The Great Refrainer
Reassessing Calvin Coolidge
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"One man"—Coolidge? Poor Warren G. Harding: He's become the Rodney Dangerfield of American presidents. The odious Wilson is a perennial top 10 favorite in the presidential rankings, those "polls by which court historians reward warmarkers and punish the peaceful," as Bill Kauffman recently put it. Harding, Wilson's successor, is nearly always dead last. (Was the Teapot Dome scandal really worse than 117,000 dead doughboys?) It pains me to see Warren G. get short shrift here too, especially from an author who appreciates presidential minimalism. Shlaes writes that "Coolidge hacked away at the federal budget with a discipline sadly missing in his well-intentioned predecessor." Harding may not have been the most disciplined of men, but of the two, he was the more accomplished budget-cutter. By the time Coolidge took the oath after Harding's death, federal spending had been cut nearly in half, leading to large government surpluses.
But this is a biography, after all—so what about Coolidge the man? At times Shlaes lets her admiration for her subject drift into hagiography: "Always, a philosophy of service inspired Coolidge," she insists. That's one way of putting it. Another is H.L. Mencken's: "Coolidge is simply a professional politician," he wrote in 1924, and a very "dull one" at that. "He has lived by job-seeking and job-holding all his life; his every thought is that of his miserable trade."
At times, Coolidge makes it hard not to agree with Mencken's harsh assessment. Despite her best efforts, Shlaes's Coolidge often seems like a grim, boring striver, given to expressions as petulant and morose as Morrissey lyrics. Writing to his father from his berth at Amherst College, young Cal groused, "I never earned any money and I do not know as I ever made any happiness." "I am so tired," he signed off in a letter telling a onetime love interest he forgave her rejection.
Clearly, this was a man with a melancholic temperament. It would get worse after the death of his 16-year-old son, Calvin Jr., in 1924 from sepsis after developing a blister playing tennis on the White House courts. In his 2003 book The Tormented President, Robert E. Gilbert argues that this tragedy is key to understanding Coolidge's performance in office, which, like most presidential rankers, he views negatively. Cal Jr.'s death left Coolidge "clinically depressed" throughout the bulk of his presidency, Gilbert writes, "a broken man, waiting passively, distractedly, indifferently to lay down the heavy burdens of office."
Interesting, if true. But aside from passing references to Calvin's crabby moods and the distance between him and the first lady, Shlaes isn't terribly interested in the president's psyche.
For my money, she makes too little use of Coolidge's spare and powerful Autobiography. There's a passage therein about the death of his son where Silent Cal's Old WASP reserve cracks just slightly. You can tell that as a dad, he wasn't full of hugs, but the pain and anger that lie under the surface of these words is all the more palpable for his tight-lipped refusal to let it gush forth:
In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not.
When he went the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him.
The ways of Providence are often beyond our understanding. It seemed to me that the world had need of the work that it was probable he could do.
I do not know why such a price was exacted for occupying the White House.
Well, the conventional wisdom overvalues presidents who enjoy the job. In his influential 1972 book The Presidential Character, political scientist James David Barber argued that we should pick presidents by their personality type. The "active-positive" president—the ideal voters should seek—tackles the job with manic energy and zest and "gives forth the feeling that he has fun in political life." The "passive-negative" sees the office as a matter of stern duty, and his "tendency is to withdraw." Among Barber's "active-positives" were troublemakers FDR, Truman, and JFK; his "passive-negatives" included the Cincinnatus-like figures Washington, Eisenhower, and, of course, Coolidge. Maybe we should only give the job to people who are so depressed they can barely get out of bed.
Mencken's initial disdain for Coolidge mellowed as the '20s receded. After the ex-president's sudden death from a heart attack in 1933, Mencken eulogized that, for all Coolidge's faults, "the itch to run things did not afflict him....He never made inflammatory speeches....No bughouse professors, sweating fourth-dimensional economics, were received at the White House." After Wilson's reign of terror, Americans wanted peace, "and simple peace was what Dr. Coolidge gave them." Given the "World-Savers" that preceded and followed Cal, "he begins to seem, in retrospect, an extremely comfortable and even praiseworthy citizen. His failings are forgotten; the country remembers only the grateful fact that he let it alone." There are, Mencken observed, "worse epitaphs for a statesman."
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Say what you will, his Dogs Playing Poker turned the art world on its ear.
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Wasn't that Cassius Coolidge?
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I've got the Warren G and Silent Cal album. Beats were dope, but it was irritating when Warren G threw it to Silent Cal and there'd just be a gap in the rap
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He's the mother-flippin' hip-hop-apotamus, his lyrics are bottomless.
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...
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There ain't no party like my Gramma's tea party!
Heyyyyy, Hoooo, Heyyyy, Hoooo
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Doesn't Wilson deserve some credit for slashing the budget as well?
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That warmonger deserves nothing but scorn.
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But he slashed the budget!
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Right after he blew it up and dove into a world war.
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Of course, but he was decent enough to dramatically cut afterwards. Harding frequently gets all of the credit for some reason.
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Any credit he may deserve for cutting spending after the war (as opposed to allowing the war spending to become the new baseline) is wiped out for signing the Espionage and Sedition Acts. Fuck Woodrow Wilson.
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I really don't understand how your credit system works. Is it based on feelings or something?
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Was he actively governing at that point, or should we be thanking his wife for cutting the budget?
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That's possible, but federal expenditures did start declining before his stroke.
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Just like after WWII expenditures declined, but only from the peaks of spending, not pre-war spending. Would you say Woodrow Wilson's term in office left us more free or less free?
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Just about every president has left as less free than the previous, including Harding, so I really can't see the point of your question based on the original point I raised.
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Sure, right after he gets the credit he deserves for jailing Eugene V. Debs.
Wilson was also responsible for setting back racial progress at least two generations. He was scum.
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And we haven't even brought up the Fed.
If I had a gun with two bullets and were in a room with Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Wilson, I would shoot Wilson twice.
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Re: Tak kak,
Doesn't Wilson deserve some credit for slashing the budget as well?
You mean after he blew it to kingdom come, he deserves credit for bringing it a bit down??? -
Yes. Giving it all to Harding (as has been done, particularly in libertarian circles) is simply incorrect.
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"An admirable record, particularly considering the shape the country was in after Professor Wilson's reign. Weighed down by debt and wartime controls, plagued by unemployment, the country seemed "lost, if not cursed," Shlaes writes. "Yet within a few years the panic passed and the trouble eased," she says. "The reversal was in good measure due to the perseverance of one man": Coolidge."
See, there it is. Right there in the history books. Anyone can read it in black and white, in stark terms. To say that the pols today are well meaning, or have the nation's interests in mind is absurd. These fuckers are not well meaning but mistaken, they are evil.
I look at the current crop of pols and their behavior, listen to their words, and long to see them stretching ropes. Where is our Coolidge? Our Washington? Our Jefferson? Nowhere in sight.
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I'd settle for them all being like William Henry Harrison and dying a month into office.
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Back in my day, it was considered dishonorable to seem too eager to be president. Not just unseemly, but dangerous. People who spent their lives seeking power were understood to be the worst people to actually entrust with power.
Today, you need to spend your entire life grooming yourself to be President. You need to avoid, wherever possible, taking actual stands on any controversial issues, lest you offend some part of the party whose platform you run on. You need to avoid any actual accomplishments that could be dredged up and held against you. Then, you need to spend years begging and pleading and fellating your donors for the money you will need just to run for office. If it any wonder we see the constant parade of mediocrity through the White House?
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What is most important is that they wear their heart on their sleeve, shed crocodile tears, and make a good impression on the talk shows, preferably by singing, dancing, or playing an instrument.
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Coolidge is probably the last President this country had who actually had any business being President.
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+10
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The odious Wilson is a perennial top 10 favorite in the presidential rankings, those "polls by which court historians reward warmarkers and punish the peaceful," as Bill Kauffman recently put it.
I couldn't agree more with this. Even if you ignore libertarian principles around non-intervention and just focus on the idea of executive efficiency, a truly ideal president would never have the opportunity to "display Presidential leadership". His administration would be, well, boring. They would identify, respond to, and checkmate any potential crisis while it was still in its infancy. To an outside observer (heck, probably to an inside observer) it would look like nothing significant happened during his tenure. But, that would only be because nothing was allowed to rise to the level of significance.
Businesspeople rightly applaud Steve Jobs for his turnaround of Apple. But this ignores the fact that it was the corporate culture and business model Jobs put in place at Apple that made a turnaround necessary. Doesn't it make more sense to applaud an executive who quietly hammers out a long-term strategy, builds a strong corporate culture, generates consistently superior returns and sees consistent, steady gains in the company's stock?
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But but but... TOP. MEN.
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Well, okay. But isn't this what the tippitiest toppitiest man would look like?
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I had two chiefs during my four years in the navy. The first one left the technical matters to the first class (small department) and concentrated on people matters. I pretty much ignored him. His replacement was a jackass; sat around drinking coffee and shooting the shit with his buddies, never did a lick of work, always got in the way, especially making rules for no reason except to push his weight around. It was only then that I realized how smooth the first chief had been, spotting signs of trouble before anyone else, taking people aside and talking with them, straightening things out so smoothly that none of us really recognized it.
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making rules for no reason except to push his weight around...
Isn't this the whole point of having AUTHORITAY in the first place? I mean, what's the point of having power if you're not gonna use it to push around everyone "beneath" you? /typical douchebag pol (or cop or anyone else who actively seeks power).
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I had two chiefs during my four years in the navy. The first one left the technical matters to the first class (small department) and concentrated on people matters.
This is a pretty consistent lesson throughout military history, especially in the modern era of mass armies and high technology--you have to give your subordinates the freedom to excel or fuck up the details, while maintaining a handle on the big picture. The micromanagers inevitably become overwhelmed by details and lose sight of the mission.
Commanders like Frederick the Great and Eisenhower intuitively understood this, which made them great generals, while great organizers like McClellan were horrible on the battlefield.
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When I visit family in Virginia, I drive by signs for the Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center. I always wonder if it is populated by drug addicts, or by Progressive historians attempting to rehabilitate the reputation of the man who was re-elected in 1916 because he "kept us out of war". Most likely both, I assume.
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..."I drive by signs for the Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center."...
I'm not sure he could have been rehabilitated. -
Tariffs on paintbrush handles?
Not that it will make a difference, but it would be good to point out to the people just how many stupid regulations we've got.
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there was a time when tariffs were Uncle Sam's only revenue source. If only that were still the case.
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Throughout its history, the GOP has been a big-government party. Harding and Coolidge were the exception, not the rule.
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Sadly, this ^
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Throughout its history, the government has been big-government. Small government is the exception, not the rule.
It's like the power of Sauron's ring. Government wants to be run by dictators. "Understand Frodo, I would use this ring from a desire to do good.."
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Alas, after Coolidge's elegant introduction, the sledding gets much tougher. Long stretches of this 456-page tome read like an info-dump from Shlaes's clearly formidable research files.
Shlaes certianly has a revisionist way of looking at early 20th century America, but she's not a very focused writer. "The Forgotten Man," for example, starts off strong and then meanders off in directions that stray from her original point.
Paul Johnson wrote a fantastic summary of Coolidge's presidency in "Modern Times," and that's as good a place to start as any.
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my best friend's mom makes $70/hour on the internet. She has been out of a job for 5 months but last month her income was $18311 just working on the internet for a few hours. Read more on this web site http://www.FLY38.COM
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Was this the same site where you could buy pictures of Rex Ryan's wife's feet?
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Actually, he's lying.
His best friend's mom makes some dough, but it ain't on the net, if ya know what I mean... -
Well, maybe not with a net, but surely with a hook.
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"The tax cuts that Coolidge and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon orchestrated took millions of people off the tax rolls. Unlike Mitt Romney, Coolidge and Mellon didn't worry that they'd created a new horde of 'takers.'"
Coolidge and Mellon had no need to worry about creating a new horde of takers because in their day there was no significant mechanism to force transfers of wealth from "makers" to "takers", nor was there significant pressure for creating one.
At least Romney and others have noticed that things are different now.
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I can understand not sending federal money, but he wouldn't even go on the radio to ask people to help? Huh?
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It was not necessary. You had thousands of newspapers asking people to help and thousands of radio announcers as well. Today it seems odd but it really should not be necessary and back then it was not as common place.
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"To that daunting portfolio add "Feeler-in-Chief," a term coined in all earnestness by The New York Times's Maureen Dowd,"
I *feel* your pain....
I increasingly conclude that humanity actually comes in separate species. How any human can *want*, let alone *stand*, these kinds of narcissistic megalomaniac with delusions of godhood is beyond me. The cup of my contempt runneth over. Even contemplating such creatures makes me feel unclean.
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The Coolidge farm estate is about 15 minutes from where I live in VT, I used to think about how boring it appeared, now I appreciate for how normal it is.
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everyone after Coolidge is trash