Coolidge (2 page)

Yet if Coolidge was a Scrooge, he was a Scrooge who begat plenty. Coolidge served for sixty-seven months, finishing out Harding’s term after Harding died in early August 1923 and remaining until early March 1929. Under Coolidge, the federal debt fell. Under Coolidge, the top income tax rate came down by half, to 25 percent. Under Coolidge, the federal budget was always in surplus. Under Coolidge, unemployment was 5 percent or even 3 percent. Under Coolidge, Americans wired their homes for electricity and bought their first cars or household appliances on credit. Under Coolidge, the economy grew strongly, even as the federal government shrank. Under Coolidge, the rates of patent applications and patents granted increased dramatically. Under Coolidge, there came no federal antilynching law, but lynchings themselves became less frequent and Ku Klux Klan membership dropped by millions. Under Coolidge, a man from a town without a railroad station, Americans moved from the road into the air.

Under Coolidge, religious faith found its modern context: the first great White House Christmas tree was lit, an ingenious use for the new technology, electricity. Under Coolidge, the number of local telephone calls went up by a quarter. In Silent Cal’s time, Americans learned to chatter. Under Coolidge, wages rose and interest rates came down so that the poor might borrow more easily. Under Coolidge, the rich came to pay a greater share of the income tax.

How did the curse become a blessing? In World War I, government policy had been so dramatic that it was like a great pendulum, swinging wildly back and forth and intimidating those in its path. Coolidge reached out his hand and stilled the pendulum. Or, to put his achievement more simply, Coolidge kept government out of the way of commerce. When in 1929 the thirtieth president climbed onto a train at Union Station to head back home to Massachusetts after his sixty-seven months in office, the federal government was smaller than when he had become president in 1923.

Somehow, the extent of the Coolidge achievement is not known. Coolidge figures infrequently in the great national conversation about presidents; when he does win mention, it is often as a caricature of Puritanism, Silent Cal, or as a placeholder between Roosevelts. My preceding book was called
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
; in researching that book on the 1930s, I discovered I was writing the prequel, the story of a forgotten president from the 1920s. Getting to know Coolidge, I puzzled out the reasons for his obscurity. Our great presidential heroes have often been war leaders, generals, and commanders. That seems natural to us. The big personalities of some presidents have drawn attention, hostile or friendly: Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt. There are plenty of personal events in Coolidge’s life, many of them sad ones, but he was principally a man of work. Indeed, Coolidge was a rare kind of hero: a minimalist president, an economic general of budgeting and tax cuts. Economic heroism is subtler than other forms of heroism, harder to appreciate.

The overlooking of Coolidge is in any case a shame, for full knowledge of this president enriches the study of all presidents. Without seeing Coolidge in the ranks, we cannot entirely appreciate the office. In different ways, many ranging far from economics, Coolidge emulated, resembled, or inspired many other presidents. Like John Adams, another plainspoken lawyer from Massachusetts, Coolidge endured dark days as vice president, and at times shared Adams’s appraisal of the vice presidency as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived.” Like Adams and George Washington, Coolidge was uncomfortable in high society. Like Adams and Washington, Coolidge was comfortable with that discomfort. Like Abraham Lincoln, Coolidge frustrated others with his slowness to respond, but acted decisively when he did move. Like Lincoln too, Coolidge lost a son while in office; like Lincoln, he pushed ahead and achieved much despite that loss. Like Grover Cleveland, Coolidge resisted the expansion of government and perfected the use of obscure legislative devices like the pocket veto in the service of that cause. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Coolidge ended a period of corruption and poured great energy into improving the reputation and quality of government service.

Like Woodrow Wilson, he deemed international law the best approach to prevent war, and poured his heart into campaigning for such a treaty. Like Warren Harding, Coolidge understood the value of predictability in government: that a predictable tax policy and predictable policy toward debt were the bases for strong commerce. Like John Kennedy, he looked to the skies and new technology to lift the spirits of the men below. Like Lyndon Johnson, Coolidge was a former vice president who masterfully completed legislative work left unfinished after the untimely death of his predecessor. Like Gerald Ford, Coolidge healed a country with civility after a period of scandal involving his predecessor. Like Ronald Reagan, who did appreciate him, Coolidge understood that a government that was too large could infringe upon freedom. Like Reagan too, Coolidge took a controversial stand against a powerful public-sector union at a key moment in U.S. history, in his case the Boston police—a move that opened a new and calmer era of less union unrest and increased employment. Like George H. W. Bush, Coolidge understood the great importance of civility and character in the presidency, that a man did lived not for himself but for service. Like George W. Bush, Coolidge saw that individual freedom and religious faith can go hand in hand, and saw that many Americans believed that too. Like Washington again, Coolidge saw danger in a lengthy incumbency in the office of the president. It was Washington whom Coolidge emulated in his deliberate decision not to seek reelection in 1928.

Our ignorance of Coolidge hurts more than our understanding of the presidency; it diminishes our understanding of his era, and our past. The education in rhetoric, religion, classics, and geometry Coolidge received at his quirky independent school, Black River Academy, and at Amherst College reminds us how our schools have changed since then. Coolidge and the poet Robert Frost never knew much about each other; Coolidge was a Republican, Frost a Grover Cleveland Democrat. But the lives of the pair crossed in odd ways, including at Coolidge’s college, Amherst. And Frost’s themes—independence, responsibility, character, property rights—also preoccupied Coolidge. There was some of Coolidge as well in the work of Will Rogers, the superstar columnist of the era. Rogers liked the president so much he wrote a column to help Coolidge find work after the presidency. Without knowing Coolidge, Americans cannot know the 1920s.

To be sure, there were areas where Coolidge fell short, as a man or president. He was not always patient. His intuitive sympathy for free markets notwithstanding, Coolidge never fully grasped the damage of his party’s pro-tariff plank. He spoke out against intolerance and bigotry, but did too little to stop them. He thought so well of other statesmen that he never foresaw the extent to which Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, or Japanese leaders would take advantage of international disarmament agreements and use those agreements as cover to arm for war. He likewise never entirely foresaw the extent to which succeeding presidents and Congress would diverge from precedent when it came to economic policy. The thirtieth president therefore never imagined the consequences of such a divergence: a depression as lengthy and severe as the one the United States experienced over the ensuing decade.

But there are many fields in which Coolidge surpassed other men and other presidents and set a standard. Most presidents place faith in action; the modern presidency is perpetual motion. Coolidge made virtue of inaction. “Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation,” he told his colleagues in the Massachusetts Senate. “It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones,” he wrote to his father as early as 1910. Congress always says, “Do.” Coolidge replied, “Do not do,” or, at least, “Do less.” Whereas other presidents made themselves omnipresent, Coolidge held back. At the time, and subsequently, many have deemed the Coolidge method laziness. Upon examination, however, the inaction reflects strength. In politics as in business, it is often harder, after all, not to do, to delegate, than to do. Coolidge is our great refrainer.

What compelled Coolidge to persevere and enabled him to succeed? The traditions of Vermont and its “hardy self-contained people,” as he described them, always inspired him. Respect for the written law animated him, but he also cherished the spiritual and what we call natural law: “Men do not make laws. They do but discover them,” he told Massachusetts state senators in 1914. His wife, Grace, one of the most beautiful first ladies, gave him the confidence to move forward. A ferocious discipline in work proved crucial as well. As documented in White House appointment books, whereas other presidents met sporadically with budget advisers, Coolidge met faithfully and weekly with his Budget Bureau director, General Herbert Mayhew Lord. An intuitive understanding of the struggles of small business aided Coolidge. Though he was not, like Margaret Thatcher, born over a storefront, Coolidge was born beside one. A keen sense of timing also helped him: Coolidge, a shrewd politician, knew when to fight and when to wait. A thorough understanding of the devices of government, and a willingness to use them, also proved key. Also crucial was the Coolidge willingness to be unpopular, which he displayed while still governor of Massachusetts, when he stared down the striking Boston police, or when, as president, he turned down his own people, farmers, by repeatedly vetoing subsidies for them.

Always, a philosophy of service inspired Coolidge. He served his family, to whom he was intensely loyal; he served the law and the people. He was among the most selfless of presidents, ranking individual above political constituency and office above individual. Once, on a walk with the president, Senator Selden Spencer of Missouri tried to cheer Coolidge by pointing to the White House and asking, in a joking tone, who might live there. “Nobody,” Coolidge replied, “they just come and go.”

Much later, in 1969, Richard Nixon spoke of a “silent majority” of Americans who thought progressives went too far; that phrase came not from Nixon but from the past. The advertising executive Bruce Barton wrote in 1919 that “it sometimes seems as if this great silent majority had no spokesman. But Coolidge belongs with that crowd, he lives like them, he works like them, and understands.” The teacher who identified the primacy of service for Coolidge was a professor who instructed him in his final years at Amherst College, Charles Edward Garman. Garman, a philosopher, also inspired Coolidge’s friend and ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow. Garman spoke of life as a great river journey. The professor told his students that, as Coolidge paraphrased it, “if they would go along with events and have the courage and industry to hold to the main stream without being washed ashore they would some day be men of power.” Garman’s image of the river, of water, and of his own task as pilot navigating amid the waves defined Coolidge’s life.

There is little evidence that Coolidge ever learned much about Oliver Coolidge beyond the name, or that he was aware that the limekiln lot property itself he inherited, along with a mare colt and a heifer calf, had once been part of a family squabble. “I never knew what had become of the descendants of Oliver,” Coolidge wrote a cousin, Ada Taintor, who inquired from Minnesota in January 1920. But genealogy always preoccupied Coolidge. Late December 1925, for example, a period crucial for his proposed tax legislation, found Coolidge distractedly writing to the town clerk of Wallingford, Vermont, to inquire about the precise birth and death dates of another ancestor, his great-grandfather Israel Brewer, Calvin Galusha’s father-in-law, and the dates when Brewer had paid taxes. The old limekiln lot itself, hardly good for farming and of value mostly only for wood and maple sugar, remained present all through the life of the thirtieth president. As a boy he worked the plot with his father. From his boardinghouse at college, he wrote home to ask if it was throwing off any revenue he might use for necessary expenses. Yet later, the president’s sons, John and Calvin, played on the land; Calvin, Jr., liked to collect spruce gum. After the death of Calvin, Jr., at age sixteen, it was up the road to the old limekiln lot that his mother, Grace, went to dig up a young spruce as a memorial to him. She replanted the spruce on the White House grounds so that the president might see it from the windows.

When Henry Ford visited Plymouth, his hosts, the president and his father, gave the automaker a sap bucket from their sugar equipment. In his final days, Coolidge’s father leased the lot to a tenant and wrote friendly copy to describe “nice sugar” made by the tenant from the sap collected there. The Coolidge sympathy for tariffs, including tariffs on Canadian maple sugar, grew out of experience; the Canadian product competed with the small harvest of his lot. Toward the end of his presidency, Coolidge journeyed west, partly to call on regions crucial to the Republican Party but also to trace the trail that his forebears, men like Oliver, had blazed. He shipped headstones from Vermont to Wisconsin for the graves of the parents of his grandmother Sarah Almeda Brewer Coolidge, Israel Brewer, and Israel’s wife, Sally. Vermont, Coolidge believed, should honor those who had left her and try to understand why they had done so.

Indeed, all his life, and at every station on the great figurative river, Coolidge never ceased to probe the same questions of debt, money, commerce, growth, and prosperity that had so affected Oliver, puzzling over in his mind what might be the right balance. Coolidge’s inquiries into political economy were so intense and so fruitful that it is, again, hard to understand why they are not better known. From time to time historians—more than economists—try to blame Coolidge for the Great Depression and therefore downgrade his policies. A market correction was due in 1929. Coolidge himself anticipated that drop. In fact, he fretted over its possible consequences. The country would endure trouble, he knew, yet he remained convinced that arbitrary interventions, experiments, would only prolong the downturn. But the contention that Coolidge can be blamed for the extended double-digit unemployment of the 1930s is a stretch. Many of the events that converted the 1929 break in the Dow Jones Industrial Average from a serious market crash into the decade-long Great Depression took place after Coolidge’s presidency or in places far away.