“Do the day's work. If it be to protect the rights of the weak, whoever objects, do it.”
Have Faith in Massachusetts (Houghton Mifflin, 1919) is a collection of speeches and official messages Coolidge delivered between 1914 and 1919 as he climbed from president of the Massachusetts Senate to governor. Its title comes from his 1914 address on taking the Senate chair — a compact statement of his whole philosophy of government, including the line that became his creed: "Do the day's work."
The book put Coolidge on the national map and reads like the man himself: terse, unsentimental, morally direct. Hearing it in his own restored voice restores the texture the page can only suggest — the flat New England vowels, the unhurried pauses, the refusal to waste a single syllable.
Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) was the 30th President of the United States, a flinty Vermont-born lawyer who rose from the Massachusetts statehouse to the White House on a reputation for thrift, restraint, and an almost legendary economy of words. The press nicknamed him Silent Cal, yet he was anything but absent from the airwaves — he became the first president whose voice reached the nation by radio, and Americans came to know the dry, clipped, distinctly Yankee cadence behind the silence.
Coolidge believed government should do less and do it well, that character outranked cleverness, and that the steady doing of one's daily duty was the foundation of a free republic. Few presidents have written so plainly or meant so precisely what they said.
This recording is reconstructed from genuine archival recordings of Calvin Coolidge — including his radio addresses and sound films of the 1920s, several preserved by the Library of Congress and on early pallophotophone sound film — that captured his actual speaking voice. It is a restoration built from real audio of the man, not a present-day impersonation, and it is not a claim that Coolidge is literally speaking today.
Provenance: Restored from real recordings. We label every voice honestly — restored, narrated, or disputed.
Coolidge had a thin, high, flat New England voice with clipped Yankee vowels and a famously sparing, unhurried delivery. Surviving radio and sound-film recordings — he was the first president heard widely by radio — preserve that distinctive plainspoken cadence.
It is a restoration built from real archival recordings of Coolidge's actual voice, so the timbre and accent are drawn from authentic audio of the man. It is not a live recording of him reading this entire book, and it is not an impersonation — it is his documented voice, reconstructed.
Yes. Published in 1919, the work is in the public domain in the United States, which is why it can be freely produced as an audiobook.
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