Sworn in after the death of President Harding by the light of a kerosene lamp, the 30th President of the United States led the country through 6 years of the prosperous roaring 1920s.Coolidge polled more than 54% of the popular vote in 1924, so what was so good about 'silent Cal'? To find out, Don is joined by Amity Shlaes, author of 'Coolidge' and 'The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression'.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey at https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK.All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 Media.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.
Chapter 1: What was the significance of the Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924?
The year is 1924, and it's quite the holiday season here at the newly renovated Macy's Department Store in New York City. After completing a vast expansion of more than 1.5 million square feet, Macy's is now officially the largest store in the world, with some 20 wooden escalators carrying customers to 148 departments, selling nearly everything a retailer can possibly offer.
To usher in the season and to celebrate the transformation, Macy's staged the first of its famous Thanksgiving Day parades, complete with Santa Claus ushering in the season. From fine watches to vacuum cleaners, newfangled washing machines and refrigerators to women's apparel, beauty goods and travel needs, never mind hardware and children's toys.
Macy's
It is American History Hit, and I am Don Wildman. And it's time for another in our ever-lengthening series on the American presidents. We've even elected a new one since we recorded our last. Today, the story behind our 30th chief executive, Silent Cal, Calvin Coolidge. Born in the Green Mountains of Vermont on July 4th, 1872. Talk about destiny. He's the only U.S.
president hatched on Independence Day. Automatic annual birthday parade. Not bad. John Calvin Coolidge, Calvin being his middle name, served two terms in the White House from 1923 to 1929. As Warren G. Harding's vice president when that poor man perished from a heart attack, he was next in line. Have a listen to episode 228 for extra credit.
Coolidge's entire presidency rode on the wave of the economic prosperity we know today as the Roaring Twenties. Rode it right into the year 1929 when it crashed onto the rocks of the Great Depression. For many conservatives, even today, Coolidge is a model president. Ronald Reagan considered him a hero, hung his portrait in the Oval Office.
Coolidge pursued a small government, low-tax, pro-business agenda. Straightforward stuff there. But it's his personal leadership style that needs an update. He gets a bad rap as a dour and dry guy, even that he was directly responsible for teeing up the Depression. But read a few things on the man, and that seems to ring less true.
So let's find out about who the real Calvin Coolidge was and what he did leading the nation with Amity Shlaes, a former reporter and editor with The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, now chair of the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation. an author of a Coolidge biography and other bestselling history books, including The Forgotten Man, A New History of the Great Depression.
Hello, Amity. Nice to meet you.
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Chapter 2: Who was Calvin Coolidge and what were his key policies?
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.
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.
I think of the 20s myself, for some reason, as the birth of radio and all of that is really a major stake in the ground for American civilization, you know, in terms of the reach of the media empires that we build in the future. Coolidge's one feather in his cap, so to speak, was the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. We've done a past episode on that, which people should listen to, I hope.
Native peoples are finally made eligible for U.S. citizenship, reversing the exclusion of the 14th Amendment. And this is signed into law by Calvin Coolidge. I imagine he took great pride in this.
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.
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Chapter 4: What was Coolidge's approach to governance and economic policy?
Thank you. Thank you.
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