Episode 83
Who is Calvin Coolidge?
On this day 100 years ago, a Presidential inauguration was broadcast on national radio for the first time. Having inherited the White House from Warren G. Harding three years into his Vice Presidential career, the thirtieth President of the United States arrived amidst scandal and left behind a Great Depression. But was he popular? Was he successful? And why didn’t he run for a second full term? In this episode, I’m asking… who is President Calvin Coolidge?
...
Special guest for this episode:
- Amity Shlaes, the author of four New York Times bestsellers, including Coolidge, a full-length biography of the thirtieth president. She now chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, a national foundation based at the birthplace of President Coolidge.
...
Additional Resources:
READ: The Coolidge Foundation
READ: Coolidge by Amity Shlaes
LISTEN: Calvin Coolidge: A tale of two - Presidential - Apple Podcasts
LISTEN: 1924, Coolidge vs. Davis vs. L - American Elections: Wicked Game - Apple Podcasts
READ: Calvin Coolidge: Life Before the Presidency | Miller Center
...
And if you like this episode, you might also love:
What Was the Constitutional Convention?
Why Does the President Only Serve Two Terms?
Is the President Above the Law?
...
Thank you for listening to our podcast. It's a labor of love by an American history nerd and some smarter folk. Making it does come at a small cost so if you'd like to help:
- Individuals - support the show with a one-off or monthly donation: https://america-a-history.captivate.fm/support
- Universities & Colleges - become an academic partner or email liam@mercurypodcasts.com for more info
- Brands - for sponsorship and advertising enquiries, email liam@mercurypodcasts.com
Your support helps us keep the show running, and it is highly appreciated!
Are you a University, college, or higher education institution? Become an academic partner and your name will appear right here.
Transcript
On this day 100 years ago, a presidential inauguration was broadcast on national radio for the first time.
Speaker A:Having inherited the White House from Warren G.
Speaker A:Harding, three years into his vice presidential career, the 30th president of the United States arrived amidst scandal and left behind a Great Depression.
Speaker A:But was he popular, was he successful?
Speaker A:And why didn't he run for a second full term?
Speaker A:In this episode, I'm asking, who is President Calvin Coolidge?
Speaker A:Welcome to America, a history podcast.
Speaker A:I'm Niamh Heffernan and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places, the.
Speaker A:And the events that make the USA what it is today.
Speaker A:To discuss this, I am joined by a former columnist at the Financial Times and the author of four New York Times bestsellers, including Coolidge, a full length biography of the 30th President.
Speaker A:She now chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential foundation, which is a national foundation based at the birthplace of President Coolidge.
Speaker A:Welcome to the podcast Amity Schlaiz.
Speaker B:Glad to be here, particularly in this season.
Speaker B:Thank you.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's a real, a real pleasure to have you on the podcast and talking about a president who I don't think gets enough attention.
Speaker B:Oh, absolutely.
Speaker B:You had so many questions, but the first is who.
Speaker B:Who is Calvin Coolidge?
Speaker B:I'll start with who was Calvin Coolidge?
Speaker B:It's no accident his first name was Calvin.
Speaker B:His family were generally called John Calvin or Oliver.
Speaker B:So you get the drift.
Speaker B:This was a serious family, a family with moral aspirations and a family with a tradition of living on several levels, by which I mean the spiritual, the level of the civil servant, the servant of God, and then also the material they came.
Speaker B:The Coolidges came from Cottenham, England, so that Cambridgeshire, and they went over very early to the United States.
Speaker B:He belongs in the Pilgrim Puritan group.
Speaker B:And then there were a number of them and younger brothers didn't have so much land as in England and went out west, which would be to Vermont.
Speaker B:That's sort of a joke today.
Speaker B:But to them that was the West.
Speaker B:After the Revolutionary War, on the Revolutionary Road and settled in Vermont, where no one particularly wanted to live because it was very rocky, not particularly not arable land.
Speaker B:We would, we would judge today with our agriculture experts, where they lived a proud but not easy existence among the rocks in a very beautiful little bowl, kind of its own ecological ecosphere.
Speaker B:A little bowl.
Speaker B:Now it's these days, people ski over there in Vermont in that area.
Speaker B:He basically sits on the edge of the Coolidge family, sits on the edge of killington Mountain, and I think people know that ski resort, but they weren't skiers.
Speaker B:They were just farmers trying to make out an agriculture, cultural life in a village.
Speaker A:So let's talk a bit more then about his.
Speaker A:His early life and upbringing, because a lot of presidents tend to spin their own narrative here and tend to have their legacy remembered as these kind of hard working, sometimes rural chaps who kind of are living out the American dream and it took them to the White House.
Speaker A:What was Calvin's childhood like?
Speaker B:Well, that narrative is the added virtue of being true in Coolidge's case.
Speaker B:He, his childhood was a farmer, but also ran the store.
Speaker B:He was a little bit of a squire, that is, he was sheriff from time to time, and he was a state lawmaker at Vermont State Capitol, which is called Montpelier.
Speaker B:John Coolidge was his father.
Speaker B:And so the Coolidges weren't poor, but they didn't have many things.
Speaker B:And they worked all the time from collecting maple syrup.
Speaker B:So it would be SAP, maple SAP in the spring, turning that into sort of all the way to the slaughtering of animals in the autumn and harvest in between.
Speaker B:His father was relatively prosperous for their little village.
Speaker B:He was as a mayor and often ran the town meeting.
Speaker B:They had town meetings and selectmen, as you've heard in the history of New England, very democratic, more plebiscite or referendum, shall we say, than republic, their town.
Speaker B:And I think it is kind of false to pretend they were nobody and not thoughtful.
Speaker B:However, they were very thoughtful people.
Speaker B:That's why I mentioned the pilgrim part of it.
Speaker B:They were in Vermont because they were sent there sort of on a great mission to explore the United States, to settle the United States in the general way early Americans were.
Speaker B:And in Calvin's case, the family were what we call Northern Baptist.
Speaker B:But he was sent off to a Northern Baptist boarding school about 10 miles down the road in Ludlow, where there was a train depot.
Speaker B: Coolidge was born in: Speaker B:So the family certainly had ambitions for their children.
Speaker B:This boarding school, which is no longer operating, but was Baptist, had also been attended, at least briefly, by his parents.
Speaker B:And from there, Coolidge made the big leap and went to American college at Amherst, Amherst College down the valley, so to speak.
Speaker B:And the family was able to pull itself together and pay for that.
Speaker B:So they're not as poor, the Coolidges, as Lincoln's family, but they were really not poor at all.
Speaker B:They were just cash poor.
Speaker B:But still, his father balked at law school, for example.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And though not poor.
Speaker A:I think Calvin's challenges throughout his childhood were probably more family based.
Speaker A:Suffering early trauma with his mother dying and the subsequent kind of upheaval there was, that did that affect him?
Speaker B:Well, thank you for mentioning that.
Speaker B:Just about everyone had tuberculosis in the 19th century.
Speaker B:So it's a little bit as in Dickens.
Speaker B:And his mother unfortunately passed away quite young when he was about 12, probably from tuberculosis, we don't exactly know.
Speaker B:And his sister died, probably of appendicitis, Abby.
Speaker B:And she was quite a lively girl, and they went off to boarding school together.
Speaker B:And so that was a blow to Calvin, his dearest companion, sister and mother.
Speaker B:But I don't think Coolidge was wrecked by this.
Speaker B:Indeed, it was a situation in which he learned to move past loss.
Speaker B:And that's important too, you know, to see someone overcome a rough flow.
Speaker B:What were his consolations?
Speaker B:Well, curiosity.
Speaker B:Ludlow, you know, Ludlow was in the network.
Speaker B:The network.
Speaker B:Network of trains and the network of the world where his boarding school was, as opposed to his town, which is quite isolated.
Speaker B:No train line chose to go to his town, Plymouth.
Speaker B:And it's still hard to get there today.
Speaker B:But, but Ludlow, the boarding school just 10 miles away, that, that was plenty lively.
Speaker B:And he had relations there and stayed with friends and, I don't know, in boarding houses and on weekends with relations.
Speaker B:And he got a glimpse into the wider world.
Speaker B:What did he like about the wider world?
Speaker B:He liked commerce, he liked the trains, he liked the depot, and he liked government.
Speaker B:He learned quite a bit about American history while at school, even before heading to Amherst.
Speaker A:From what you've said, it really does sound like these early experiences of, you know, certainly for their time, moving westward, you know, starting a life and by all accounts succeeding with that.
Speaker A:And then, you know, going to college.
Speaker A:It's, it's all of these kind of.
Speaker A:It's like the American checklist, right.
Speaker A:And I just, I wonder how, how all of that really shaped his determination to pursue law and then ultimately politics.
Speaker B:Well, his father was a practical lawyer, a lawyer without a degree.
Speaker B:His father, so to speak, his father was a notary, a sheriff.
Speaker B:So his father was well acquainted with the law and even had to arrest people and take them to prison.
Speaker B:In my book I have story of a relation who went to prison in Woodstock, probably for something related to debt, and wrote bitter letters to the other Coolidges about being trapped in Woodstock jail.
Speaker B:Most of the Coolidges moved away.
Speaker B:The Midwest was more promising.
Speaker B:The land was flat there.
Speaker B:Your assets lay before you, all beautiful in a yellow field.
Speaker B:If you manage to irrigate.
Speaker B:And the Coolidges saw that the Midwest was more promising.
Speaker B:John Coolidge, the father of the President, stayed, and that stuck with the sun as well.
Speaker B:But he decided to learn law.
Speaker B:He wasn't as wealthy as many or even as settled as many of the students at Amherst.
Speaker B:He's one of the poorer students.
Speaker B:But he did find his way into the community through debate, through arguing with other students and then formal debate contests, sort of like, I would say, you know, any debate league in the UK or the Oxford Union.
Speaker B:That's what it was like at Amherst.
Speaker B:And he did distinguish himself in debate.
Speaker B:So, you know, his nickname is Silent Cal.
Speaker B:This president, he's supposed to have been shy.
Speaker B:You can't be entirely shy if you can debate.
Speaker B:And he wrote to his father.
Speaker B:Nothing made him feel better than arguing a point in debate before other students.
Speaker B:He'd learned that watching his father and watching the selectman of his town argue over the store.
Speaker B:Margaret Thatcher was born over the store.
Speaker B:Coolidge was born behind the store, his father's store, which is a version of which is still in Plymouth.
Speaker B:But he went over the store to the.
Speaker B:To the attic like structure, which was the town hall.
Speaker B:So that was all very interesting.
Speaker B:And he decided he would read law.
Speaker B:He kind of thought.
Speaker B:He kind of berated his father, reproached his father for not taking law schools seriously because his friends went to law school.
Speaker B:There were law schools in the United States by then.
Speaker B:Dwight Morrow went to Columbia, and so did Harlan Fisk Stone, who later Coolidge made Supreme Court Justice.
Speaker B:So everybody else is going to law school.
Speaker B:What about me?
Speaker B:Well, there was another way to learn law, which is clerking, reading law, as they said, as Lincoln had.
Speaker B:And Coolidge ended up clerking for a firm called Hammond and Field in the county seat of the county in which his college sat, that is Hampshire county in western Massachusetts.
Speaker B:And so he read law in the firm and then sat the bar, and indeed sat the bar early and passed.
Speaker B:And that was the way Coolidge joined the legal profession.
Speaker A:Over the 150 years prior to Calvin Coolidge sort of ascending to the White House, there had become an ever stronger link between law and politics.
Speaker A:I guess I'm wondering what, you know, what came first.
Speaker A:Was it.
Speaker A:Was it his desire to move into politics that sort of drove his.
Speaker A:His path into law, or the.
Speaker A:By virtue of the fact that he went into law, he was seen as someone who could be a good politician?
Speaker B:I don't know.
Speaker B:I think they were separate.
Speaker B:The politics came from the family.
Speaker B:Even his grandfather Calvin was a straight, was, excuse me, a state lawmaker, served in Montpelier, Vermont and a lot of the Coolidge there was a cousin who was governor of Vermont before Coolidge's time.
Speaker B:And so this sort of the family avocation, I wouldn't quite call it vocation because most of them served only part time in government.
Speaker B:The government was a part time job and spent the rest getting a living.
Speaker B:So Coolidge wanted to get a living in the law, but he really liked first principles.
Speaker B:Today he would have been a constitutional lawyer.
Speaker B:Appeals would have appealed to him, that is constitutional questions or questions of governance, jurisprudence and jurisdiction.
Speaker B:Or he might have been a tax lawyer, which is a neat closed system, not entirely logical, but more logical than most the system of tax law.
Speaker B:Logical on its own terms, logical in its perversity sometimes.
Speaker B:But still I see him as a tax lawyer or a con law professor or judge.
Speaker B:He was a natural judge and he would have been more solicitor than barrister, though he could debate and did debate.
Speaker B:His temperamental inclination was to settle.
Speaker B:It's more economical.
Speaker B:You get more done and move on.
Speaker B:And his temperamental inclination was to study the case.
Speaker B:He was remarkably well informed.
Speaker B:He was one of those people who comes in the meeting and makes a trick of being underrated and then turns out to be the best informed in the room.
Speaker B:You'll often find smaller men do that and it's.
Speaker B:They're not, they're not going to bustle in the room like the big bully and awe everyone with their size.
Speaker B:But it turns out the rest of the room is turning to them for advice and leadership.
Speaker B:By the end of the meeting, that was Cal Coolidge.
Speaker A:It's interesting, you know, parallels that you drew earlier to Lincoln because when you talk about his like studiousness and his sort of need to really understand something and learn something before he then makes decisions on it.
Speaker A:That too strikes me as something that was very characteristic of Lincoln as well.
Speaker A:I am just wondering now though, at what point did that pivot happen from law to politics?
Speaker A:And when did Coolidge's political career begin?
Speaker B:They went together all along.
Speaker B:When he got to Hammond and Field, he saw that the, the partners, the big men were, were involved in city government of Northampton.
Speaker B:Northampton is where Smith College is today.
Speaker B:It's in western Massachusetts.
Speaker B:People don't quite think of it as a city, but it thought of itself as the city at that time.
Speaker B:Northampton hasn't quite delivered on its promise.
Speaker B:It promised to be a great city and now it's just a lovable town.
Speaker B:And he was there in the City period, when they were laying the city rails, were they going to have a trolley?
Speaker B:Were they going to, you know, everything was connecting up.
Speaker B:It was also quite, it's also quite beautiful area, western Massachusetts.
Speaker B:So right away he thought, oh, look, this partner is involved in city government.
Speaker B:I can be too.
Speaker B:And he began to work for the party.
Speaker B:The Coolidges happened to be Republicans, and I don't think he ever questioned whether he should be a Republican.
Speaker B:That was the family party.
Speaker B:He had respect for Democrats and he just got right involved and wasn't dog catcher, but close, ran documents, did party work in elections, became clerk.
Speaker B:So he learned process.
Speaker B:He always liked to learn process.
Speaker B:Became a representative, became a state representative, became mayor of Northampton, became lieutenant governor.
Speaker B:Then he was at some point in there, he was head of the senate of the state of Massachusetts, what they say, President of the Senate, and then he eventually became governor.
Speaker B: trajectory that starts around: Speaker A:So I mean, it's an impressive trajectory and career, but one that I'm sure was rivaled by many other politicians at the time who had equally impressive credentials.
Speaker A:So when it came to, to Warren Harding running for president, what was it about Calvin that made him stand out as the running mate of choice?
Speaker B:First of all, I'll say just before we get to Harding and the national stage, the political process in the US was a bit different than the party selected people.
Speaker B:We didn't have an amendment to the Constitution that said our Senate, our upper chamber, be elected directly.
Speaker B:So that's the rule.
Speaker B:Now then the Senate.
Speaker B:In those days, senators were picked by state lawmakers who knew the candidates for the job to the US Senate rather well.
Speaker B:So I would say it was more of a second impression culture than a first impression culture.
Speaker B:What we have now, you know, someone bursts unknown bursts on the scene.
Speaker B:There were negatives to that, which is there were party machines.
Speaker B:We all knew each other and we only helped each other.
Speaker B:And that's how you got events.
Speaker B:But there were parts positives too, because certainly sometimes one finds that the third impression tells one the truth about an individual and his capacity for work or service better than the first.
Speaker B:It wasn't a TV culture, a radio culture, or even anything theater culture.
Speaker B:They all knew each other rather well.
Speaker B:So it's a compliment to Calvin that he got to be governor in a very small milieu where people saw him over and over again.
Speaker B:They said he always under promised and over delivered.
Speaker B:And he always understood that people remember everything about one.
Speaker B:And if one is rude, one day they'll remember.
Speaker B:You never meet anyone for the first time.
Speaker B:It's still true.
Speaker B:Even if the political system has changed.
Speaker B:You know, even the most anonymous trade is recorded.
Speaker B:And if one misbehaves, someone remembers so the event.
Speaker B:Coolidge was a governor of Massachusetts.
Speaker B:He was something of a progressive, as his party was.
Speaker B:But subsequent towards the end of World War I, the US was in upheaval.
Speaker B:Not upheaval like Germany or Russia, but still upheaval.
Speaker B:There were plenty of strikes.
Speaker B:There was a new movement for public sector unions which we'd never had before in the United States.
Speaker B:There were general strikes in the cities, which I'm sure you no from the uk, but one city, Seattle, was paralyzed by a general strike.
Speaker B:It was said nothing but the tide moved in the city when the general strike was on in Seattle, nothing but the tide.
Speaker B:Soldiers came back from Europe and were demanding more dramatic change, having seen Europe, than they might have before.
Speaker B:There was a strike unexpected of the Boston police.
Speaker B:The police had a contract that underpaid them, particularly in the.
Speaker B:It was very like today.
Speaker B:There was much more inflation than anyone acknowledged, certainly than officials acknowledged.
Speaker B:They didn't even know quite how to quantify it.
Speaker B:The poor police were underpaid.
Speaker B:They had served in the war.
Speaker B:They had worked double in the war.
Speaker B:Now the war was over.
Speaker B:1918.
Speaker B:1919.
Speaker B:They were waiting for their reward.
Speaker B:That is a big raise.
Speaker B:It didn't come fast enough.
Speaker B:They decided to go on strike.
Speaker B:But the police of Boston were counting on Coolidge to maybe support them or help them through because many of them had voted for him and he knew it.
Speaker B:So there was that.
Speaker B:And also they had genuine grievances.
Speaker B:There were rats chewing on their helmets in the station houses.
Speaker B:They had to sleep in the same cot with, you know, after another man with no change of the bedding for weeks on it.
Speaker B:You know, like that.
Speaker B:They were overworked.
Speaker B:And then there was the pay.
Speaker B:But the contract to the police did not permit strikes.
Speaker B:So they.
Speaker B:They also knew the police that there might be riots in Boston if they went on strike.
Speaker B:So they went on strike after Labor Day in September, Also very much inspired by Ireland.
Speaker B:In fact, you know, the world was much closer after World War I.
Speaker B:So there they were, went on strike bravely.
Speaker B:Nice men, men who had voted for Coolidge.
Speaker B:Boston erupts in chaos.
Speaker B:Windows are smashed.
Speaker B:Looting of the shops on the major streets ensued.
Speaker B:Coolidge had the governor called out the National Guard.
Speaker B:To come and keep order.
Speaker B:This was a time when we didn't really have electric stoplights, but we did have automobiles the late teens.
Speaker B:So with no policeman to direct traffic, you can imagine what trouble lay there as well.
Speaker B:Crossing the street was an adventure when there were crossing policemen in that time, and when none, it was quite dangerous on multiple levels.
Speaker B:Even the students of Harvard went out to help police.
Speaker B:And the policeman allied with Sam Gompers, the great American union leader of the American Federation of Labor.
Speaker B:So they thought Mr.
Speaker B:Gompers would.
Speaker B:Would convince Mr.
Speaker B:Coolidge, Governor Coolidge, to.
Speaker B:To be kind and settle and steady.
Speaker B:Fired the policeman, or he backed up the police commissioner in firing the policeman.
Speaker B: election coming up that year,: Speaker B:He thought he would lose the election when he fired the policeman.
Speaker B:It was a terrible thing to do for him.
Speaker B:But he said, effectively, someone has to make it clear there's a.
Speaker B:There's a conflict between public service and union membership.
Speaker B:He believed, he said, and there's no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.
Speaker B:It's an odd sentence if you listen to it.
Speaker B:It's not quite grammatical, and it reflects his tension.
Speaker B:There's no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.
Speaker B:Sometimes it's quoted slightly differently, but you're wondering about the bye.
Speaker B:About the prepositions and so on.
Speaker B:But you can feel the tension in the statement no right to strike.
Speaker B:No right to strike.
Speaker B:And that lot for public sector workers.
Speaker B:And that line reverberated all across the United States.
Speaker B:Even President Wilson praised it, President Wilson being a Democrat, Coolidge being a Republican.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And that caught the.
Speaker B:It was a mood rather like now.
Speaker B:People thought, well, maybe there shouldn't be so much looting in shops or we shouldn't wink at it.
Speaker B:And so Coolidge became a law and order candidate and the Republican candidate for president as picked Warren Harding, his number two.
Speaker B: chard Nixon, the candidate in: Speaker B:Nixon was certainly a law and order candidate in 68.
Speaker B:So the country was ready for a law and order, if not in the White House, then in the second spot as vice president.
Speaker B: rding and Coolidge did win in: Speaker A:So we've actually discussed on the podcast quite recently about the importance of vice president, seeing as so.
Speaker A:So many of them do tend to get their moment as president at some point.
Speaker A:I think 20% or so of vice presidents have gone on to become president.
Speaker A:How was Coolidge as vice President.
Speaker B:Well, awkward, miserable.
Speaker B:That's important to know.
Speaker B:The Vice President is the president of the U.S.
Speaker B:senate.
Speaker B:That's a thankless job.
Speaker B:And in his case, particularly thankless because the senior fellow in the Senate was also from the Bay State.
Speaker B:It was a terrific snobby named Henry Cabot Lodge.
Speaker B:And Lodge had a few goals.
Speaker B:He was near obsessive on them.
Speaker B:And one of them was to block the League of Nations, to block US entry into the League of Nations.
Speaker B:He really was fighting with President Wilson all the time, the free sitting President.
Speaker B:And whatever Lodge wanted, he was accustomed to getting in the Senate.
Speaker B:Senior figure in the Senate.
Speaker B:And there was this fellow he barely knew who had been Governor, let's see, just barely become governor in Massachusetts, his putative boss as President of the Senate.
Speaker B:So that was not pleasant for Coolidge being President of the Senate over Henry Cabot Lodge, Senate Majority Leader and then the Senate was quite erratic.
Speaker B:It was an erratic time after World War I.
Speaker B:It was a difficult time.
Speaker B:Harding and he had a very coherent program called normalcy.
Speaker B:I don't really like that word.
Speaker B:So what is that normalcy?
Speaker B:It sounds like let's all be cogs, but essentially what they were saying is let's get back to a more common sense America or a more middle of the road America.
Speaker B:Let's be civil to one another again.
Speaker B:Let's pardon or commute the sentence, say of Eugene Victor Debs, socialist of war resisters.
Speaker B:Let's get past that.
Speaker B:And the other part of normalcy was a wager.
Speaker B:And this here is very different from the uk at the same point was a wager that if we could get the economy going again through emphasis on the private sector and sort of liberation of the private sector to create jobs, then the war's troubles would recede.
Speaker B:Ours was not a social welfare state though, that we created for the returning vets to the same extent it was in the uk.
Speaker B:Ours was a let markets take care of the mess of war and restore people to their proper station and occupation through jobs.
Speaker B:And that worked in the United States.
Speaker B:So normalcy, the central tenet of normalcy, according to Coolidge in particular, was tax reduction.
Speaker A:Yeah, well, we need to come back to the economy because that's definitely something that Coolidge has been remembered for, particularly the circumstances after he left.
Speaker A:But before that, I just, I want to touch on how he became president.
Speaker A:And obviously the tragic circumstances of Harding's death aside, he took over his administration at a time when it was mired by scandal.
Speaker A:And that can't have been an easy transition for Coolidge.
Speaker B:Harding was kind to Coolidge, and he invited him in the cabinet meetings when he was vice president, which he didn't have to do.
Speaker B:The vice president.
Speaker B:It is a vice presidency.
Speaker B:There are worse terms that have been used, but it's essentially a purgatory.
Speaker B:So Harding.
Speaker B:Harding had several scandals.
Speaker B:And think of it this way.
Speaker B:The goal of the Harding administration was privatization of government resources.
Speaker B:Government was bulging large, a leviathan after World War I.
Speaker B:And put them in private hands.
Speaker B:Well, if you make the case that put, say, oil reserves, that was the issue, in private hands, you tell the people, the government's going to give up something that is the people's, well, you better do it.
Speaker B:Well, Harding botched that, and instead he sold the resources.
Speaker B:The scandal is now called Teapot Dome, after the site where some of the energy laid below the ground.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:He sold the resources or leased them to friends of friends.
Speaker B:Well, that's awful because it's illegal, but it's also awful because it undermines the principle the party had established of privatization.
Speaker B:And the same with hospitals.
Speaker B:The government and the party promised to build hospitals, but not to create payments.
Speaker B:Essentially, pensions, more extravagant pensions for the vets.
Speaker B:And these vets, many had lost a leg.
Speaker B:This was an era pre penicillin.
Speaker B:They needed help.
Speaker B:But we said, no pensions are government for you, or no grand pensions, but we'll build hospitals.
Speaker B:Then it turned out the hospitals were.
Speaker B:The construction was corrupt as well.
Speaker B:And the man in charge of the hospitals, Mr.
Speaker B:Forbes, ended up in Leavenworth prison.
Speaker B:So it wasn't just the scandal.
Speaker B:It was that Harding, a bit like Bill Clinton, besmirched the principles he stood for through his sloppiness.
Speaker B:So in comes Coolidge.
Speaker B:This is all not even out.
Speaker B:But when Harding dies, summer of 23, suddenly on a trip, and Coolidge comes into office, and all the mess comes out, and he has to rescue the presidency and the party.
Speaker B:So that would be August 23rd.
Speaker B:And how does he do it?
Speaker B:By following the program, the agenda, the platform.
Speaker B:To the letter.
Speaker B:He doesn't say, I will do everything new now.
Speaker B:He says, when it comes to the commitments of the party, they are good.
Speaker B:And I will.
Speaker B:It's as if Harding dropped a baton and I will pick it up and carry it.
Speaker B:There was that when it came to the scandals, he, a lawyer, announced investigations.
Speaker B:There were investigators, in fact, from both parties to demonstrate the nonpartisan nature Coolidge hoped for for the investigation of Teapot Dome in particular, that's been remembered in all scholarship.
Speaker B:You know, when it came to Watergate or to Whitewater with President Clinton or more recently, how Coolidge picked men from two parties.
Speaker B:His attorney general went away.
Speaker B:Many several people went to prison.
Speaker B:It was very painful for Coolidge, but he executed on that.
Speaker B:And the party in the country we were able to move past the scandals.
Speaker B:I think, though I should say that the incredible discipline of Coolidge contrasted with Harding, who was lovable, a very good talker, a very good rounder up of votes, a true old boy, but not so focused.
Speaker B:So Cooley said, darn it, I'm going.
Speaker B:You got the tax rate down to say 40 something or 50.
Speaker B:I'm going to get the top marginal rate down to 24.
Speaker B:And he did.
Speaker B:It took him a few years and an election.
Speaker B:When Coolidge ran on it, he was very determined.
Speaker B:There was no mess about him.
Speaker B:He understood that scandal cost political capital.
Speaker B:He lived in almost pristine life.
Speaker B:It was painful to his family, but the reward was people understood he was serious.
Speaker B:And we had a three way race in 24 when he had to run.
Speaker B:He'd inherited the presidency, acceded to it at the death of harding.
Speaker B:But in 24 he had to run.
Speaker B:And the progressives had the momentum and they Indeed took over 16% of the vote.
Speaker B:That's scary for United States.
Speaker B:United States, where we usually only have two parties.
Speaker B:Whoa, a big change.
Speaker B:And yet Coolidge did prevail as an old Republican.
Speaker B:In fact, he took an absolute majority of the vote, which means he took.
Speaker B:His total was higher, of course, course than the sum of the other two parties, Democrats and Progressives combined.
Speaker B:That's very unusual at best when you have a three way race in the United States.
Speaker B:Do think of President Clinton with Ross Perot.
Speaker B:The winner is someone with a plurality.
Speaker B:So That's a tremendous victory.
Speaker B:24.
Speaker B:That's an affirmation from the people of.
Speaker A:Coolidge and it's a real vote of confidence in Coolidge's sort of mandate.
Speaker A:And you mentioned before about how methodical he is as well and how studious he is.
Speaker A:But it's quite easy I would imagine, to win votes when you're promising tax cuts.
Speaker A:Because that sounds very good in hindsight when you consider that he left office and the Great Depression happened, it does bring into question some of the effectiveness of his economic policies.
Speaker B:Oh really?
Speaker B:There's not much evidence for that.
Speaker B:I know that it's.
Speaker B:Well, this allegation that Coolidge caused the Great Depression is ironed in particularly overseas, but there's not much evidence for that.
Speaker B:That's because the growth in the 20s wasn't really.
Speaker B:There's A Gatsby S Corner.
Speaker B:That's the stock market.
Speaker B:But not so many Americans were in the stock market at that time, right?
Speaker B:So that's quite played up.
Speaker B:The speculators buying on margin, you know.
Speaker B:But the general economy was quite strong.
Speaker B:Farming had some trouble because commodity prices went down.
Speaker B:Farming had a depression before the Depression, but people were moving off the farms at a rapid rate and industry was growing so strongly.
Speaker B:The productivity gain, the gold standard for economic quality versus economic BS is productivity, whether you can make a widget faster and a better quality widget and in less time.
Speaker B:And the productivity gains and the patents of the twenties are studied to this day at Harvard Business School because so much of what we consider key, you know, the early plans and ideas for television, for example, got their start in the 20s.
Speaker B:The other thing to remember is that the standard of living in the twenties increased quite well.
Speaker B:I mean, if you're talking to an undergraduate today, you'd say, what's your standard for the difference between grinding poverty and being working class?
Speaker B:And they usually say indoor plumbing.
Speaker B:The 20s were the decade when the United States got indoor plumbing.
Speaker B:They were the decade when the work week went from a grueling six days to five days because of productivity gains, not because of large increase, you know, not because of waste or something else.
Speaker B:So it's hard to slime the 20s with the 30s.
Speaker B:From the data we had, you, you know what happened?
Speaker B:We had an international credit contraction and then the pres.
Speaker B:That was part of it.
Speaker B:We've all studied that with the Match King and so on and the breakdown and trouble in Europe and currency and European debt and American debt.
Speaker B:We had a banking problem in the US called unit banking, where the banks, to put it quite plainly, were not in a Fed network, the little banks.
Speaker B:So of the banks that failed, and they were mostly small banks, were without a network.
Speaker B:They were, as in the film I think it's It's a Wonderful Life about a small bank failing.
Speaker B:They.
Speaker B:They didn't have anyone to call but the bad rich man in the town, as in the fiction.
Speaker B:So all that happened, but it's hard to blame Coolidge.
Speaker B:One should also add that though Coolidge was succeeded by a Republican in 29, Herbert Hoover, Hoover was entirely different in policy to Coolidge.
Speaker B:In many ways he was closer to Roosevelt.
Speaker B:In fact, the Roosevelt people said, we just did what Hoover did, only more so.
Speaker B:I wrote about that in my book Forgotten Man Hoover.
Speaker B:One area that's very important.
Speaker B:Why do we care about employment?
Speaker B:Because that is the pain of a downturn.
Speaker B:It's the employment.
Speaker B:If there's no unemployment, it's not a depression.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So there was serious unemployment after 29.
Speaker B:The business cycle was where it was.
Speaker B:And unlike in preceding downturns in the United States, of which there were many, the President did something different.
Speaker B:He shifted policy.
Speaker B:It pressured business personally and through suasion.
Speaker B:And the President has a lot of authority here with business and also through statute to pay high wages which the businesses could ill afford.
Speaker B:So in all preceding downturns in the United States, what happened?
Speaker B:Wages went down.
Speaker B:Why?
Speaker B:Because as an employer, if given a choice, you'd rather lower wages wages and lay people off.
Speaker B:Hoover precluded that choice.
Speaker B:His policy didn't make that choice possible.
Speaker B:He said you must raise wages because then the worker will spend and get the economy going.
Speaker B:It was a proto Keynesian philosophy.
Speaker B:It was an idea Hoover had been thinking about since the early twenties and had commissions and meetings and conventions about.
Speaker B:And it was put into practice, as I say, both through suasion and through law, such as a law called Davis Bacon, which affected ever more important federal contracts.
Speaker B:And this contributed to the unemployment in the Depression.
Speaker B:Not so much, though somewhat in Hoover's time, but even more under Roosevelt, who followed.
Speaker B:Roosevelt pushed for high wage policy.
Speaker B:Employers were terribly frightened because profits were down.
Speaker B:They couldn't pay high wages, but they had to under criminal penalty under Roosevelt.
Speaker B:And I wrote about this quite a bit in my book Forgotten man the History of the Great Depression.
Speaker B:But if you're interested, the scholar to blame on the unemployment in the 30s is a guy named Lee Ohanian who is often talked about for the Fed.
Speaker B:He teaches at UCLA along with another fellow, Harold of Penn.
Speaker B:And what they found was wages in the 30s, which is a terrible thing to report, were above trend for the century in the United States.
Speaker B:That's awful.
Speaker B:Why?
Speaker B:Because it was fine if you had a job, but if you didn't, you weren't going to get one.
Speaker B:Employers were rehiring much more slowly than they had done.
Speaker B:And this is sort of what we heard from our grandparents was fine if you had a job, but nobody could get a job about the Great Depression.
Speaker B:It goes with the sort of family wisdom one hears.
Speaker B:So there were anyway, there were many factors to the Great Depression, but it's hard to hang it on Coolidge even.
Speaker B:It's sort of a post Coolidge ergo propter Coolidge fallacy.
Speaker A:That's fair.
Speaker A:And actually, you know, you mentioned the Hoover was a Republican and Harding of course was a Republican.
Speaker A:You don't often see a President inherit an administration from their former president from their own party, and then successfully pass the baton onto another president from their party.
Speaker A:I can't think of another occasion when three successive presidents have been from the same party.
Speaker A:That must suggest that Coolidge himself was quite a popular guy.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker B:Well, the election, yeah.
Speaker B:But mainly he just followed through on the policy, minus the sloppiness and the corruption.
Speaker B:And that shows personal discipline.
Speaker B:He.
Speaker B:You know what Americans, we have a new movie about him on YouTube.
Speaker B:And what Americans wonder at was, in 28, Coolidge could have run again, and he didn't because he'd been only elected one term.
Speaker B:We didn't have the rules we have now about two terms and so on, either.
Speaker B:So why didn't he run again?
Speaker B:I think, effectively he says it in his autobiography, which we sell on the Coolidge foundation website and which is a wonderful book.
Speaker B:Well, you know, it's good if we change up in the United States.
Speaker B:He also said, you know, from time to time, no perma president.
Speaker B:The presidency becomes the monarchy if you do that, you know, and that he had that sort of Jeffersonian streak to him.
Speaker B:And Washington had made such a decision.
Speaker B:It happened.
Speaker B:Various centennials fell in Coolidge presidency.
Speaker B:So he had ample time to consider George Washington and Washington's farewell address.
Speaker B:I'm going home.
Speaker B:I'm going back to my vineyard.
Speaker B:You know, I'm turning away from the plow cincinnatus to the plow.
Speaker B:Turning away from the.
Speaker B:The government or the arms cincinnatus.
Speaker B:So Coolidge had that, and he said, it's a great safety to the country and to the President.
Speaker B:I'm paraphrasing here.
Speaker B:For the president to know he is not a great man.
Speaker B:Oh, opposite to some politicians today, very humble.
Speaker B:There's a good story about Coolidge walking outside the White House with a senator named Seldon Spencer.
Speaker B:And the senator was trying to cheer Coolidge up.
Speaker B:Coolidge was grumpy because saying no is painful.
Speaker B:And he said no.
Speaker B:He had 50 vetoes.
Speaker B:That wasn't likable.
Speaker B:Anyway, the senator was trying to cheer Coolidge up.
Speaker B:Sees the White House with the pillars.
Speaker B:He said, well, what lucky dude gets to live in that pretty White House with a pillars?
Speaker B:And Coolidge said, nobody.
Speaker B:They just come and go.
Speaker B:Nobody.
Speaker B:They just come and go.
Speaker B:He understood the presidency in his true sense, which is not the imperial presidency, but rather as presider.
Speaker B:And we owe him a lot because that sounds like, oh, sort of almost atavistic.
Speaker B:That, oh, he was from another.
Speaker B:He was a quirk, an outlier, a throwback.
Speaker B:Whatever.
Speaker B:But no, what he was trying to suggest was that even in the modern era the old culture of our restrained founders is intensely applicable.
Speaker B:That's the con law.
Speaker B:The constitutional lawyer in him.
Speaker B:I'm surprised he didn't get named to the Supreme Court bench as his predecessor Taft was.
Speaker B:And I won.
Speaker B:And I'm looking for a forensic researcher to help me look into that.
Speaker A:Yeah, that's certainly an interesting one.
Speaker A: le president is to us here in: Speaker A:That's quite an alien concept to have such a modest man in the White House.
Speaker B:I'm not enough of an English scholar to know why, but particularly UK doesn't like him.
Speaker B:I think one reason was if you go look in economic consequences of the piece and correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Keynes moot's the idea of UK debt being forgiven to the United States.
Speaker B:Well, Coolidge did not do that.
Speaker B:He may have changed the terms over.
Speaker B:You see the US constantly rescheduling foreign debt.
Speaker B:As things got easier over here.
Speaker B:We rescheduled, interest rates came down.
Speaker B:We were glad interest rates came down because we could reschedule European country's debt.
Speaker B:But we didn't forgive everything right away by any means.
Speaker B:I think England did put more and Britain did put so much more into the war that naturally it thought it was owed ever more support from the US post war.
Speaker B:And maybe we didn't deliver what Britain thought because I'm puzzled by Churchill's animosity to Coolidge and there is some, and by Paul Johnson's animosity which I think comes through Murray Rothbard and Churchill.
Speaker B:But I'm puzzled by it.
Speaker B:Coolidge was a very familiar type and in some ways to me a laudable type.
Speaker B:So why the anger?
Speaker B:One thing was that the US did so much better than the uk.
Speaker B:We had a Thatcher revolution over here.
Speaker B:You went more the social democratic way.
Speaker B:And the resulting contrast was hard to look at.
Speaker B:The US sort of firmed up its position as the world's strongest economy in the twenties.
Speaker B:It appeared to be emerging as that with war's end, World War I, but it kind of solidly claimed the role through the 20s.
Speaker B:And part of it was the result of this more conservative, more market oriented policy.
Speaker A:Yeah, I mean a lot to unpack there as particularly about the UK US relationship over time.
Speaker A:But I am really keen before we have to bring this discussion to a close just to understand for people who don't really know a lot about college and haven't seen much about his presidency, what are the defining characteristics of him as a president and I guess as a person as well.
Speaker B:Well, he's known as Silent Cal, but that's a little bit of a theater in a way, because he's known as shy.
Speaker B:Nobody's silent or shy and makes it all the way to U.S.
Speaker B:president.
Speaker B:I think the defining thing about him was he did what he said he would do, and there wasn't much dog whistling.
Speaker B:He laid out specific goals, government restraint, and then he delivered government restraint.
Speaker B:When he left office, the federal government was smaller than when he came in 67 months later.
Speaker B:And people will say, oh, yeah, Amity.
Speaker B:Is that adjusted for inflation or what?
Speaker B:You know, deflation or what?
Speaker B:No, in all terms, the government was smaller than when he came in.
Speaker B:And that's quite hard to do in the United States with the population and the economy growing.
Speaker B:So he did what he said.
Speaker B:Wow.
Speaker B:And then he was always civil.
Speaker B:I'm his biographer.
Speaker B:So I looked high and low for evidence of him saying something nasty.
Speaker B:It's hard to find.
Speaker B:He.
Speaker B:He said less sometimes strategically, because he knows if you don't talk after a while, the person in the interview will get uncomfortable and leave and won't ask for.
Speaker B:For something you can't afford to give.
Speaker B:But mainly what he said he would do, which he said, I want to save.
Speaker B:I'm for economy, not because I'm Scrooge effectively, but because I want to save people.
Speaker B:I want to save money so I can save people.
Speaker B:And he did that.
Speaker B:He put our government, you know, nobody wants to be head of an austerity government.
Speaker B:And he did it extremely well and even kindly, which is hard to do without much political.
Speaker B:Much of a political feel to it.
Speaker B:He wasn't a machine man really at all.
Speaker B:He was in that he was a bit like Barack Obama or Woodrow Wilson.
Speaker B:He consulted himself first and people like that.
Speaker B:I consult my conscience.
Speaker A:It's a stark contrast to some of the recent politicians that have dominated the landscape in the US but that's a conversation for another day, perhaps.
Speaker A:I am just keen.
Speaker A:Before we go, Amity, and thank you so much for joining us for this conversation.
Speaker A:Just to talk to us a little bit about the Coolidge foundation, the work you do, and how people can connect with you and get involved in that.
Speaker B:We are so grateful to you for that.
Speaker B:The Coolidge foundation is based in Vermont.
Speaker B:That's small place, hard to get to.
Speaker B:Exceedingly beautiful.
Speaker B:Where Coolidge is from his grave is no higher than that of the others around him.
Speaker B:To give you an idea of his humility, kind of willed humility.
Speaker B:So what we do is we have a merit scholarship for young Americans because Coolidge works so hard in school.
Speaker B:And we want to honor effort, quantifiable effort.
Speaker B:And this is the most popular scholarship in America right now.
Speaker B:We had 4,900 candidates for five scholarships this year.
Speaker B:It pays for university and in order to apply.
Speaker B:And there's a purpose here, too, beyond honoring merit.
Speaker B:It's to acquaint young people with Coolidge.
Speaker B:The students write two essays about Coolidge philosophies.
Speaker B:They don't have to agree with them, but they have to articulate them to demonstrate an understanding.
Speaker B:So imagine, well, close to 10,000, 9,800 essays about Coolidge philosophy.
Speaker B:One, his tax philosophy, another, his philosophy relating to the Declaration of Independence, whose anniversary.
Speaker B:Those were all generated this year as students applied.
Speaker B:That's sort of to make up a shortcoming of our schools currently, which is they don't teach Coolidge at all.
Speaker B:It's kind of a footnote, our secondary schools.
Speaker B:So at least we can acquaint coming up, cohorts with Coolidge.
Speaker B:Again, they don't have to agree with him, but they should at least be familiar with his arguments.
Speaker B:And we also have a debate program because he was a debater.
Speaker B:And mostly our topics are economic because Coolidge loved economics after the law, it was his second thing.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So you can certainly support us and get to know us.
Speaker B:We also have Coolidge House in the Georgetown section of Washington.
Speaker B:I would just go to the website and write to info.
Speaker B:At 4th of July, we have a large event.
Speaker B:It's also the President's birthday, by the way.
Speaker B:And you're welcome to materialize in Vermont in the Fourth of July.
Speaker B:There's hardly a more beautiful place than New England in the summer.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's on my bucket list of places to visit.
Speaker A:It's one of the places I just didn't have time to get to when I was in the States.
Speaker A:And it just seems like such a beautiful part of the country.
Speaker A:But actually born on the Fourth of July, he must be the only president to have been born on Independence Day, isn't he?
Speaker B:That is correct.
Speaker A:There you go.
Speaker A:A little factoid to end that on Amity.
Speaker A:Thank you so much for joining me for this podcast.
Speaker A:I'm hoping that we can have you hang on for just a little bit to record a little bonus chat to go out on the podcast as well.
Speaker A:But for those of you listening to this and enjoying the episode, we're going to leave some links in the show notes so you can find out more.
Speaker A:You can check out the Coolidge Foundation.
Speaker A:Buy Amity's book and learn loads more about Coolidge after this podcast.
Speaker A:And of course course do follow the show as well.
Speaker A:So all new episodes appear magically in your feed and if you do want to support us, you can do again.
Speaker A:All the links are in the show notes.
Speaker A:Thank you so much for listening and goodbye.
