Skip to main content

The Forgotten President



I was wondering where all this love for Coolidge came from.  Seems like Amity Shlaes has been busy recasting Coolidge as the paragon of fiscal conservatism.  Here she is plugging her previous book on The Great Depression, downplaying FDR, and playing up Hoover.

Glenn Beck not so long ago came out with a book Cowards, where he took progressives to task, including Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover.  Instead, he chose to cite the courage of Harding and Coolidge.  You can read the introduction here, if your stomach can bear it.

We really do have an attempt taking place to rewrite the narrative of the 20th century.

Comments

  1. Interesting blurb from your link:

    Coolidge is a welcome new biography of a great American president. Amity Shlaes shines fresh light on a leader of humble persistence who unexpectedly found himself in the presidency and whose faith in the American people helped restore American prosperity during a period of great turmoil. Amidst today's economic hardships and an uncertain future, Shlaes illuminates a path forward - making Coolidge a must-read for policymakers and citizens alike." -- Paul Ryan.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yea, pretty much says it all. Why anyone would idolize Silent Cal is beyond me.

    ReplyDelete
  3. i just want to see if i can post under my own name again.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Success! We've gotten a few spams lately, so I will probably put a filter on the forum. I keep hoping Robert pitches up at some point, and don't want to block him out.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Welcome back Bo. Lots of anons floating around, and it's always hard to know if it's a "real" one or not. Like that Chinese spammer I deleted.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I started running google chrome in addition to explorer and google finally accepted a password change.Each time I tried it before on Explorer Google kept telling me my password was invalid no matter changing it like 5 times.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Welcome to the world of Chrome, bo.

    It is worth reading the intro to Cowards only because it helps to define what right wing conservatives think and how they are trying to redefine the Republican Party (and in turn the nation) by denigrating past Republicans who had progressive leanings like TR. But, Beck's criticisms don't stop there, he also takes Eisenhower to task through the guise of Goldwater, calling his progressive "streak" a "Dime Store New Deal." In Beck's addled mind, the only true conservatives the past century were Harding, Coolidge, Goldwater and Reagan.

    Books, like those of Shlaes, help legitimize this conservative view, as they are packaged in the form of "history."

    ReplyDelete
  8. It also give you a sense how WEB DuBois must have felt reading all those books coming out of the Dunning School, which defined what many Americans felt about post-Civil-War America.

    Now, as Foner wrote in "Who Owns History?" we have a similar "intellectual" redemption taking place in the post-Civil-Rights era.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer.  Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions.  I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters.  Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs.  Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77.  I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not.  Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.  -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!