Amity Shlaes
speaker
107 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Amity Shlaes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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American History Hit · President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader · 12 Dec 2024
podcast
Glad to be here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
When his father happened to be going up to Montpelier, capital of Vermont, as a lawmaker later in life.
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