A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge was published by Macmillan in 1938. The title captures White’s thesis perfectly: Coolidge was a genuine Puritan — frugal, honest, hardworking, morally scrupulous in personal life — who presided over the most un-Puritan era in American history: the speculative excess, the consumption mania, and the moral looseness of the 1920s. The Puritan watched Babylon build itself around him and did nothing.
White’s portrait is both sympathetic and devastating. He respects Coolidge’s personal qualities: the silence, the frugality, the genuine modesty, the Yankee virtues inherited from generations of Vermont farmers. But he argues that these virtues, while admirable in a private citizen, were catastrophically inadequate in a president who needed to understand and regulate the explosive economic forces of the era. Coolidge’s laissez-faire philosophy — his genuine belief that the less government did, the better — left the country defenseless against the speculative bubble that produced the crash of 1929.
The biography is one of White’s finest pieces of writing — more controlled than his novels, more personal than his political journalism, and informed by genuine puzzlement about a man White knew personally but never fully understood. It remains one of the best books about the 1920s and about the relationship between personal virtue and political responsibility.
Collecting A Puritan in Babylon
First edition (Macmillan, New York, 1938): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$75
- Very good: $15–$30