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Home – Founding Fathers & American History – Calvin Coolidge on the Christian Roots of American Liberty

Calvin Coolidge on the Christian Roots of American Liberty

Welcome to the seventh in our series, Landmark Speeches in American History. We are celebrating America’s 250th anniversary with articles by prominent authors about how some of the greatest speeches in our history—by celebrated orators like Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr.—honored the vision of our founding document, the Declaration of Independence.

America’s 30th president, Calvin Coolidge, was famously so taciturn that he earned the nickname “Silent Cal.” Yet this least talkative of American leaders delivered on July 5, 1926, one of the greatest speeches in our nation’s history—a masterpiece not of high-flown rhetoric but of deep insight into the religious origins and philosophical permanence of the Declaration of Independence.

Coolidge’s speech, delivered in Philadelphia, was part of that year’s celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the declaration and American independence. The president was engaged in a battle: like his immediate predecessor, Warren Harding, Coolidge represented a repudiation of the progressive ideology of the Woodrow Wilson administration.

To read the full speech, click here.

Progressives tended to look upon the Constitution as outdated—an 18th-century charter of government wholly unsuited to the more advanced world of the early 20th-century—and the Declaration of Independence as mere propaganda. Progressives, then as now, thought of themselves as servants of science, while conservatives, they believed, were prisoners of nostalgia and tools of selfish businessmen.

The sesquicentennial of the declaration arrived just a few years after the Bolsheviks had consolidated power in the newly formed Soviet Union. While not all progressives were pro-Communist, the USSR seemed to many to be a model of what modern government should be: It was secular, claimed to be scientific, and understood “democracy” in economic terms, requiring the expropriation of the wealthy (and the middle class, and, really, everyone else) to establish the equality necessary for a truly free political system, one in which highly educated administrators—commissars—would serve the people in a spirit of objectivity, without all the cumbersome checks and balances and partisan distractions of the American system.

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What the Soviet Union really was, from its very beginning, was a murderous tyranny ruled by a completely unaccountable elite of Communist Party insiders. But progressives were so disillusioned by what they considered to be the selfishness of capitalism and the irrationality of our antiquated institutions that they looked abroad for models of modernity, and many found what they wanted to see in the Soviet Union and, for that matter, in Benito Mussolini’s Italy.

Coolidge did not pander to progressive opinion; he defied it. He refused to present the Declaration of Independence as a secular creed: in his telling, it had a distinctly Protestant genealogy. Instead of looking to a progressive future, Coolidge emphasized America’s colonial history. And there could be no progress beyond the vision of the Declaration of Independence, he argued,........

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