American History Hit - President Calvin Coolidge: The Roaring 20s' Quiet Leader

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

Sworn in after the death of President Harding by the light of a kerosene lamp, the 30th President of the United States led the country through 6 years of the prosperous roaring 1920s.Coolidge polled more than 54% of the popular vote in 1924, so what was so good about 'silent Cal'? To find out, Don is joined by Amity Shlaes, author of 'Coolidge' and 'The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression'.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey at https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK.All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 Media.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. The year is 1924, and it's quite the holiday season here at the newly renovated Macy's Department Store in New York City. After completing a vast expansion of more than 1.5 million square feet, Macy's is now officially the largest store in the world,

with some 20 wooden escalators carrying customers to 148 apartments, selling nearly everything a retailer can possibly offer. To usher in the season and to celebrate the transformation, Macy's staged the first of its famous Thanksgiving Day parades, complete with Santa Claus, ushering in the season. From fine watches to vacuum cleaners, newfangled washing machines and refrigerators, to women's apparel, beauty goods and travel needs, never mind hardware and children's toys.

Whatever you see plastered on the billboards, magazine pages, or advertise on the radio, you can get it right here. Macy's is one-stop shopping for a New York roaring through the 1920s, with the freedom, prosperity, and consumer demand a newly elected President Calvin Coolidge could only dream of. It is American History Hit, and I am Don Wildman, and it's time for another in our ever-lengthening series on the American presidents.

We've even elected a new one since we recorded our last. Today, the story behind our 30th Chief Executive, Silent Cal, Calvin Coolidge, born in the Green Mountains of Vermont on July 4th, 1872, talk about destiny. he's the only U.S. President hatched on Independence Day, automatic annual birthday parade, not bad. John Calvin Coolidge, Calvin being his middle name, served two terms in the White House from 1923 to 1929. As Warren G. Harding's vice president, when that poor man perished from a heart attack, he was next in line. Have a listen to Episode 228 for extra credit. Coolidge's entire presidency rode on the wave of the economic prosperity we know today as the roaring 20s.

wrote it right into the year in 1929 when it crashed under the rocks of the Great Depression. For many conservatives, even today, Coolidge is a model president. Ronald Reagan considered him a hero, hung his portrait in the Oval Office. Coolidge pursued a small government, low-tax, pro-business agenda. Straightforward stuff there. But it's his personal leadership style that needs an update. He gets a bad rap as a dour and dry guy, even that he was directly responsible for teeing up the Depression. but read a few things on the man, and that seems to ring less true.

So let's find out about who the real Calvin Coolidge was, and what he did, leading the nation, with Amity Schlaes, a former reporter and editor with the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, now chair of the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, an author of a Coolidge biography and other best-selling history books, including The Forgotten Man, a new history of the Great Depression. Hello, Amity, nice to meet you. Glad to be here. Amity, let's start in the middle of the story and then we'll back up.

We'll start with his assumption to the presidency and then go back to his origins before drilling down to his years in D.C. Where was Calvin Coolidge on August 2nd, 1923 and how did he learn that he was suddenly president? Calvin Coolidge was sleeping in his bed in his little hamlet home of Plymouth Notch, Vermont. It's remote now. It was even remoter than when he, while he slept, he suddenly heard. his father, John, call up the stairs and said, Calvin, the president has passed away. So this is always a dire moment for the country when there's no president. The new president must be sworn in right away. So Vice President Coolidge was sworn in in the middle of the night right there in Plymouth Notch, with the Bible on the table without electricity by kerosene, by his father, by virtue of his father being a town

notary, and that is also remarkable and became the 30th president. And then he famously went right back to bed, didn't he? Soon after, he was an economic man. He understood the importance of sleep. The next morning, he got up, visited his mother's grave, and took the train to Washington. He said, I think I can swing it, which is a wonderful line. I thought I could swing it. I can do this. Yes. This is an unfortunate aspect of the presidency sometimes where the vice president must step into someone who is deceased. It always opens up the chapter of how will this person behave once they become the president. Are they going to carry forth the agenda or become

their own sort of leader? How did the nation view Coolidge taking over from Harding? That is the key question, Don. Coolidge could have said, I will be a new man. I will change the cabinet. In fact, there were corrupt members of the cabinet. That's not what he said at the beginning. he said, I will execute on the agenda Harding and I had, where Harding started to perfection. He used that phrase. And it's interesting, what they were talking about was the 1920 Republican agenda, which was called Normacy. And Coolidge saw this like a relay race.

Unfortunately, Harding dropped the baton. Coolidge picked it up, and if he moved well, there'd be barely a break between the two men. And that was how it was. It was a form of discipline on the part of Coolidge and, frankly, a willingness to suppress vanity. It's not about me. It's about what we promised the voters in 1920. And that's unusual nowadays when presidents are all about personality, isn't it? That someone would say, this is about a document in 1920, not how I feel, how my wife feels.

We're going and we'll do what was promised for the people. Yeah. I'll give away the ending for me. I ended up after much of preparation here, really liking Calvin Coolidge. There's much to appreciate about this man, I must say. But when we talk about normalcy, that theme, it's important to put in context, we're coming out of World War I at this point. This has been an enormous, an abrupt departure for the United States from its usual ways. We're suddenly out there in the international world. The federal government has massively expanded to create this war effort. All kinds of kinds of things that Americans aren't traditionally used to. And that's what the Republicans are capitalizing on when they take power in 1920. Let's get back to normal, is their attitude. Well, yes, normalcy is kind of an unfortunate phrase. It comes from Warren Harding, and I don't know about you, but when I was in secondary school, I thought normalcy meant, be like a cog, be normal, which did not sound very attractive to me. That is not at all what Harding and Coolidge

meant, they meant establish a relatively stable environment so that we can do quirky, creative things, including business. That's a wonderful proposition, and that's what they sought. And if you look at their policy, it's all about that. So taxes were very high, well over 50 percent following World War I. The federal debt, the country kind of staggered under the federal debt. There were strikes, there was unrest, there was bombing, there was terrorism. How do you deal with all that? What Harding and Coolidge said is we'll make the economy, we'll make a relatively friendly environment for enterprise in the economy, which is not quite the same as pandering to business, will make a friendly environment for all players, and then business will take the lead and get us

past the war. And that was their wager. That was what they were trying to do at the beginning. So you get tax rates lower. They had all sorts of promises about basically staying out of the way and replacing an era of crisis with an era of common opportunity. Sure, yeah. It smacks of many such trends in American society kind of go back and forth like a rubber band in this regard. But there's also communism rising in Europe. Trade unions are taking power, you know, facing off against the industrialists here. All kinds of stuff is happening that we really need to understand.

and place Calvin Coolidge in the midst of. Let's back up to his origins, as we already mentioned, born in a rural town, not a rich guy, and not a rich family. Mother passes away when he's 12 years old. It's a farming family, but it's also in politics, which is a very unusual combination. Grandfather served in the Vermont House of Representatives and his dad, another John Calvin Coolidge, the senior, is in the General Assembly. So was this a bit of predestination that Calvin Coolidge would go into politics? Yes, I'd say so, which is interesting because he would. would pretend otherwise. But Plymouth, Vermont is the middle of nowhere, even today. It's beautiful nowhere, but it's hard to get to. But these people were not, so to speak, entirely provincial.

They came from pilgrims, people who came over the ocean to make a new world. And then they themselves were also pilgrims, pioneers, in the sense that they came from Boston to Plymouth following the Revolutionary War. And they saw themselves a bit as missionaries and pilgrims. that is if young Calvin goes to boarding school a whole 10 miles away in Ludlow, Vermont, well, he's pilgriming over there to learn. And then when he goes down to college at Amherst, Massachusetts, well, he's going to learn about the big world, but also do some work on all our behalf. And one thing, if you ever read Coolidge's letters to his father, which I entirely recommend, the book is called Your Son Calvin Coolidge. They're preserved in that book.

Coolidge, even, you know, well into manhood would have write his father, my wife needs a coat or I need money. And when I first read that, I thought, what a whiner, you know, what a young man. He's constantly, then I realized his family saw him as their emissary or missionary or ambassador. You could pick your term. And father hadn't gone down to Massachusetts and tried to set up a law practice, but he was proud of Calvin and they were one unit, his father and he. It was one of those families.

The communication between father and son was constant, like a wire, an invisible wire. You could feel very close. And of course, Coolidge eventually earned enough money that he didn't have to ask for anymore. But they all knew that politics were a financial sacrifice, and the family were willing to support that well into Coolidge's manhood. So I think Coolidge did think he stood for some ideals, which his family prized, and that he would do his very best at any stage to represent those ideals.

It didn't change much either throughout the long course of his career because after graduating from Amherst, he read law, he learned the law by reading and clerking. And then he pretty quickly went into Ward Politics in Northampton, Massachusetts, the county seat and went all the way up, mayor, state rep, to eventually governor, always working in politics and always with his father behind him. At some point he even starts to tell his father how politics works. You know, that flip father's son. And that's always enjoyable. He told his father, it's better to kill a bad law than pass a good one when his father happened to be going up to Montpelier, capital of Vermont, as the lawmaker later in life.

It's his time at Amherst, really, that first flies in the face of his historical reputation. He was a very popular class leader, a very good orator, considered to have a very good sense of humor. And then as you say, he goes. goes to Northampton, which is one of my favorite towns in the country, as a matter of fact, where he really becomes an institution unto himself. He works his way through the whole system, which speaks to how electable the guy really was. He starts as the city lawyer and then eventually becomes mayor. Two years later, he's in the Massachusetts Senate. We're talking about 1910 to 1916, runs for governor and wins in 1918. I mean, boy, what a what a rocket ship this guy was in terms of work in the system. And no one how to get himself elected.

Well, he understood about service. He said, I want your vote, I need your vote, I'll appreciate your vote. But he wasn't corrupt. In fact, he was so terrified of being corrupt that he didn't want to take out a mortgage because then he would have the bank, right? I see, yes. Someone would own him. Someone would own him.

Oh, no. I think another factor, if you look at the coolidge is they have little amounts of money, little piles, little sums, and a number of banks, these deposits. and that was partly a function of the absence of deposit insurance in their era. They didn't want to risk too much on one bank, but it was also their political savvy. But I think his service was marked by an absence of corruption. He just wanted to do a good job where he could. And he didn't make promises he couldn't keep.

I don't want to get ahead of us. But when he becomes president, he doesn't think he's president of Massachusetts or Vermont. And we can talk about that later. He's president of the whole nation. So he viewed serving Massachusetts and Vermont too much as evidence of poor presidency. The president's serve works for everyone. You can't do for your own what you don't do for the rest of Americans with some consequences. I think he was quite consistent about that. Another theme we hear a lot of these days. He's very much in the mode, as a matter of fact, of that Massachusetts progressive Republican governor. Even today, we hear a lot of. lot about these guys. However, when the Republicans return to power at the close of World War I, he gets attention for suppressing a labor strike in Boston. This is a big event in his political career. He calls out the National Guard. Can you explain this choice that he made and why people paid so much attention to it? Yes. The Republican Party were the Progressive Party,

remember, in that period. So he, as the lawmaker, he supported many progressive laws, even, you know, antitrust against theaters. The big amendments that passed to our Constitution nationally changes in Vermont that are regarded as progressive. But over time, he became a little skeptical about the volume of progressive shift. He said, well, there are too many new laws give administration a chance to catch up with legislation. He didn't like the prescriptive, detailed aspect of all the new laws. whether give men some faith, you don't have to write everything down. That's a very old tradition he's leaning on sort of common law.

We don't need to write every single thing down and make a regulation about it. What happened in 1919 when he was a new governor, say a freshman governor, was that it wasn't just a union that went on strike. It was a public sector union. Public sector unions are different from private sector unions. And there are different reasons for supporting them or being more skeptical about them. What he saw was that there was a conflict between public service, which is what public workers render, and public sector unionism.

And it was a very compelling story because it was the policemen of Boston who happened to be the union who went on strike. In an era when public sector unions were becoming common, where there were strikes and general strikes in cities such as Seattle. and the policemen had every reason to complain. They were underpaid. There was inflation. There were rats in the station houses, chewing on their helmets.

They were asked to work too much. They had to share their cots in seriatim in different shifts with other policemen. And so they went on strike. The problem was their contract said no strike. So what do you do then? And by the way, everyone knew that when they struck, this is just after the war, tumultuous time, the middle, by the way, of a pandemic, in that case, the influenza, everyone knew there would be violence if the police went on strike.

They did, and Coolidge backed up the police commissioner in firing the men for violating their contract. He said a line that reverberated across the land, there's no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time. There are limits to striking, and that's the problem with unions in the public sector sphere. This sort of foreshadows Ronald Reagan's decision about the air traffic controllers, Pat Co. Always a difficult decision. And by the way, these policemen were Coolidge constituents. There was a whole dissertation written about how immigrants voted for Coolidge.

These policemen were Irish Americans, and they liked Coolidge. So they expected him to back them up. And he wrote his family kind of miserably. I'm not sure I'm going to win the next election, but this was the right thing to do. In fact, President Wilson backed Coolidge up because Wilson, too, had his doubts about vast strikes by public sector unions in the United States and mayhem. And Coolidge instead became popular for this decision, though not sadly with the policeman. He wrote later, without a doubt, it was my move on the Boston police as bitter as it was.

that put me on the national stage. There is a switch in the Republican Party from that progressive identity to a more pro-business stance or known for that. Is it fair to hang that hat on Calvin Coolidge? Absolutely. I would just quarrel with the term pro-business because there's one kind of pro-business, which is you go out with a company and give it a sweetheart deal. There's another kind of pro-business, which is more anonymous and I'd say more virtuous

and Coolidge was quite explicit about this, make conditions for all businesses better, not particular businesses who might have been campaign contributors or something like that. The Republicans were not entirely consistent on this because they favored the tariff, which naturally favors not only certain industries, but eventually certain firms.

But otherwise, on domestic policy, the goal of Harding and Coolidge was to make the environment fairer or freer for business. which is not the same as teaming up with some charismatic person from a big company. You know, it's very, very different. So the drive of Harding and then Coolidge was only pro-business in the sense that it wanted to make the environment-friendly or for business, not pro-business in the corrupt or crony sense, the domestic drive. And he was painfully aware of this because there was very famous stuff that happened during Harding's, his predecessor.

term in this regard that was even playing out while he took them the presidency, right? Absolutely. And that was very good of you to get at that in your preceding showdown. So if you go out and tell everyone you want the free market and you want to privatize government assets, which is what Harding did, then when you privatize, you better do it fairly, right? You don't want to create an object lesson in why the private sector is worse than the public sector. If you're trying to praise the private sector, yet harding employees, particularly the cabinet member Dardy, and then also the director of the veteran affairs, who is named Charles Forbes on your last show, those people were corrupt. They gave sweetheart contracts in Forbes's orbit. There were kickbacks taken for hospitals built for veterans.

I believe Forbes ended up in Leavenworth Prison. Well, that's nasty. It also besmirches the value of privatization that you're seeking to advance. It builds the case for more public sector work, doesn't it? It's the opposite of what the Republican Party sought. That was the damage of the name of the Harding scandal was Tepot Dome, and the veteran scandals was that they proved in some narrow way the risks of privatizing rather than the merits. Uh-oh.

You know, not good. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. The Harding election that he's on the ticket of is also a referendum on the Treaty of Versailles, basically. Americans are dying to leave World War I behind and Europe, for that matter. It's really a matter of an isolationist movement that's going on here for every good reason. Well, it's a retreat. I mean, it's specifically more in the League and the League of Nations. Well, we might lose some sovereignty if we go in this league with these people.

we don't particularly know about, Clemelsso, you know, from France, Lloyd George, or various English leaders. Well, we're not quite so sure, even though we were sure we wanted to, most of us, that we want to intervene in Europe during the war. Well, do we want to be surrendering sovereignty of the United States in this period? It's important to note that Coolidge, for example, did support some international groups, some international treaties that he, backed his secretary of state, Kellogg and the Kellogg-Bri-on pact outlawing war. That's roundly mocked in graduate students' classes today, but I think that's up for revision, too, the pact to end war, the Kellogg-Bri-on.

And that was a Coolidge adventure. He said, does this really damage our sovereignty? No, it doesn't. Okay, I'm for it. Coolidge had a streak of Woodrow Wilson in him, I will say, the Protestant minister. and there's more to compare than the textbooks would suggest, more similarities between Woodrow and Calvin. The Silent Cow reputation, how true was that? I mean, I mentioned before.

He has a great sense of humor. I mean, very kind of my style of a sense of humor for better or worse, very droll, well-liked with the colleagues in press, also very aware of media, as was Harding. I mean, that's kind of what's going on here. He's got a whole sort of modernist view of the presidency. Yeah, I mean, you know, you say he was a very shy president. Well, President Obama was a very shy president. There's no such thing as a truly shy president. Otherwise, they wouldn't get to president. It's just impossible not to work with men and women in order to get to this level of power in the United States. I would say Coolidge was an introvert, as many presidents are, but not shy when he needed to be. bold or when he needed to speak up as in the Boston police strike, not a shy move, not a compromising move. He didn't like to talk a lot. That was more out of political savvy. You don't have

to deliver what you don't promise. And he was in cutting mode as president and also, by the way, as governor. So the more you talk with someone, the more likely you are to say yes to that person. Everyone knows that. So he would cut short his audiences. But there is a theater to Coolidge. Mrs. Coolidge played the extrovert. She was an extrovert. She was a teacher of the death.

She was lovely. And he played Silent Cow. It was their show, but mostly only that. In press conferences, Coolidge spoke quite a bit. And if you go to the Coolidge Foundation website, we digitize the press conferences. He yammers on. Sometimes it's a bit like a Fed chairman. And he's yet talking, but not saying too much.

But because he doesn't want to get in trouble or overstep, but he talked all the time. These press conferences were weekly, sometimes more. He gave plenty of speeches. And the speeches became his principal work as the presidency went on because he wanted to explain and shore up his legacy of restrained government. He makes the decision to run for president himself. but in June of that summer, 1924, a defining personal tragedy occurs right on the White House grounds involving his son, Calvin Coolidge, Jr. Can you explain this event and how it affected him?

It was the death of his son, Calvin Jr. It was kind of unexpected, totally unexpected, in fact. And one week, this 16-year-old is playing tennis and the next week he dies. This is the tragedy of life before antibiotics. an infection when we can be death the next, and we can only imagine it. We antibiotic era people. Calvin got a blister playing tennis. He was about 16, and the boy didn't complain about it. It went septic throughout his system, and he died. So the Coolidge's just didn't expect this. And Calvin Jr. was also the happier of the two sons of the Coolidge's, the luck child, the one who

understood politics better. Young Calvin wrote a poem, an ironic poem, about success and the hypocrisy of people's praise when one is in the public eye that's in some articles I've written. He was a very perceptive young man. He's the one who understood his father, I think, better. Very young age, right? These were boys. His brother was only a bit older, just getting ready to start at Amherst, and he was gone. So the Coolidge is real. and this was also an election year, 1924. In fact, I think all Americans were sympathetic. When word of the death of Calvin Jr.

came to the Democratic National Convention, which was a rowdy, difficult event with many, many ballots, much unhappiness, the Ku Klux Klan, his fights, all of a sudden, when that word came, the whole hall that was the old Madison Square, Garden fell silent. And the New York Times wrote of the moment, their troubles are the presidents, but his troubles are also theirs, are the publics, and that the public showed that by their respect

at the moment of this awful news. So it was a moment of the country coming together when the Democratic National Convention stopped to honor the president and mourn Calvin Jr. That was quite stunning. And I tried to capture that in my biography of Coolidge. After he's elected of his own accord in 1924, he continues an agenda of deregulation in low taxes, which we're now in the midst of what we call now the roaring 20s. What was that era really about and how much is Coolidge responsible for that kind of prosperity? Well, I would say the 1920 platform is quite responsible. So Coolidge is executor, ambassador, you know, enforcer of it is quite responsible. If you go back to the 20s, I think the standard American second. school student and maybe in the UK as well, their image of the 20s has to do with

troubles in Britain, which is going a different way. And Great Gatsby, right? It was all fake. Bad people were at the top, like the Buchanan's. The growth was a bubble in a champagne glass, not real. I mean, there are many streams in Gatsby, many threads because it's a beautiful book, but I think that's the takeaway. A lot of it was fake and somehow the bubble or the bubble pop. That wasn't the case at all. The 20s did roar. There was real growth that reached most Americans. The 20s were the decade when efficiency in the factory meant that for the same wage,

a worker could work five days, not six. So productivity gain is kind of a bland concept to offer people. But I think of it as the 20s were the decade that gave us Saturday. And that is a gift. That is Saturday off that anyone can understand. And that's when electricity came in the home. It's when indoor plumbing came in the home. And if you ever work and develop, you know the one marker, the difference between being

truly poor poverty and being working class wherever in the world is indoor plumbing. That's when it became the rule in the United States. Automobile brought a lot of joy into American life and a lot of progress into American commerce. So they were a good decade. I often wonder, sometimes I think non-U.S. writers import foreign angst and painted over the 20s. The 20s, even in the 20s, the Ku Klux Klan had a terrible flare-up, worse than that. And they marched in Washington. But by the end of the 20s, they were in decline. You can look at the number of lynching, in fact, which is a terrible number to contemplate in the historical statistics of the United States.

And you'll see lynching goes down in the later 20s as prosperity takes home. There were pockets of failure, farms suffered. Florida had a bubble. But by and large, the 20s were an era of progress that nearly every American felt. I think of the 20s myself, for some reason, as the birth of radio and all of that is really a major stake in the ground for American civilization, you know, in terms of the reach of the media empires that we build in the future. Coolidge is one feather in his cap, so to speak. was the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. We've done a past episode on that, which people should listen to. I hope Native of peoples are finally made eligible for U.S. citizenship reversing the exclusion of the 14th Amendment.

And this is signed into law by Calvin Coolidge. I imagine he took great pride in this. He did. And it's a little bit controversial. Think of Killers of the Flower Moon. Even at the time, some Native Americans said, well, they don't want to be citizens. They want sovereign nations, right? It's not in the direction of establishing reservations. It's in the direction of assimilation, at least in civil life. So people debate that, but I regard it as a wonderful thing to do for the president to be sure that anyone who is Native American is in the United States can vote. It's part of the progressive coolidge, or I would say the classically liberal cool, it's the same one that endorsed women's suffrage.

So there you are. But I know you're going to ask next about the Johnson-Reed Act, the immigration law, which came about the same time that law restricted and established new quotas for incomers. It favored Northern Europe proportional to the U.S. population, actually. And it's been criticized. I just want to point out that if you're for a pause in immigration, which is what Kulage was for, doesn't automatically make you a bigot. It might be you're just for a pause in immigration. One thing that's important to note about that law is Coolidge signed it, but he didn't have really much choice in terms of outcome because had he vetoed it, his veto would have been overridden. The law, the Johnson Mead Act passed by such overwhelming majorities in both houses. I think it was 69-9 in the Senate that the president didn't really have much say about what was happening. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. You've mentioned already, but I just really want to underscore this time in America, not Coolidge's doing at all. But in terms of the Ku Klux Klan, I mean, this is that famous picture of the thousands and thousands of costumed Ku Klux Klan marching up Pennsylvania Avenue. I mean, that's how extraordinary this peak was. Some four million members during this time. Did he write anything about this? Where did he come out later in life about the KKK? He gave a direct rebuttal to the American Legion. He didn't say, I'm going to talk now about the Ku Klux Klan marching, but he gave his speech where he said, and I'm paraphrasing, so forgive me, whether we came over three centuries

ago on the Mayflower, something like the Coolidge family, or three years ago in the steerage, here we're all in the same boat. That is, we're together. That's a pretty direct rebuttal to the sort of sorting and the bigotry that went on. We, here have to stick together and build our country. He also said, if all men are equal, that is final. That is, he wouldn't sit around and make divisions among groups. One of the things he did for African Americans, and I again find it very deliberate, small but significant, was he went to Howard U, the historically African American College in Washington, and he supported funding for the building of a medical school there.

But he wanted to support any effort by any population, but particularly African Americans, to professionalize. You don't do that if you don't expect people can do the work. He did. He favored night schools. One of our trustees is Kurt Schmoke, who leads a school at the University of Baltimore, has a good share of students who are older than 22.

That is, people have gone back to school who go back vocationally, who are very serious about building their career. That was Coolidge, too. His name was used briefly for a law school that was a night law school, not a fancy day law school, because Coolidge himself worked at night to learn the law in the library in Northampton. He believed in effort, and he was not a bigot. But it was his, I suppose it's fair to say that it was his focus on business and the deregiveness. and the deregulation of industry that would have taken his focus off of those social issues.

He did not see it as his purview, right? And was that the feeling of it? Well, not that he was narrow or narrowed himself, but that he believed that a prosperous economy would do more for any disadvantaged group than a social measure. That's the essential proposition. If you give, what's the best thing you can do for someone, you give him a job, not or allow a job to be created for him was by the market, not create a social program for him. He was fascinated with insurance because he saw the actuarial potential of insurance.

You could build an annuity for every American because by the math, the pool is large enough, right? If every American signs up for some kind of annuity, which would be the equivalent of Social Security, and pays in, well, there'll be enough money for everyone's annuity. He gave speeches about insurance for this reason because he saw Social Security coming. He said the man who takes an insurance policy makes the uncertain, less uncertain. So he thought a lot about helping people to deal with the great challenges of life, old age, poverty. But he had more traditional solutions. And our history books tend to joke about those.

Oh, before Social Security, the 1930s program, there was nothing. There was not nothing. Tocqueville's America, the America of the 20s even, was just a thick net of little programs. Sometimes, you know, the Italian men's burial society or sometimes through the church, sometimes through the town, the town charity hospital that were doing a not perfect, but a not dismissable job at providing social services. So you could debate with his straight face that having an economy strong enough to support yet more local charity was the answer for even industrialized cities.

We don't have that conversation anymore, but it wasn't a joke in the 20s. Let's talk about why he chooses not to run for a second term, his own second term. He's already been in power, understand the rest of Harding's time, but he could have run again in 1928, but he chooses not to. He said, if I take another term, I'd be in the White House until 1933. Ten years in Washington is too long. It's incredible. It spares him all the trauma of what happened.

I mean, he might have just had good instincts, right? The technical interpretation is that he had good instincts. He probably did because he understood that there were business cycles. He'd seen, I think, more than five crashes in his adulthood. And he knew that in a crash, it would be hard to stand up for less government. wouldn't it? But that I don't believe was the main motive. There's also a school that says, well, he was sick. He kind of had what we would call a version of emphysema. But the main motive, I believe, was restraint. In my book and in our Coolidge movie we have, we talk about Rushmore,

because he happened to go to Mount Rushmore in the summer of 27. That is the year before he would have run. There was Gutsenborgland, the sculptor, the Nietzschean, the Monumentally. building these giant busser presidents. Not sure. I think that kind of grossed Coolidge out, frankly, to see those big heads. But it also gave him an opportunity to focus on George Washington, which he was anyhow due to various anniversaries.

And I believe, though, it's not written anywhere. This is a biographer surmise that Washington influenced Coolidge. Washington's farewell address, Washington's own decision not to run again. But even before Washington, Washington isn't the only one to return to his vineyard in the history of the world rather than stay in power. Coolidge said it's a great safety to the country for the president to know he is not a great man. And he also said the country does better when we change up leadership from time to time. He thought it out and he thought, well, let someone else have a turn.

That's where that decision came from. I should make clear and I didn't really, Coolidge happened to be. in South Dakota when Rushmore got started. He was, had established the summer White House there. So he got a real opportunity to think about grandeur, but also service. He went up to meet with Borglam. And it was in South Dakota where he announced he would not run again. So let's talk about it. What do historians now say about how his policies may or may not led to circumstances that created the Great Depression or laid the groundwork for what happened? economic historians who study economics are more skeptical of that argument that Coolidge caused

a great depression. Economic historians who have a PhD in history aren't so economic, and they tend to favor the storyline that Coolidge not only caused a crash, but also caused the great depression. The crash was coming. I mean, the market went too high in the 20s. It went to 381, and it had been just a few short years before 100. So when that, you know, everyone wants to duck when you get that high. But the first way of unpacking that is to ask whether the crash of 29 caused a great depression. It didn't.

It was a crash. The market recovered 10, 20, 30, 40 percent in coming months. The depression itself is multi-causal. For every year, there's a different reason the depression kept going. But the reason it's great and not a depression, the Depression, the Great Depression was the duration. And what happened was first another Republican, Hoover, who had run on following Coolidge policy, didn't. Hoover was a progressive, three policies that were different by Hoover. One, he believed in pushing up labor prices in order on the theory

that people have money, spend money and get the economy going, what we would call Keynesianism. Coolidge did not push up wages. So Hoover, promoted a policy that did that, he exhorted employers to pay high in the Depression. Well, if you ask someone who's losing money to pay high, what does he do? He lays off more. That's an example. Hoover signed a big, smooth holly, a big tariff. That wasn't helpful either. I think Coolidge might have signed that because all Republicans were for tariffs, but maybe it, I mean, I don't want to speculate about that. What else did Hoover do? He raised taxes, very stressful. for business. There was even a tax on checks, which is very hard when you want markets to clear. You

don't want to throw what we say sand in the gears. And generally, Hoover blamed business, which you didn't even mean. He just thought it might be popular if he did, which isn't productive either. He blocked short selling, which sounds nice because short sales do bring the market down. But when you do that, you prevent the market from clearing and finding its own level, which if you follow markets, you know, allowing markets to clear can shorten, make worse, but also shorten the pain of a downturn. It's more like a snap than a prolonged set of years of trouble. So Hoover did all that. He was a constitutional progressive. And then came Franklin Roosevelt. It was a much bolder progressive and decided to go all the way into the economy and to announce

experimentation. It's important to understand that Roosevelt's policy were truly the mirror opposite of what Harding had proposed all those years ago in 20. Harding said no experimentation. If you go and look at his 21 inaugural, you'll see he says no experimenting. Let's go back to our proven system. Wow. And Roosevelt says bold, persistent experimentation is what we need. The absolute opposite.

And that is what Roosevelt did. So one of the things I try to get at in my forgotten. man book, which is about the 30s, is the cost of experimentation. Long after Coolidge and even Hoover, experimenting went on. And the economy doesn't like that. You know, recoveries are like people. You know, they can come back or they can elect to stay away. And the recovery took a look at the rate of experimentation under Roosevelt and said,

I'll sit this one out one more year each time. So that was the problem. I mean, you can go for volumes, what happened to, 37 and 36, but the real point about the Great Depression was the duration. And there's a good case to be made that that was caused largely by government intervention. It is fun to speculate, whether Coolidge would have handled that so much better than Hoover did. Yeah, and particularly, he was just cautious about intervening. The excitement of reform is seductive, right? Oh, Roosevelt comes along. He's going to reform everything. He's reassuring, and he was reassuring. And he was also a great war leader, a great admiral, Roosevelt. You don't have to hate Roosevelt to note the failure of his economic policy. I mean, all of us know, even the most convicted, I mean, convinced democratic family gets whispered, well, only the war brought the end to the Depression. Mother whispers to child, right? But why was that? And after the

the war, there was a great retrenchment. That is, the most dramatic laws of the New Deal were edited down quite seriously. I'm thinking here, the Wagner Act of 1935 being edited in the Taft-Hartley law that followed World War II. Or when President Truman wanted to nationalize a company, the Supreme Court said, sorry, you can't do that. So the most dramatic New Deal efforts were undone. Social security, which everyone agreed was kind of okay, useful, important. Sometimes a lifesaver was left in place. Okay. That's a good compromise for America. How did the world perceive our leader at that time? What was the international opinion of Calvin Coolidge? They didn't get him. I mean, he came up suddenly and there were other coolages, fancier coolages from Boston,

who were known quantities to, say, Henry Cabot Lodge, the very senior senator from the Bay State, and who is this other Coolidge? There's a comment from Lodge who was a real recognizable snob. He said, I didn't know Coolidge until it was necessary to know him, referring to Calvin. And I remember finding an amusing German article about the new vice presidential candidate. They had the wrong Coolidge. They had another Coolidge in mind because they couldn't imagine some of the U.S. Vice Presidential candidate they'd never heard of. was government new governor of mass. So first, they didn't know he was. Second, they didn't know how to take him. And third, Europe owed the United States so much money, the whole mess that were the

German obligations, that was the UK obligation. And there was Europe staggering under the debt, not clear how to generate growth in their economies that might begin to support the debt. Where the Europeans were correct about the wrongs of the U.S. That was the tariff because you can't ask someone to pay you back money and then impose a policy that makes it tougher for them to export. And that is what the Republicans did. That was a big ouch. U.S. hypocrites, right? That was the wart on the Republicans or the sin of the Republicans that should never be forgotten.

John Calvin Coolidge died on January 5, 1933, at only the age of 60, which is sad. He was buried where he was born in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. A life lived very successfully in politics, and when it was over, so was he. Final thoughts on the legacy of Calvin Coolidge, Amity? Just how lovely man never said a nasty thing in public. You just didn't see any utility in that. Always talk policy, not personality. So that's what we like about him at the Coolidge Foundation.

And we try to introduce young people to Coolidge, let them make up their own mind about who their favorite president is it's not just the man, it's the policy. And particularly his modesty is something so rare in politics today. I do believe somebody like that could be elected again. The radio hosts often tell us no. I do believe it's quite possible for the Coolidge to win again. We like people we like on the second and third impression, not just the first. Amity Schles is the chair of the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation and the author of a number of best-selling books, including Coolidge, a biography, and The Forgotten Man, a new history of the Great Depression. Amity, where can listeners find out more about Calvin Coolidge

and your work? Oh, check out our website, CoolidgeFoundation.org. I'm working on a book about the Gilded Age. I better do a good job. I'm particularly proud of a book on The Great Society, which took the new deal even farther, called Great Society, and I hope you take a look at it. Appreciate it. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode of American History Hit. Please remember to like, review, and subscribe. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts.

And I'll see you next time.