“Great men are the ambassadors of Providence sent to reveal to their fellow men their unknown selves. . . . When the reverence of this nation for great men dies, the glory of the nation will die with it.”
—Calvin Coolidge
“It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man. When a man begins to feel that he is the only one who can lead in this republic, he is guilty of treason to the spirit of our institutions.”
—Calvin Coolidge
Coolidge was the last president who wrote his own speeches
He read classic literature in the original Greek and Latin in the evenings at the White House for relaxation
Coolidge may have suffered from clinical depression following the tragic death of his young son
He was the only president born on the Fourth of July
Liberal historians have reviled and belittled Calvin Coolidge even more than Warren Harding and Herbert Hoover, chiefly because Coolidge is a more formidable figure who presents the most serious challenge to the pretentions of Progressivism. Coolidge was the anti-Wilson in every way—except that he was just as interested as Wilson in theoretical questions about the applicability of the Constitution to modern America. To Harding’s reverence for our Founding documents and restrained conduct in the presidential office, Coolidge added a principled and intellectually sophisticated defense of constitutional government against the Progressives’ attack on it. He was personally modest, he harbored no grand aspirations for transforming America in accordance with his own self-generated “vision,” and he conducted himself in office more like the presidents of the nineteenth century. But Coolidge ably defended America’s founding documents against the Progressive assault on the founding, as no nineteenth-century president had to do. And he has been punished for taking up arms against the Progressive revolution by historians who share its principles and cheer its victories.
“One with the law is a majority.”
“I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves.”
“Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing.”
“Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.”
“Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.”
“Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped.”
“To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race.”
Historian Thomas B. Silver summarizes the conventional wisdom: “Coolidge has been subjected to more ridicule perhaps than any other president in American history. His policies are regarded by most historians as beneath contempt.” Liberals dismiss Coolidge as “Silent Cal,” an appellation meant to suggest that he said little and achieved no deeds or thoughts worthy of recollection. Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager criticize Coolidge as “thrifty with words and ideas . . . a thoroughly limited politician, dour and unimaginative”—as though having a president who declined to speak at us on an almost daily basis about his grand “vision” for transforming the nation was a bad thing.
In fact Coolidge said a lot, and displayed a dry, terse wit. When someone once walked up to him and said, “I didn’t vote for you,” Coolidge replied: “Someone did.” But much of what he said drew deeply on his reverence for and attachment to the principles of the American Founding—which led him to reject the premises of the Progressive Era. Rather than take up the challenge Coolidge presents, liberal historians choose to distort or ignore his thoughts and actions. A close and unbiased look at Coolidge will reveal him to have been one of the most thoughtful and substantive presidents of any century.
A close look at the second most common charge made against Coolidge—after the “Silent Cal” epithet—reveals the bad faith and distortions of liberal historians and journalists. Coolidge is said to have been a simple-minded, pro-business president; the supposed evidence for this canard has become his most famous statement: “The business of America is business.” Mark Shields calls the quotation “Cal’s most-repeated epigram.” Long-time Washington Post reporter Haynes Johnson chimes in, “It was Coolidge who gave Americans such memorable examples of presidential wisdom as: ‘The business of America is business.’” A thousand quotation books have passed along this familiar chestnut, and two generations of history students have been taught it. John Hicks’s Republican Ascendancy reads, ‘The business of America is business,’ [Coolidge] later proclaimed; and the business of government, he might have added, was to help business in every possible way.”
There’s only one problem. This is a misquotation.
Not only is it a misquotation, but it ignores the context of Coolidge’s actual remark, a context that shows Coolidge to have been much more thoughtful than his critics. This is what Coolidge really said:
After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of our people will always find these are moving impulses of our life. . . . Wealth is the product of industry, ambition, character and untiring effort. In all experience, the accumulation of wealth means the multiplication of schools, the increase of knowledge, and dissemination of intelligence, the encouragement of science, the broadening of outlook, the expansion of liberties, the widening of culture. Of course, the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence. But we are compelled to recognize it as a means to well-nigh every desirable achievement. So long as wealth is made the means and not the end, we need not greatly fear it. [emphasis added]
In the very same speech in which Coolidge said the chief business of the American people was business, he also claimed, “The chief ideal of the American people is idealism.”
Saying that the chief business of the American people is business is simply acknowledging the uncontroversial fact that America is a commercial republic. Coolidge, far from being a pro-business simpleton, was warning against exactly the worship of commerce and wealth that he is accused of recommending. Haynes Johnson’s judgment that Coolidge was “the patron saint of business” is as incorrect as it is crude.
Coolidge subordinated wealth and commerce to the political principles of liberal democracy consistently throughout his life. In 1925, Coolidge wrote,
Great captains of industry who have aroused the wonder of the world by their financial success would not have been captains at all had it not been for the generations of liberal culture in the past and the existence all about them of a society permeated, inspired, and led by the liberal culture of the present. If it were possible to strike out that factor from present existence, he would find all the value of his great possessions diminish to the vanishing point, and he himself would be but a barbarian among barbarians.
Clearly there is more to this man than meets the liberal eye.
Coincidence though it may be, the twentieth-century president who understood and loved the Constitution best was the only American president born on the Fourth of July. Coolidge acquired his insight into, and reverence for, the principles of the American founding the old-fashioned way—he had the benefit of a classical education, the kind it would be nearly impossible to acquire in an elite American university today. There are few better arguments for the connection between a sound moral education and magnanimous statesmanship than Coolidge’s charming memoir, The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge, written shortly after he left the presidency in 1929. At 247 pages, this short work is utterly unlike nearly all other memoirs of former presidents; it is not the least concerned with providing either a narrative account of his tenure or justification for his acts in office. In fact, the book stops recounting Coolidge’s political career at 1924, with his election to his first full term as president. Like Winston Churchill’s reflections on his self-education in My Early Life, Coolidge’s autobiography is an eloquent affirmation of the crucial value of a traditional and moral education, and it is well worth reading today. Coolidge relates that he first encountered the Constitution in school at the age of thirteen, and that “the subject interested me exceedingly. The study of it which I then began has never ceased, and the more I study it the more I have come to admire it, realizing that no other document devised by the hand of man ever brought so much progress and happiness to humanity. The good it has wrought can never be measured.”
Coolidge studied Greek and Latin classics in grade school and read the speeches of Cicero and Demosthenes, the poetry of Homer, and works by giants of American literature. He also excelled at mathematics, proceeding through calculus. He was an extremely hard worker, noting, “I joined the French class in mid year and made up the work by starting my study at about three o’clock in the morning.”
At Amherst College Coolidge especially enjoyed his studies in history. In the hands of Anson Morse, his favorite professor, “Washington was treated with the greatest reverence, and a high estimate was placed on the statesmanlike qualities and financial capacity of Hamilton, but Jefferson was not neglected. . . . The whole course was a thesis on good citizenship and good government. Those who took it came to a clearer comprehension not only of their rights and liberties but of their duties and responsibilities.” His coursework in philosophy “revealed that man is endowed with reason, that the human mind has the power to weigh evidence, to distinguish between right and wrong and to know the truth.” Armed with this classical and reverential education, Coolidge won the Sons of the American Revolution’s national contest for the best essay by a college senior. Coolidge’s topic was “The Principles Fought for in the American Revolution.”
The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge by Calvin Coolidge.
His education enabled Coolidge to recognize how “Progressivism” was undermining the constitutional foundations of American government—and to dig down to the root of the error, in the Progressive’s denial of the natural rights philosophy in the Declaration of Independence. Liberals reacted with outrage when Ronald Reagan replaced Thomas Jefferson’s portrait in the White House cabinet room with a portrait of Coolidge. Columnist (and former Democratic speechwriter) Mark Shields was incredulous: “Don’t try and tell me that Calvin Coolidge could ever substitute for Thomas Jefferson,” Shields wrote; “That’s almost a national sacrilege.” The irony is that Coolidge was the most fervent presidential defender of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence in the twentieth century—indeed, the most fervent defender of the Declaration since Lincoln.
As the example of Woodrow Wilson shows, it is liberal presidents who would have removed Jefferson’s portrait from the White House, if their decorating choices had followed their political philosophy. By 1922, liberals were starting to agree with the prominent historian Carl Becker, whose book on the Declaration of Independence asserted, “To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question.” Coolidge took Jefferson’s side and argued otherwise, against the Progressive intellectuals who were the guiding lights, then and now, of the Democratic Party. “About the Declaration,” Coolidge said in a speech in Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 1926,
there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
Even a superficial reader of this passage will see that Coolidge is explicitly rejecting the premises of his Progressive predecessors. This is the real reason for the liberal contempt for Coolidge.
Coolidge also understood how Progressive ideology and the administrative state, with its ever-growing independent bureaucracy, threatened to undermine both the rule of law and the character of the American citizenry. In a wide-ranging 1922 speech to the American Bar Association on “The Limitations of the Law,” Coolidge took dead aim at Progressivism, noting that a government that tries to do too much will govern badly:
Coolidge and the Historians by Thomas B. Silver (Carolina Academic Press, 1984).
So long as the National Government confined itself to providing those fundamentals of liberty, order, and justice for which it was primarily established, its course was reasonably clear and plain. No large amount of revenue was required. No great swarms of public employees were necessary. There was little clash of special interests or different sections, and what there was of this nature consisted not of petty details but of broad principles. There was time for the consideration of great questions of policy. There was an opportunity for mature deliberation. What the government undertook to do it could perform with a fair degree of accuracy and precision.
But now, Coolidge observed, the federal government was taking on more and more responsibilities, acquiring more and more power, and becoming less and less limited. This, Coolidge made clear, represented not merely a small change in the scale and focus of government, but a fundamental transformation in the nature and character of government. He viewed this development with foreboding, both for the nation and for the presidency. In one passage he almost anticipates the mass appeal of Barack Obama:
This is not the government which was put into form by Washington and Hamilton and popularized by Jefferson. . . . Behind very many of these enlarging activities lies the untenable theory that there is some short cut to perfection. It is conceived that there can be a horizontal elevation of the standards of the nation, immediate and perceptible, by the simple device of new laws. This has never been the case in human experience. . . .
Under the attempt to perform the impossible there sets in a general disintegration. When legislation fails, those who look upon it as a sovereign remedy simply cry out for more legislation. A sound and wise statesmanship which recognizes and attempts to abide by its limitations will undoubtedly find itself displaced by that type of public official who promises much, talks much, legislates much, expends much, but accomplishes little. [emphasis added]
No wonder liberals acquired an abiding hatred of Coolidge and embarked on a project to denigrate him.
Following a brief apprenticeship as a lawyer after graduating from college, Coolidge entered politics. It is often said that every person elected to the town council dreams of some day becoming president, but Coolidge is the only president who in fact began his path to the presidency on that very lowest rung of the political ladder, winning election to the city council of Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1898. Coolidge’s political career proceeded rapidly through the state Senate, to lieutenant governor, to governor in 1918. In contrast to his later reputation among liberals as a rigid conservative reactionary, Coolidge was known throughout his time in Massachusetts politics as a moderate “progressive,” supporting women’s suffrage, more generous workers’ compensation benefits, maximum hours labor laws for women and children, veterans’ bonuses, and the direct election of U.S. senators. About pro-labor legislation, Coolidge said, “We must humanize industry, or the system will break down.”
Coolidge won national fame—and the subsequent disdain of liberals—for his handling of the Boston police strike in 1919. In what looks like a foreshadowing of current controversies over public employee unions, Boston police proposed to form a union with the encouragement of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The city’s police commissioner, Edwin Curtis, threatened to suspend or fire the union organizers in the police force. Matters spun out of control when three-quarters of the police force walked out in a wildcat strike. The city, left unpatrolled, quickly saw a wave of rioting and looting. Up to this point Governor Coolidge had watched events from the sidelines, leaving the matter to local government to resolve. But when Boston’s panicked mayor Andrew Peters fired Curtis and called up Massachusetts National Guard troops to patrol Boston’s streets without Coolidge’s authorization, Governor Coolidge stepped in to gain control of the situation. He restored Curtis as police commissioner and backed Curtis’s decision to fire the striking policemen and hire replacements. The climax of the episode came when Coolidge replied sternly to a pleading telegram from the AFL’s legendary leader Sam Gompers, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anyone, anywhere, any time. . . . I am equally determined to defend the sovereignty of Massachusetts and to maintain the authority and jurisdiction over her public officers where it has been placed by the Constitution and laws of her people.” Coolidge’s widely publicized answer to Gompers made him a national figure and propelled him to the national Republican ticket; he was Warren Harding’s running mate in the 1920 election. President Reagan recalled Coolidge’s firm handling of the Boston police strike when he confronted the similar air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981.
Coolidge: An American Enigma by Robert Sobel (Regnery, 1998).
Another reason liberals hate Coolidge is that he was a tax cutter, and a model for Ronald Reagan’s “supply-side” economics. Coolidge understood that his tax cuts would work in the very way that the Laffer Curve explained fifty years later. In his 1924 state of the union message to Congress, Coolidge argued that “the larger incomes of the country would actually yield more revenue to the Government if the basis of taxation were scientifically revised downward. . . . There is no escaping the fact that when the taxation of large incomes is excessive they tend to disappear.” And earlier in the year, at a Lincoln Day dinner, he had argued,
I agree perfectly with those who wish to relieve the small taxpayer by getting the largest possible contribution from the people with large incomes. But if the rates on large incomes are so high that they disappear, the small taxpayer will be left to bear the entire burden. If, on the other hand, the rates are placed where they will produce the most revenue from large incomes, then the small taxpayer will be relieved.
Coolidge—and the Laffer Curve—turned out to be right in the 1920s.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Age of Roosevelt says Coolidge “concentrated on cutting taxes for millionaires.” The facts of the Coolidge-era tax cuts are as follows: Coolidge cut income taxes three times. His chief target each time was the emergency income surtax rates that had been enacted during World War I, but which had not been lowered after the war ended, as is typical of “temporary” or “emergency” government measures. The surtax kicked in at an income of $6,000, and the top rate was originally 73 percent. A household with a $1 million income in 1924 paid a net tax of $550,000. Harding and Coolidge between them lowered the top surtax rate from 73 percent to 25 percent, and finally to 20 percent. Coolidge also cut the lowest tax bracket from 4 percent to 1.5 percent. He raised the income threshold at which the surtax took effect from $6,000 to $10,000, removing thousands of households from the income tax rolls entirely. While Coolidge’s tax cut is pejoratively described as a giveaway to the rich, 70 percent of the tax reduction went to households with income under $10,000. This is one reason the Coolidge tax cuts were broadly popular with Americans. Ironically, the Coolidge tax cuts were highly progressive in their effects: the proportion of the total income tax burden paid by those earning $100,000 and above increased from 28 percent in 1921 to 61 percent in 1928.
In 1922, the surtax yielded only $77 million from taxpayers with incomes over $300,000, down from $243 million in 1919 and $220 million in 1918. In 1927, by which time the top surtax rate had been reduced to 20 percent, the Treasury netted $230 million from taxpayers with incomes over $300,000. In the first year after Coolidge’s 1924 tax cut there was a decline of $127 million in total income tax revenues, though, as economist Lawrence Lindsey discovered upon sifting the data, tax receipts from taxpayers with incomes over $100,000 increased. In other words, all of the lost revenue came from lower and middle incomes. Coolidge’s tax cuts shifted more of the tax burden onto upper-income taxpayers—exactly the opposite of what critics of tax cuts claimed, both then and now. And by 1928 income tax revenues had risen $310 million above where they had been before the first tax cut, and 61 percent of total tax revenues came from taxpayers with incomes over $100,000. Only 4 percent of income tax receipts came from taxpayers with incomes under $10,000.
“A whole generation of historians has assailed Coolidge for the superficial optimism which kept him from seeing that a great storm was brewing at home and also more distantly abroad. This is grossly unfair. . . . There was much that was good about the world of which Coolidge spoke. . . . the twenties in America were a very good time.”
___________________________
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929
Coolidge also hewed to conservative principle on farm relief. The farm economy had been devastated by the roller-coaster economy of the years during and immediately after World War I, and the farm belt recovered from the near depression of 1920–1921 much more slowly than the rest of the economy. By 1924 farm income had only recovered about halfway to its pre-recessionary level. There was sentiment in Congress for various farm relief measures, including subsidies and tariff protection against food imports. Coolidge vetoed or threatened to veto several proposed measures, such as the two McNary-Haugen farm relief bills, that would have required the federal government to buy surplus farm products to prop up prices and therefore incomes (the exact policy Roosevelt would embrace in the Great Depression a decade later). In his veto message Coolidge noted,
Nothing is more certain than that such price fixing would upset the normal exchange relationships existing in the open market and that it would finally have to be extended to cover a multitude of other goods and services. Government price fixing, once started, has alike no justice and no end. It is an economic folly from which this country has every right to be spared.
Demonstrating his economic literacy, Coolidge observed that offering subsidies would cause farmers to grow more crops, thereby putting additional downward pressure on prices, and increasing the demand on Washington to offer still more subsidies. Coolidge added that there were several other reasons to disapprove the bill, but that “the most decisive one is that it is not constitutional.” Far from being indifferent to the difficulties of the farm belt, Coolidge proposed alternative remedies that would rely on private sector agricultural cooperative arrangements to stabilize farm prices and incomes without government support.
Coolidge’s similar attitude on the question of flood relief for the Mississippi River basin, which suffered record flooding in 1927 that was not equaled until the 1990s, has also attracted liberal criticism. While Coolidge did place Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, known for his food relief efforts in Europe after World War I, in charge of relief efforts, he resisted calls for large federal spending on flood relief and flood control projects. Coolidge thought that these problems should be the responsibility of state governments, and that interstate flood control projects should be paid for by property owners who benefitted from them rather than by the U.S. taxpayer. Under pressure, Coolidge ultimately relented on a $500 million flood control bill in 1928 (Congress had wanted $1.4 billion), which, Coolidge biographer Robert Sobel has noted, “marked an important step in the expansion of government responsibilities and obligations.”
In both cases—farm price supports and disaster relief—Coolidge’s principles have been fully vindicated in subsequent decades, as farm subsidies have swollen into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and Washington has become the indemnifier of first resort for every natural calamity, with disaster relief managed by one of the more egregious federal bureaucracies, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Liberals attack Coolidge for his supposed “isolationism,” but ignore his one major foreign policy initiative, the distinctly un-conservative Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, in which sixty-two nations promised to renounce war forever as an instrument of national policy and to resolve all international disputes peacefully. Coolidge did not subscribe to the sentimental and utopian premises behind the Pact, but he embraced it nonetheless, likely because Kellogg-Briand aided the cause of spending restraint, as Coolidge was resisting calls for a naval arms race with Britain and France. Coolidge’s Secretary of State, Frank Kellogg, won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the Pact, which has justly gone down in history as a laughable misadventure of liberal internationalism.
Coolidge’s teenage son Calvin Jr. died of sepsis after developing a blister playing tennis at the White House. Coolidge wrote of the death’s effect on him in his Autobiography, “We do not know what would have happened to him under other circumstances, but if I had not been President he would not have raised a blister on his toe, which resulted in blood poisoning, playing lawn tennis in the South Grounds.
“In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not.
“When he went the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him.
“The ways of Providence are often beyond our understanding. It seemed to me that the world had need of the work that it was probable he could do.
“I do not know why such a price was exacted for occupying the White House. . . . It costs a great deal to be President.”
Coolidge decided not to run for a second full term in 1928, issuing a typically terse and enigmatic statement: “I do not choose to run for president in 1928.” He was not enthusiastic about his prospective replacement, Herbert Hoover, remarking to an associate that “for six years that man has given me unsolicited advice—all of it bad.”
There are apocryphal accounts that Coolidge said he expected a depression was on its way, but it is more likely that his sense of modesty, closely associated with his constitutional scruples, guided his decision not to run for re-election. As he explained it afterward,
It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness. They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation which sooner or later impairs their judgment. They are in grave danger of becoming careless and arrogant.
Would that more of our presidents had this firm a grasp on reality.
Coolidge’s sole appointment to the Supreme Court was Harlan Fiske Stone in 1925, and the disappointing nature of this appointment can be summed up in a single fact: Franklin Roosevelt elevated Stone to Chief Justice in 1941. Stone had been dean of Columbia University Law School and then served as Coolidge’s attorney general. His appointment to the Court was controversial, with some senators concerned about his Wall Street connections; and Stone proposed the step of answering questions before the Senate Judiciary Committee—thereby establishing a practice that has continued ever since.
But on the Court Stone generally sided with liberals such as Brandeis and Holmes in upholding government regulation. Indeed, in the 1930s he voted most of the time in favor of FDR’s New Deal legislation when it came before the Court. Stone is most notorious as the author of one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time, the 1938 U.S. v. Carolene Products case, in which he invented an entirely extra-constitutional distinction between individual economic rights, which the Court would allow wide deference to Congress to regulate, and other civil rights, to which the Court would apply “strict scrutiny.”
Stone’s appointment has to be ranked as the only significant disappointment of Coolidge’s record in respect to his constitutional duties. But Coolidge did not anticipate that the Supreme Court would increasingly fail in its duty to uphold the Constitution over the coming decades; he could not have foreseen the damage that a Supreme Court cut loose from its constitutional moorings might do. In his speech on the limitations of the law, Coolidge expressed the still common view that Hamilton had been right in supposing the judiciary to be the “least dangerous branch”: “This court is human,” Coolidge had said in 1922, “and therefore not infallible; but in the more than one hundred and thirty years of its existence its decisions which have not withstood the questioning of criticism could almost be counted upon one hand.”
Despite this one disappointment, Coolidge still deserves an A+ grade for his principled constitutionalism.