Reviewed by Robert Cooperman
The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge
by Charles Rammelkamp
Kelsay Books
September 2025, 108 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1639807963
With perhaps the exception of Gerald Ford and of course the current occupant of the White House, no American president has been the butt of more jokes than Calvin Coolidge. Ridiculed for not possessing the eloquence of Franklin Roosevelt, the ebullient loquaciousness of Teddy Roosevelt, the earnest oratory power of John F. Kennedy, Coolidge has long been seen only as “Silent Cal,” a man of a few, miserly words who didn’t do much in office except to keep quiet and whose perhaps only claim to fame was that for one summer on vacation in the Black Hills, his bodyguard, unbeknownst to Coolidge, was none other than Al Capone’s older brother Richard Hart, a former revenuer, who sought to hide his Italian, mobbed up connection with Al, by giving out hints he was a Native American.
Now, to rectify the historical and rhetorical record, Charles Rammelkamp has written a verse biography of Coolidge, and in fittingly plain spoken poems has turned him into a kind of no-nonsense American hero in the mold of men who speak few words, but when they do, it pays to listen very, very attentively. The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge begins not so much with Coolidge himself, but with a poem by one of his sons, describing how his brother Calvin, Jr. succumbed to sepsis from an infected blister incurred while playing tennis. Tellingly, the future president speaks only four words in “Love Match”: “Oh my beautiful boy,” while he holds his dying son’s hand and watches helplessly the inevitable end of his beloved son. But how poignantly eloquent that one short sentence is! Also ironically eloquent is the poem’s title. We expect “Love Match” to be about a young Coolidge falling in love, courting, and marrying his Abbie, his future bride. But it’s really a play on the tennis term, “Love,” meaning not scoring a point, being, to use the tennis term, bageled, and against the ultimate opponent, Death, Coolidge’s son was shut out, swept off the board by the most ruthless player of all.
Though Coolidge had a reputation for taciturnity, the poems in this collection that are spoken by him have a down-to-earth and practical fluency. What shines forth most brightly is the man’s innate decency, his desire to be a good husband, father, and perhaps most of all, president. We see this over and over again in this collection, without Coolidge feeling the necessity to call attention to his essential integrity. Here he is upon learning he has just been promoted to the presidency, from vice-president, after the death of Warren G. Harding:
We were in Plymouth, Vermont, visiting family
when on the night of August 2, 1923,
my father awakened me with the news,
voice trembling with emotion.
Father was the first to address me as President,
a culmination of a lifelong desire for my success,
but oh, the circumstances!
It takes a second to realize this “lifelong desire” may have been as much Coolidge’s father’s dream as the now president’s, who will of course accept the new job and the responsibility that goes with it, but the price overweighs the elevation itself. Tellingly, his first act is to send a condolence telegram to Harding’s widow. Only after that duty is taken care of does he allow his father, a notary public, to swear him in as president.
The man we think of now as utterly lacking a sense of humor, as a straight-laced and stiff-backed, unbending puritan, was far from that. Instead in, “The Hobby,” Coolidge’s rich sense of playful irony comes out in just a couple of words:
A reporter once asked me
if I had any hobbies.
‘Holding office,’ I deadpanned in response.
I ran for something seventeen times in my life,
and that doesn’t even include the primaries.
Coolidge’s credo of wise and ironic silence can be summed up in the near title poem, “”The Tao According to Cal,” in which the final two lines state, “Those who know do not talk./Those who talk do not know.” And in the next poem, “Silence,” he has some puckish fun at a dinner party:
I know the jokes.
I even find them funny.
‘Silent Cal”: the nickname makes me smile.
The woman I sat next to at dinner
Who told me, ‘I bet my friend
I would be able to get more
than two words out of you tonight.”
‘You lose.’
Did I really say that?
It makes a good story, doesn’t it?
Did he or didn’t he? We’ll never know and he certainly won’t tell us, but maybe he did and was smiling long after that dinner party and his gentle taunt of the presumptuous woman he sat next to.
Like the straightforward man that “Silent Cal” was, the poems in this collection follow a linear progression of Coolidge as a young man, a man in his first profession as school teacher, a man in love, a man furthering his public career, and then life after public office, and finally poems spoken by his widow and son after his death.
One of the greatest gifts Rammelkamp gives us in The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge is not just another depiction of a man famous, or infamous, for not being a great talker, but that Coolidge’s very taciturn nature hid the depths of feeling he was capable of and barely hid behind his cloak of quiet. In the penultimate poem, “The Rest Is Silence,” Coolidge’s son has this to say about his deceased father:
I think of Father’s silence, a trait
I always tried to emulate, as it enhances
self-control, self-awareness, spirituality,
enables you to have some perspective.
Those of us close to him
knew he’d never recovered
from my brother’s death.
Did he welcome his own,
that ultimate silence?
Here, as elsewhere in this fine collection, Rammelkamp’s poetical plain style doesn’t attempt to call attention to its cleverness, but mirrors Coolidge’s own reserved eloquence. Or as Abraham Lincoln once ironically opined: if you keep your mouth shut, people will think you’re a fool. If you open it, they’ll know for sure. Calvin Coolidge was no fool, just a practical man trying to do the best he could with what he had to work with. And in this refreshing collection. Rammelkamp shows us the man’s many admirable qualities.
About the reviewer: Robert Cooperman has taught composition and literature at the University of Georgia; Bowling Green State University, in Ohio; and the University of Baltimore. He’s also led various poetry writing workshops. Cooperman has had more than twenty volumes of poetry published, among them In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains (Western Reflections Books), which won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. The Widow’s Burden (Western Reflections Books) was the runner-up for the WILLA Award from Women Writing the West. Draft Board Blues (FutureCycle Press) was named One of The Ten Best Books by a Colorado Author for 2017 by Westword Magazine. My Shtetl won the Holland Award from Logan House Press. Cooperman’s most recent collection is Reefer Madness. In addition, Cooperman’s two most recent chapbooks are Saved by the Dead (Liquid Light Press) and All Our Fare-Thee-Wells (Finishing Line Press).