- Shlaes, Amity.
Coolidge.
New York: Harper Perennial, [2013] 2014.
ISBN 978-0-06-196759-7.
-
John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. was born in 1872 in Plymouth Notch,
Vermont. His family were among the branch of the Coolidge
clan who stayed in Vermont while others left its steep, rocky,
and often bleak land for opportunity in the Wild West of
Ohio and beyond when the Erie canal opened up these new
territories to settlement. His father and namesake made
his living by cutting wood, tapping trees for sugar, and
small-scale farming on his modest plot of land. He
diversified his income by operating a general store in
town and selling insurance. There was a long tradition
of public service in the family. Young Coolidge's great-grandfather
was an officer in the American Revolution and his grandfather
was elected to the Vermont House of Representatives. His
father was justice of the peace and tax collector in Plymouth Notch,
and would later serve in the Vermont House of Representatives
and Senate.
Although many in the cities would consider their rural life
far from the nearest railroad terminal hard-scrabble, the
family was sufficiently prosperous to pay for young
Calvin (the name he went by from boyhood) to attend private
schools, boarding with families in the towns where they
were located and infrequently returning home. He followed
a general college preparatory curriculum and, after failing the
entrance examination the first time, was admitted on his
second attempt to Amherst College as a freshman in 1891.
A loner, and already with a reputation for being taciturn,
he joined none of the fraternities to which his classmates
belonged, nor did he participate in the athletics which
were a part of college life. He quickly perceived that Amherst
had a class system, where the scions of old money families
from Boston who had supported the college were elevated
above nobodies from the boonies like himself. He concentrated
on his studies, mastering Greek and Latin, and immersing
himself in the works of the great orators of those cultures.
As his college years passed, Coolidge became increasingly
interested in politics, joined the college
Republican Club, and worked on the 1892 re-election campaign of
Benjamin Harrison, whose Democrat opponent, Grover Cleveland,
was seeking to regain the presidency he had lost to Harrison
in 1888. Writing to his father after Harrison's defeat, his
analysis was that “the reason seems to be in the never
satisfied mind of the American and in the ever desire to shift
in hope of something better and in the vague idea of the working
and farming classes that somebody is getting all the money
while they get all the work.”
His confidence growing, Coolidge began to participate in formal
debates, finally, in his senior year, joined a fraternity,
and ran for and won the honour of being an orator at his
class's graduation. He worked hard on the speech, which
was a great success, keeping his audience engaged and
frequently laughing at his wit. While still quiet in one-on-one
settings, he enjoyed public speaking and connecting with
an audience.
After graduation, Coolidge decided to pursue a career in the
law and considered attending law school at Harvard or Columbia
University, but decided he could not afford the tuition, as
he was still being supported by his father and had no prospects
for earning sufficient money while studying the law. In that
era, most states did not require a law school education; an
aspiring lawyer could, instead, become an apprentice at an
established law firm and study on his own, a practice called
reading the law.
Coolidge became an apprentice at a firm in Northampton, Massachusetts
run by two Amherst graduates and, after two years, in 1897, passed
the Massachusetts bar examination and was admitted to the bar.
In 1898, he set out on his own and opened a small law office
in Northampton; he had embarked on the career of a country
lawyer.
While developing his law practice, Coolidge followed in the
footsteps of his father and grandfather and entered public
life as a Republican, winning election to the Northampton
City Council in 1898. In the following years, he held the
offices of City Solicitor and county clerk of courts. In
1903 he married Grace Anna Goodhue, a teacher at the
Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton. The next
year, running for the local school board, he suffered the
only defeat of his political career, in part because his
opponents pointed out he had no children in the schools.
Coolidge said, “Might give me time.” (The
Coolidges went on to have two sons, John, born in 1906,
and Calvin Jr., in 1908.)
In 1906, Coolidge sought statewide office for the first time,
running for the Massachusetts House of Representatives and
narrowly defeating the Democrat incumbent. He was re-elected
the following year, but declined to run for a third term,
returning to Northampton where he ran for mayor, won, and
served two one year terms. In 1912 he ran for the State Senate
seat of the retiring Republican incumbent and won. In the
presidential election of that year, when the Republican party
split between the traditional wing favouring William Howard
Taft and progressives backing Theodore Roosevelt, Coolidge,
although identified as a progressive, having supported women's
suffrage and the direct election of federal senators, among
other causes, stayed with the Taft Republicans and won
re-election. Coolidge sought a third term in 1914 and won,
being named President of the State Senate with substantial
influence on legislation in the body.
In 1915, Coolidge moved further up the ladder by running
for the office of Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts,
balancing the Republican ticket led by a gubernatorial
candidate from the east of the state with his own
base of support in the rural west. In Massachusetts, the
Lieutenant Governor does not preside over the State Senate,
but rather fulfils an administrative role, chairing
executive committees. Coolidge presided over the finance
committee, which provided him experience in managing a
budget and dealing with competing demands from departments
that was to prove useful later in his career. After being
re-elected to the office in 1915 and 1916 (statewide offices
in Massachusetts at the time had a term of only one year),
with the governor announcing his retirement, Coolidge was
unopposed for the Republican nomination for governor and
narrowly defeated the Democrat in the 1918 election.
Coolidge took office at a time of great unrest between
industry and labour. Prices in 1918 had doubled from their
1913 level; nothing of the kind had happened since the
paper money inflation during the Civil War and its aftermath.
Nobody seemed to know why: it was usually
attributed to the war, but nobody understood the cause and
effect. There doesn't seem to have been a single
mainstream voice who observed that the rapid rise in
prices (which was really a depreciation of the dollar) began
precisely at the moment the
Creature
from Jekyll Island was unleashed upon the U.S. economy
and banking system. What was obvious, however, was that in
most cases industrial wages had not kept pace with the rise in
the cost of living, and that large companies which had raised
their prices had not correspondingly increased what they paid
their workers. This gave a powerful boost to the growing union
movement. In early 1919 an ugly
general
strike in Seattle idled workers across the city, and the
United Mine Workers threatened a nationwide coal strike for
November 1919, just as the maximum demand for coal in winter
would arrive. In Boston, police officers voted to unionise and
affiliate with the American Federation of Labor, ignoring an
order from the Police Commissioner forbidding officers to
join a union. On September 9th, a majority of policemen defied
the order and walked off the job.
Those who question the need for a police presence on the street
in big cities should consider the Boston police strike as a cautionary
tale, at least as things were in the city of Boston in the year
1919. As the Sun went down, the city erupted in chaos, mayhem,
looting, and violence. A streetcar conductor was shot for no
apparent reason. There were reports of rapes, murders, and serious
injuries. The next day, more than a thousand residents applied
for gun permits. Downtown stores were boarding up their
display windows and hiring private security forces. Telephone
operators and employees at the electric power plant threatened
to walk out in sympathy with the police. From Montana, where
he was campaigning in favour of ratification of the League
of Nations treaty, President Woodrow Wilson issued a mealy-mouthed
statement saying, “There is no use in talking about
political democracy unless you have also industrial
democracy”.
Governor Coolidge acted swiftly and decisively. He called up the
Guard and deployed them throughout the city, fired all of the
striking policemen, and issued a statement saying “The
action of the police in leaving their posts of duty is not a
strike. It is a desertion. … There is nothing to
arbitrate, nothing to compromise. In my personal opinion there
are no conditions under which the men can return to the force.”
He directed the police commissioner to hire a new force to
replace the fired men. He publicly rebuked American Federation of
Labor chief Samuel Gompers in a telegram released to the press
which concluded, “There is no right to strike against the
public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.”
When the dust settled, the union was broken, peace was restored
to the streets of Boston, and Coolidge had emerged onto the
national stage as a decisive leader and champion of what he
called the “reign of law.” Later in 1919, he was
re-elected governor with seven times the margin of his first
election. He began to be spoken of as a potential candidate
for the Republican presidential nomination in 1920.
Coolidge was nominated at the 1920 Republican convention, but
never came in above sixth in the balloting, in the middle of
the pack of regional and favourite son candidates. On the
tenth ballot, Warren G. Harding of Ohio was chosen, and
party bosses announced their choice for Vice President, a
senator from Wisconsin. But when time came for delegates
to vote, a Coolidge wave among rank and file tired of the
bosses ordering them around gave him the nod. Coolidge did
not attend the convention in Chicago; he got the news of
his nomination by telephone. After he hung up, Grace asked
him what it was all about. He said, “Nominated for
vice president.” She responded, “You don't
mean it.” “Indeed I do”, he answered.
“You are not going to accept it, are you?”
“I suppose I shall have to.”
Harding ran on a platform of “normalcy” after the
turbulence of the war and Wilson's helter-skelter progressive
agenda. He expressed his philosophy in a speech several months
earlier,
America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not
nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not
agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the
dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise;
not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in
triumphant nationality. It is one thing to battle successfully
against world domination by military autocracy, because the
infinite God never intended such a program, but it is
quite another to revise human nature and suspend the
fundamental laws of life and all of life's acquirements.
The election was a blow-out. Harding and Coolidge won the
largest electoral college majority (404 to 127) since James
Monroe's unopposed re-election in 1820, and more than 60% of the
popular vote. Harding carried every state except for the Old South,
and was the first Republican to win Tennessee since
Reconstruction. Republicans picked up 63 seats in the House,
for a majority of 303 to 131, and 10 seats in the Senate, with
59 to 37. Whatever Harding's priorities, he was likely to be
able to enact them.
The top priority in Harding's quest for normalcy was federal
finances. The Wilson administration and the Great War had
expanded the federal government into
terra incognita.
Between 1789 and 1913, when Wilson took office, the U.S. had
accumulated a total of US$2.9 billion in public debt. When
Harding was inaugurated in 1921, the debt stood at US$24
billion, more than a factor of eight greater. In 1913, total
federal spending was US$715 million; by 1920 it had ballooned to
US$6358 million, almost nine times more. The top marginal
income tax rate, 7% before the war, was 70% when Harding took
the oath of office, and the cost of living had approximately doubled
since 1913, which shouldn't have been a surprise (although it
was largely unappreciated at the time), because a complaisant
Federal Reserve had doubled the money supply from US$22.09
billion in 1913 to US$48.73 billion in 1920.
At the time, federal spending worked much as it had in the
early days of the Republic: individual agencies presented
their spending requests to Congress, where they battled against
other demands on the federal purse, with congressional
advocates of particular agencies doing deals to get what
they wanted. There was no overall budget process worthy of
the name (or as existed in private companies a fraction the
size of the federal government), and the President, as chief
executive, could only sign or veto individual spending bills,
not an overall budget for the government. Harding had campaigned
on introducing a formal budget process and made this his
top priority after taking office. He called an extraordinary
session of Congress and, making the most of the Republican
majorities in the House and Senate, enacted a bill which created
a Budget Bureau in the executive branch, empowered the president
to approve a comprehensive budget for all federal expenditures,
and even allowed the president to reduce agency spending of
already appropriated funds. The budget would be a central
focus for the next eight years.
Harding also undertook to dispose of surplus federal assets
accumulated during the war, including naval petroleum reserves.
This, combined with Harding's penchant for cronyism, led to a
number of scandals which tainted the reputation of his
administration. On August 2nd, 1923, while on a speaking tour of the
country promoting U.S. membership in the World Court, he
suffered a heart attack and died in San Francisco. Coolidge,
who was visiting his family in Vermont, where there was no
telephone service at night, was awakened to learn that he
had succeeded to the presidency. He took the oath of office
by kerosene light in his parents' living room, administered
by his father, a Vermont notary public. As he left Vermont
for Washington, he said, “I believe I can swing it.”
As Coolidge was in complete agreement with Harding's policies,
if not his style and choice of associates, he interpreted
“normalcy” as continuing on the course set by
his predecessor. He retained Harding's entire cabinet
(although he had his doubts about some of its more dodgy
members), and began to work closely with his budget
director,
Herbert Lord,
meeting with him weekly before the full cabinet meeting.
Their goal was to continue to cut federal spending,
generate surpluses to pay down the public debt, and
eventually cut taxes to boost the economy and leave more money
in the pockets of those who earned it. He had a powerful ally
in these goals in Treasury secretary
Andrew Mellon,
who went further and advocated his theory of “scientific
taxation”. He argued that the existing high tax rates
not only hampered economic growth but actually reduced the
amount of revenue collected by the government. Just as a
railroad's profits would suffer from a drop in traffic if it
set its freight rates too high, a high tax rate would deter
individuals and companies from making more taxable income.
What was crucial was the “top marginal tax rate”: the
tax paid on the next additional dollar earned. With the tax
rate on high earners at the postwar level of 70%, individuals
got to keep only thirty cents of each additional dollar they
earned; many would not bother putting in the effort.
Half a century later, Mellon would have been called a
“supply sider”, and his ideas were just as
valid as when they were applied in the Reagan administration
in the 1980s. Coolidge wasn't sure he agreed with all of
Mellon's theory, but he was 100% in favour of cutting the
budget, paying down the debt, and reducing the tax burden
on individuals and business, so he was willing to give it
a try. It worked. The last budget submitted by the Coolidge
administration (fiscal year 1929) was 3.127 billion, less
than half of fiscal year 1920's expenditures. The public
debt had been paid down from US$24 billion go US$17.6
billion, and the top marginal tax rate had been more than
halved from 70% to 31%.
Achieving these goals required constant vigilance and an
unceasing struggle with the congress, where politicians of
both parties regarded any budget surplus or increase in
revenue generated by lower tax rates and a booming
economy as an invitation to spend, spend, spend. The Army
and Navy argued for major expenditures to defend the
nation from the emerging threat posed by aviation. Coolidge's
head of defense aviation observed that the Great Lakes had
been undefended for a century, yet Canada had not so far
invaded and occupied the Midwest and that, “to create a
defense system based upon a hypothetical attack from
Canada, Mexico, or another of our near neighbors would
be wholly unreasonable.” When devastating floods
struck the states along the Mississippi, Coolidge was
steadfast in insisting that relief and recovery were the
responsibility of the states. The New York Times
approved, “Fortunately, there are still some things
that can be done without the wisdom of Congress and the
all-fathering Federal Government.”
When Coolidge succeeded to the presidency, Republicans were
unsure whether he would run in 1924, or would obtain the
nomination if he sought it. By the time of the convention in
June of that year, Coolidge's popularity was such that he was
nominated on the first ballot. The 1924 election was another
blow-out, with Coolidge winning 35 states and 54% of the
popular vote. His Democrat opponent, John W. Davis, carried
just the 12 states of the “solid South” and won
28.8% of the popular vote, the lowest popular vote
percentage of any Democrat candidate to this day. Robert
La Follette of Wisconsin, who had challenged Coolidge for
the Republican nomination and lost, ran as a Progressive,
advocating higher taxes on the wealthy and nationalisation
of the railroads, and won 16.6% of the popular vote and
carried the state of Wisconsin and its 13 electoral votes.
Tragedy struck the Coolidge family in the White House in 1924
when his second son, Calvin Jr., developed a blister while
playing tennis on the White House courts. The blister
became infected with Staphylococcus aureus, a
bacterium which is readily treated today with penicillin
and other antibiotics, but in 1924 had no treatment
other than hoping the patient's immune system would throw
off the infection. The infection spread to the blood and
sixteen year old Calvin Jr. died on July 7th, 1924. The
president was devastated by the loss of his son and never
forgave himself for bringing his son to Washington where
the injury occurred.
In his second term, Coolidge continued the policies of
his first, opposing government spending programs, paying down
the debt through budget surpluses, and cutting taxes. When
the mayor of Johannesburg, South Africa, presented the
president with two lion cubs, he named them “Tax
Reduction” and “Budget Bureau” before
donating them to the National Zoo. In 1927, on vacation
in South Dakota, the president issued a characteristically
brief statement, “I do not choose to run for
President in nineteen twenty eight.” Washington
pundits spilled barrels of ink parsing Coolidge's twelve
words, but they meant exactly what they said: he had had
enough of Washington and the endless struggle against big
spenders in Congress, and (although re-election was
considered almost certain given his landslide the last
time, popularity, and booming economy) considered ten
years in office (which would have been longer than any
previous president) too long for any individual to
serve. Also, he was becoming increasingly concerned
about speculation in the stock market, which had more
than doubled during his administration and would
continue to climb in its remaining months. He was
opposed to government intervention in the markets and,
in an era before the Securities and Exchange Commission,
had few tools with which to do so. Edmund Starling, his
Secret Service bodyguard and frequent companion on walks,
said, “He saw economic disaster ahead”, and
as the 1928 election approached and it appeared that
Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover would be the Republican
nominee, Coolidge said, “Well, they're going to elect that
superman Hoover, and he's going to have some trouble. He's
going to have to spend money. But he won't spend enough.
Then the Democrats will come in and they'll spend money
like water. But they don't know anything about money.”
Coolidge may have spoken few words, but when he did he was
worth listening to.
Indeed, Hoover was elected in 1928 in another Republican
landslide (40 to 8 states, 444 to 87 electoral votes, and
58.2% of the popular vote), and things played out exactly
as Coolidge had foreseen. The 1929 crash triggered a
series of moves by Hoover which undid most of the patient
economies of Harding and Coolidge, and by the time Hoover was
defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, he had added
33% to the national debt and raised the top marginal
personal income tax rate to 63% and corporate taxes by 15%.
Coolidge, in retirement, said little about Hoover's policies
and did his duty to the party, campaigning for him in the
foredoomed re-election campaign in 1932. After the
election, he remarked to an editor of the New York
Evening Mail, “I have been out of touch so
long with political activities I feel that I no longer
fit in with these times.” On January 5, 1933,
Coolidge, while shaving, suffered a sudden heart attack
and was found dead in his dressing room by his wife
Grace.
Calvin Coolidge was arguably the last U.S. president to
act in office as envisioned by the Constitution. He advanced
no ambitious legislative agenda, leaving lawmaking to Congress.
He saw his job as similar to an executive in a business,
seeking economies and efficiency, eliminating waste and
duplication, and restraining the ambition of subordinates
who sought to broaden the mission of their departments
beyond what had been authorised by Congress and the
Constitution. He set difficult but limited goals for
his administration and achieved them all, and he
was popular while in office and respected after leaving it.
But how quickly it was all undone is a lesson in how
fickle the electorate can be, and how tempting ill-conceived
ideas are in a time of economic crisis.
This is a superb history of Coolidge and his time, full of
lessons for our age which has veered so far from the
constitutional framework he so respected.
August 2019 