Calvin Coolidge - Fraud

.The Great Refrainer‘Coolidge,’ by Amity Shlaes


By JACOB HEILBRUNN

Published: February 14, 2013

This past December the Claremont Institute convened a forum at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington to discuss the presidential election. The mood among the conservative stalwarts during the reception may have ranged from pensive to glum, but it brightened somewhat when Clare­mont’s panelists contemplated a return to true Republican principles as advanced by the last president to slash both taxes and the federal budget — Calvin Coolidge. James Ceaser, a political scientist at the University of Virginia and a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard, said it was important to revive the “moral stigma” of debt, and added, “I want to go back to Coolidge and even McKinley.” The Claremont fellow Charles Kesler, author of “I Am the Change,” a recent book denouncing President Obama and liberalism, agreed: “We’re in for a Coolidge revival.”



COOLIDGE



By Amity Shlaes


Indeed we are. Coolidge was a figure of sport in his own era. H. L. Mencken mocked his daily naps — “Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored” — and Dorothy Parker reportedly asked, “How could they tell?” when his death was announced. But such quips have only heightened the determination of a growing contingent of Coolidge buffs to resurrect him. They abhor the progressive tradition among Democrats (Woodrow Wilson) and Republicans (Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover) as hostile to big business and prosperity. Instead, their aim is to spread the austere doctrine of what might be called Republican Calvinism. Their liturgy is based on Coolidge’s remark “If the federal government were to go out of business, the common run of people would not detect the difference.” Coolidge, the new Calvinists say, has been calumniated by liberal intellectuals for his embrace of what amounted to supply-side economics — tax cuts for the wealthy that would pay for themselves. Far from being a hapless president who set the stage for the Great Depression, they argue, he presided over a notable golden age.



This view of Silent Cal as a prophet on the right emerged during the Reagan administration. A freshly inaugurated Reagan banished Harry Truman’s portrait from the Cabinet Room and replaced it with Coolidge’s. As president, Reagan praised Coolidge, read his autobiography and met with Thomas Silver, the author of “Coolidge and the Historians,” a pioneering attack on his liberal detractors. Bouquets to Coolidge proliferated: in 1983 Paul Johnson declared in his popular history “Modern Times” that Coolidge had presided over “the last Arcadia.” Then more than a decade later the prolific business writer Robert Sobel published a tribute called “Coolidge: An American Enigma” with the Regnery press. In it, he bestowed what has become the right’s highest commendation — “the last president who believed in a passive executive branch in times of peace and prosperity.”



Since then a flurry of panegyrists have gone on to contrast that passivity favorably with Obama’s alleged hubris. In a column about the “unsilent Barack,” for example, George F. Will lamented that Coolidge was “the last president with a proper sense of his office’s constitutional proportions.” Sarah Palin has expressed her devotion to Coolidge in “America by Heart,” while Michele Bachmann has urged that his visage be carved on Mount Rushmore. Meanwhile, Arthur C. Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, singles him out in the recent book “The Road to Freedom.”



No one, however, is offering as silky a defense of Coolidge as Amity Shlaes. ­Shlaes, whose new biography is blurbed by Representative Paul Ryan as a “must-read,” has always had a deft finger on the conservative pulse. Her previous book — the best seller “The Forgotten Man,” which assailed both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt for perpetuating the Great Depression through big-­government activism — was described in 2009 by Politico as an essential text for House Republicans, who were, it said, “tearing through . . . ‘The Forgotten Man’ like soccer moms before book club night.”



Now Shlaes, a trustee of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation and a former editor at The Wall Street Journal, has turned to Coolidge. She has assiduously researched Coolidge’s life, drawing both on his private papers (going so far as to photograph his appointment books) and on contemporary newspaper reports. Her biography depicts him as a paragon of a president, less for what he did than for what he did not do — Coolidge, she says, “is our great refrainer.” But that, for the most part, is as far as Shlaes is willing to go. She has not written a fiery polemic, but a stylistically assured narrative of Coolidge’s life that seeks to nudge the reader imperceptibly into sharing his (and her) views. Wall Street potentates like J. P. Morgan and notorious railroad tycoons like E. H. Harriman are blandly depicted as underdogs, the victims of progressive politicians and intellectuals. She displays a marked disinclination to mention, let alone engage, differing interpretations of key events in Coolidge’s career. It is also the case that she assumes an omniscient insight into his views, playing Edgar Bergen to Coolidge’s Charlie McCarthy, which can make it difficult to distinguish where Coolidge ends and Shlaes begins. Her distinctive approach to Coolidge results in a soothing lullaby about a vanished America, an exercise in nostalgic reverence rather than an authoritative history.



The pity of it is that Coolidge was in fact a more astute politician than the easy scorn of his contemporaries suggested, and historians like David Greenberg, the author of a fine study of Coolidge (which Shlaes scarcely mentions), are starting to offer a more judicious appraisal of him. Coolidge was canny enough to work with several spinmeisters who sought, as far as possible, to mold his public image as a Yankee steward of the Republic through the new media of newsreels and radio. Shlaes doesn’t attempt to scrutinize Coolidge’s image but to burnish it.



What makes Coolidge a fascinating character, however, aren’t his bromidic phrases and vapid homilies, designed to reassure a public unsettled by rapid social and economic change; or his loyalty to his vivacious wife, Grace; or his taciturnity or any of his other personal qualities. Rather, it is that he represented the right’s first sweeping counterrevolution against liberal Republicans in a battle that continues down to the present. What Shlaes’s biography underscores is the fantastic tenacity with which the party still adheres to the ossified pre-New-Deal-era economic doctrines enunciated by Silent Cal.



Coolidge, who was born in Vermont on the Fourth of July in 1872, grew up in the village of Plymouth Notch, where the Yankee virtues of thrift and industry were prized. His father was a farmer, a merchant and a state legislator; at the age of 3, Calvin sat in the governor’s chair, hewed from the timbers of the U.S.S. Constitution. Yet the future president — a sickly, gaunt and solitary boy who suffered great anguish when his mother died on her 39th birthday — seemed himself to be made of unpromising material. Not until he entered Amherst College did he display much potential. All his life Coolidge may have been a shy fellow, but he blossomed when he spoke publicly at Amherst. He also studied under a popular professor named Charles Garman, who, Shlaes writes, mesmerized his disciples with the revelation that “the group was less important than the individual . . . because there was really no such thing as group happiness.”



It was a lesson Coolidge never forgot. He first made it clear that he was at loggerheads with the progressives when he backed the pro-business William Howard Taft in the 1912 election against Theodore Roosevelt, a split that allowed the Democrat Woodrow Wilson to enter the Oval Office. Coolidge could not discern any distinction, however minute, between the welfare of business and individuals. They were identical. In the Massachusetts Senate his “crowning achievement,” Shlaes says, “had been killing a tax on stocks at the last minute by masterfully exercising the Senate president’s privilege to create a tie vote.” Coolidge believed that anyone who constructed a factory was building a temple deserving of “reverence and praise.”



This sentiment reached full bloom when he won praise as Massachusetts governor for breaking a policemen’s strike in Boston in 1919 at a moment when the country was in the midst of the Red Scare, fearful of radicals and immigrants. As Shlaes depicts it, Coolidge acted decisively and heroically to restore the “reign of law” for businesses and private property by sending in the state guard. “Coolidge felt certain of one thing,” she reports. “The progressives could not be met. Conciliation would not work.” Maybe not, but was it really necessary to fire all the policemen in the aftermath? And why had Coolidge not intervened sooner rather than waiting until the strike degenerated into violence?



But Coolidge’s intransigence at a time of internal tumult made him a national hero, and his wealthy backers like Frank Stearns, a Boston department store magnate, and Dwight Morrow, a partner at J. P. Morgan, began to see in him presidential timber. The finishing touches were supplied by the advertising man Bruce Barton, a fellow Amherst graduate and an evangelist for capitalism who himself earned fame for his tract “The Man Nobody Knows,” a best seller that depicted Jesus and his disciples as the pioneers of a business organization that conquered the world. As part of Coolidge’s quest for the presidential nomination in 1920, Barton wrote the first national article about him, in Collier’s, emphasizing his flinty “Yankee” character — Coolidge’s frugality meant that he rented half of a two-family house in Northampton — and portraying him as a “man who kept his own counsel, a novelty when most prominent politicians freely gave advice on everything.” He was, Barton said, “cut from granite.”



What Stearns, Morrow and Barton detected in 1920 was that the Coolidge brand could be effectively marketed to a public weary of World War I and Woodrow Wilson. But Coolidge’s Republican adversaries kept him from receiving the nomination (“Nominate a man who lives in a two-family house?” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge said. “Never!”), and he had to settle for a spot on the ticket as vice president to Warren Harding. After Harding died in August 1923, Lodge told a reporter: “My God! That means Coolidge is president!”



No sooner did Coolidge become president than he went on a budget and tax cutting spree to terminate what he called the “despotic exactions” of the past years. The immediate aim was to enact Harding’s hope to roll back the higher progressive income tax that Wilson had imposed during World War I. Coolidge, for his part, idolized the Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon, whose frosty credo was that “the people generally must become more interested in saving the government’s money than in spending it.” Tax cuts, Shlaes asserts, were “not merely to favor the rich, as many said. The tax rate cuts at the top were designed to favor enterprise. If people got to keep more of their money, they would hire others, Mellon said.” As Mellon saw it, this was “scientific taxation,” a program he detailed in 1924 in his classic statement of supply-side economics, “Taxation: The People’s Business.” But progressive Republicans initially impeded Coolidge and Mellon’s sweeping plans. Coolidge was undaunted. “Cutting rates brought more revenue,” says Shlaes. “So cutting rates even more might bring yet more cash.” All Coolidge could think about was economizing. He was a cheap tipper. He berated the White House housekeeper, Mrs. Jaffray, for favoring specialty shops rather than the new supermarkets. Talking to a group of Jewish philanthropists, he admitted that the budget was “a sort of obsession with me. . . . I regard a good budget as among the noblest monuments of virtue.” When the mayor of Johannesburg, South Africa, sent the Coolidges two lion cubs, the White House named them Tax Reduction and Budget Bureau. In 1926, Coolidge finally got the tax cuts he had always dreamed about, what ­Shlaes deems nothing less than “a beauty to behold, with its surtax rate topping out at 20 percent.” By the end of his term, only the very wealthiest Americans paid any income tax at all. Frenzied speculation took off. The bubble would soon pop. But Shlaes suavely dismisses the notion that Coolidge bears responsibility for the Great Depression and suggests his work was “complete, ready as a kind of blessing for another era.”



This is flapdoodle. No, Coolidge was not single-handedly culpable for the economic calamity of the 1930s. But neither can he be safely extracted from the ruin that followed his presidency. Quite the contrary. Coolidge was the pre-­eminent cheerleader for the economic nostrums that led to the crash. His opposition to regulation allowed Wall Street and the banks to engage in rampant speculation and insider trading, practices that were not curbed until Joseph Kennedy was appointed head of the new Securities and Exchange Commission by Franklin Roose­velt to ban the very practices he himself had employed. So deep was Coolidge’s antipathy to any form of government action that he even viewed his gifted secretary of commerce and successor Herbert Hoover with a measure of contempt, calling him the “wonder boy” because he fell into the progressive Republican camp.



With yet another tribute about to appear — “Why Coolidge Matters,” by the former Claremont Institute fellow Charles C. Johnson, will be published in March — Coolidge will surely continue to enjoy a comeback on the right. Yet his actual record shows that he was an extraordinarily blinkered and foolish and complacent leader, no less than George W. Bush before the stock market plummeted in 2008. The bogus nostrums that Coolidge touted have directly led either to enormous deficits during the Reagan era or to outright catastrophe during the Bush era. Shlaes never stops to ponder the abundant literature chafing at and exposing the conformity and avarice of the Roaring Twenties, but the prosperity offered by Calvinism has always proved as elusive as the promise of the green light that Jay Gatsby watches at the end of Daisy’s dock. Conservatives may be intent on excavating a hero, but Coolidge is no model for the present. He is a bleak omen from the past.





Jacob Heilbrunn, a regular contributor to the Book Review, is a senior editor at The National Interest.