Coolidge, Provoker of Legend
Today, President Calvin Coolidge's "Silent Cal" reputation is the most famous thing about him. An August 1924 New York Times Magazine article by Horace Green collected notable examples of this personality on display, even if some anecdotes are of dubious veracity.
Like this one:
One afternoon toward sundown, the president asked his friend and adviser, Frank W. Stearns, to come into the Executive Office. Stearns found a dejected figure in the back of a chair, gazing out of the oval windows toward the Potomac. He waited for Mr. Coolidge to speak. He sat down. Ten minutes went by without a word. At length the president turned around and said:
"That will be all."
Personally, I find the story a little hard to believe. Stearns really went ten whole minutes without saying anything? Not even "What's on your mind, Mr. President?" After about 10 to 30 seconds, almost any other person would have broken the silence.
Another story that Green quotes was apparently debunked by Coolidge himself:
During Coolidge's vice presidential days, one of the sisters was placed on his left at dinner, whereupon she opened the conversation with the sally:
"Oh, Mister Coolidge, I've just made a ten-dollar bet that I can make you talk." With some dignity, the vice president of the United States answered: "I am sorry, Madam, that you have lost your wager," and turned his strict attention to the lady on his right.
Coolidge's apocryphal quote is usually quoted as simply: "You lose." However, Coolidge debunked this anecdote at the Associated Press annual luncheon in April 1924, four months before this article.
However, Green relays at least one fact which is almost certainly true, because it could be fact-checked by anyone who visited the physical site where it takes place. Referring to the Coolidge family cemetery plot in Vermont, Green wrote:
Below each name is the date of birth and death. There is nothing more. No word of any sort, kind, or description. Not a single stone carries an epitaph. There is no "Where stranger pauses by these bones," no poem, no cherub without wings. Not even a decorative "Hie Jacet." [Latin for "He lies here."] The name and the date. All else left to the imagination.
What an astounding revelation of the mental directness of the ancestors of our president. What a stone-cut denial of the allegation that his silences are a pose for political or other purpose!
Indeed, when Coolidge would later die nine years later in 1933, his gravestone looks the exact same:
Coolidge, Provoker of Legend: Folklore of the Silent President's Brief Lapses Into Language
Published: Sunday, August 10, 1924