Tag Archives: Frustration

Coolidge, by Amity Shlaes, HarperCollins, 576 pages,
$35
If there was ever a time when the president could simply
preside, it has long passed. As early as the Eisenhower era,
political scientist Clinton Rossiter observed that the public had
come to see the federal chief executive as “a combination of
scoutmaster, Delphic oracle, hero of the silver screen, and father
of the multitudes.” Under the pressure of public demands, the
office had accrued a host of responsibilities over and above its
constitutional ones: “World Leader,” “Protector of the Peace,”
“Chief Legislator,” “Manager of Prosperity,” “Voice of the People,”
and more.
To that daunting portfolio add “Feeler-in-Chief,” a term coined
in all earnestness by ;New York Times columnist
Maureen Dowd in 2010 while lashing out at Barack Obama for being
insufficiently emotive about the BP oil spill. Obama, she wrote,
had “resisted fulfilling a signal part of his job: being a prism in
moments of fear and pride, reflecting what Americans feel so they
know he gets it.”
Poor MoDo would have kicked the cat in sheer frustration if
confronted by the implacable, inscrutable Calvin Coolidge, whose
reaction to the presidency’s more unreasonable demands was a
Bartleby-like “I prefer not to.” Shortly after taking office in
1923, Coolidge informed the press that he did not intend “to
surrender to every emotional movement” toward executive cures for
whatever ails the body politic. In the midst of the Great
Mississippi Flood of 1927, which killed hundreds and left some
600,000 Americans homeless, Coolidge resisted calls for federal
relief, even refusing a request by NBC that he broadcast a
nationwide radio appeal for aid.
In her new biography, ;Coolidge, Amity Shlaes,
Bloomberg News columnist and author of The Forgotten Man: A New
History of the Great Depression, suggests that in our current
era of fiscal and emotional incontinence, we have much to learn
from this parsimonious president. And while the journey through
Coolidge can be dull at times, Shlaes demonstrates that
there’s something to be said for boring chief executives. ;
“Debt takes its toll,” Coolidge begins. Shlaes
underscores that point with an absorbing anecdote about one of
Cal’s forebears, Oliver Coolidge, who in 1849, for want of 30 bucks
to pay off a creditor, suffered through a stint in debtor’s prison.
“Lame in one leg from birth,” Oliver, the brother of the
president’s great-grandfather, had never been able to farm the
rocky land of southeastern Vermont as well as the other Coolidges.
And so, at age 61, he found himself behind bars, cursing his
brother, sending out “despairing letters to one family member after
another.”
In Shlaes’ hands, Oliver’s captivity and subsequent
redemption—after his release he headed west, where he and his
family began new lives—serves as a metaphor for the horrors of debt
and the virtues of Yankee perseverance. “The very area that plagued
Oliver” saw “the greatest persevering of Calvin Coolidge,” Shlaes
writes. “Under Coolidge, the federal debt fell”; under Coolidge,
after “sixty-seven months in office, the federal government was
smaller” than when he’d found it.
Here was “a rare kind of hero: a minimalist president,” Shlaes
posits. And although history remembers “Silent Cal” mostly for his
reticence and frequent napping, Shlaes reminds us that “inaction
betrays strength.” In politics, it’s often easier to “do
something,” however unwise, than it is to hold firm. “Coolidge is
our great refrainer,” she concludes.
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’ clearly formidable research
files. Like the hardscrabble farmers of Plymouth Notch, you need to
set your jaw grimly and persevere through a long winter of
sentences that should have been left on the cutting room floor,
such as: “Coolidge met with [Budget Director Herbert] Lord six
times and reduced a tariff on paintbrush handles by half, his
second cut that year, the other a reduction in duty on live bob
quail.” Shlaes should have followed the example of her famously
taciturn subject, who in his 1915 opening address as president of
the Massachusetts Senate delivered a crisp little homily of 44
words, ending in “above all things, be brief.”
Still, the level of detail Shlaes provides inspires reflection
on the vast gulf between today’s GOP and the grand party of old.
Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge cut
taxes ;and ;shrank spending. They were pro-peace
and anti-wiretapping. They embraced “normalcy” instead of stoking
fear. And—go figure—they were popular. Today’s Republicans could
profit from studying their example.
Tax cuts were central to Coolidge’s legislative program, and he
believed, correctly, that under the prevailing conditions (the top
rate had crept above 70 percent during World War I) they’d lead to
increased revenue. But unlike modern supply-siders, Coolidge
attacked the beast of government head-on, instead of hoping to
“starve” it indirectly. “I am for economy,” he said in 1924. “After
that, I am for more economy.” He vetoed farm subsidies and new
veterans’ benefits, and Shlaes reports that he spent a great deal
of time “plotting to fend off military spending demands.”
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.” By 1927, as it became clear that top earners
were providing more revenue at lower rates, Mellon boasted that
their policy had transformed the income tax into “a class rather
than a national tax.”
On foreign policy, Coolidge “deemed international law the best
approach to prevent war,” backing the somewhat quixotic
Kellogg-Briand Pact to outlaw the practice. Coolidge being
Coolidge, he took a green-eyeshades view of the matter: “It pays to
be at peace.” But peace also allowed greater protection of civil
liberties. Shlaes notes that Coolidge “removed William Burns, the
head of the Bureau of Investigation, and curtailed wiretapping, one
of Burns’s favored tools.” (Alas, he replaced Burns with young J.
Edgar Hoover.) Coolidge also finished the job of freeing the World
War I protesters jailed by Woodrow Wilson. Harding had pardoned 25,
including Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs. Coolidge ordered the
release of Wilson’s remaining political prisoners.
It’s 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.…The reversal was in good
measure due to the perseverance of one man”: Coolidge.
“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 the independent historian 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.
This is a biography, after all, so what about Coolidge the man?
At times Shlaes lets 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 observation in 1924: “Coolidge is simply a professional
politician,” he ;wrote, 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’
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.” Telling a onetime love interest that he forgave her
rejection, he signed off one letter, “I am so tired.” ;
Clearly, this was a man with a melancholic temperament. It would
get worse after the death of his 16-year-old son, Calvin Jr., from
sepsis in 1924, due to a blister caused by 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, Gilbert 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.”
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 give the job only 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, Mencken
said, “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.” ; … Read More