Thanksgiving

The little band of Pilgrims who first established this institution on the shore by Plymouth Rock had no doubts. If their little colony of devoted souls, when exiled to a foreign wilderness by persecution, cut in half by disease, surrounded by hostility and threatened with famine, could give thanks, how much more should this great nation, less deserving than the Pilgrims yet abounding in freedom, peace, security and plenty, now have the faith to return thanks to the author of all good and perfect gifts.

From "Calvin Coolidge Says", November 28, 1930.

Veteran's Day

What the veterans gave cannot be measured in money. It was priceless.

From "Calvin Coolidge Says", January 28, 1931

Silent Cal

A wise old owl lived in an oak.
The more he saw the less he spoke.
The less he spoke the more he heard;
Why can't we be like that old bird?

Over the fireplace in Coolidge's home at Northampton, Massachusetts

Past and Future

We review the past not in order that we may return to it but that we find in what direction, straight and clear, it points to the future.

Address as vice president, Burlington, Vermont, June 12, 1923

Columbus Day

Measured by its effect on all following history, the voyage of Columbus, ending in the discovery of a new hemisphere, was an achievement of the first magnitude. Possibly others preceded him, but he was the first who made known the existence of America to European civilization.

From "Calvin Coolidge Says", October 11, 1930

Election Day

Elections are the most serious business in which our citizens engage. On their results depends not only the welfare of the people but the demonstration of their ability to govern themselves with safety and justice to each other. The greatest peace-time test of the moral power of a people is the ability to cast a disinterested, unselfish and patriotic vote. At the present time the country needs the most conscientious thought it can give in choosing officers. Only such decision is worthy of a free people.

from "Calvin Coolidge Says", September 29, 1930

Frank Ashford

In 1927, President and Mrs. Coolidge had a busy summer in Rapid City, South Dakota, a part of the country unfamiliar to both of these Vermont natives. It was here that he received a Native-American warrior’s headdress now displayed at the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum (CCPLM). Coolidge was president in 1924 when citizenship was granted to all of the native population. A local Boy Scout troop presented him

with a cowboy outfit complete with hat and chaps. In early August, the president delivered his famous one line news release that startled the nation by saying, “I do not choose to run for president in 1928.”

Lesser known today is that Frank Clifford Ashford painted two portraits of President Coolidge and two portraits of Grace Coolidge that summer at the State Lodge in Custer State Park where they resided. Two of the artworks hang at the CCPLM, one of the president in the Native-American headdress and the other, a profile of the first lady in a red dress. The other two works remain hanging at the lodge where they were originally painted. In those, the couple is in more formal dress.

Ashford, born in Iowa, worked as a farm hand on his father’s farm in Rondell, Brown County, SD as late as 1900. During the next three decades, he worked as an artist in Paris and New York where he studied, exhibited and is known to have painted landscapes as well as portraits. In New York, he was a student of William Merritt Chase.

After Ashford’s works were exhibited in the Salon of the Societe des Artistes Francais in 1912, and both at the Chicago Art Institute and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in 1913, he showed a painting titled "Marjorie" at the National Academy of Design in 1920. The latter may have been a portrait of his wife, Marjorie Rickel, whom he married in South Dakota in 1918 and divorced by the time of the US Census in 1930.

From 1930 until his death in 1960, he resided and worked primarily in South Dakota.