Most people are unaware that April 13 is John W. Davis’ birthday, since most people are unaware of John W. Davis.
But Garland Tucker chronicled Davis’ 1924 Democratic campaign for the presidency in the book The High Tide of American Conservatism, and Tucker honors Davis today in an American Thinker column:
It is appropriate that Davis shared a birthday with his political godfather, Thomas Jefferson. His bedrock values, completely in line with Jeffersonian conservatism, were the sanctity of private property, the rule of law, and the obligation of the government to ensure equality of opportunity — not outcome. To this end, he wrote, “The chief aim of all government is to preserve the freedom of the citizen. His control over his person, his property, his movements, his business, his desires should be restrained only so far as the public welfare imperatively demands. The world is in more danger of being governed too much than too little.”
Though it may shock today’s conservatives (and liberals, for that matter), Davis believed that the traditional role of the Democratic Party (before the twentieth century) had been “to oppose centralization in government as the sure road to tyranny and has demanded the preservation of the local self-governing power of the states.” In fact, he always viewed himself as “an old fashioned liberal,” in the eighteenth-century sense of the term. Writing to a close friend in the 1940s — after the term “liberal” had been appropriated by the progressives — Davis commented, “I have gloried in the name of liberal, which I interpret to mean a love for the greatest liberty consistent with public order. The great trouble with our modern ‘liberals’ is that they think liberalism means exceeding liberality with other people’s money.” Not a bad definition for the twenty-first century as well.
Tucker discusses Davis and his 1924 opponent, incumbent President Calvin Coolidge, in the video clip below.