Amity Shlaes

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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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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