Why Coolidge Matters Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE - “IN THE EYE OF THE NATION”

  CHAPTER TWO - LABOR, BLOWS TO BOLSHEVISM, AND TAKING UP “MANLY BURDENS”

  CHAPTER THREE - EARLY EDUCATION

  Educating the Young Coolidge

  The College Commencement Speeches and the Threat to the Liberal-Arts Order

  Coolidge and Academia

  Practical Politics from Garman’s Lessons

  CHAPTER FOUR - BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY

  Coolidge’s Declaration of Independence

  Lincoln and Coolidge

  CHAPTER FIVE - “I THOUGHT I COULD SWING IT”

  Publius and Coolidge versus Wilson on the Separation of Powers: Government of ...

  CHAPTER SIX - THE “POSSIBILITIES OF SOUL”

  Coolidge, Blacks, and the Klan

  Indians

  Japanese Americans

  Immigrants

  Women

  CHAPTER SEVEN - HOW PROGRESSIVE POLITICAL THOUGHT UNDERMINED AMERICA’S DEFENSE

  The Kellogg-Briand Pact

  CONCLUSION

  AFTERWORD

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  The Daily Grind in Washington

  Coolidge holding Congress’s nose

  to the grindstone of the economy,

  January 15, 1925.

  COURTESY OF THE JAY N. “DING” DARLING

  WILDLIFE SOCIETY

  For the Corcos family,

  with thanks for everything

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe many debts that I, unlike President Coolidge and his Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, am hard pressed to repay. Here I shall list my necessary debts, ever thankful that I incurred them and hopeful that they are sufficient.

  The list begins with Professors Kesler and Rossum, who kept me out of (most) trouble at college. What Charles Garman was to Coolidge, Rossum and Kesler are to me. They have opened their minds, their libraries, and even their homes to me. “The great distinguishing mark of all of [my professors] was that they were men of character,” Coolidge noted about his time at Amherst. So, too, I can say of my favorite professors at Claremont. In particular, special thanks go to Professor Kesler. It was said that Garman alone in the wilderness would be a university; the same is true of Professor Kesler, who gave his attention – and more important, his encouragement – to this project.

  Ryan Williams, Linnea Powell, Bryce Gerard, John Kienker, Sam Corcos, and, as always, Bernadette, listened to me recount my love of the ’20s. Coolidge once said that it takes a “great man to be a good listener.” I am surrounded, then, by great men and women, who tolerated me even when I was intolerable, which, I am ashamed to say, was often.

  An especially patient man is David Frisk. He is a good friend and a magnificent editor, and he poured his attention into this project with all the enthusiasm that the perennial student of history and government can muster.

  The family Corcos, to whom this work is dedicated, are the greatest friends I have ever had. When I had not a lot, they took me in for Christmas, not once, not twice, but thrice, and gave me the greatest Christmases ever.

  This is fitting because in some key respects, it is always Christmas with them. When I read Coolidge’s reminder that those who have “the real spirit of Christmas” are those who “cherish peace and good will” and are “plenteous in mercy,” I picture the Corcos family. How lucky I am to count them among my friends; how different these years would have been without them.

  My parents inspire from afar, in the land that so desperately needs another Coolidge. They are truly public servants, serving the public schools where they teach, not for their pay, but for the love of, and respect for, the children in their charges. I, of course, was their first pupil – and for that I am always grateful.

  I am grateful as well for the opportunity to study Calvin Coolidge. He was not silent but silenced, and here I hope to have him speak for himself. As we shall see, he has much to say – if only we care to listen.

  Nothing in the 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 alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

  CALVIN COOLIDGE

  quotation from a 1933 Coolidge memorial program

  FOREWORD

  YOU WOULD NOT want Charles Johnson to look into your background, not if you had anything to hide. He is an indefatigable investigator, who, at the campus conservative magazine, the Claremont Independent – and at his own rollicking blog – for four years kept Claremont McKenna College buzzing with revelations about affirmative action, politically tendentious speakers, and abuses in student government. He held college administrators’ feet to the fire, and they got singed.

  It was easier to condemn than to refute him, and his critics soon gave up on the latter. Outside CMC, more disinterested judges quickly discovered the boldness of his reporting and commentary. Soon he had been awarded virtually every prize a young journalist of conservative disposition could receive: the Robert L. Bartley Fellowship at the Wall Street Journal, the Eric Breindel Award, the Robert Novak Award from the Phillips Foundation, and a Publius Fellowship at the Claremont Institute. Hitting the trifecta is hard, but what Charles achieved is so remarkable as to be nameless: hitting – what, the quadrifecta?

  While leading his very public life as a student journalist, Charles pursued, more quietly but just as intrepidly, the study of politics. His senior thesis, a precocious work of political biography, became the starting point for the book (his first) you are now reading. Why Coolidge Matters marks the appearance of a major new conservative talent – and the reappearance of a major old one.

  We are on the verge of Calvin Coolidge revival, and it is long overdue. It has kindled for a while, at least since the publication in 1982 of Thomas B. Silver’s brilliant Coolidge and the Historians. This was not long after President Ronald Reagan had rearranged the presidential portraits in the Cabinet Room: Thomas Jefferson’s went out, and Coolidge’s in, to the consternation of liberal society. Reagan, born in 1911, remembered the Coolidge years in blessed contrast to the times surrounding them. In Silver’s words: “The hallmarks of the years proceeding Coolidge were war and depression; the hallmarks of the years following were depression and war. The hallmarks of the Coolidge era were prosperity and peace.”

  Doubtless, Harry V. Jaffa, Silver’s teacher who had set him on the path of studying Coolidge, was right to complain that “Calvin Coolidge would have been more honored if his portrait had been side by side with that of the author of the Declaration of Independence.” After all, Coolidge was the only president to have been born on the Fourth of July. Perhaps Reagan, who had made his own study of Coolidge, counted him not as a replacement for Jefferson but as a representative of genuine twentieth-century Jeffersonianism, as opposed to the spurious kind circulated by, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Before a Coolidge revival can proceed very far, it has to confront the damaging myths about him. These originated in the political charges hurled against him by his partisan opponents, which, with anger and bias aplenty, were then transcribed into the history books by the court historians of the New Deal. Read the accounts by Allan Nevins, Henry Steele Commager, and above all Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and you will see this mythology, part of the official narrative of modern lib
eralism, passed down to later historians who credulously repeat the same stories. Schlesinger’s indictment of Coolidge in The Crisis of the Old Order, the first volume (published in 1957) of his admiring Age of Roosevelt, is classic:[Coolidge’s] speeches offered his social philosophy in dry pellets of aphorism. ‘The chief business of the American people,’ he said, ‘is business.’ But, for Coolidge, business was more than business; it was a religion; and to it he committed all the passion of his arid nature.... As he worshipped business, so he detested government.... The federal government justified itself only as it served business.... And the chief way by which the federal government could serve business was to diminish itself.

  It is easy to imagine President Barack Obama denouncing Mitt Romney in substantially the same terms half a century later – because he did.

  Although Silver’s book demolished Schlesinger’s suave assertions and misrepresentations, it got little notice. Drawing on its young author’s prodigious research skills, Why Coolidge Matters adds impressive evidence and argument to the case and should command fresh attention. Consider, for example, some of the passages and arguments from Coolidge that never make it into the books of liberal historians. In the same paragraph in which he remarked that “the chief business of the American people is business,” Coolidge proceeded to say: “Of course, the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence. But we are compelled to recognize it as a means to well nigh every desirable achievement. So long as wealth is made the means and not the end, we need not greatly fear it.” What are those desirable achievements, those ends of existence? “In all experience,” he explained, “the accumulation of wealth means the multiplication of schools, the increase of knowledge, the dissemination of intelligence, the encouragement of science, the broadening of outlook, the expansion of liberties, the widening of culture.”

  He dilated on that point in another speech that escaped Schlesinger’s notice. Coolidge lamented the decline of liberal education in America:Great captains of industry who have aroused the wonder of the world by their financial success would not have been captains at all had it not been for the generations of liberal culture in the past and the existence all about them of a society permeated, inspired, and led by the liberal culture of the present. If it were possible to strike out that factor from present existence, he would find all the value of his great possessions diminish to the vanishing point, and he himself would be but a barbarian among barbarians.

  Dry pellets of aphorism? Business as a religion? The real Coolidge was one of the most cultured, thoughtful, and eloquent of modern presidents. He was hardly “Silent Cal,” although thanks to the prevailing historians he has been, as Charles Johnson well expresses it, effectively silenced.

  Did Coolidge, like Scrooge, detest government as a distraction from moneymaking? Hardly, and in certain respects he was, in Jaffa’s formulation, “the most notable interpreter of the Declaration since Abraham Lincoln.” As proof, here is one last passage, one of the loveliest in his writings, from “The Inspiration of the Declaration,” his address on the sesquicentennial of the Declaration of Independence:We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence they had for the things that are holy.

  On at least three counts the present book makes striking contributions to our knowledge of this neglected president. Johnson fills in the picture of the young Coolidge as a moderate Progressive of the Republican ilk. Most Progressives in the early twentieth century were Republicans, to be sure, and in some states most Republicans were Progressives. But which was typically the adjective and which the noun (Progressive Republican or Republican Progressive?) remained unclear; it had to be puzzled out case by case. In retrospect, and maybe even to contemporaries, President Coolidge was important as one of those statesmen who attempted to subordinate Progressivism to timeless republican principles reaching back to Lincoln’s statesmanship, Hamiltonian constitutionalism, and the Declaration’s doctrine of natural rights.

  Second, the book helps to render explicit what Coolidge usually left implicit, namely, the distance between his conservatism (not a word he favored) and Woodrow Wilson’s and Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressivism, their far-reaching impatience with the Constitution and its premises. It is fair to say the book may raise as many questions as it answers on this front, but it is a service to explore the issue, so rife with implications for the definition and conduct of twenty-first-century American conservatism.

  Finally, and above all, the reader should welcome such a winning portrait of such an underrated human being and president. After finishing Charles Johnson’s bracing book, no one should doubt why Coolidge matters.

  CHARLES R. KESLER

  INTRODUCTION

  WHY COOLIDGE MATTERS

  Calvin Coolidge is the only President on record who did not seem to care what was written about him.1

  It will be said of [Coolidge] as of Sir Harry Vane – leader of the Puritans on both sides of the water, Governor of Massachusetts in 1636 – “He made men think that there was somewhat in him of extraordinary; and his whole life made good that imagination.” 2

  IMAGINE A COUNTRY in which strikes by public-sector unions occupied the public square; where, after nearly a decade of military adventurism, foreign policy wandered aimlessly as America disentangled itself from wars abroad and a potential civil war on its southern border; where racial and ethnic groups jostled for political influence; where a war on illicit substances led to violence in its cities; where technology was dramatically changing how mankind communicated and moved about – and where the educated harbored increasing contempt for the philosophic underpinnings of our Republic.

  You might say that such a world looks a lot like our own – except that it doesn’t. The 1920s were a period of “general prosperity that was historically unique in its experience or that of any other society,” in the words of historian Paul Johnson.3 They were, as their popular name would suggest, “roaring,” with unemployment at the lowest – and economic growth at the highest – ever recorded in the twentieth century. Cars and radios rolled off the assembly lines as industrial titans made unheard-of fortunes. We know their names still: Edison, Ford, Firestone, and Disney. More and more people of modest means could afford the conveniences of modern life as real per capita income rose from $522 to $716 during the Coolidge years.4 This prosperity, as we know in hindsight, did not last, but what prosperity does? It was real enough for those who experienced it.

  President Calvin Coolidge knew this well, telling reporters at one of his many press conferences: “If you can base the economic conditions of the people on their appearance, the way they are dressed, the general appearance of prosperity, I should say it was very good.... I noticed most of the ladies had on silk dresses and I thought I saw a rather general display of silk stockings.”5 Prosperity, in other words, wasn’t something to turn away from, but to embrace – so long as it was on a sure foundation and designed to truly benefit the people. For, as Coolidge also warned, there “is no surer road to destruction than prosperity without character.”6

  It was far more important, Coolidge knew, to recognize where prosperity comes from than to set about chasing it for its own sake. “Prosperity is only an instrument to be used,” he is reported to have said, “not a deity to be worshipped.” Whether or not he uttered these exact words, they reflect his deep beliefs. As often happens, great men have great words spoken for them by an admiring public. Having learned such lessons, Coolidge had much to teach, and he did so frequently. In Fredericksburg, Virginia, he told those assembled:It is sometimes assumed that
Americans care only for material things, that they are bent only on that kind of success which can be cashed into dollars and cents. That is a very narrow and unintelligent opinion. We have been successful beyond others in great commercial and industrial enterprises because we have been a people of vision. Our prosperity has resulted not only by disregarding but by maintaining high ideals. Material resources do not, and cannot, stand alone; they are the product of spiritual resources. It is because America, as a nation, has held fast to the higher things of life, because it has had a faith in mankind which it has dared to put to the test of self-government, because it has believed greatly in honor and righteousness, that a great material prosperity has been added unto it.7

  This is not the Coolidge of popular memory, who, if the persisting legend is true, was too friendly with business and couldn’t see economic questions objectively. The cartoonish portrayal remains lodged in the popular imagination in part because “Silent Cal” wasn’t so much silent as he was silenced. Other scholars have wrestled with why he was silenced without delving deeply into what he had to say, only compounding the problem of his obscurity. I am much more interested in exploring what he has to say for his time – and perhaps for our time and all time – than in pursuing detailed arguments with his generations of detractors. Coolidge did, after all, publish three collections of speeches, an autobiography, hundreds of letters, and a syndicated post-presidential column, all of which he wrote himself. He also took great pride in his speeches, showing them off in the library that had helped produce them.