On July 4 I raised a glass of Tokay in honor of Calvin Coolidge. Although President Coolidge appears to have obeyed the Volstead Act during Prohibition, it is said that he enjoyed a glass of this Hungarian desert wine when it was legal.

Like Ronald Reagan I revere Coolidge. He believed that running up the national debt was indistinguishable from running up the tax bill payable by the American people. Like Reagan he expanded the revenue stream flowing into the U.S. Treasury by reducing the marginal tax rate. Unlike Reagan, he cut those taxes every year. Unlike Reagan he steadily reduced the national debt every year. At the end of his terms Reagan admitted that his efforts to reduce the government and its debt had fallen far short.

Reagan’s foreign and defense policies did not allow him to concentrate on limiting government. Coolidge met weekly with his Budget Bureau director, General Herbert Mayhew Lord, from Rockland Maine. The two of them had one unchanging priority, reducing government extravagance and inefficiency. Cutting is never popular. People receiving money from the government always believe they deserve it. Sometimes they do. But Coolidge had an unusual immunity to unpopularity.

The fact that our 30th president was born on July 4 is one reason for raising a toast his memory on that day. Another is the speech he delivered in Philadelphia July 5, 1926 commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This speech made a number of important points which today’s protesters clearly do not understand, and may never understand unless they stumble into adulthood and discover that thinking is more interesting than shouting vapid slogans.

Think about this: “It was not because it [the Declaration] was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history.”

Understand? There was no boast that the new Republic was born with its ideals all in place. The Founders aspired to establish their ideals as the foundation for a nation unlike any other then in existence. Apart from a few excitable visionaries, they did not indulge in Thomas Paine’s fantasy that an entire culture could be wiped away in order to make the world anew. John Adams reacted to this sort of blather with his observation that Paine was a useful man to have around when you are building a revolution, but a pest when you are trying to build a new nation.

Think about this valuable insight. “Great ideas do not burst upon the world unannounced. They are reached by a gradual development over a length of time usually proportionate to their importance. This is especially true of the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Three very definite propositions were set out in its preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.

No, great ideas do not burst upon the world unannounced. They are reached by a gradual development. But how do you explain this to gangs of pea-brained undergraduates convinced that they were either born with a full suite of great ideas or worked them out in bananasyrup sessions with their pathetic peers. Peers may includes high school students—there is often little to distinguish the intellectual development taking place between high school and college graduation.

Three very definite propositions were set out in the preamble to the Declaration regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government: the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.

These three “definite propositions” were never systematically denied by a consequential American political group. Racialist doctrines were not so much a flat denial of equality as an attempt to get around slavery by assuming that Africans were not fully evolved men. I use the verb “assume” because I’ve never read any theorizing. It was just convenient to believe. And probably reassuring to working class white men who believed that rights were natural. They would not want to believe that white men could be reduced to slavery. History does not support this belief.

“About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful,” Coolidge concluded. “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.”

John Frary of Farmington, the GOP candidate for U.S. Congress in 2008, is a retired history professor, an emeritus Board Member of Maine Taxpayers United, a Maine Citizen’s Coalition Board member, and publisher of FraryHomeCompanion.com. He can be reached at jfrary8070@aol.com.