Wilson, Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland. What-
ever strength and genius Grant had was displayed
in the army and not in Washington. Our other
Presidents in the half century have been the stand-
ard product of our politics--men with the faults and
virtues of their craft--not a bad craft as crafts go,
however much it is abused.

Calvin Coolidge, although he is the most incor-
rigible politician that has come to the White House
in this generation, strangely enough is the most
baffling person who has ruled us in the memory of
living man. He is baffling chiefly because he is not
candid. His self-reservation is not conscious. He
refuses to explain himself; to help the people to
judge him, to boast or bluster or justify himself.
Perhaps he uses the first personal pronoun as often
as his more outspoken predecessors used it; cer-
tainly he is no violet by a mossy stone. He esteems
himself highly; and why not? But their I's had the
portrait painter's camel's hair on one end, and so
their I's blocked them into the canvas and finally
their I's outlined them in detail as they talked.
Coolidge's I is blunt--unilluminating.

The chapters that shall follow in this book are
submitted in the endeavor to find the man behind
his mask of protective modesty. He hides not so
much in fear, as from habit. And when one would
ask why he began the habit of reticence and self-con-
cealment, one must go back to his boyhood, back
even beyond his boyhood into his ancestry and back

-4-