Why doesn’t Coolidge have a big national library like, say, President Bush, President Clinton, President Carter or President Truman? One reason Coolidge doesn’t have such a library is that the presidential library laws were different in his time. Another reason though was that Coolidge resisted large monuments. He simply didn’t believe in the “great man” theory of history.
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This photo of the great singer Marian Anderson was taken during World War II. Most of us associate Anderson’s performances in Washington with her most famous one, the 1939 appearance at the Lincoln Memorial. We recently stumbled across an article that reminded us that the iconic contralto had performed in Washington even before the 1930s.
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St. Johnsbury Academy just proudly reported that Academy math students earned the highest cumulative score in the annual New England Mathematics League Contest. Few know that Coolidge actually attended St. Johnsbury, if only for a few weeks. The future president was there for a short prep course that helped him to gain admission to the college of his choice, Amherst College in Massachusetts.
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Coolidge honored teachers, and often supported pay raises for them. In 1919, the same year that he opposed a public-sector police union, Coolidge wrote from Boston to the mayor of Northampton that he was concerned about teachers’ compensation: “It has become notorious that the pay for this most important function is much less than that which prevails in commercial life and business activities.”
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Coolidge viewed doing nothing as a virtue – at least when it came to legislating. That’s the attitude of most Americans these days. After all, it’s not uncommon to hear lawmakers get criticized for “doing nothing.” But Coolidge viewed doing nothing as a virtue – at least when it came to legislating.
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