Presidential biography season is well under way. The last
several years have seen several new studies of George Washington, James Madison,
Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. These and
other Presidents have long been the recipients of copious attentions from
biographers, but not all Presidents are so fortunate. Some, like Chester
Whenever any writer—historian or not—decides to write a long
examination of the life of a man as famous as Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933), the
thirtieth President of the United States, and a man about whom numerous studies
and biographies have already been written—including Robert Sobel’s Coolidge: An American Enigma (1998),
Robert H. Ferrell’s The Presidency of
Calvin Coolidge (1998), and David Greenberg’s Calvin Coolidge (2006)—they must justify or explain what new needs
to be said. Why now? Why Coolidge? Coolidge, of course, wrote his own
discursive account of his life and work while leaving the Presidency—The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge
(1929)—and his life and Presidency became the subjects of writers and
biographers of all stripes as soon as his main achievements, economy in
government and the booming economy, were blown to bits by his immediate successors.
One such account appeared in 1938, from the Kansas
Coolidge, despite the perception of being remembered by few,
has never been long out of the spotlight. The New Dealers came to power—and
stayed in power—largely on a strident critique of the 1920s and early 1930s—the
Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover
According to Amity Shlaes (syndicated columnist for Bloomberg View and winner of the Hayek
and Bastiat Prizes for journalism—as well as a trustee of the Calvin Coolidge
Memorial Foundation), a new biography of the Vermont born and raised Amherst
graduate who became Governor of Massachusetts, national prominence from ending
the first major attempt of an urban police force to strike, and then the
Vice-Presidency and Presidency is warranted because of what we might learn of
the possibilities for our own problems.
It is hard for modern students of economics to know
what to make of a government that treated economic weakness by raising interest
rates 300 basis points, cutting tax rates, and halving the federal government,
so much at odds is that prescription with the antidotes to recession our own
experts tend to recommend. It is harder still for modern economists to concede
that that recipe, the policy recipe for the early 1920s advocated by Coolidge
and Harding, yielded growth on a scale to which we can aspire today.[3]
Certainly, on the face of it, a man who directed—or helped
direct—the reduction of the national debt from $28 billion to $17.65 billion (a
37% decrease that if replicated at this exact moment would bring the national
debt of the United States from $16.74 trillion to $10.55 trillion) seems to
have answers for today’s problems.[4] But
the curious thing about Shlaes’ biography of “Silent Cal” is that there are
virtually no answers. This is, I believe, not her fault, but rather is related
to issues which she only peripherally examines but fundamental to explaining
the very real oddity that White identified—that the same nation which elected
Harding and Coolidge also elected Franklin Roosevelt to office more times than
his three predecessors put together.
Part of the problem arises from a methodological issue
prevalent among many modern biographers—David McCullough, Ron Chernow, and a
great many other of the most able practitioners—a blurred chronological focus
on nearly everything. Biographers, unless they purposely set out to write an
intellectual biography or a “life and times” of their subjects, often try to
give a Herodotean survey of all the facets of the men and women they examine.
This means that often as much attention is paid to private personal incidents
and relationships as are given to large public episodes and events. Only a
brave soul will make the difficult editorial decisions in a one volume
biography to pass over or minimize the truly less important events and
incidents of a life and withstand the waves of criticism that will arrive from
editors and reviewers. Also lost are the grand meta-historical issues related
to the biography of a man—such as his philosophy and political thought, that require
chronology to be sacrificed for the sake of thematic continuity and examination.
These issues are not unique to Shlaes’ account of Calvin Coolidge by any means,
but they are certainly not solved and make the answers she hopes her account
can provide elusive, if not entirely absent.
A couple of examples from Coolidge’s life and times will
illustrate why a purely chronological account of his life is insufficient for
getting at anything resembling useful answers in today’s political climate—and
also leaves any uninformed reader with surprisingly little understanding of
what was going on in the 1920s (or 1910s and 1930s). Take just the language of
political description: conservative, liberal, Progressive, Republican,
Democrat, etc. The Republican Party, and Coolidge himself, were the primary
incubators of late nineteenth-century Progressivism particularly under such
party standard bearers as Chester
This evolution, we are told, is generally away from the
regulatory state of Franklin Roosevelt and even Herbert Hoover, but then we
have to deal with serious problems in that interpretation. One, not covered (or
only very quickly) by Shlaes, is President Coolidge’s ease with regulating new
technologies—airplanes, cars, and radio. Another is President Coolidge’s firm
embrace of protectionism. This was not from lack of inquiry about the results
of tariffs—in fact Shlaes keeps some of the leading thinkers of the period
perpetually in the background of her narrative, as shown in this passage:
“Coolidge rated (William Graham) Sumner “on the whole sound.” But Coolidge was
not ready to sign on to Sumner’s philosophy: “I do not think that human
existence is quite so much on the basis of dollars and cents as he puts it. ...
He nowhere enunciates the principle of service.””[7]
Shlaes, while offering an explanation for Coolidge’s adherence to protectionism
rooted in his New England experience, is
unsympathetic to his conclusions. But how did Coolidge and Republicans square
protectionism—which Shlaes correctly points out hurt the farmers of the Midwest
and drove increasing numbers of them into the arms of free-trading
Democrats—with such notions of government as: “The most important thing now was
to free the individual, for, as Coolidge said, “It is our theory that the
people own the government, not that the government should own the people.””[8]
The people own the government to partition trade advantages among regions of
the country?
How about Coolidge’s signing of one of the worst legislative
landmarks of the 1920s, the Immigration Act of 1924 (that excluded
“undesirable” Japanese and Chinese immigrants entirely from legally moving into
the republic and essentially ended most Eastern and Southern European immigration):
“Coolidge was willing to go along with restrictionists. “I am convinced that
our present economic and social conditions warrant a limitation of those to be
admitted,” he wrote. But he was not hostile to immigrants already in the United States
We might be further confused from the seeming bifurcation of
the Republican Party in spite of the argument proffered from Shlaes of
Coolidge’s immense popularity and of his policies. For instance, while Hoover
swept into the Presidency promising to continue the Coolidge policies, it is
clear from Shlaes’ recounting that many Republicans—including Hoover—had major
disagreements with Coolidge, as we can see from this passage that makes obvious
that Franklin Roosevelt’s activities were neither unpredictable nor even unique
to his partisan identity: “Many Republicans, including [William] Borah, were
plotting to move the party to the left; Borah had allowed he might back George
Norris, who sought federal ownership of hydropower.”[10] Hoover
What is truly interesting about Coolidge and the period of
American politics that he inhabited and represented, the roaring twenties and
Prohibition—it is nearly unaccountable how little discussion there is in this
biography about Prohibition, the enforcement of which fell mostly heavily on
Calvin Coolidge and that greatly expanded the pernicious tentacles of Federal
power to every corner of the nation through the enforcement carried out by
Federal agents largely under the authority of J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal
Bureau of Investigation—was its transitional nature. The great “flip” in the
roles of the political parties was occurring and maturing during this very
period—though the truly interesting part of the tale was on the Democratic side
and we get very little of that here. Coolidge, while a “throwback” in some
regards, was mostly a “throwback” to what the Democratic Party used to be under
the auspices of Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and Grover Cleveland—and even
there only in part. Coolidge’s record of cutting the Federal Budget, the debt,
and the size of the Government workforce (there is a difference between that
and restraining its power and scope, which Coolidge achieved very little
towards) was and is admirable, but as Shlaes makes clear—as she must—this was
ephemeral. Hoover
So what are the answers? How do we now take anything of
value from the story of Calvin Coolidge and cutting the budget and debt—other
than simply knowing it was once done? What did Coolidge cut and why? What did
he see as government’s proper role and why? How did he square either of those
answers with his own actions in office which sometimes tended toward greater
liberalism and sometimes towards the greater statism on the horizon? Did he
renounce the Progressive wing of his party or any of its standard-bearers? How
did he square Theodore Roosevelt’s notions of government activism with his own?
Or is the better question: Did he have to do so? The greatest reason why we
cannot cut our humongous budget deficit (one of the book’s funnier passages
relates to Coolidge’s angry frustration with the advent of a $37 million
deficit at the end of his term) let alone reduce our mind-boggling national
debt, relates to the widespread acceptance of a notion of government
interventionism that Coolidge did, indeed, have issues with.[11]
But does his story offer us an antidote to that acceptance—based in notions of
“service” that Coolidge may have agreed with in large part? Did he ever
articulate a full-throated case against economic interventionism? Or a defense
of limited government—why it was necessary and what it was meant to do? So far
as anyone can tell from Shlaes’ book, the answer is no—and that is the correct
answer. Why, then, write a straight biography of such a person if the goal is
offer some path to future prosperity and economic growth? The heavy lifting of
the changes necessary to preserve liberty and fiscal sanity has to be done with
ammunition a bit more potent than simply pointing to a brief transitional
period in American political history—after a war and major military build-up
(the disconcerting thing here is that Shlaes could have written a similar
account of Harry Truman’s Presidency in more ways than just that point)—where
the budget and national debt were reduced. Coolidge running for President today
would lose because he would react in horror to the post-World War II welfare
state consensus, the precise reason why Alf Landon, Wendell Wilkie, and Thomas
Dewey all lost the elections of 1936, 1940, 1944, and 1948. Only when General
Eisenhower moved the party progressively and firmly into the wake of Franklin
Roosevelt’s “bold experimentation” did the Republican Party re-emerge. Even the
great Coolidge booster, Reagan, was a Roosevelt
man in the 1930s.
Americans are all New Dealers now. Coolidge’s encomium to Vermont Vermont Vermont
That Coolidge was an interesting figure with laudable ideas,
goals, and achievements is undeniable—and Shlaes’ biography reminds us all of
that and informs those new to him of it—but that has always been the case while
never promoting any of his ideas in contemporary policy debates. While the
American people continue to demand their cake after the eating, on the dime of
whatever despised minority getting the short-end of the stick, the good that
Coolidge did will continue not to live after him. That disposition and attitude
has to be countered by an antipode that did not exist in Coolidge’s day and one
that Coolidge may very well have disagreed with—a bold defense of liberty,
economic and personal. A defense of liberty and capitalism as the only moral
system in the world—a system based on defending individual rights from the
initiation of force as the reason, the only reason, for government to exist.
Only as such ideas begin winning the debate for the consciences of the American
people, can the role of government contract and, with it, our never-ending
budget deficits and unfathomable sea of national debt.
-- A republican
[1] Amity
Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History
of the Great Depression (New York : Harper
Perennial, 2008); Amity Shlaes, Coolidge
(New York
[2] William
Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The
Story of Calvin Coolidge (The Macmillan Company, 1938; Easton Press
reprint, 1986), v-vi.
[3] Shlaes, Coolidge, 12.
[4] Ibid,
349, 419.
[5] Ibid,
177.
[6] Ibid,
110, 114, 191.
[7] Ibid,
192.
[8] Ibid,
318.
[9] Ibid,
268.
[10] Ibid,
395-396.
[11] Ibid,
428.
[12] Ibid,
430.
