Tempered Counsel
' f ^HE speeches which the nation's chief executive de-•• livers on major occasions have a quality all their own which has by now come to be recognized and is counted upon in advance. It must...
...George Gissing, at about his age, confessed that he stood "aghast" ati the significance of money in the world...
...Let any man study, among his own acquaintance, those who sincerely and poignantly doubt of the direction our civilization has taken, and those whose energies are absorbed in achieving economic salvation with the material and means to hand, and he will cease to wonder at the significance that has come to attach to speeches which resolutely eschew distinction either in thought or language...
...For the rather surprising fact remains that, even after making every allowance for the importance which the office confers on the man, and for the tendency of those who have no time to speak for their own convictions to erect the man who has into a symbol...
...It has at least the childlike gravity and reverence which are possessed by all religions held in the heart...
...President Coolidge's speeches never fall below a certain level of dignity...
...The shrewd humor which made the late Thomas R. Marshall so quotable is conspicuous by its absence...
...This may not be, as William Allen White enthusiastically believes, "the language of a mystic...
...It is at least the language of a sincere and humane man...
...They are the text of all his "preachments...
...The dignity may be homespun (it is never uncouth) ; it may seem to scorn the adventitious aid of literary elegance...
...It is quite possible to disagree with them very heartily, yet somehow to be proud of them...
...Quite a lengthy list, in fact, might be compiled of all the properties which a Coolidge speech lacks...
...Nevertheless, these presidential utterances, widely reported and widely read, do carry, we believe, hope and confidence to many hundreds of thousands of plain citizens the Union over...
...I wish to favor the policy of economy," he told us in days before his voice carried the weight it has secured today, "not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people...
...There is little trace of that hatred of injustice wherever perceived that often makes Senator Borah the mouthpiece of the depressed right...
...as each falls into place in his argument, a sense of almost mechanical precision may overtake those who listen or read...
...Nearer than the swollen fortunes, the big combines that make good and bad financial weather at their will, his eye perceives certain homely accessible landmarks, the snug country or suburban home, the comfort, the general seemliness of the American life that has attained to even relative security...
...Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant...
...It must be said of them that they lack the note of personal idiosyncrasy which endeared the public utterances of Colonel Roosevelt to headline builders...
...Critics who are baffled are sometimes resentful, and the harsh things that have often been said about the President when he turns spokesman for the nation, might, we believe, be largely traced to this elusiveness, or negativeness, if you will, strange to find in a man who is quite generally accepted as voicing the characteristic point of view of the "practical" citizen...
...And his mental vision refuses to be distracted from them...
...Here," he tells us today, and our daily experience confirms his words quite as often as it refutes them, "industry can find employment, thrift can amass a competency, and square dealing is assured of justice...
...It is easy to riddle them with criticism, easy to point out disturbing facts they seem to evade, or opportunities to speak of things of the spirit which have no tangible reward on earth that they have the air of ignoring...
...Coolidge does not think this way, and who shall say he is wrong...
...It has not arrived at equipoise without the unhindered perpetration of monstrous economic injustices, without an exploitation of natural resources for private ends that dismays the thinker who thinks on the catastrophic scale...
...But Mr...
...What the liberal censors of our President (that noxious brood) are missing when they can find it in their hearts to term him insincere or even note "a talent for smug self-assuredness which seems fictional" is just this: He is the prophet of an age and country that is, on the whole, distrustful of change and glad to be static...
...It would be a useless task to seek in any one of their phrases the repressed emotion that ennobled every utterance' of our great martyr President...
...It is reassuring or depressing just in so far as a man is either convinced that salvation lies at the end of the road along which we are advancing, or believes that a halt and fresh orientation before it is too late has assumed the complexion of an urgency...
...the phrases it chooses may be the time-worn counters that have served scores of presidential orators before him...
...Coolidge is not aghast, but he is very much convinced...
...But a Coolidge speech is only banal if all the values the contemporary world has erected into first values are banal too...
...Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meagre...
Vol. 6 • July 1927 • No. 10
