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

You know, not good.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And I tried to capture that in my biography of Coolidge.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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