(On September 11, 2004, I gave a speech on the subject of ‘Heroes,’ and my unlikely subject was President Calvin Coolidge. I submit this excerpt on the occasion of President’s Week (despite the fact that Coolidge was the only president born on the Fourth of July.)
To my knowledge, the Gallup Organization hasn’t done a recent survey asking Americans whom we would identify as our “heroes.” But if they were to do so, I suspect Calvin Coolidge would be found among those listed under “other,” if he were found at all.
Let’s face it, we admire Coolidge for many reasons, but “heroic” is not an adjective often found in close proximity to his name. The image thing is all-wrong. He was small, and while he was physically active, he clearly falls on the Davis end of the Gray Davis – Arnold Schwarzenegger spectrum.
And by many accounts those seeking his presence were rarely overwhelmed by his charm. People who visited Ronald Reagan reported that Reagan made them feel as though their concern was his total focus. The same has been said about President Clinton.
Coolidge’s advice to President-elect Herbert Hoover suggests a different approach:
“You have to stand every day three or four hours for visitors. Nine-tenths of them want something they ought not to have. If you keep dead still they will run down in three or four minutes. If you even cough or smile they will start up all over again.”[i]
Similar advice was offered to Channing Cox, his successor as Governor of Massachusetts, who complained that he, Cox, was spending far more time at the office than had Coolidge. Coolidge immediately diagnosed the cause of the problem. “You talk back,” he observed.[ii]
Nonetheless, under other circumstances there was something remarkable about Coolidge’s inter-personal skills. In fact, this is what caused him to be noticed while serving in the Massachusetts Legislature. He was a gifted mediator, and he managed his legislative work not through floor debate but through personal conversations and solid committee work. The principal skill of the mediator is the ability to listen, something not often found among politicians.
Perhaps the earliest statewide recognition of Coolidge’s abilities came in January of 1914. Upon his inauguration as President of the Massachusetts Senate, he delivered a speech, later titled “Have Faith in Massachusetts,” which laid out the economic philosophy that would carry him to the White House. Fifteen years later, Coolidge wrote in his autobiography,
“It appeared to me in January, 1914, that a spirit of radicalism prevailed which unless checked was likely to prove very destructive. . . It consisted of the claim in general that in some way the government was to be blamed because everybody was not prosperous, because it was necessary to work for a living, and because our written constitutions, the legislatures, and the courts protected the rights of private owners especially in relation to large aggregations of property.
“The previous session had been overwhelmed with a record number of bills introduced, many of them in an attempt to help the employee by impairing the property of the employer. Though anxious to improve the condition of our wage earners, I believed this doctrine would destroy business and deprive them of a livelihood. What was needed was a restoration of confidence in our institutions and in each other, on which economic progress might rest.
“In taking the chair as President of the Senate I therefore made a short address, which I had carefully prepared, appealing to the conservative spirit of the people. I argued that the government could not relieve us from toil, that large concerns are necessary for the progress in which capital and labor all have a common interest, and I defended representative government and the integrity of the courts. . .
“Many people in the Commonwealth had been waiting for such a word, and the effect was beyond my expectation. Confusion of thought began to disappear, and unsound legislative proposals to diminish.”
This was leadership, and it demonstrated integrity, character and an unusual ability to organize and present complex ideas in a commonsense way that connected with people.
One day shy of the nineteenth anniversary of this speech - the day following Coolidge’s sudden death at age 61 - the New York Sun published the following quote from a recent Coolidge interview regarding the first four years of the New Deal:
“Great changes can come in four years. These socialistic notions of government are not of my day. When I was in office, tax reduction, debt reduction, tariff stability and economy were the things to which I gave attention. We succeeded on those lines.”[iii]
The Harding-Coolidge ticket had been elected to reverse the economic fortunes of the nation, which, in 1920, was in a deep depression. Coolidge recalled, “For months following the Armistice we had persisted in a course of much extravagance and reckless buying. Wages had been paid that had not been earned. The whole country, from the national government down, had been living on borrowed money.”[iv]
In a speech at Philadelphia delivered just before the election, vice-presidential candidate Coolidge offered his solution. He later recalled:
“I contended that the only sure way of relieving this distress was for the country to follow the advice of Benjamin Franklin and begin to work and save. Our productive capacity is sufficient to maintain us all in a state of prosperity if we give sufficient attention to thrift and industry. Within a year the country had adopted that course, which has brought an era of great plenty.”[v]
Harding and Coolidge reduced the top federal income tax rate, which was at seventy-seven percent when they took office. In his 1924 State of the Union message, Coolidge argued, “I am convinced that the larger incomes of the country would actually yield more revenue to the government if the basis of taxation were scientifically revised downward.”
It worked. By 1927, after cutting marginal tax rates nearly in half, seventy percent of all income tax revenue came from people with incomes above $50,000. Now remember, this is 1927. In 1920, those earning less than $5,000 per year had paid nearly one dollar in federal tax for every six dollars earned; by 1929 they paid one dollar for each $2,500 earned. Indeed, by that point ninety-eight percent of all Americans paid no income tax at all. Unemployment, which had been at 20 percent in 1921, remained steady at 3.3 percent during Coolidge’s presidency. Federal budgets were balanced, the national debt was cut by one-third and the gross national product grew seven percent per year between 1924 and 1929. It is little wonder that in his time Calvin Coolidge was enormously popular.
Coolidge’s post-mortem claim of success was clearly justified. So why has history dismissed, instead of celebrated, this exceptional leader and his remarkable record?
The Great Depression altered everything. In 1927, the song that topped the charts was “I’m Looking over a Four Leaf Clover”. Five years later it was “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” History’s view of Coolidge was obscured by the sunless decade of the 1930’s, and by his successors.
President Roosevelt’s New Deal was a dramatic departure from earlier policies. Anxious to implement their big government programs, the ‘new-dealers’ needed to explain why tax cuts, frugal budgets and private enterprise would not do the trick this time. The perfect answer was to blame the Depression, itself, on the policies of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover.
In hindsight, fair criticism can be lodged at Coolidge and Hoover for their failure to regulate the excessive speculation and other business excesses that helped inflate the stock bubble during the twenties. Late in his presidency, Coolidge sent for a Harvard professor who had written a book about the “skullduggery” behind the bull market. But when Coolidge pressed the professor on what was to be done about it, the professor responded, “It’s a state matter.”[vi]
But the stock market crash of October 1929 did not ‘cause’ the Depression, any more than the stock market crash of 1987 ‘caused’ the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1990’s. Indeed, by December 1929 the market had stabilized, and by the following May, half of the loss of value at the crash had been restored. One month later, upon passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, the market resumed its slide, losing 89 percent of its 1929 peak value over the following two years.
We now understand that a series of misguided tax, trade and monetary actions either brought the Depression on or dramatically deepened and extended it. The decisions to tighten the money supply, raise taxes and enact the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Act were entirely the responsibility of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. And by totally rejecting the Coolidge policies, Roosevelt and Hoover unintentionally prolonged the Great Depression by years.
So successful was the effort to vilify Coolidge, the very utterance of this fact some 70 years later is still seen as politically risky.
Coolidge had represented traditional values; his upbringing in Plymouth, his religious faith, his personal integrity, his trust in classic market economics – even his innate shyness – were like a national touchstone in the twenties; an era of unequaled progress, prosperity and liberal social change.
But as the Depression dragged on, the prosperity of the twenties came to be seen as a cruel joke. Economic depression was the new reality. In this new era there was no Calvin Coolidge to argue that what we most needed was a restoration of confidence in our institutions and each other. America’s new leaders told us that only government was big enough and powerful enough to defeat the forces of poverty and despair.
It is amazing to me that an entire generation of Americans came to believe that prosperity was in some way the cause of the Depression, rather than its cure.
Coolidge’s values, so critical in his time, fell out of fashion, and he, out of favor.
[i] Source: The Quotable Calvin Coolidge Peter Hannaford
[ii] Source: ibid
[iii] Source: ibid
[iv] Source: The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge Calvin Coolidge
[v] Source: The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge Calvin Coolidge
[vi] Source: America in the Twenties Geoffrey Perrett
There is a funny story about the phlegmatic Coolidge giving an out-of-character absorbing speech at a dinner in, I think, New York. As he sat down, H.L. Mencken (or possibly it was Will Rogers, I can't recall) jumped to his feet, shouting "Author! Author!" The joke gets nowhere today because politicians no longer write their own speeches. In Coolidge's day, they mostly did, and thus the episode was considered quite funny.
Posted by: Jon Harrison | March 03, 2008 at 08:53 PM
"...and I defended representative government and the integrity of the courts. . ."
Whether our politicians and judges are more, less or equally corrupt as they were in Coolidge's day, the integrity of government has become a source of endless jokes. Trusting lawyers, who become our politicians and judges, to fairly enact and adjudicate the volumes and volumes of laws that have been exponentially increased over the last century is a pipe dream. Lawyers are no more or less equipped with common sense and decency than the rest of us. Indeed, it may be argued that the prospect of exercising the power inherent in such positions attracts the more greedy among us, and that democracies in general are no more or less immune to tyranny than other forms of government.
Posted by: Trice | March 05, 2008 at 10:23 AM