Barton wrote a glowing profile of the governor in the magazine Collier’s, the first such article in a national publication. “Less than five percent of the people of America today are doing 95 percent of the talking,” Barton noted, with a nod to Coolidge’s silence. “The radicals and reactionaries fill the newspapers, but the great majority of Americans are neither radicals nor reactionaries. They are middle-of-the-road folks who own their own homes and work hard … . Coolidge belongs with that crowd.” Over the next decade, the publicist would pen many more of these encomiums for magazines whose
...more
