of events that started with a national conference on Coolidge and his legacy at the Library of Congress in February. It’s a moment in the steady ascent of Coolidge’s reputation and the organic development of the Plymouth Notch site and the foundation. The man and the mission seem to be working in perfect sync, and that’s rare.

This coming week, from Plymouth Notch to Park Avenue I go. The May New York art fairs start this weekend. I plan to cover the TEFAF — the European Fine Arts Fair — and the Park Avenue Armory and the American Art Fair at the Bohemian National Hall on East 73rd Street. If Silent Cal could be rendered any more speechless, the price tags might very well do the trick.