Amity Shlaes
speaker
107 appearances
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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
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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.
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.
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.
He went up to meet with Borglum, and it was in South Dakota where he announced he would not run again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
And there's a good case to be made that that was caused largely by government intervention.
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.
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.
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.
Okay, that's a good compromise for America.
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.
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