August 3, 2023 represents the 100-year anniversary of the inauguration of President Calvin Coolidge.  The immediate circumstances of his rise to the highest office from the position of Vice President were peculiar and challenging.  President Warren Harding died in San Francisco on August 2, 1923.  Word reached Plymouth, Vermont late in the night.  Coolidge’s father John, a notary public, took the unusual step of swearing his son into the Presidency at almost 3 a.m. at the Coolidge family homestead.  The event is being recreated this week at the Coolidge Presidential Site. 

Harding and Coolidge represented an important break in the emergence of an imperial Presidency embodied by Woodrow Wilson.  Wilson was raised as a child in the South during the Civil War and grew up with profound resentment toward the Republican Congress and its actions to reconstitute the South politically toward a political praxis of racial equality.  Wilson’s experiences led him to two important political ambitions as he matured through his collegiate and doctoral education:  1) advocate for a stronger presidency that could resist and perhaps reform the misguided actions of the Reconstruction Congress and 2) establish national norms for the segregation and exclusion of Black people.  In 1902, Wilson authored as a political science professor at Princeton an extensive history of the United States that explains the political nobility of the former South and the virtue of the terrorist organization known as the KKK. Wilson was unable to secure a popular vote in 1912 and 1916 despite winning consecutive terms as President.  His written sentiments were included in the film Birth of a Nation, shown by Wilson in the White House in 1915. The film was a profound catalyst for restarting the Klan in 1915. Wilson also placed anti-Black discrimination rules upon the federal workforce and told African American advocate William Trotter that he was doing Black people a favor by segregating them. 

These are important pretexts to the Presidential election of 1920.  Crippled by strokes and an ambitious physical trek across the United States to impose the League of Nations upon U.S. politics, Wilson was prevented from running again in 1920.  James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt ran for the Democrats in the 1920 election.  An important public argument against the election of Harding and Coolidge for the Republicans was authored by well-respected professor William Estabrook Chancellor of Ohio.  He argued that Harding had a Black matriarch in his family history and was therefore disqualified to be President of the United States.  The argument appeared in political ads and newspapers across the nation -- including the New York Times.  Harding’s own father-in-law had told his daughter Florence not to marry Warren Harding because he was an “n-word.”  This common allegation against Harding was made in his state election races as well.  The Ohio Democratic Party argued publicly that if Harding won the election, Black people would rise up and take over the state.  Harding himself could not clarify whether he might have Black lineage and was happy to campaign for and alongside Black candidates in 1920.  At a time when anti-Black lynchings were at a peak and women were voting for the first time, the American public overwhelmingly rejected the racist slur against the Harding and Coolidge ticket.  Harding and Coolidge won more than 60% of the popular vote and more than 400 electoral votes.  It was a powerful repudiation of the anti-Black racism made by academic professors such as Woodrow Wilson and William Estabrook Chancellor.  Blacks who voted for Coolidge and Harding in places such as Florida were murdered in race riots over Blacks voting.  The South voted as a solid block for Cox and Roosevelt. 

Harding and Coolidge campaigned and gave speeches as President and Vice President in favor of racial equality.  Harding confronted the South at Birmingham by arguing in terms nearly identical to his Oklahoma City campaign speech of fall 1920 when he said:  “I wouldn't be fit to be president of the United States if I didn't tell you the same things here in the south that I tell in the north. I believe in race equality before the law. You can't give one right to a white man and deny it to a black man.”  In 1924, Coolidge wrote an editorial to a New York newspaper correcting a Republican who said that Blacks should not be able to run for public office: 

“The suggestion of denying any measure of their full political rights to such a great group of our population as the colored people is one which, however it might be received in some other quarters, could not possibly be permitted by one who feels a responsibility for living up to the traditions and maintaining the principles of the Republican Party. Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or color. I have taken my oath to support that Constitution. It is the source of your rights and my rights. I purpose to regard it, and administer it, as the source of the rights of all the people, whatever their belief or race. A colored man is precisely as much entitled to submit his candidacy in a party primary, as is any other citizen.”

The 100th anniversary of Coolidge’s rise to the Presidency and the painful national mourning surrounding the death of President Harding is an important time to reconsider the received academic history of the American Presidency.  Much of our current political angst is rooted in a hyperbolic view of the Presidency inaugurated by President Wilson.  The Presidency is but one of our co-equal branches of the small federal government.  It is not to be an aspiring form of authoritarian control.  The limited practice and corrective rhetoric of Harding and Coolidge is an important healing balm for our nation’s politics today.     

Dr. Ben Voth is professor of rhetoric and director of debate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.  His forthcoming book -- The Presidential Rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge: The Centennial of the Modern American Presidency -- will be published this fall from Lexington Books.  He serves as the Coolidge Debate Fellow at the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation.

Image: Library of Congress