Coolidge

by Amity Shlaes

Under Coolidge, there came no federal antilynching law, but lynchings themselves became less frequent and Ku Klux Klan membership dropped by millions.

Under Coolidge, wages rose and interest rates came down so that the poor might borrow more easily.

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.

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.

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.

Such experiences were not easy to forget: debt preoccupied Galusha, an upright dignitary, all his days. Later Galusha went on to serve as judge and governor, holding the latter post for multiple terms. In those final years, he wrote explicitly that he disliked the debt collection process. The reality, Jonas Galusha saw, was that “more money is spent in the collection of such debts than is saved by the collection.”

Vermont, after all, had been the first state to call for the abolition of slavery in its constitution.

The town of Plymouth Notch was contemptuous of snobbery: when a maidservant needed a ride in the wagon, the children of the employer would give up their places and stay home.

Indeed, a Northampton man had once been governor of the state; Caleb Strong, who had read law in Northampton and become one of the Constitution’s framers, had served for a total of eleven years at the beginning of the 1800s. As governor, Strong had proved feisty; deeming foreign policy to be the province of the states, not Washington, he had refused to send the Massachusetts militia against the British in the controversial War of 1812.

After a point, he digressed to take a stab at Henry Cabot Lodge, who had recently told voters that it was a choice between the Republican Party and the “Cossacks,” his way of assailing progressives in the Democratic Party. Coolidge sought to include where Lodge had excluded, to show that the progressive Republicans were men of democracy. In the Republican Party of western Massachusetts, Coolidge told his fellows, “we call in every kind, ‘barbarian, Scythian, bond or free’ you are welcome one and all, we care not at what shrine you worship or how you eat your pie. That includes what Senator Lodge calls Cossacks.”

McCall warned that Americans passed laws too casually, with an “easy optimism” that overlooked the effects of the laws.

That characteristic, the Coolidge habit of staying friendly, was beginning to win notice. “There is one thing we like about Coolidge,” said the Hampshire Gazette. “He does not say anything about the other candidate.”

“It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.”

even if judges were corrupt, this process, recall, could be corrupt as well.

They were protesting the wage reduction that had followed the new progressive law.

He and other IWW leaders were committed to a new tool, the general strike: that workers bring a whole town down in order to change corporations’ policy.

Coolidge argued that Roosevelt’s concept of judicial recall pushed democracy too far; when it came to senior judges, no influence should weigh on them. Professionalism mattered over party.

Brandeis’s protégé, Joseph Eastman, was coming to the Senate chamber to argue the opposite: that the little lines needed independence to survive. But Eastman had never known what it was like to be twelve miles from nowhere. Coolidge battled for his western trolleys and also for the great railroads;

Echoing Demosthenes, whom he had studied all those days back at Amherst, he said, “Men do not make laws. They do but discover them.” Laws must rest, he said, “on the eternal foundations of righteousness.”

Theodore Roosevelt was deeply mired in a libel lawsuit involving New York State politics.

Samuel Untermyer, the same progressive firebrand who had challenged J. P. Morgan in the Washington hearings, was not busting trusts that week; he was in London, running a rescue operation in his hotel and trying to hail down ships leaving the continent in the hope that they would stop and pick up U.S. citizens before they crossed the Atlantic.

Though he was attacking Democratic tariff levels now, he still did not attack individual Democrats, in the Senate or in western Massachusetts.

Rails were in use nonstop. But despite greater traffic, they struggled for cash flow. Two separate events were squeezing the rail companies. The rate rules that the ICC had been imposing since the passage of the Hepburn Act had indeed kept rates that railroads might charge lower. But companies were finding their costs were higher, as well as their taxes. Meanwhile, workers were demanding pay increases to keep pace with their own costs. The railroads could not keep up with the demands of war. To serve the war effort, Wilson was contemplating nationalizing the railroads.

As for Washington, Wilson, Coolidge said, was now “clothed in dictatorial powers”—that was as it had to be, but Coolidge told voters that the dictatorship could “not be continued in time of peace.” At Christmas 1917, the Wilson administration did nationalize the railroads, after all.

The street railways everywhere could not raise fares without demonstrations, yet they did not have enough revenue without the fare raises. Coolidge took time in his address to comment that with the railways, “the problem is where to get the money.” Massachusetts had to face reality: “there are only two sources, increased fares and the public treasury”; the companies were broke.

Gompers, careful about picking his battles, had advised against the strike, but the women had proceeded anyhow, and Postmaster General Albert Burleson’s efforts to replace them with soldiers had backfired. The soldiers found it unchivalrous to face off with the telephone ladies.

Each hour of that Thursday that Coolidge waited would be another hour for rioters. That morning there were more applications for gun licenses from companies at Curtis’s headquarters; over the day an additional 846 licenses would be filed. In addition, 369 applications for licenses for guards would be received.

“While the public does not realize it, there is a certain percentage of the population of every large city which will loot, destroy and institute mob rule at the first sign that they may do so uninterrupted by the law.”

That day there were 270 applications for pistol and revolver licenses, nine times more than normal.

What’s more, Coolidge put this new idea in the old language, that of Garman and his textbooks, rather than the modern labor-capital lexicon of Wilson and Gompers: “The action of the police in leaving their posts of duty is not a strike. It is a desertion.” “There is nothing to arbitrate,” he said, “nothing to compromise. In my personal opinion there are no conditions under which the men can return to the force.”

“We come here to honor the past, and in doing so render more secure the present,” Coolidge had said.

The line in the telegram to Gompers was becoming a refrain: “No right to strike against the public safety by anyone, anywhere, anytime.” Commentators likened Coolidge to Ole Hanson of Seattle, the mayor who had stared down the strikers earlier that year.

The book also included Coolidge’s statement after he vetoed a pay raise for lawmakers: “Service in the General Court is not obligatory, but optional.

It was now generally well known that Wilson was physically incapacitated; Vice President Marshall was in an agony of indecision. If he tried to enforce the Constitution, he might end up disrupting the country more and make himself look like a usurper in the process.

If the applause had pealed after the strike statement, now it thundered. For not only had Coolidge shown you could stand up against the radical workmen, he had confirmed that you could do so and still win an election. He had demonstrated that even with many new immigrants in the country, Republicans could still win, and even take votes from the opposition.

Coolidge took advantage of the cover of victory to announce his controversial “Big List,” the new names for his slimmed-down government. The papers first noted how many of the old officials had been dropped—those on the old state board of labor, those on the civil service commission, the head of the immigration bureau, and the chairman of the highway commission. In their place, bound to infuriate, were fewer departments and new names to head them. Coolidge issued a carefully worded explanation for his choices. He was acting, he claimed, in the best reform tradition, selecting the old and young, the western and the Boston man, and “Catholics, Protestants and Hebrews impartially.”

Around Christmas, the U.S. attorney general had deported the most notorious radicals to Russia in a ship, the Buford; the photos and drawings of the ship had shocked many Americans. Deportion seemed a nasty, fearful act, unworthy of the United States.

“Isn’t it a strange thing,” he asked Barton, “that in every period of social unrest men have the notion that they can pass a law and suspend the operations of economic law?”

McCamant had led a successful campaign in his state to ensure that although the state now required college for law school entry, young students could satisfy the college requirement with proof of equivalent education. Practical education had to fight back.

The world,” Harding said, “needs to be reminded that all human ills are not curable by legislation.”

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 thing to revise human nature and suspend the fundamental laws of life and all of life’s acquirements.

“He might be the hardest man to nominate and the easiest to elect,”

The Securities Exchange Company, one of the small firms that had promised extravagant returns, was enduring a run. Critics were now beginning to say that its founder, Charles Ponzi, had invested nothing, merely recycling money to new investors.

The state treasurer, Fred Burrell, was mixed up in the scheme;

As governor, Coolidge issued a warning to banks not to buy advertising from the state treasurer.

But those present in the Morgan office at the bombing noticed something else. One ticker, Clarence Barron’s ticker from Dow Jones, still clattered. The glass bell over the machine was smashed, and shards had embedded themselves in its slender wood frame, but the apparatus continued to spew news of the explosion and then, all afternoon, the details of its consequences. The sputtering little machine sent a signal that the whole nation heard. Commerce would not be stopped.

Theodore Roosevelt’s sister Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, still grieving over TR’s death, invited Coolidge to speak at the Women’s Roosevelt Memorial Foundation, telling Coolidge, “I would rather have you as the speaker of this meeting than anyone else for your works seem to me to be a reincarnation of both Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.”

As the train rolled, Coolidge began to write his own plan to earn the office of the presidency. He had to finish what Harding had started, to prove that the war period had been an interlude, to take the country back to a time of smaller national government.

A strange young man had broken in and was going through his clothing. In the morning light, Coolidge could see that the burglar had taken a wallet, a chain, and a charm. “I wish you wouldn’t take that,” Coolidge said. “I don’t mean the watch and chain, only the charm. Read what is engraved on the back of it.” The burglar read the back: “Presented to Calvin Coolidge . . . by the Massachusetts General Court”—and stopped dead in shock. He was robbing the president. It emerged that the burglar was a hotel guest who had found himself short of cash to return home. Coolidge gave the burglar $32, what he called a “loan,” and helped him to navigate around the Secret Service as he departed.

Harding tended to say yes when you went to his office; with Coolidge by contrast the answer was almost always no. Coolidge’s nos, Hughes guessed, would stick; unlike Harding, he had the temperament for it.