dual personalities

On August 2nd, 1923–100 years ago–Vice President Calvin Coolidge and his wife Grace were on vacation at Coolidge’s family farm near Plymouth Notch, Vermont in the Green Mountains.

The farm house had no electricity and a phone that only occasionally worked. The couple went to bed early, but a little before midnight, they were awakened by a loud knock at the front door. A moment later, Coolidge’s father called up to Calvin to come down. President Warren Harding was dead.

Coolidge got dressed. He prayed with his wife. And in the early morning hours of August 3rd, he was sworn into office by his father John Calvin Coolidge Sr. who was a Vermont notary public and justice of the peace. By the light of a kerosene lamp, Calvin Coolidge became the 30th President of the United States. Since it was 2:47 in the morning, President Coolidge went back to bed.

With the 1924 election just around the corner, many expected Coolidge to be a lame duck President, but on his train ride back to Washington he began immediately to plan how to build upon Harding’s most important policies. His first order of business…limiting the government itself.

We could use old Silent Cal these days, don’t you think?

Well, it is August now and we are well into the Dog Days of Summer. We are finally getting out of town tomorrow–heading to Saratoga, NY to attend the wedding of my nephew Tim and Abbie.

We are very much looking forward to the festivities and to seeing our DP and her family, but the air travel will no doubt be arduous. Please pray for travel mercies for the OM and me, the boy, daughter #1, and daughter #2 and her petite famille.

In the meantime, here are some good links to worthwhile things:

August on TCM is Summer Under the Stars month with a different star celebrated every day. At first glance it’s not a great selection, but there are some good days in there!

This is the Introduction to the graphic novel, The Grand Inquisitor, but it serves as an excellent overview of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. This novel is very relevant today in view of our culture’s desire to find technological/scientific solutions to the problem of Evil. “This way of thinking appalled Dostoyevsky. With his profound grasp of psychology, he regarded the materialists’ view of human nature as hopelessly simplistic. Deeply suspicious of what intellectuals would do if they ever gained the power they sought, he described in greater detail than any other nineteenth-century thinker what we have come to call totalitarianism. Even in its less terrifying forms, rule by supposedly benevolent experts was, he thought, more dangerous than people understood.”

Also, I read recently that the New York Times is disbanding its sports department. Oh really? If our local paper got rid of its sports department, there would be (literally) nothing left to read. Another nail in the coffin of print journalism I guess.

We are looking forward to a guest post from DN on Friday, so stay tuned!

The painting is “The Swearing In of Calvin Coolidge by His Father” by Arthur I. Keller, 1923.