Amity Shlaes
Appearances
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
And by the way, these policemen were Coolidge constituents. There was a whole dissertation written about how immigrants voted for Coolidge. These policemen were Irish-Americans, and they liked Coolidge, so they expected him to back them up. And he wrote his family kind of miserably, I'm not sure I'm going to win the next election, but this was the right thing to do.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
In fact, President Wilson backed Coolidge up because Wilson, too, had his doubts about vast strikes by public sector unions in the United States and mayhem. And Coolidge instead became popular for this decision, though not sadly with the policeman. He wrote later, without a doubt, it was my move on the Boston police, as bitter as it was, that put me on the national stage.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Absolutely. I would just quarrel with the term pro-business because there's one kind of pro-business, which is you go out with a company and give it a sweetheart deal.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
There's another kind of pro-business, which is more anonymous and I'd say more virtuous, and Coolidge was quite explicit about this, make conditions for all businesses better, not particular businesses who might have been campaign contributors or something like that.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
The Republicans were not entirely consistent on this because they favored the tariff, which naturally favors not only certain industries, but eventually certain firms. But otherwise, on domestic policy, the goal of Harding and Coolidge was to make the environment fairer or freer for business, which is not the same as teaming up with some charismatic person from a big company.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
You know, it's very, very different. So the drive of Harding and then Coolidge was only pro-business in the sense that it wanted to make the environment friendlier for business, not pro-business in the corrupt or crony sense, the domestic drive.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Absolutely. And that was very good of you to get at that in your preceding show, Don. So if you go out and tell everyone you want the free market and you want to privatize government assets, which is what Harding did, then when you privatize, you better do it fairly, right? You don't want to create an object lesson in why the private sector is worse than the public sector.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
If you're trying to praise the private sector, yet Harding employees are particularly the cabinet member Daugherty, and then also the director of the Veteran Affairs, who is named Charles Forbes on your last show, those people were corrupt. They gave sweetheart contracts in Forbes's orbit. There were kickbacks taken for hospitals built for... I believe Forbes ended up in Leavenworth Prison.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Well, that's nasty. It also besmirches the value of privatization that you're seeking to advance. It builds the case for more public sector work, doesn't it? It's the opposite of what the Republican Party sought. That was the damage of the name of the Harding scandal was Teapot Dome. And the veteran scandals was that they proved in some narrow way the risks of privatizing rather than the merits.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Well, it's a retreat. I mean, it's specifically more in the League and the League of Nations. Well, we might lose some sovereignty if we go in this league with these people we don't particularly know about, Clemenceau from France, Lloyd George, or various English leaders.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Well, we're not quite so sure, even though we were sure we wanted to, most of us, that we want to intervene in Europe during the war. Well, do we want to be surrendering sovereignty of the United States in this period.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
It's important to note that Coolidge, for example, did support some international groups, some international treaties that he backed his Secretary of State, Kellogg, in the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war. That's roundly mocked in graduate students' classes today, but I think that's up for revision too. The Pact to End War, the Kellogg-Briand Pact. And that was a Coolidge adventure.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
He said, does this really damage our sovereignty? No, it doesn't. Okay, I'm for it. Coolidge had a streak of Woodrow Wilson in him, I will say, the Protestant minister. And there's more to compare than the textbooks would suggest, more similarities between Woodrow and Calvin.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Yeah. I mean, you say he was a very shy president. Well, President Obama was a very shy president. There's no such thing as a truly shy president. Otherwise, they wouldn't get to president. It's just impossible not to work with men and women in order to get to this level of power in the United States. I would say Coolidge was an introvert, as many presidents are,
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
but not shy when he needed to be bold or when he needed to speak up, as in the Boston police strike. Not a shy move, not a compromising move. He didn't like to talk a lot. That was more out of political savvy. You don't have to deliver what you don't promise. And he was in cutting mode as president and also, by the way, as governor.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
So the more you talk with someone, the more likely you are to say yes to that person. Everyone knows that. So he would cut short his audiences. But there is a theater to Coolidge. Mrs. Coolidge played the extrovert. She was an extrovert. She was a teacher of the deaf. She was lovely. And he played Silent Cow. It was their show, but mostly only that in press conferences.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Coolidge spoke quite a bit. And if you go to the Coolidge Foundation website, we've digitized the press conferences. He yammers on. Sometimes it's a bit like a Fed chairman. He's yet talking, but not saying too much. But because he doesn't want to get in trouble or overstep, but he talked all the time. These press conferences were weekly, sometimes more.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
He gave plenty of speeches and the speeches became his principal work as the presidency went on because he wanted to explain and shore up his legacy of restrained government.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
It was the death of his son, Calvin Jr. It was kind of unexpected, totally unexpected, in fact. And one week, this 16-year-old is playing tennis, and the next week he dies. This is the tragedy of life before antibiotics. An infection one week can be death the next, and we can only imagine it. We antibiotic era people. Calvin got a blister playing tennis. He was about 16.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
And the boy didn't complain about it. It went septic throughout his system and he died. So the Coolidges just didn't expect this. And Calvin Jr. was also the happier of the two sons of the Coolidges, the luck child, the one who understood politics better. Young Calvin wrote a poem, an ironic poem, about success and the hypocrisy of people's praise when one is in the public eye.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
That's in some articles I've written. He was a very perceptive young man. He's the one who understood his father, I think, better. very young age, right? These were boys. His brother was only a bit older, just getting ready to start at Amherst, and he was gone. So the Coolidge's reeled, and this was also an election year, 1924.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
In fact, I think all Americans were sympathetic when word of the death of Calvin Jr. came to the Democratic National Convention, which was a rowdy, difficult event with many, many ballots, much unhappiness, the Ku Klux Klan, fistfights. All of a sudden, when that word came, the whole hall that was the old Madison Square Garden fell silent.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
And the New York Times wrote of the moment, their troubles are the president's, but his troubles are also theirs, are the public's. And that the public showed that by their respect at the moment of this awful news. So it was a moment of the country coming together when the Democratic National Convention stopped to honor the president and mourn Calvin Jr. That was quite stunning.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
And I tried to capture that in my biography of Coolidge.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Well, I would say the 1920 platform is quite responsible. So Coolidge's executor, ambassador, you know, enforcer of it is quite responsible. If you go back to the 20s, I think the standard American secondary school student and maybe in the UK as well, their image of the 20s has to do with troubles in Britain, which is going a different way. And Great Gatsby, right? It was all fake.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Bad people were at the top, like the Buchanans. The growth was a bubble in a champagne glass, not real. I mean, there are many streams in Gatsby, many threads, because it's a beautiful book. But I think that's the takeaway. A lot of it was fake. And somehow the bubble or the bubble popped. That wasn't the case at all. The 20s did roar. There was real growth that reached most Americans.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
The 20s were the decade when efficiency in the factory meant that for the same wage, a worker could work five days, not six. So productivity gain is kind of a bland concept to offer people. But I think of it as the 20s were the decade that gave us Saturday. And that is a gift that is Saturday off that anyone can understand. That's when electricity came in the home.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
It's when indoor plumbing came in the home. And if you ever work and develop, you know, the one marker, the difference between being truly poor poverty and being working class wherever in the world is indoor plumbing. That's when it became the rule in the United States. Automobile brought a lot of joy into American life and a lot of progress into American commerce. So they were a good decade.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
I often wonder, sometimes I think non-US writers import foreign angst and paint it over the 20s. The 20s, even in the 20s, the Ku Klux Klan had a terrible time. flare up worse than that. And they marched in Washington. But by the end of the 20s, they were in decline.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
You can look at the number of lynching, in fact, which is a terrible number to contemplate in the historical statistics of the United States. And you'll see lynching goes down in the later 20s as Prosperity takes hold. There were pockets of failure. Farms suffered. Florida had a bubble. But by and large, the 20s were an era of progress that nearly every American felt.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
He did. And it's a little bit controversial. Think of Killers of the Flower Moon. Even at the time, some Native Americans said, well, they don't want to be citizens. They want sovereign nations, right? It's not in the direction of establishing reservations. It's in the direction of assimilation, at least in civil life. So people debate that.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
But I regard it as a wonderful thing to do for the president to be sure that anyone who is Native American is in the United States can vote. It's part of the progressive coolidge or I would say the classically liberal coolidge, the same one. That endorsed women's suffrage. So there you are.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
But I know you're going to ask next about the Johnson-Reed Act, the immigration law, which came about the same time that law restricted and established new quotas for incomers. It favored Northern Europe. proportional to the U.S. population, actually. And it's been criticized.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
I just want to point out that if you're for a pause in immigration, which is what Coolidge was for, it doesn't automatically make you a bigot. It might be you're just for a pause in immigration. One thing that's important to note about that law is Coolidge signed it, but he didn't have really much choice in terms of outcome because had he vetoed it, his veto would have been overridden.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
The law, the Johnson-Reed Act, passed by such overwhelming majorities in both houses. I think it was 69-9 in the Senate that the president didn't really have much say about what was happening.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
He gave a direct rebuttal to the American Legion. He didn't say, I'm going to talk now about the Ku Klux Klan marching, but he gave a speech where he said, and I'm paraphrasing, so forgive me, whether we came over three centuries ago on the Mayflower, something like the Coolidge family, or three years ago in the steerage, here we're all in the same boat. That is, we're together.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
That's a pretty direct rebuttal to the sort of sorting and the bigotry that went on. We here have to stick together and build our country. He also said, if all men are equal, that is final. That is, he wouldn't sit around and make divisions among groups.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
One of the things he did for African-Americans, and I, again, find it very deliberate, small but significant, was he went to Howard U., the historically African-American college in Washington, and he supported funding for the building of a medical school there. But he wanted to support any effort by any population, but particularly African-Americans, to professionalize.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
You don't do that if you don't expect people can do the work. He did. He favored night schools. One of our trustees is Kurt Schmoke, who leads a school, the University of Baltimore, that has a good share of students who are older than 22. That is, people have gone back to school who go back vocationally who are very serious about building their career. That was Coolidge, too.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
His name was used briefly for a law school that was a night law school, not a fancy day law school, because Coolidge himself worked at night to learn the law in the library in Northampton. He believed in effort, and he was not a bigot.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Calvin Coolidge was sleeping in his bed in his little hamlet home of Plymouth Notch, Vermont. It's remote now. It was even remoter then. While he slept, he suddenly heard his father, John, call up the stairs and said, Calvin? The president has passed away. So this is always a dire moment for the country when there's no president. The new president must be sworn in right away.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Well, not that he was narrow or narrow to himself, but that he believed that a prosperous economy would do more for any disadvantaged group than a social measure. That's the essential proposition. What's the best thing you can do for someone? Give him a job or allow a job to be created for him by the market, not create a social program for him.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
He was fascinated with insurance because he saw the actuarial potential of insurance. You could build an annuity for every American because by the math, the pool is large enough, right? If every American signs up for some kind of annuity, which would be the equivalent of Social Security, and pays in, well, there'll be enough money for everyone's annuity.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
He gave speeches about insurance for this reason, because he saw Social Security coming. He said the man who takes an insurance policy makes the uncertain less uncertain. So he thought a lot about helping people to deal with the great challenges of life, old age, poverty. But he had more traditional solutions. And our history books tend to joke about this.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Oh, before Social Security, the 1930s program, there was nothing. There was not nothing. Tocqueville's America, the America of the 20s even, was just a thick net of little programs.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Sometimes, you know, the Italian Men's Burial Society or sometimes through the church, sometimes through the town, the town charity hospital that were doing a not perfect, but a not dismissible job at providing social services. So you could debate with a straight face. that having an economy strong enough to support yet more local charity was the answer for even industrialized cities.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
We don't have that conversation anymore, but it wasn't a joke in the 20s.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
The interpretation is that he had good instincts. He probably did because he understood that there were business cycles. He'd seen, I think, more than five crashes in his adulthood. And he knew that in a crash, it would be hard to stand up for less government, wouldn't it? But that, I don't believe, was the main motive. There's also a school that says, well, he was sick. He was sick.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
He kind of had what we would call a version of emphysema. But the main motive, I believe, was restraint. In my book and in our Coolidge movie we have, we talk about Rushmore because he happened to go to Mount Rushmore in the summer of 27. That is the year before he would have run There was Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, the Nietzschean, the monumentalist, building these giant busts of presidents.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Not sure. I think that kind of grossed Coolidge out, frankly, to see those big heads. But it also gave him an opportunity to focus on George Washington, which he was anyhow due to various anniversaries. And I believe, though it's not written anywhere, this is a biographer's surmise, that Washington influenced Coolidge. Washington's farewell address, Washington's own decision not to run again.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
But even before Washington, Washington isn't the only one, you know, to return to his vineyard in the history of the world rather than stay in power. Coolidge said... It's a great safety to the country for the president to know he is not a great man. And he also said the country does better when we change up leadership from time to time.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
He thought it out and he thought, well, let someone else have a turn. That's where that decision came from. I should make clear, and I didn't really, Coolidge happened to be in South Dakota when Rushmore got started. He had established the summer White House there. So he got a real opportunity to think about grandeur, but also service.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
So Vice President Coolidge was sworn in in the middle of the night, right there in Plymouth Notch with the Bible on the table, without electricity, by kerosene, by his father, by virtue of his father being a town notary. And that is also remarkable and became the 30th president.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
He went up to meet with Borglum, and it was in South Dakota where he announced he would not run again.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Economic historians who study economics are more skeptical of that argument that Coolidge caused the Great Depression. Economic historians who have a PhD in history aren't so economic, and they tend to favor the storyline that Coolidge not only caused the crash, but also caused the Great Depression. The crash was coming. I mean, the market went too high in the 20s.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
It went to 381 and it had been just a few short years before 100. But so when that, you know, everyone wants to duck when you get that high. So but the first way of unpacking that is to ask whether the crash of 29 caused a Great Depression. It didn't. It was a crash. The market recovered 10, 20, 30, 40 percent in coming months. The depression itself is multi-causal.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
For every year, there's a different reason the depression kept going. But the reason it's great and not a depression, but the depression, the Great Depression was the duration. And what happened was first another Republican, Hoover, who had run on following Coolidge policy, didn't. Hoover was a progressive. Three policies that were different by Hoover.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
One, he believed in pushing up labor prices in order on the theory that people have money, spend money and get the economy going, what we would call Keynesianism. Coolidge did not. push up wages. So Hoover promoted a policy that did that. He exhorted employers to pay high in the Depression. Well, if you ask someone who's losing money to pay high, what does he do? He lays off more.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
That's an example. Hoover signed a big smooth holly, a big tariff. That wasn't helpful either. I think Coolidge might have signed that because all Republicans were for tariffs, but maybe, I mean, I don't want to speculate about that. What else did Hoover do? He raised taxes, very stressful for business. There was even a tax on checks for which is very hard when you want markets to clear.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
You don't want to throw what we say sand in the gears. And generally, Hoover blamed business, which he didn't even mean. He just thought it might be popular if he did, which isn't productive either. He blocked short selling, which sounds nice because short sales do bring the market down. But when you do that, you prevent the market from clearing and finding its own level, which
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
If you follow markets, you know, allowing markets to clear can shorten, make worse, but also shorten the pain of a downturn. It's more like a snap than a prolonged downturn. set of years of trouble. So Hoover did all that. He was a constitutional progressive.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
And then came Franklin Roosevelt, who was a much bolder progressive and decided to go all the way into the economy and to announce experimentation. It's important to understand that Roosevelt's policy were truly the mirror opposite of of what Harding had proposed all those years ago in 20. Harding said no experimentation. If you go and look at his 21 inaugural, you'll see he says no experimenting.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Soon after, he was an economic man. He understood the importance of sleep. The next morning, he got up, visited his mother's grave and took the train to Washington. He said, I think I can swing it, which is a wonderful line. I thought I could swing it. I can do this.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Let's go back to our proven system. Wow. And Roosevelt says no. Bold, persistent experimentation is what we need. The absolute opposite, and that is what Roosevelt did. So one of the things I try to get at in my Forgotten Man book, which is about the 30s, is the cost of experimentation. long after Coolidge and even Hoover experimenting went on. And the economy doesn't like that.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
You know, recoveries are like people, you know, they can come back or they can elect to stay away. And the recovery took a look at the rate of experimentation under Roosevelt and said, I'll sit this one out one more year each time. So that was the problem. I mean, you can go for volumes, what happened in 37 and 36, but The real point about the Great Depression was the duration.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
And there's a good case to be made that that was caused largely by government intervention.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Yeah. And particularly, he was just cautious about intervening. The excitement of reform is seductive, right? Oh, Roosevelt comes along. He's going to reform everything. He's reassuring. And he was reassuring. And he was also a great war leader, a great admiral, Roosevelt. You don't have to hate Roosevelt. To note the failure of his economic policy.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
I mean, all of us know, even the most convicted, I mean, convinced democratic family gets whispered, well, only the war happens. brought the end to the Depression. Mother whispers to child, right? But why was that? And after the war, there was a great retrenchment. That is, the most dramatic laws of the New Deal were edited down quite seriously.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
I'm thinking here of the Wagner Act of 1935 being edited in the Taft-Hartley Law that followed World War II, or when President Truman wanted to nationalize a company, the Supreme Court said, sorry, you can't do that. So the most dramatic New Deal efforts were undone. Social security, which everyone agreed was kind of okay, useful, important. Sometimes a lifesaver was left in place.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Okay, that's a good compromise for America.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
They didn't get him. I mean, he came up suddenly, and there were other Coolidges, fancier Coolidges from Boston, who were known quantities to, say, Henry Cabot Lodge, the very senior senator from the Bay State. And who is this other Coolidge? There's a comment from Lodge, who is a real... A recognizable snob. He said, I didn't know Coolidge until it was necessary to know him, referring to Calvin.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
And I remember finding an amusing German article about the new vice presidential candidate. They had the wrong Coolidge. They had another Coolidge in mind because they couldn't imagine some of the U.S. vice presidential candidate they'd never heard of. But he was government, new governor of Mass. So first, they didn't know he was. Second, they didn't know how to take him.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
And third, Europe owed the United States so much money, the whole mess that were the German obligations that was the UK obligation. And there was Europe staggering under the debt, not clear how to generate growth in their economies that might begin to support the debt.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Where the Europeans were correct about the wrongs of the U.S., that was the tariff, because you can't ask someone to pay you back money and then impose a policy that makes it tougher for them to export. And that is what the Republicans did. That was a big ouch. U.S. hypocrites, right? That was the wart on the Republicans or the sin of the Republicans that should never be forgotten.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Just a lovely man, never said a nasty thing in public. He just didn't see any utility in that. Always talk policy, not personality. So that's what we like about him at the Coolidge Foundation. And we try to introduce young people to Coolidge, let them make up their own mind about who their favorite president is. It's not just the man, it's the policy.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
And particularly his modesty is something so rare in politics today. I do believe somebody like that could be elected again. The radio hosts often tell us no. I do believe it's quite possible for Coolidge to win again. We like people we like on the second and third impression, not just the first.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Oh, check out our website, CoolidgeFoundation.org. I'm working on a book about the Gilded Age. I better do a good job. I'm particularly proud of a book on the Great Society, which took the New Deal even farther, called Great Society. And I hope you take a look at it.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
That is the key question, Don. Coolidge could have said, I will be a new man. I will change the cabinet. In fact, there were corrupt members of the cabinet. That's not what he said at the beginning. He said, I will execute on the agenda Harding and I had. where Harding started, to perfection. He used that phrase.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
And it's interesting, what they were talking about was the 1920 Republican agenda, which was called normalcy. And Coolidge saw this like a relay race. Unfortunately, Harding dropped the baton. Coolidge picked it up, and if he moved well, there'd be barely a break between the two men. And that was how it was.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
It was a form of discipline on the part of Coolidge, and frankly, a willingness to suppress vanity. It's not about me. It's about what we promised the voters in 1920. And that's unusual nowadays when presidents are all about personality, isn't it? That someone would say, this is about a document in 1920, not how I feel, how my wife feels. We're going and we'll do what was promised for the people.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
It comes from Warren Harding, and I don't know about you, but when I was in secondary school, I thought normalcy meant be like a cog, be normal, which did not sound very attractive to me. That is not at all what Harding and Coolidge meant. They meant establish a relatively stable environment so that we can do quirky, creative things, including business. That's a wonderful proposition.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
And that's what they sought. And if you look at their policy, it's all about that. So taxes were very high, well over 50% following World War I. The federal debt, the country kind of staggered under the federal debt. There were strikes. There was unrest. There was bombing. There was terror. How do you deal with all that?
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
What Harding and Coolidge said is we'll make the economy, we'll make it a relatively friendly environment for enterprise in the economy, which is not quite the same as pandering to business. We'll make a friendly environment for all players and then business will take the lead and get us past the war. And that was their wager. That was what they were trying to do at the beginning. Right.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
So you get tax rates lower. They had all sorts of promises about basically staying out of the way and replacing an era of crisis with an era of common opportunity.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Yes, I'd say so, which is interesting because he would pretend otherwise. But Plymouth, Vermont is the middle of nowhere even today. It's beautiful nowhere, but it's hard to get to. But these people were not, so to speak, entirely provincial. They came from pilgrims, people who came over the ocean to make a new world.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
And then they themselves were also pilgrims, pioneers, in the sense that they came from Boston to Plymouth following the Revolutionary War. And they saw themselves a bit as missionaries and pilgrims. That is, if young Calvin goes to boarding school a whole 10 miles away in Ludlow, Vermont, well, he's pilgrim over there to learn.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
And then when he goes down to college at Amherst, Massachusetts, well, he's going to learn about the big world, but also do some work on all our behalf. And one thing, if you ever read Coolidge's letters to his father, which I entirely recommend, the book is called Your Son, Calvin Coolidge. They're preserved in that book.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Coolidge, even well into manhood, would write his father, my wife needs a coat or I need money. And when I first read that, I thought, what a whiner. What a young man. Then I realized his family saw him as their emissary or missionary or ambassador. You can pick your... Your term and father hadn't gone down to Massachusetts and tried to set up a law practice, but he was proud of Calvin.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
And they were one unit, his father and he. It was one of those families that the communication between father and son was constant, like a wire, an invisible wire. You could feel very close. And of course, Coolidge eventually earned enough money that he didn't have to ask for anymore. But they all knew that politics were a financial sacrifice and the family were
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
willing to support that well into Coolidge's manhood. So I think Coolidge did think he stood for some ideals, which his family prized, and that he would do his very best at any stage to represent those ideals.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
It didn't change much either throughout the long course of his career, because he, after graduating from Amherst, he read law, he learned the law by reading and clerking, and then he pretty quickly went into ward politics in Northampton, Massachusetts, the county seat, and went
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
All the way up, mayor, state rep, to eventually governor, always working in politics and always with his father behind him. At some point, he even starts to tell his father how politics works. You know, that flip father-son. And that's always enjoyable. He told his father, it's better to kill a bad law than pass a good one.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
When his father happened to be going up to Montpelier, capital of Vermont, as a lawmaker later in life.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Well, he understood about service. He said, I want your vote. I need your vote. I'll appreciate your vote. But he wasn't corrupt. In fact, he was so terrified of being corrupt that he didn't want to take out a mortgage because then he would owe the bank, right?
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Someone would own him. Oh, no. I think another factor, if you look at the Coolidge's, they have little amounts of money, little piles, little sums, and a number of banks, these deposits. And that was partly a function of the absence of deposit insurance in their era. They didn't want to risk too much on one bank, but it was also their political savvy.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
But I think his service was marked by an absence of corruption. He just wanted to do a good job where he could. And he didn't make promises he couldn't keep. I don't want to get ahead of us, but when he becomes president, he doesn't think he's president of Massachusetts or Vermont. And we can talk about that later. He's president of the whole nation.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
So he viewed serving Massachusetts and Vermont too much as evidence of poor presidency. The president works for everyone. You can't do for your own what you don't do for the rest of Americans with some consequences. I think he was quite consistent about that.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
Yes, the Republican Party were the progressive party, remember, in that period. So he, as the lawmaker, he supported many progressive laws, even, you know, antitrust against theaters, the big amendments that passed to our Constitution nationally. Changes in Vermont that are regarded as progressive. But over time, he became a little skeptical about the volume of progressive shift.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
He said, well, there are too many new laws. Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation. He didn't like the prescriptive, detailed aspect of all the new laws either. Give men some faith. You don't have to write everything down. That's a very old tradition he's leaning on, sort of common law. We don't need to write every single thing down and make a regulation about it.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
What happened in 1919 when he was a new governor, say a freshman governor, was that it wasn't just a union that went on strike. It was a public sector union. Public sector unions are different from private sector unions, and there are different reasons for supporting them or being more skeptical about them.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
What he saw was that there was a conflict between public service, which is what public workers render, and public sector unionism. And it was a very compelling story because it was the policemen of Boston who happened to be the union who went on strike in an era when public sector unions were becoming common, where there were strikes and general strikes in cities such as Seattle.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
And the policemen had every reason to complain. They were underpaid. There was inflation. There were rats in the station houses chewing on their helmets. They were asked to work too much. They had to share their cots in seriatim in different shifts with other policemen. And so they went on strike. The problem was their contract said no strike. So what do you do then?
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
And by the way, everyone knew that when they struck, this is just after the war, tumultuous time, the middle, by the way, of a pandemic, in that case, the influenza, everyone knew there would be violence if the police went on strike. They did. And Coolidge backed up the police commissioner. in firing the men for violating their contract.
American History Hit
President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader
He said a line that reverberated across the land, there's no right to strike against the public safety. by anybody, anywhere, anytime. There are limits to striking, and that's the problem with unions in the public sector sphere. This sort of foreshadows Ronald Reagan's decision about the air traffic controllers, PATCO. Always a difficult decision.