Date: January 25, 1919
Location: Boston, MA
Context: Governor Coolidge’s speech during a reception tendered to him after the adjournment of the Annual Meeting of the Vermont Association of Boston, held January 25, 1919, at the Hotel Somerset.
(Original source available here)
Mr. President and Members and Guests of the Vermont Association:
I want to thank you for gathering here this evening and giving such a greeting to me. I want you to know how deeply I appreciate it, coming as it does not only from those who are associated with me in the citizenship of Massachusetts but whose memory and association go back with mine to the old Green Mountain State.
If I were to speak to you of Massachusetts I should have to begin, I suppose, with the location of that picture to which the President has directed your attention. There are one or two things about it that he has not fully explained to you. That is not a toga that I am wearing there, but is what all of us know as a frock. I used to have one that was spun and woven and made up into a garment by my grandmother, but this one was the property of my grandfather, not spun and woven on the farm but no doubt the product of some of the mills of Massachusetts. And the boots that I have on there also belonged to my grandfather, and it is a tradition in the family that they were made for him there in Plymouth in 1858, when he was elected to be a member of the Vermont House of Representatives, where my grandmother said that he contracted the extravagant habit of blacking his boots instead of greasing them.
I am not sure whether that is so or not. I looked at the boots when she told me about it and there were no remains of blacking on them.
But I said that I should have to begin with that picture if I was to speak to you of Massachusetts, because it was in that neighborhood that I first began to learn of this old Commonwealth of ours; and while it was my grandfather’s grandfather that went from Massachusetts somewhere just after 1780 and settled in the town of Plymouth and died, I think, on the farm that this picture represents, we would always look back to the Commonwealth as the source of our family, not only of my paternal grandfather’s family but my grandmother’s family, and of course practically all the relatives that we had. And we were proud of the history of the old Commonwealth from its beginning up to the day when we happened to be talking about it and discussing it, – whether we remembered the sailing of the Mayflower and the hardships that the early settlers endured and their determination to establish and maintain a government of their own, coming along through the Indian wars and the old French war, which had more of a meaning to me perhaps than I realized at the time, for it was in that season that the old military road running from Charlestown, New Hampshire, over towards Ticonderoga was cut through under the orders of Lord Jeffrey Amherst, who was in command of the English and Colonial forces, and it was on the top of the hill between the valley of the Connecticut on the east and the valley of the Champlain on the west that my grandfather’s grandfather settled when he went to Vermont from the town of Lancaster, Massachusetts. And there were there in this farmhouse some flintlock guns and one of them, I was told, had been borne by a soldier of the Revolutionary War; and we knew that our relatives had fought in that war and that when Paul Revere rode out through Middlesex to rouse up the country on the night between the eighteenth and nineteenth of April that he had roused up our kinsfolk and brought them by means of that arousal to Concord Bridge, where that historic shot was fired that the poet tells us justly was heard around the world. And of course we knew of the old frigate “Constitution” – “Old Ironsides” – which now lies in our harbor here, and of the historic part it had played in the War of 1812; and we knew how the Vermont troops and the Massachusetts troops had fought shoulder to shoulder through that great war between the States that had determined that this nation of our was not to be half slave and half free, but was to be finally and forever all free.
I came to Massachusetts in 1891 for the purpose of attending college, because while there were colleges in Vermont we still looked to Massachusetts for leadership in all educational efforts, and I have been connected intimately with the old Bay State ever since that time, because, coming out of college, I started in with the study of law in the city which is still my home, the old town of Northampton. I saw from there the troops leave that were destined to fight with the old Second Regiment of the Connecticut Valley and the Ninth Regiment of Boston at Santiago; and of course I have known of all Massachusetts history since that time. I have seen what the old Commonwealth stands for. I have known of its great men, whether they were statesmen of the old days, like the Adamses, Hancock, Franklin, or whether of the pre-war period, like Choate and the great Senator from Massachusetts (though like me born in a neighboring State), Daniel Webster, and their own Massachusetts man, Charles Sumner. I have known of her great war Governor, John A. Andrew, and the part he played in bringing about the victory that will be justly celebrated forever. And her poets – Longfellow, Whittier; and her writers, like Emerson and Holmes. I know what Massachusetts stands for now at the national capital and the leadership that it has there, and I have seen what we have been doing here during the storm and stress of the past four years – the two hundred thousand of Massachusetts men that we have sent into the service and the more than a billion dollars of her treasure that we have given to save not only our own liberties but to save the liberties of the world.
So we men from Vermont look to Massachusetts in almost the same way that we look to our own State – many of us part and parcel of the same thing – and it is a little difficult for us to know whether we are Vermont men or whether we are Massachusetts men, or a happy combination of both. We are all proud of Massachusetts and we are proud of Vermont and the things that they both stand for. We have seen the industries of our Commonwealth grow, and we have seen the wise laws under which it lives and the justice, fair and equitable, that is administered by its courts, and we have seen the prosperity that has come to the whole people of the Commonwealth. I think we are as determined now as we ever were in the past to maintain those institutions, to maintain the Constitution of the old Commonwealth and all of those blessings that have meant so much to her people, and, standing on those as a firm foundation of support to carry into the future the hope of a civilization higher and finer and better than was handed down to us.
Citation: Vermont Historical Society
The Coolidge Foundation thanks Isaac Oberman, who prepared this document for digital publication