Fathers and Sons, by John M. Grondelski

By John M. Grondelski, The Catholic Thing, June 18, 2023

John Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is a former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. All views herein are exclusively his.

The day that Calvin Coolidge succeeded Warren G. Harding as president his son, Calvin Jr., started work on a tobacco farm.  Coolidge writes, “When one of his fellow laborers said to him, ‘If my father was president, I would not work in a tobacco field.’  He replied, ‘If my father were your father, you would.’”

It’s not that Calvin didn’t love Calvin Jr., a son he would lose within a year, likely from sepsis, it’s that Coolidge believed in honest work.  A father who thought a 16-year-old son should work and have a summer job was not unusual in 1923.  It is today, given data that Nicholas Eberstadt includes in his study, Men without Work, of men’s flight from the workplace. …

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