Coolidge's 1926 Declaration Speech Is the Best Answer to Progress Talk

Folks, here is a fact that ought to be on a bumper sticker. The president with the reputation for saying the least gave one of the greatest speeches in American history on the subject of the most important sentence ever written in the English language. They called him Silent Cal. He talked, as it turned out, when he had something to say.

He had something to say on July 5, 1926. The country had just finished celebrating the 150th birthday of the Declaration of Independence. Orators from coast to coast had said the usual things. And then the thirtieth president of the United States, born on the Fourth of July himself, went to Philadelphia and said something nobody was expecting: that the Declaration was not a stepping stone. It was a destination.

The occasion

The speech is formally titled "The Inspiration of the Declaration of Independence." It was delivered in Philadelphia, the city where the Declaration was signed, during the sesquicentennial celebrations of 1926. Calvin Coolidge was in the middle of his time in office, which ran from August 1923, when he took the oath after the death of Warren Harding, to March 1929. He had won the election of 1924 in his own right. He was a Vermonter and a lawyer, a former governor of Massachusetts, famous for his dry manner, and also known for a plain and compressed style in his speeches.

The occasion was a patriotic festival, and the easy thing to do on such an occasion is to praise the Founders and sit down. Coolidge did something harder. He used the anniversary to answer an argument that had been building for a generation, the argument that the old principles were out of date.

The Progressive challenge

To see what he was answering, go back a little.

The Progressive movement of the early twentieth century had a theory of its own. Woodrow Wilson, in Constitutional Government in the United States (1908), argued that the Founders' government was a Newtonian machine and that the modern state should be treated like a living organism that evolves. We deal with that argument in Woodrow Wilson Wanted a Darwinian Constitution, and Conservatives Said No. The theory flowed from a simple premise: society changes, so rights and powers must change with it. A principle that suited the farmers of 1776 might not suit the factory workers of 1910. The Declaration, on this view, was a splendid product of its moment, and no more binding than a splendid dress from the same year.

Coolidge was no stranger to this argument. He had come up through Massachusetts politics in the Progressive era and had watched it at work. He did not think it was foolish. He thought it was mistaken on one point, and he put the point as precisely as a lawyer.

The key passage, read closely

Here is the central passage, which is worth quoting at length.

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary.

Take it apart sentence by sentence.

"A finality that is exceedingly restful." Coolidge begins with a mood, and it is a wry one. In an age that prided itself on restlessness, he finds comfort in something settled. The word "restful" is a joke and an argument: it suggests that perpetual revision is tiring, and that a society which has to re-argue its foundations every decade is a society that cannot get on with living.

"It is often asserted..." He states the objection fairly. He does not pretend that the other side is stupid. The world has indeed made progress in science, medicine, industry and much else. He grants all of that.

"But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter." Here is the move. Progress is a feature of some kinds of knowledge and not of others. You can improve a steam engine. You cannot improve on a proposition that is true.

The three "if" sentences. This is the logical core. Coolidge restates three claims of the Declaration: equality, unalienable rights, and the consent of the governed. Each one is a statement about what is true, not about what is convenient. If it is true that all men are created equal, then it is final, in the way that a mathematical truth is final. The point is not that the Founders were wise. It is that the proposition is correct.

"Not forward, but backward." Now the trap closes. Where could one go from equality? Toward inequality. From rights? Toward the absence of rights. From consent of the governed? Toward rule without consent. Anyone who says he is moving beyond the Declaration must say which of the three he wishes to leave behind, and there is no way to leave any of them behind that counts as moving forward.

"They are reactionary." The final sentence takes the Progressives' favourite word and hands it back. The reactionaries, in Coolidge's usage, are not those who hold to the Declaration. They are those who would depart from it.

That is how you win an argument: by showing that the other side's premise, taken seriously, supports yours.

The colonial preachers

The speech has a second argument that is less quoted and just as interesting. Coolidge contended that the Declaration was not an invention of 1776. It was the product of a long development of political and religious thought in America. He traced its ideas to the colonial pulpit, naming such figures as Thomas Hooker, the Hartford minister whose preaching in the 1630s taught that the foundation of authority is the free consent of the people, and John Wise, the Massachusetts minister who argued early in the eighteenth century that government by consent was the natural form for men made in God's image.

Coolidge's point was that the Declaration did not fall from the sky. It summed up a century and a half of colonial experience in which ministers had taught that every person had worth before God, that congregations governed themselves and that rulers answered to a higher law. When Jefferson wrote "created equal", he drew on ideas his readers already held. The roots were religious. We follow those roots to their source in Made in God's Image, the Idea Behind Every Claim to Human Dignity.

This is a conservative argument in the best sense. It says that the principles of the Declaration are not whims of the moment but the fruit of a long inheritance, and that people who discard them are discarding a great deal more than a sheet of paper.

The steelman: don't rights evolve?

Now the other side, put as its friends would put it.

The Progressive reply to Coolidge is that he confuses a principle with its application. The words "all men are created equal" were true in 1776, but they were applied narrowly. Women could not vote, enslaved people were excluded, and the poor had little voice. What looked final to the Founders was actually the beginning of a long expansion. Rights have grown, the argument runs, because each generation has seen further than the last. The meaning of equality was not frozen in 1776. It evolved. To say that the Declaration is final is to say that we should have stopped with its authors' blind spots.

This is a strong objection. It deserves a better answer than a shrug.

The answer

The answer is that the expansion of rights in American history was not an evolution beyond the Declaration. It was an appeal to it.

Consider who did the expanding. Frederick Douglass, in his 1852 speech, did not say that the Declaration was outdated. He said it was true and that the country was violating it, as we explain in What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July and Why Douglass Kept the Constitution. Lincoln, as we saw in Lincoln's Apple of Gold Fragment Explains the Declaration and Constitution, held that the principle was a standard to be approached ever more closely. The women of Seneca Falls in 1848 modelled their Declaration of Sentiments on the Declaration of Independence, following its form and rewriting its famous claim to say that men and women are created equal. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 called the Declaration a promissory note on which America had defaulted.

Every one of these reformers argued that the country had failed to live up to the proposition. None of them argued that the proposition had been superseded. They were not saying that equality had to evolve into something new. They were saying that it had to be applied. That is Coolidge's point exactly. The Declaration was final, and the work of American history was to make the practice catch up with it.

By contrast, the view that rights evolve has had a less honourable career. If rights change with the age, then the age can take them away. The Progressive habit of treating rights as products of social development leads naturally to treating them as grants from the state. Franklin Roosevelt, in his Commonwealth Club address of 1932, called for "a re-appraisal of values" and a recognition of "the new terms of the old social contract," and the later claim of economic rights, which we examine in FDR's Second Bill of Rights Turned Freedoms Into Claims on Neighbors, follows from that. Whatever one thinks of the policy, the philosophical move is different from Douglass's and King's. They claimed an old right that had been denied. The evolving view creates a new claim that the state must supply. The first limits government. The second enlarges it.

Why it still persuades

Coolidge's speech has a lasting appeal for three reasons.

It is short and clear. The key passage takes under a minute to read aloud, and its logic is simple enough for a child to follow. That is rare in political philosophy.

It is optimistic. Coolidge is not a gloomy conservative. He does not say that progress is impossible. He says that on a few things the work is finished, and so we are free to build on them.

It is a model of how to argue. The speech does not abuse its opponents. It takes their word, progress, and shows what it requires. If you think the Declaration is outdated, name the clause you would drop. Coolidge's challenge still stands, and in a hundred years nobody has taken it up on its own terms.

Readers who want to test the claim further can start with Unalienable Means You Cannot Even Give Your Rights Away, and Here Is Why and Rights Are Not Social Constructs, and Here Is the Answer to That Claim.

The case in brief

1. On July 5, 1926 in Philadelphia, Coolidge argued that the Declaration's propositions of equality, unalienable rights and consent are final.
2. His logic is that no one can move beyond them forward; the only direction from equality, rights and consent is back toward inequality, rightlessness and rule without consent.
3. He traced the Declaration's ideas to colonial preachers such as Thomas Hooker and John Wise, so they were a long inheritance and not a passing fashion.
4. The Progressive reply that rights evolve fails because Douglass, Lincoln, Seneca Falls and King all advanced by appealing to the Declaration, not by superseding it.
5. The difference matters: an old right limits the state, while an evolving right can be redefined or supplied by it.

What you can do: read the Declaration's second paragraph with a friend who calls himself progressive, and ask which of its three claims, equality, rights or consent, he thinks is out of date.