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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We don't have that conversation anymore, but it wasn't a joke in the 20s.

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.

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.

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