Coolidge and the Historians
Thomas B. Silver

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Calvin Coolidge, the 30th President of the United States, has no academic defenders. He is almost universally regarded by historians as a fit object for denunciation and ridicule.

According to the conventional view, Coolidge’s decade in national politics was bracketed by two crises—the Boston police strike and the Great Depression— which resulted in part from his weak and evasive political leadership. In between, it is said, Coolidge presided over a time of national peace and prosperity, during which business and the wealthy profited at the expense of farmers, labor, and other underprivileged groups. Coolidge approved of this state of affairs: he was a willing and enthusiastic tool of the business interests.

This book examines several of the major crises and battles in which Coolidge was involved during the years 1919-1929, as seen through the eyes of prominent historians of the period. Author Thomas B. Silver concludes that these historians have ignored or distorted Coolidge’s speeches and deeds and have thereby created a one-eyed view of him, and of the 1920s, for students of American history.

Silver’s critique of the standard interpretation of the New Era clears the way for the writing of a new history to offer a full and balanced account of the Coolidge administration in place of the narrowly partisan accounts that have dominated modern historiography. 

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Praise for Coolidge and the Historians

“Coolidge and the Historians . . . is one of those books that will, in the course of a generation’s slow circulation and dissemination, utterly change the way Americans view their history, and hence the way they view themselves.” —Charles R. Kesler, National Review

“Coolidge and the Historians is not only enlightening. It is also entertaining. Mr. Silver’s prose style is elegant and graceful. Trained as a political philosopher, he brings insights to the study of Mr. Coolidge’s presidential statesmanship that go beyond the usual.”—Mackubin T. Owens, The Washington Times

“This is the volume that turned America’s eyes to a forgotten president. Through accurate and precise scholarship, Silver showed just how wrong the old evaluation of Coolidge was. In the process, Silver also demonstrated the power of a substantive rebuttal—to change minds, and to change history. Coolidge and the Historians is must reading for anyone interested in Calvin Coolidge.”—Amity Shlaes, Author, Coolidge