Happy birthday, Silent… John?
I’ll start with a trivia question. What was Ulysses S Grant’s middle name?
Samuel is a good guess. He was apparently nicknamed Uncle Sam at West Point due to his initials US. In fact, I don’t know what the S in Ulysses S Grant stands for. Neither does anyone else, because Ulysses S Grant’s middle initial was not actually S. It turns out that what was Ulysses S Grant’s middle name? is a trick question.
Ulysses S Grant’s middle name was Ulysses.
Ulysses S Grant’s first name was Hiram; Ulysses was his middle name. There was never an S. Because of the Uncle Sam nickname, there’s an argument that the S stood for Sam, but it wasn’t short for Samuel or Samwell, nor Samuele, Samir, Samson, or Ishmael for that matter.
A clerical error at West Point got his names mixed up and added the accidental new initial, cementing the use of his middle name Ulysses as his common name. Exactly why the S got added is unclear, but then so is most of the rest of history.
I find this especially notable because Ulysses S Grant is the center of the most common trick question of all historical trivia (who is buried in Grant’s tomb?) This one about his middle name has been hiding in plain sight the whole time.
It’s not unique to Grant, however. We can ask this same question in regard to many US Presidents.
What was Woodrow Wilson’s middle name? Woodrow. Given name Thomas.
What was Grover Cleveland’s middle name? Grover. Given name Stephen.
What was Dwight David Eisenhower’s middle name? Dwight. Slightly different from other examples in that Little Ike’s mother explicitly decided to swap his first and middle names to keep from having two Davids in the household. It’s common enough practice to go by one’s middle name for a variety of reasons, but it’s an extra step to swap the order of the names. In any case, David Dwight is what was on President Eisenhower’s birth certificate and as far as I can tell there’s no legal name change on record.
That brings us to Calvin Coolidge’s middle name, which you’ve already guessed was Calvin. His father was John Calvin Coolidge Sr, and he was John Calvin Coolidge Jr. It’s common to use different names for two people in the same household who share a name, for reasons so obvious that I’m surprised anyone ever names their child after themselves. But Cal notably doubled down by naming his sons John Coolidge (no middle name, so not John Coolidge III) and Calvin Coolidge Jr, a slightly maddening choice because it’s my understanding that Jr should be applied to offspring with the same name. However, this does indicate something similar to what I flagged about Eisenhower’s name. In practice, Coolidge wasn’t going by his middle name. In his mind perhaps he had simply dropped the “John” and considered his name Calvin Coolidge.
In the past, name changes after birth were not always documented as they usually are today. It would be unfair to characterize any of these as instances of not having going by their real first names. Historically, our assumption that one must go to court to get a legal declaration of a name change is an aberration rather than the norm. It’s not up to me to tell someone else what their real name is.
Perhaps if we were being overly pedantic we would say that Calvin Coolidge Jr was the son of Calvin Coolidge (né John Calvin Coolidge). Should we append “Sr” to President Calvin Coolidge’s name? No, we just use the names they chose. All this may be interesting trivia but it is indeed trivial.
More significant trivia is that today is Calvin Coolidge’s birthday. He is the only United States President to have been born on the Fourth of July.
If you haven’t read his address commemorating the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Declaration of Independence, or haven’t done so recently, it’s worth a few minutes of your time. It’s worth a lot more than a few minutes, but that’s all it will take.
While far from the only important or inspiring part of his 5 July 1926 address, this one stood out to me this year as being even more necessary on the 250th birthday than it was on the 150th:
We are too prone to overlook another conclusion. Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.
I find this at turns troubling and comforting. It says that character is destiny, but writ large: it’s not the character of one person on whose virtues or lack thereof our nation’s success will rise and fall, but the character of the nation. I find myself wondering if our nation’s character is our saving grace or if it is become our liability.
It saddens me to think, on our 250th birthday, that I have lost hope in the American people. Once upon a time I believed I could trust Americans’ character regardless of the leaders we chose. My faith is not broken, but it has been shaken. This is not just a Trump thing, but it’s not not a Trump thing.
I try not to let Trump get to me. I know that part of his shtick is intended to get under my skin. It’s meant to raise my ire. It’s not just that he doesn’t care what I think; he wants people to disagree with him publicly so that they can be tarred with the Trump Derangement Syndrome brush. There’s no question that some hate Trump by reflex rather than principle, but just as all of them would say it’s on principle (and for most it would be at least partly true) it matters not at all how principled one’s stand is; there is nothing short of sycophantic lockstep which can dispel the taint of so-called derangement.
That is itself its own form of derangement, and would not deliver the safety it might seem to promise. It is not enough to say that two plus two equals five today; tomorrow two plus two will equal seventeen, and the day after two plus two must equal glockenspiel. Then on the third day comes the cruelest twist when without warning two plus two must equal four. It’s cruel for two reasons: first because daring to hope that one can continue on saying two plus two equals four invites heartbreak. Second, because those who have said each day that the Leader was wrong will be obliged to question whether there is such a thing as truth and may be lured into reflexively denouncing the new “truth”… even though it is true.
That is why it’s a problem that the Vice President denies that the United States is a creedal nation and insists that what matters is blood and soil. It’s not just that it’s not true. It’s not just that truth matters. The truth — those truths the Continental Congress voted to declare as self-evident on the Second Day of July in 1776 and sent out to the colonies two days later — is the wellspring of the nation’s greatness.
As Coolidge said, “it is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation,” it is not the declaration of self-evident truths two hundred fifty years ago that makes us the United States of America, it is that we continue to hold those truths to be self-evident. It does not matter how many T‑shirts you print with images of the Declaration, or of bald eagles, or of the Twin Towers, if we don’t continue to hold those truths and protect them, it does not matter whether we hold the land and protect it.
We can’t hold and protect truths unless there is such a thing as truth. The nation’s character cannot be great unless our characters are. Venerating people of low character will destroy our nation more surely than the scoundrels themselves could. Making excuses for them, justifying their villainy, rallying to their sides, pretending there are glimmers of virtue in them where there are none to be found, these are the dangerous corruptions of which we must be wary.
I know we can survive corrupt politicians. I have less faith that we can survive being corrupted ourselves.
I came out to see the fireworks tonight and got eaten alive by mosquitoes. The fireworks show was very impressive, as one would hope it to be on the 250th. But what actually made my night was seeing fireflies on the path through the wooded area for the first time this summer. Maybe they’ve been out for weeks but I just haven’t been out and about at the right times. Or maybe I haven’t been paying enough attention. There’s something reassuring about seeing fireflies on a summer night, and I’m not sure that the town’s fireworks display, as good as it was, could possibly have matched those flickers in the darkness.
Last note: a few days ago Jonah Goldberg interviewed Michael Auslin about his book National Treasure: How The Declaration of Independence Made America. I haven’t read the book but I was fascinated by the podcast. https://thedispatch.com/podcast/remnant/the-declaration-of-independence-interview-michael-auslin/ You won’t be able to listen to it on the Fourth of July because the Fourth is minutes away from being over, but it will be a good listen whenever you get to it.
