STEVE HAYWARD: What Presidential Rankings Get Wrong.

When Ronald Reagan put Calvin Coolidge’s portrait up in the White House Cabinet Room, taking down a painting of Thomas Jefferson, the outrage in the media was ­deafening.

Historians typically treated Coolidge with disdain as well. When I was in college, as my contemporary history professor went through the run-up to the Great Depression, the only thing he said of Coolidge was, “If you took the Washington Monument and dug a commensurate hole in the ground, that would be a fitting monument for Calvin Coolidge’s contributions to America.” That was it. No argument, no specifics, nothing to substantiate this view.

In the years since, historians have revisited Coolidge. Thomas B. Silver made an important contribution in the early 1980s with his book Coolidge and the Historians. Paul Johnson got a lot of the story right in Modern Times and A History of the American People. The restoration culminated in Amity Shlaes’s spectacular biography, Coolidge.

Of course, Coolidge still achieves middling marks in most presidential rankings. He has that reputation as Silent Cal. This is a superficial take. Coolidge was not silent at all. He gave more press conferences than any other president and used the radio well. But his taciturn nature remains legendary. It makes for fun ­reading.

Still, I have always thought historians who disliked Coolidge had a secondary purpose to attaching the Silent Cal label to him: they hoped you would ignore what he said—because if you read it, you might be persuaded by it.

Take the 1922 speech Vice President Coolidge gave before the American Bar Association. Coolidge wrote his own speeches, and that address is a brilliant and prescient analysis of what today we call the administrative state and why it can’t give us effective government. When you read it, you realize he is contesting all the premises of Woodrow Wilson and the early administrative state before that term came into use.

When you look at how Coolidge fares in presidential rankings and at some of the presidents who rate highly, you realize we need a new standard for assessing our chief executives.

When asked in a press conference near the end of his time in office what his administration’s most important accomplishment was, Coolidge was quoted as replying, “I think it would have to be, minding our own business.”

That’s very useful advice for every administration, and would have come in handy right around this time four years ago.