Coolidge

by Amity Shlaes

Nothing but persistence

“If I had permitted my failures, or what seemed to me at the time a lack of success, to discourage me,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I cannot see any way in which I would have ever made progress.”

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent.”

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.

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.

Perseverance and Fidelity will bring success

“At first no doubt it will be a struggle to live but perseverance and fidelity will bring success.”

Roosevelt quote on a man who argues for free and independent Cuba doctor say so by using his body.

When he did, he saw that Roosevelt, the municipal reformer and now assistant secretary of the navy, was heading for the front, believing that a man who took the position that one should fight for free Cuba ought to demonstrate his goodwill by fighting: “he should pay with his body.”

“It is axiomatic that popular government cannot long exist without a free ballot.”

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

There was nothing quaint about it; in the end the strikers and the progressives had hurt themselves. Exasperated, he wrote his stepmother, “The leaders there are socialists and anarchists, and they do not want anybody to work for wages. The trouble is not about the amount of wages; it is a small attempt to destroy all authority, whether of any church or government.”

If you can make a better product it unions may not matter.

If a company figured out how to make a product better, industrial unions’ demands, especially, might not matter; the workers would get the raises they sought automatically because they produced more goods.

Have faith in Massachussets

The states, he suggested, not the federal government, were the natural place to solve problems. He went on to give the assembled another precept: “Do the day’s work. If it be to protect the rights of the weak, whoever objects, do it. If it be to help a powerful corporation better serve the people, whatever the opposition, do that.”

“Expect to be called a stand patter. But don’t be a stand patter. Expect to be called a demagogue, but don’t be a demagogue.” He did offer some reservations about the progressives’ practice, particularly their emphasis on producing so many laws: “Don’t hurry to legislate. Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation.”

Give the administration to catch up!

Above all, though, he emphasized service and humility. Laws were not to be invented by politicians or judges, or, most important, righteous prosecutors. 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.”

Men Do not create laws they discover them. Laws must be based on the natural and eternal principles of righteousness

“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.”

“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.”

“Shall we throw the Constitution overboard because it does not please us all alike?” the farmer Smith had asked. “Suppose two or three of you,” Smith had gone on, “had been at pains to break up a piece of rough land and sow it with wheat. Would you let it lie waste because you could not agree what sort of a fence to make?”

“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?”

Practical education had to fight back.

Coolidge pointed out to the crowd that there was nothing noble about the pilgrims’ blood at the time they voyaged. It was their deeds that distinguished them for later Americans.

A lady seated beside Coolidge told him she had heard he was silent. She had made a bet, however, that she could get him to say more than two words over the course of the evening. “You lose,” Coolidge said. Grace managed the damage from the encounter by repackaging it and circulating it as an anecdote.

“But we would like to have the Administration come clean and not indulge in these little pleasantries about the merit system.”

“Your glory lies in what you have given and may give to your country not in what your country has or may give to you.”

“Shall we use our power for self aggrandizement or service?”

“It has been the lack of moral fibre which has been the downfall of people in the past.”

By talking about a state and its interests, you reminded Washington that the states had made the union.

“by thinking, they meant stocking up with radical ideas, by learning, they meant stocking up with conservative ideas.”

The American spirit was not about what happened in Washington, he said. If the republic was to be maintained and improved that would “be through the efforts and character of the individual.” The American spirit, by which he meant the spirit that lived between men, always survived, and “those who have scoffed at it from the days of the Stuarts and the Bourbons to the days of the Hohenzollerns have seen it rise and prevail over them.”

With the emphasis on the Constitution, on the Bible on the table, on the notary’s authority, Coolidge was saying that this time, the presidency truly would be the kind that presided over the old contract between man and man, just as he had described it in his inaugural address of 1921.

service above self-aggrandizement.

title, an office, had to be earned.

“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.

Others observed the strength of the connection. People said of the pair that they conversed in pauses.

Coolidge could see that he and Mellon came at the question of the budget and money differently. Coolidge believed higher taxes were wrong because they took away from men money that was their property; he believed lower rates were good precisely because they encouraged enterprise, but also because they brought less money. Low rates starved the government beast.

How did a business decide what price to charge for freight? The answer was a shipping company always aimed to charge, as the railmen put it, “what the traffic will bear.” If the company raised fees too high, people would not use your company or your railroad to ship their goods. And sometimes a big cut in rates brought many more customers. Such a large rate cut would therefore cost only a little revenue.

Mellon showed how the theory underlying scientific taxation applied to cars as well. Ford Motor Company had reduced the price of Model T’s, yet was earning more money than it had before; it was making up on volume what it lost on price.

one might cut tax rates and get more revenue, not less. Top rates, the surtax on top of the base, or normal tax, mattered especially.

The budget system was working. He would maintain it. But he would also prioritize new tax law to change the tax system. Congress had to join him. Tax-exempt securities should lose their special status. It was wrong to tax earned incomes, and movie tickets, as the country now did. There needed to be a revision in the progressivity of the code.

But lowering surtaxes, Coolidge said, “will not greatly reduce the revenue from that source, and may in the future actually increase it.”

reduce war taxes is to give every home a better chance. . . . Of all services which the Congress can render to the country I have no hesitation in declaring this one to be paramount.” And the president threw a challenge to the lawmakers: “The country wants this measure to have the right of way over many others.”

Journalists began to trumpet Coolidge’s possibilities in such exaggerated tones that the editors at The Wall Street Journal had to laugh. “It is almost pitiful if it were not so funny to observe the newspapers which a week ago were accusing Coolidge of sitting on the fence and of having no opinions of his own falling over their own feet to join the procession,” the Journal wrote on December 8.

It was wrong to have a platform with too many “catch planks,” specific gifts to specific groups to corral votes. Lincoln in 1860 had demanded a short platform, in fact less than two thousand words;

The medium seemed to Coolidge a marvelous accident that had just arrived for him. It obviated the kind of endless touring that had brought down Wilson and Harding.

Perhaps the president might, after all, together with Slemp, manage the Congress and get the legislation he sought the next term. Perhaps some of the challenges might take care of themselves. Every month that a federal bonus was not passed, one state or the other passed some kind of bonus. That, to Coolidge’s mind, was proper; it was the states’ job, not the federal government’s, to take care of citizens. By the end of 1923, nineteen states had found ways to finance the bonuses.

one sandwich was larger than the other, Coolidge would add cheese, or shave some down, to make them even. Starling expressed his admiration for a chief executive who made his own sandwiches. “I have to furnish the cheese, too,” the president muttered.