Calvin Coolidge’s “Hebraic Mortar”
In May 1925, President Calvin Coolidge offered a vivid tribute to the “Hebraic mortar … of American democracy.” It should have been a vanilla speech at a prosy Washington event—the dedication of a new Jewish community center. But Coolidge took stock of the moment; a century later, his address is worth revisiting.
Just a couple of years earlier, in 1923, Henry Ford—America’s great industrialist, in many ways the Elon Musk of his time—had dominated multiple presidential polls, trumping the incumbent, Warren G. Harding. Ford never announced his candidacy for the 1924 election, nor had he ever held elected office. But he had captured the American imagination as an avatar for business ingenuity, education reform, and general uplift for the American middle class. It is also undeniable that Ford sought to mainstream anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States. He ultimately endorsed Coolidge for president in December 1923, after Harding’s sudden death from a heart attack. In Coolidge’s 1925 speech to a largely Jewish crowd, he decisively broke with the anti-Jewish element of Ford’s movement.
In November 1920, Ford published the first installment of The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. A multivolume anthology drawn from Ford’s anti-Jewish weekly, The Dearborn Independent, it was soon translated into sixteen languages—including six editions printed in Germany between 1920 and 1922. By the mid-1920s, the Dearborn Independent had reached a circulation of between 700,000 and 900,000. These numbers were in part due to the paper’s distribution in Ford automotive dealerships, but are nonetheless significant, considering that the New York Times had a circulation of 345,149 in 1925; the Chicago Tribune reached 608,130.
Of course, other forms of bigotry flourished in the teens and twenties. The 1915 silent film Birth of a Nation was banned in cities across the Midwest for its insulting depictions of black people. Despite these widespread restrictions, then–President Woodrow Wilson watched the film upon its release, in the first-ever movie screening held at the White House. Birth of a Nation soon inspired a new iteration of the anti-Catholic, racist, and anti-immigrant Ku Klux Klan. Hugo Black, the Alabama politician and sometime Klan member who eventually became a Supreme Court justice, built his early career attacking Catholicism; he delivered dozens of anti-Catholic speeches at Klan meetings across Alabama during his 1926 Senate campaign.
It was in this troubled atmosphere that Coolidge took the stage at a dedication ceremony for a community center, in 1925, “a year of dedications and rededications.” Hearkening to the start of the American Revolution in 1775, Coolidge attributed the success of the American project to a “common spiritual inspiration” powerful enough to “mold and weld together into a national unity, the many and scattered colonial communities that had been planted along the Atlantic seaboard.” He reminded his audience that tension among the early colonies seemed more organic and far more likely than cooperation. There was no guarantee that the colonies would form a national entity for revolution, and no clear idea of which colonies might agree to join it:
No man, on the day of Lexington, could be altogether sure that the Revolution was more than a New England affair. It might or it might not draw the middle and southern colonies into its armed array of resistance. On the other hand, the thirteen might have been joined by Canada, which was British in sovereignty, but chiefly French in population, by Florida and Louisiana, which were both mainly Spanish. In short, there might have been fourteen, or fifteen, or sixteen original colonies participating in the North American revolution against Europe, or there might have been less than a half dozen of them.
Coolidge goes on to discuss further “scraps of territorial history,” illustrating that European powers tussled over claims to the continent. He does so to make a simple point: “there were few and doubtful common concerns to bind them together.”
The colonies’ chief commercial interests rested overseas, with their mother countries, rather than with one another. New England was ruggedly Puritan; Pennsylvania was founded by pacifist Quakers. Few Southern colonists had been impelled to settle the New World by religious motive or persecution; a popular Southern Cavalier ideal was the great estate of the English gentry.
Coolidge details further differences. But he argues that the colonial character was nonetheless marked by a common religious liberalism: “From its beginnings, the new continent had seemed destined to be the home of religious tolerance.” This, he suggests, is because of the Bible, “the work of literature that was common to all of them.” Scripture was everywhere in the colonies. Citing “the historian Lecky”—presumably the nineteenth-century Irishman William Lecky—Coolidge contends that “Hebraic mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy.”
For the “sturdy old divines of those days,” the Bible served as a patriotic rallying cry:
They knew the Book. They were profoundly familiar with it, and eminently capable in the exposition of all its justifications for rebellion. To them, the record of the exodus from Egypt was indeed an inspired precedent. They knew what arguments from holy writ would most powerfully influence their people. It required no great stretch of logical processes to demonstrate that the children of Israel, making bricks without straw in Egypt, had their modern counterpart in the people of the colonies, enduring the imposition of taxation without representation!
The idea of America as a kind of Israel, an “almost chosen nation,” in Abraham Lincoln’s words some generations earlier, was not new. William Bradford, founder of the Plymouth colony in 1620, compared his personal study of Hebrew to Moses seeing the Promised Land, yet not being permitted to enter. John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, founders of the New Haven colony in 1637, were expert Hebrew scholars; around half of the dozens of statutes in the New Haven code of 1655 contained references to Hebrew scripture. Davenport ensured that the first public school in New Haven included Hebrew in the core curriculum and encouraged broad engagement with, as Coolidge puts it, the “great figures of Hebrew history, with Joshua, Samuel, Moses, Joseph, David, Solomon, Gideon, Elisha.” The United States is peppered with place names sourced from the Bible: Salem, Sharon, Jericho, Bethlehem, Goshen, Shiloh, and Hebron are just a few examples.
George Washington famously sent warm greetings to Jewish congregations, most notably to a synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, where he offered a blessing inspired by Hebrew prophets: “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
This biblical rootedness, Coolidge suggests, remains vital to maintaining a cohesive polity. A shared attachment to the Bible bolstered the patriot cause, drawing together scattered sympathies and interests and “divergencies of religious faith.” It is no wonder, he notes, that Jews—who first arrived on America’s shores in the 1650s—formed an integral part of the Revolutionary War effort, giving ample blood and treasure.
Coolidge does not directly address the conspiracies about Jews endemic at the time he offered these remarks: the idea that worldwide Jewry conspired to start World War I, for example, or to assassinate President William McKinley in 1901. Descendants of these theories abound today, as “Zionists” are blamed for the Iraq War or the assassination of JFK or Charlie Kirk. Coolidge notes instead that Jews living in America’s capital city have passed “beyond the need for any other benevolence” and are prepared to continue contributing “to the national life, fully worthy of the traditions they had inherited.”
The speech is also not highly political; it does not deal with questions of the then-young modern Zionist movement, for example. It instead recalls the “broadening lines” of the American idea of pluralism, present at the country’s earliest stages. Jews belong to this project too, he insists: “Made up of so many diverse elements, our country must cling to those fundamentals that have been tried and proved as buttresses of national solidarity.” These fundamentals, to Coolidge, include the lessons of Jewish history, both in the Bible and the events recorded since. Jews have learned to adapt, Coolidge argues, without “sacrifice of essentials.”
Coolidge admits the challenge to the “spiritual unification of America” he pleads for in this speech: “Despite all experience, society continues to engender the hatreds and jealousies whereof are born domestic strife and international conflicts.” He notes that “there is no straight and smooth and posted highway into the vast, dim realm of the tomorrows. There are bogs and morasses, blind roads and bad detours. No philosophy of history has ever succeeded in charting accurately the future.”
But the Jewish story offers hope, Coolidge suggests. He concludes the speech thus:
May they pause long enough to contemplate that the patriots who laid the foundation of this Republic drew their faith from the Bible. May they give due credit to the people among whom the Holy Scriptures came into being. And as they ponder the assertion that “Hebraic mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy,” they cannot escape the conclusion that if American democracy is to remain the greatest hope of humanity, it must continue abundantly in the faith of the Bible.
Coolidge did not plead for special favors on behalf of Jews, but for a return to the biblical precepts he believed would bless the nation. This plea doubled as a warning: in a troubled anniversary year, when the nation was fatigued by war and wary of the future, it might succumb to ancient hatreds and jealousies inherent to the human heart and fall into disarray. Or it could make sense of things another way, remembering the diverse elements present at the founding, including the Jews who sacrificed their lives or fortunes to the revolutionary effort. One hundred years on, Coolidge’s message captures some of the best of American conservatism: a frank and grateful appraisal of the past combined with a religious spirit that embraces religious toleration.