Why Coolidge Matters

Leadership Lessons from America's Most Underrated President

Charles C. Johnson

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781594036699
• eBook ISBN: 9781594036705
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Imagine a country in which strikes by public-sector unions occupied the public square; where foreign policy wandered aimlessly as America disentangled itself from wars abroad and a potential civil war on its southern border; where racial and ethnic groups jostled for political influence; where a war on illicit substances led to violence in its cities; where technology was dramatically changing how mankind communicated and moved about—and where the educated harbored increasing contempt for the philosophic underpinnings of our republic.That country, the America of the 1920s, looked a lot like America today. One would think, then, that the President who successfully navigated these challenges, Calvin Coolidge, might be esteemed today. Instead, Coolidge’s record is little known, the result of efforts by both the left and right to distort his legacy. Why Coolidge Matters revisits the record of our most underrated president, examining Coolidge’s views on governance, public sector unions, education, race, immigration, and foreign policy. Most importantly, Why Coolidge Matters explains what lessons Coolidge—the last president to pay down the national debt—can offer the limited government movement in the post-industrial age.

CHAPTER ONE

“IN THE EYE OF THE NATION”

The Political Service and Practice
of Calvin Coolidge

The Police Strike did not make Coolidge, it revealed him. . . . The Police Strike provided a theatrical situation. Governor Coolidge plucked from it and gave the American people a vital truth, the obviousness of which had been forgotten.¹

Local issues are sometimes civilization-wide. Those, pledged by heart to the interests of civilization, instinctively look to the man of quality to help bear the burdens of civilization, and to tug at its problem.... In the day of our world-anguish, unrest, and conflicting voices, we will trust much to the man of that sort. “He that would be greatest among you, let him be the servant of all.” Calvin Coolidge is showing the largeness of persistent servanthood.²

We are in the eye of the nation. Other cities are looking on. If the Soviet theory succeeds here, it will spread to other battle grounds and become nation wide.³

THE BOSTON POLICE STRIKE of 1919 and then-governor Coolidge’s response to the lawlessness of the police department have been the subject of movies and books.⁴ His simple declaration – “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time” – launched the national political career of a once-obscure politician from Massachusetts and rural Vermont. That frank statement, and the show of resolve behind it, curtailed the excesses of public-sector unionism at a time of national recession brought on by profligate federal spending, overly friendly labor policies, and the dangerous aftermath of World War I.

The repercussions of Coolidge’s controversial yet necessary decision to call in the State Guard extend to our day.⁵ When resolving the 1981 strike of the air-traffic controllers, President Ronald Reagan reportedly drew inspiration from Coolidge’s proclamation and his telegrammed response to Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor⁶ – and in doing so, Reagan may have hastened the end of the Cold War by impressing America’s Soviet antagonists.⁷ Reagan wrote to a Coolidge enthusiast that he was “an admirer of Silent Cal,” whom he believed had been “badly treated by history.” He added: “I’ve done considerable reading and researching of his presidency. He served his country well and accomplished much.” ⁸

Indeed, although Reagan often invoked other presidents in speeches, Coolidge was the only one he claimed to have studied. He also invited Coolidge historian Tom Silver to the White House for a lecture and discussion. And he saved Coolidge quotations from the editing pens of his speechwriters. Reagan insisted on Coolidge’s successes in an interview with Newsweek at the beginning of his presidency:

I don’t know if the country has ever had a higher level of prosperity than it did under Coolidge. And he actually reduced the national debt, he cut taxes several times across the board. And maybe the criticism was in both cases that they weren’t activist enough. Well, maybe there’s a lesson in that. Maybe we’ve had instances of government being too active, intervening, interfering. You have here a couple of cases of men who were abiding by the rule that says if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.⁹

Reagan had honored Coolidge already by integrating him into his writings as early as 1975. He now had the former president’s portrait hung in the Oval Office.¹⁰ He read a biography of Coolidge while recovering from surgery in 1985.¹¹

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Reagan’s critics were quick to pounce on his fondness for Coolidge. To one commentator, Coolidge was the embodiment of “repressed sentimentality chained in a prison of smooth, flinty New England exterior.” Another called him a “throwback to earlier times – a museum piece of old fashioned New England values.” Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts castigated Reagan for “saddl[ing] us with the tattered old philosophy of Calvin Coolidge that will work no better in the 1980s than in the 1920s.”¹² Mark Shields, the Democratic speechwriter turned columnist, responded angrily to Reagan’s choice of Coolidge over Thomas Jefferson for one of his Oval Office portraits, calling it “almost a national sacrilege.”¹³ Reagan, who after all came of age during the Coolidge presidency, rightly rejected these assessments in a July 1981 interview with Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post:

Now you hear a lot of jokes about Silent Cal Coolidge, but I think the joke is on the people that make jokes because if you look at his record, he cut the taxes four times. We had probably the greatest growth and prosperity that we’ve ever known. And I have taken heed of that because if he did nothing, maybe that’s the answer [for] the federal government.”¹⁴

That the Great Communicator found Silent Cal so worthy of study and public praise should make us wary of lists that routinely rank Coolidge as one of the worst presidents of the twentieth century. ¹⁵ It should make us even more wary of scholars who downgrade the strike-breaking actions in Boston that ultimately led him to the presidency. His popularity – he was the only president to ever be featured on a coin in his lifetime¹⁶ – cannot be explained away. As William Allen White, a prominent Republican journalist and leader of the Progressive movement, wrote in 1925 in an early Coolidge biography: “When a man has gone into twenty elections and has won nineteen, he had something in him which compels confidence and which represents the popular will.”¹⁷ Thomas Edison, the man who personified American genius and the inventiveness of the 1920s, thought Americans ought to re-nominate and reelect Coolidge in 1928, in part because Coolidge had fostered an economic prosperity that helped spread the benefits of technology throughout society.¹⁸ “The United States is lucky to have Calvin Coolidge,” Edison noted after a visit to the Coolidge homestead in Vermont.¹⁹

It is my contention that Coolidge is ignored (in some cases even hated) not because he was ineffective as an executive, but because he was spectacularly effective at helping the common man while defeating attempts to socialize America. Coolidge steered the country through what Jay Lovestone, a Communist union leader, called the “eve of giant class conflicts.” Coolidge’s earlier strong support of the war effort had already earned him the ire of Socialists, who saw him as little more than a shill for the war industry.

But Lovestone’s real indictment of Coolidge in the 1920s was that he did not support labor unions as much as people like himself would have liked. Within weeks after the new president took office, Lovestone said as much in his pamphlet “What’s What – About Coolidge?” in which he explained the former governor’s rise to prominence:

The rise of Coolidge, who has ridden into national infamy thru outright strikebreaking activities, portrays with painful clarity the unbridled domination of the employing class over the working masses. Nothing can clinch this truth as forcefully as an examination of the President’s record.²⁰

In fact, examining that very successful record undermines such critics and enemies. (Lovelace himself later turned against Communism and became a government informant and labor critic.) Coolidge was not in the service of capital any more than he was in thrall to labor. Historian Robert H. Ferrell, while far from sympathetic to Coolidge, notes that the reason so many workers did not join unions was that they were doing very well under Harding and Coolidge. Union membership declined from 5.1 million in 1920 to 3 .5 million in 1923. From 1920 to 1929, “real wages rose, the workweek declined, and unemployment was low” – so low that it was a mere 3.7 percent in this period, compared with 6.1 percent for the period of 1911 – 1917.²¹ Coolidge was not opposed to the efforts of union leaders and their political allies to help workers. That’s not why labor leaders opposed him. They were roused against him because he had rendered them increasingly irrelevant. By effectively distinguishing police officers who serve the public in the most essential sense from laborers who toil for their earnings as private employees, Coolidge dealt a deathblow to the Socialists’ dream of creating a nationwide, revolutionary labor union. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and other left-wing extremists hoped that such a union would bring the country to its knees and peacefully establish Bolshevism in America. As his speeches after the strike make clear, Coolidge knew that the issue at stake wasn’t the pay of the police officers, which he had long favored increasing, but the faithful maintenance of public order, of the people’s law. Or, as he put it at the Middlesex Club in Boston on October 27, 1919:

[The police officers who went on strike] determined to substitute their will and their welfare for the will and welfare of all the people. Unless those in authority would permit this, they were to be forced to permit it by turning over Boston to terrorism. Force was to be substituted for law.

The triumph of force is the first stage of revolution – or anarchy. The question for Coolidge, as an officer of the Commonwealth charged by his oath to maintain its constitution and its order, was how best to put force back on the side of the people.

Coolidge’s reactions during the strike were the logical results of studied thought, character, and prior practice, dating back long before the events of September 1919. Without proper context, it’s impossible to understand the importance of the strike.

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It is undoubtedly true that Coolidge was more reluctant than other politicians of his time to use government’s power, but that reluctance does not mean he dithered. On the contrary, he rationed himself with political purposes in mind – a tactic long recognized as prudence in other statesmen.²² Tom Silver of the Clement Institute has shown in Coolidge and the Historians that Coolidge worked all along with Mayor Andrew Peters and Commissioner Edwin U. Curtis: He “played the lion and the fox,” while honoring the separation of powers in Massachusetts law.²³ He did not take command of the State Guard immediately to subdue the looting because he believed this problem – absent concerns for the public’s safety in the wake of rather minor property damage – lay outside his jurisdiction. He thought local matters should be taken care of by local officials. Out of principle and experience – he once quipped that his hobby was “holding office”²⁴ – Coolidge believed that local government was the best “informed of local needs” and the most “responsive to local conditions.”²⁵

It helps to understand the history immediately preceding Coolidge’s involvement in the strike. The Boston situation reflected serious national problems, not least of which was the high cost of living that central planning imposed. As governor of a populous and industrialized state, Coolidge had to confront the economic upheaval of the end of the First World War, which brought with it some of the greatest labor strikes in American history. Some four million servicemen had returned to work, only to find little employment or housing. War industries, which had employed nearly a quarter of the labor force, were shutting down. Rampant inflation (prices doubled in this period, while earnings increased by only 6 percent) eroded what little savings families had. Allegations of profiteering by landlords were widespread. Lawmakers wondered what they could do to alleviate “the high cost of living,” what we now call inflation.

As lieutenant governor, Coolidge had already confronted the problems that a wartime economy imposed. His administration appropriated money for a commission to investigate allegations of wartime profiteering, but he urged caution before he laid blame. He did not want to provoke anti-capitalist behavior. In a speech about the high cost of living, Coolidge cautioned, “Let us refrain from suspicion; let us refrain from indiscriminate blame; but let us present at once to the proper authorities all facts and all evidence of unfair practices.”²⁶ Government claimed for itself the “right and duty” to investigate profiteering, to be sure. But it must rely upon the court of public opinion to try those responsible, for ultimately the American system was one of “public opinion,” of shame. “And above all, we claim the right of publicity,” he told the audience at Faneuil Hall. “That is a remedy with an arm longer and stronger than that of the law.” He would write later that while “public opinion is of slow development and slow to act ... once set in motion, it proceeds with a completeness which is overpowering.” ²⁷

Publicity could help shape public opinion. And public opinion, Coolidge reasoned (probably from having read James Bryce’s masterful The American Commonwealth²⁸), was playing an increasingly important role in all the world’s republics. In recently defeated Germany, public opinion had held that the country’s “only protection lay in . . . a military despotism.” Men, be they Germans or anyone else, would submit to a government of force, Coolidge believed (echoing Hobbes), only so long as “they believe it is necessary for their security, necessary to protect them from the imposition of force from without.” Americans submitted to the force of the Wilson war administration because it protected them from the threat of German submarine warfare, not because they approved the restrictions on their liberty. But in safer times, “when the mind is free, it turns not to force, but to reason for the source of authority.”²⁹ Reason is accessible to all men at all times; Coolidge agreed with Wilson that the Great War might be the war to end all wars, once reason prevailed and the public fully understood war’s senselessness.

In analyzing the wartime economy, Coolidge carefully distinguished the “patriot” in business from the “profiteer.” He saw businessmen generally as loyal citizens who helped finance the war effort and who shared in the national sacrifice.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE - “IN THE EYE OF THE NATION”
• CHAPTER TWO - LABOR, BLOWS TO BOLSHEVISM, AND TAKING UP “MANLY BURDENS”
• CHAPTER THREE - EARLY EDUCATION
• CHAPTER FOUR - BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY
• CHAPTER FIVE - “I THOUGHT I COULD SWING IT”
• CHAPTER SIX - THE “POSSIBILITIES OF SOUL”
• CHAPTER SEVEN - HOW PROGRESSIVE POLITICAL THOUGHT UNDERMINED AMERICA’S DEFENSE
• CONCLUSION
• AFTERWORD
• NOTES
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• Copyright Page