A Puritan in Babylon Quotes

“I have never seen a public man who more quickly, shrewdly, efficiently got through a pile of Sunday newspapers than Calvin Coolidge. I was interested in his skill. It revealed a sharp mind, a lively set of brains. He rose abruptly after his morning stint of reading, walked out of the smoking-room without saying a word; indeed he had passed less than a dozen syllables during the hour and a half while we sat watching him above the rims of our papers.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Incidentally the squires scrambled in Boston for the state funds which might be distributed among their banks as patronage. They asked little else. Postmasters and the court house officials were of the lower orders. But the squires supported them and required a sort of political military service from them. Thus the squirearchy reigned feudally in a capitalistic democracy”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Crane, succeeding Senator Hoar in the Senate, would be congenitally the foe of Lodge. Lodge was of the Brahmin caste in Massachusetts, and Harvardian of the deepest die, a Cabot by inheritance who liked to be known as the scholar in politics; the author of several books, the friend of the literati in America and England, a travelled man, meticulous of dress, of deportment and of speech, intellectually mediocre, emotional, highly charged but heavily suppressed, capable of hatreds and friendly loyalties that were deeply affectionate”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Thin soil like Massachusetts highly cultivated” was the estimate of Congressman Lodge made by Thomas B. Reed, Speaker of the national House of Representatives.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“It is interesting to note that Senator Lodge, Crane’s rival, was invincible in Essex County, the most northeasterly in the state, and Senator Crane was moated in Berkshire, the most southwesterly. Harvard and the Catholics and an urban civilization dominated the seaboard. A sophisticated Congregational industrialism—farms, fields, and workshops—gave color to the Republican cast of thought of western Massachusetts.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“My old friends in the House{91} were gone. The Western Massachusetts Club, that had its headquarters in the Adams House where most of us lived that came from beyond the Connecticut, was inactive. The committees I had, except the chairmanship of agriculture, did not interest me greatly, and to crown my discontent the Democratic governor sent in a veto which the senate sustained, to a bill authorizing the New Haven Railroad to construct a trolley system in western Massachusetts.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Coolidge, in those days and always, distrusted reformers.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“When they appeared with bills in legislative committees where he met them, he treated the sponsors of the reform measure with a sort of embalmed courtesy, heard them, promised nothing. If the reformers really controlled votes he surprised them by helping their measures. He was educating himself politically in those senatorial years. “Education,” he wrote in one of his pat phrases, “after all is the process by which each individual creates his own universe and determines its dimensions.”{”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Arthur P. Russell, who was vice president of the New Haven Railroad, and Charles Hiller Innes, commonly accredited as the Republican boss of Boston, and of course called “Charlie,” were fairly close to the Northampton senator, and, according to the tradition of the day,{98} in a pinch Innes could deliver Coolidge’s vote. Innes testified in 1919 that he received forty thousand dollars in three years from the New Haven Railroad.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“His fairy godfather in the legislature was Senator Murray Crane. Few persons influenced Coolidge’s life more than Crane; his father, and Dwight Morrow perhaps, then Crane. So we must pause here a moment and consider Winthrop Murray Crane, twenty years older than Calvin Coolidge, a papermaker, who having been dead a decade and a half as these lines are penned Crane may well be called a statesman.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“But when Jim Curley needed something for the final uphill pull in his mayoralty race, Guy Currier knew where to find it, and when Malcolm Nichols ran on the Republican ticket, Currier was his friend; Nichols won. Such a man could not escape the admiration of Calvin Coolidge.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Further Coolidge wrote that even if he had asked Crane how to vote on those interests “about which there was constant legislation,” Crane would have told him to consult his own judgment and vote for the public interest. The fact that the two men never discussed Crane’s personal interest in legislation is significant. They enjoyed that deep intimacy which made them understand each other. Following this paragraph is another statement about Crane’s good taste in discussing legislation with the president of the senate. Coolidge wrote: “He confirmed my opinion as to the value of a silence which avoids creating a situation where one would not otherwise exist.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Governor McCall desired to go to the United States Senate. There was some feeling that he should continue his gubernatorial task. But McCall understood Coolidge’s ambition to be governor. McCall realized that Coolidge had not announced his gubernatorial candidacy out of deference to McCall. The governor apparently desired the excuse of opposition to retire gracefully as much as Coolidge desired to be governor.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Coolidge declared later that no one knew that McCall had told him to run and “some supposed I would run against him.” But Coolidge was not of that stripe.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“McCall started to run for the Senate but for some strange reason gave up the race in the midst of his primary campaign and John W. Weeks entered the senatorial race. It was a sad campaign in Massachusetts.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“President Wilson had made his unfortunate plea for Democratic support which antagonized the West but was not a sufficient handicap to defeat David I. Walsh, the Democratic leader, who overcame Senator Weeks.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“For some reason, the former President failed to rise to the response of the audience to his unconscious humor. He began a phrase modestly,
"When I was in Washington," being a euphemism for
"When I was President" and the audience burst into laughter. Afterwards, he said sadly to Mrs. Coolidge:
"They seemed to be in a strange mood. I never spoke to an audience which laughed before.""
Yet a few weeks later when an enthusiastic woman Republican gurgled at him:
"Oh, Mr. Coolidge, I enjoyed your speech so much that I stood up during the whole speech. I couldn't get a seat."
Quipped Coolidge: "So did I!”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“I have never seen a public man who more quickly, shrewdly, efficiently got through a pile of Sunday newspapers than Calvin Coolidge. I was interested in his skill. It revealed a sharp mind, a lively set of brains. He rose abruptly after his morning stint of reading, walked out of the smoking-room without saying a word; indeed he had passed less than a dozen syllables during the hour and a half while we sat watching him above the rims of our papers.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Along a plateau the traveller passes the reservoir, the Wachusett Reservoir, its bank more or less covered with pines, to West Boylston, a village by the lakeside. “Mount” Wachusett looks over the wilderness from Clinton northward.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“He told Clarence S. Brigham, of the American Antiquarian Society, that he had begun translating Dante’s “Inferno” before he was married and he liked it so well that he kept right on with it and finished it afterward.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Those two were never friends. But Grace Goodhue was right about Calvin Coolidge, her mother was wrong. It was love at first sight. She, however, probably saw him first. Not only was her social experience wider than his, her emotional intelligence was keener. So when her lover and her mother clashed, she followed her lover.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“First of all we must remember that Theodore Roosevelt was young, a President in his early forties. His appeal was directly to young Republicans. He awakened hope in the colleges. It was not strange that Calvin Coolidge heard him.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“As it was, getting out of the car that night Coolidge said to Jager: “It’s wonderful to ride in a horseless wagon.” Then a pause: “But it won’t amount to much!”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Three years after he came to town, he was elected one of the members of the common council of the town of Northampton, from Ward Two. It was in that year that the Northampton City Council was faced with the first serious traffic problem that had come up in a hundred years. Fred Jager brought an automobile to town. It was called a Locomobile. It went chugging up and down the streets and scared the horses. The Council resolved that something ought to be done.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Luck often is a lazy man’s explanation for the result of intelligent diligence.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“President Cleveland, deserting his party, battled alone for the gold standard and the big dollar.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“In those years from 1893 to 1896, Congress was thrown into turmoil by the demand for “the free coinage of silver at sixteen to one” when the commercial ratio was about thirty to one.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“He writes of the Garman ethics that “there is a standard of righteousness that might does not make right, that the end does not justify the means, and that expediency as a working principle is bound to fail. The only hope of perfecting human relationships is in accordance with the law of service under which men are not so solicitous about what they shall get as they are about what they shall give.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“He reasoned because human consciousness is a part of universal life, that the part may not be greater than the whole. Therefore he concluded that the purposive force which directs life, which guides the stars in their courses and spurs and speeds the energies inside the atom, is of itself a consciousness.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Those were the days when it was proper, even necessary for Republicans in the most nonpartisan gatherings of the North to speak of the participation “of this State in the War of the Rebellion.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge