Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation

Background

The Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation was founded in 1960 by President Calvin Coolidge’s son, John Coolidge, as the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation. In 2015, the weekly Seven Days interviewed former board member John Donald, who said for decades the foundation was “a backroom operation with a limited budget” dedicated to preserving Coolidge’s boyhood home in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. ¹

Seven Days charged that “conservative donors” had “taken over” the foundation and turned it into an organization that “has deeper pockets and greater ambitions to become a national institution befitting a former president and to spread his gospel of fiscal discipline.” ²

The newspaper said that the transformation of the foundation was led by Amity Shlaes, a former editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal and author of a biography of Coolidge published in 2013. Shlaes became a board member of the foundation in 2011 and its CEO in 2014 after the foundation received a four-year, $1 million grant from the Thomas W. Smith Foundation to pay her salary. ²

Activities

Coolidge Prize for Journalism

In 2013 the foundation said it would give a prize of $20,000 to a journalist for three columns, in honor of the 1930-1931 period in which former President Coolidge wrote a newspaper column.  “Coolidge’s principles are the ones that warrant more attention today,” Shlaes told Newsmax, “discipline, brevity, civility, and focus on debt and the economy.” ³

The foundation awarded three Coolidge Prizes for Journalism, to Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins, George Mason University economist and writer Donald Boudreaux, and lawyer Steven Frias. The foundation website does not list any winners after 2015. ⁴

College Scholarships

In 2016 the Coolidge Foundation announced it would fund college scholarships, called “The Coolidge,” that would pay in full a student’s tuition, fees, room, and board.  Shlaes, writing in Forbes, said the foundation’s purpose in supporting the scholarship “because we believe it will help elevate a President whose values can inspire the country today” and that “small competitions inspire even those hundreds or thousands of applicants who don’t win.” ⁵

The Coolidge Foundation awarded five Coolidge Scholarships in 2021. ⁶ In addition, 100 students were named “Coolidge Senators” and given a small scholarship and a trip to Washington to meet with policy makers, “with a special emphasis on entrepreneurship and the private sector.” ⁷

High School Debate Programs

The foundation sponsors a national program for high school debaters with finals Held in Plymouth on the fourth of July. Debaters compete for $15,000 in scholarship grants, and exceptional competitors are invited to membership in “The 1890 Society,” named for the year President Coolidge first gave a public speech. The 2022 topic focuses on reducing the national debt. ⁸

Preservation of Coolidge’s Writings

The foundation hosts extensive writings by President Coolidge on its website, including speeches, proclamations, newspaper columns Coolidge wrote in 1930-31 and photos of campaign buttons. ⁹

In 2021 the Intercollegiate Studies Institute published a new edition of The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge, annotated by Coolidge Foundation CEO Amity Shlaes and including several of Coolidge’s speeches. Barton Swaim, reviewing the book in the Wall Street Journal, called the book “a minor masterpiece of political memoir:  incisive, efficient, bereft of vanity and score-settling.” ¹⁰