The 1920s are the decade that signaled the arrival of a gift that still means a lot to us: Saturday.

Coolidge liked the dignity of the presidency. He didn't get on the phone easily. It's possible that he banished the phone from his desk. He was known to use it from time to time. The person who was hilarious with the phone was Hoover. He was a real engineer. He made a closed circuit phone where he could call the important people and they could call him, a government hotline, but it was closed. He shut out the possibility of input from people he didn't expect to get input from.

There's something unsettling about the education of a child who comfortably enumerates the rules for surviving zombie apocalypse but finds it uncomfortable to enumerate the rules of his grandparents' faith, if he knows them.

I'm not sure Roosevelt was quite a monster, he just did a poor job on the economics.

Coolidge was a federalist. You go back and read him and it's almost intimidating to write about him because he writes better himself than anyone. He's one of the best writers as presidents go.

Coolidge was a pragmatist. He didn't start out with a tax theory. But he observed over time that lower tax rates sometimes brought in extra revenue. The success of his and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's experiment with rate cuts has been obscured by our modern history books.

People value Halloween, like Valentine's Day, because they can tell themselves that it's not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.