The idealism of the Wilson era was in the past; the Rooseveltian passion for humanitarian reform was in the future. The decade of the twenties was dull, bourgeois and ruthless. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Economy was his self-confessed obsession. None of this venom can be explained by the real-world results of the Coolidge Administration.
The federal budget shrank. The national debt was cut almost in half. Unemployment stood at 3. Consumer prices rose at just 0. During his term, there was a remarkable Total education spending in the United States rose fourfold. In the s, illiteracy fell nearly in half. This was a golden age, by any standard. There must be some other reason that Coolidge is controversial. He has not been forgotten — like Chester Arthur or Millard Fillmore — he has been actively vilified by certain historians.
He is attacked precisely because he is a figure who speaks beyond his time. Calvin Coolidge, known for his reticence, was actually the most articulate conservative who ever served as President. This is why he continues to be relevant. Coolidge was sometimes criticized for stating and restating the obvious. His points were not simply obvious, they were fundamental.
If all the folks in the United States would do the few simple things they know they ought to do, most of our big problems would take care of themselves. Our nation is constantly in search of new ideas and new solutions. It is desperate for answers and obsessed with innovation. He urged his fellow citizens to examine the basics of their beliefs. He called their attention to the proven principles of our political tradition. This is the reason his views, opinions, and advice seem so current.
Those who call attention to the permanent things are always fresh. The s would be wise to listen to this voice from the s, speaking about principles that never age. Coolidge talked honestly about the nature of wealth and of individual responsibility. The normal must take care of themselves. Self-government means self-support…. Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing….
History reveals no civilized people among whom there was not a highly educated class and large aggregations of wealth. Large profits mean large payrolls. The only way that we can all secure more of it is to create more.
Coolidge also saw that there is a tie between wealth, individual character, and social progress. In all experience, 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 liberty, the widening of culture.
Coolidge spoke to a society struggling under the weight of federal debt. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the government.
Every dollar we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical form. No system has been devised, I do not think any system could be devised, under which any person living in this country could escape being affected by the cost of our government.
It has a direct effect both upon the rate and the purchasing power of wages. It is felt in the price of those prime necessities of existence, food, clothing, fuel and shelter…the continuing costs of public administration can be met in only one way — by the work of the people. The higher they become, the more the people must work for the government. The less they are, the more the people can work for themselves.
In some ways, President Coolidge was a supply-sider before his time. He understood that high tax rates do not always mean higher tax revenues. Woodrow Wilson fills the bill nicely, and in fact Blum is one of the leading historians of the Progressive Era, who has written fulsomely of Wilson, as have the others. The scholar-president had a flurry of legislation in his first term and the Great Crusade of World War I in the second. He was a shattered hero in the view of the New Deal School, whose dreams for peace and justice were smashed, but fortunately were revived by the man who served him as assistant secretary of the navy, FDR.
Indeed, the policies he advocated and put into place bore more resemblance to the early New Deal than the Harding-Coolidge years. The negative images of Coolidge, as a tool of business, appeared in the late s but more important, after World War II. It was not in biographies and most scholarly articles, but rather in textbooks and works dealing with the New Deal. Landon was honest, decent, and colorless. Roosevelt won in a landslide. However, these negative views of Coolidge are not confined to the New Deal historians, but rather pervade the discipline.
One might wonder why this is so. To appreciate it, a brief exploration of the training of historians is needed. Professional historians rarely are generalists. One makes a reputation in the field through specialization, writing books and articles on a narrow band of subjects in which the historian, if fortunate, intelligent, and capable, becomes known as an authority. The area of business I concentrate on is financial history. Narrow it further. The history of financial markets?
All financial markets? No, only American, and in the 20th century at that. Now ask yourself, how worthwhile is my opinion on the New England colonies in the 17th century? On the history of the Spanish missions? On the Indian Wars? On American foreign policy toward Australia at the turn of the century? You get the idea. I may know how to obtain information, synthesize it, and at times may have some worthwhile things to say on these subjects. But everything? Of course not.
So a colonial historian setting out to write a high school text will quote Coolidge as having said something about business, without bothering to go much further.
Everyone knows that he did. No wonder Coolidge receives the reputation of being a tool of big business. These historians are usually not malicious or mendacious. They simply do not know any better than to rely upon the experts—like Schlesinger, Leuchtenburg, and Blum.
Part II. New York is an imperial city, but it is not a seat of government. The empire over which it rules is not political but commercial. The great cities of the ancient world were the seats of both government and industrial power. The Middle Ages furnished a few exceptions. The great capitals of former times were not only seats of government but they actually governed.
In the modern world government is inclined to be merely a tenant of the city. Political life and industrial life flow side by side, but practically separated from each other.
When we contemplate the enormous power, autocratic and uncontrolled, which would have been created by joining the authority of government with the influence of business, we can better appreciate the wisdom of the fathers in their wise dispensation which made Washington the political center of the country and left New York to develop into its business center. They wrought mightily for freedom. To Coolidge, the wedding of government and business would lead to socialism, communism, or fascism, and certainly alter the nature of American life.
It was a common enough thought at the time, shared by moderate Democrats and Republicans alike. Herbert Hoover certainly believed this. Coolidge initially opposed aid for those who suffered as a result of the Mississippi flood of In those texts that deal with the flood this attitude often was attributed to an indifference to suffering. It might be instructive to go to the reasons he offered at the time. It almost seems to me as though the protection of the people and the property in the lower Mississippi that need protection has been somewhat lost sight of and it has become a scramble to take care of the railroads and the banks and the individuals that might have invested in levee bonds, and the great lumber concerns that own many thousands of acres in that locality, with wonderful prospects for contractors.
In this way, Coolidge indicated that a prime reason he opposed the measure was not that he wanted to withhold assistance from individuals, but from business interests that would profit from such aid. Of course, presidents and other politicians have been friendly to those interests which supported them financially or in other ways. How may one explain this? President Clinton is opposed to limiting legal fees in class actions and is strongly opposed to the voucher system in education, perhaps reflecting the major financial support he received from legal and public education lobbyists.
But is this really the way this situation came about? In other words, the tobacco, legal, and public education people backed them because they felt their professed policies served the interests of their constituencies.
This is a more likely possibility. It is also likely that businessmen during the s applauded Coolidge because they felt his approach was good for them, and for the rest of the country as well. Too often historians assume the former rather than the latter.
For example, in , trustbuster Theodore Roosevelt ran against Alton Parker, the most conservative Democrat nominated since the Civil War.
Business, led by J. Morgan and E. Harriman, contributed heavily to the Roosevelt campaign. Because they feared Socialist Eugene V. The writer then proceeded to quote from stories around the country, most of them in newspapers that were Republican and in which that theme appeared. His father was a public official and farmer, but the son became a lawyer, showing his independence by setting up his own law firm by the age of One commentator has argued that it was the Vermont background that in part made him so taciturn.
According to this analysis, the state has extremes of climate with cold evenings in autumn and spring that make socializing difficult. Coolidge, however, took silence to extremes. Beneath the silence, however, there could be steely determination. He successfully wooed a vivacious girl whom many thought above him; many more would wonder how she put up with him over the years, although his private life was kept intensely private and they appear to have loved each other devotedly.
Coolidge rose gradually but unspectacularly up the political ladder until he became Governor of Massachusetts. Here he came to national attention by his stern handling of a police strike where he fired the strikers and brought in the State Guard to maintain order.
The means by which Coolidge learned of his elevation to the presidency set the tone for his administration. A messenger delivered the news. His father, as a local notary, swore him in by the light of a kerosene lamp; he may have got the words of the oath wrong. This was a very nineteenth-century scene and Coolidge effectively operated a nineteenth-century presidency. His view of administration was that it should avoid harm rather than promote good. It was the job of the president to enforce the law as it stood not to change it.
He never did what someone else could have done instead. He attempted to control Congress by holding working breakfasts but his silence made them self-defeating.
They never knew whether he had listened or not, although perhaps months later they might recognise their suggestions in something he said or did as president. Perhaps H. He once said that if ten troubles came along the road towards him, nine would fall into the ditch before they neared him. There was initially much scepticism among his fellow politicians as to his ability to run the office of president,and - noting his reluctance to do anything but uphold the law - many felt he would be better sitting on the Supreme Court.
The USA did appear very prosperous, and while Coolidge could take no credit for this, the reputation of all leaders is enhanced when their country appears to be doing well. Coolidge spoke in his inaugural address of problems such as lynching, child labour and low wages for women.
Yet he did nothing to overcome any of these issues. His government saw successive tax reductions and yet a surplus of revenue.
The result was cutbacks in government agencies, with fewer investigators to research unfair practices and less money for government departments to do their work.
0コメント