Silent Cal

George H. Nash is best known as the biographer of modern conservatism, and second best as the biographer of Herbert Hoover. His new book, Reappraising the Right, also includes some timely material on Silent Cal.  Traditional history classes Coolidge and Hoover together, as “righties.” But that is indeed cartoon. Their conservatism and their personalities differed severely. SilentCal.com e-interviewed Nash on this pair of hereditary Republicans:
1.  SilentCal.com: What would you say is the greatest difference between the men?

George H. Nash: Coolidge was a classically conservative Republican, Hoover in the 1920s a self-styled progressive Republican who had been a bull moose supporter of Theodore Roosevelt. In domestic affairs, President Coolidge was an instinctive noninterventionist, Hoover an instinctive interventionist in the sense of wanting to “do something” to improve the world. Yet Hoover, for all his activism, was also an anti-socialist and (later) an ardent anti-New Dealer. Hoover’s political philosophy was an idiosyncratic blend of anti-statism and progressivism, a fact which kept him closer (over the long haul) to Coolidge than to Franklin Roosevelt. Coolidge and Hoover, after all, were – and remained – Republicans.

2. SC: Tell us about the philosophies at work in Hoover’s mind as he put together the dam on the Colorado River: How would Coolidge have built a Hoover Dam, or would he have built it at all?

GHN: Before entering public life Hoover had been a distinguished mining engineer – and engineers, by training and temperament, like to alter their environment. In the 1920s he developed and promoted a vision for national development of water resources (the energy issue of the day). He was a prime mover in the St. Lawrence Seaway project and Colorado River project, for example. All this entailed more governmental action and expenditure than Coolidge seemed to desire, but Hoover emphatically did not want public ownership or marketing of electric power (like the later TVA). Once again Hoover appears on the spectrum between Coolidge and Franklin Roosevelt – and ultimately closer to Coolidge. I doubt that Coolidge would have taken much initiative in this area on his own. But he did approve legislation for construction of the Coolidge Dam in Arizona, which Congress authorized in 1924.
3. SC: You point out the distinction between Coolidge and Hoover. Coolidge wanted to “prevent harm” Hoover wanted to “do good.” Which desire predominates on the G.O.P. of today?

GHN: At the moment (January 2010), clearly the former. As Scott Brown’s sensational election to the U.S. Senate attests, Republicans of all persuasions, along with many independents, have united in opposition to the perceived leftward lurch of the Obama Administration. Historically the Republican Party has been divided philosophically between progressives (or “moderates”) and conservatives – a fault line that goes back to 1910 and even earlier. One thing that holds the two factions together today is opposition to the imperious, leftist, overreach of the social democratic heirs of the New Deal and Great Society liberalism.

4. SC: Handling criticism is a big part of being president. You describe their methodologies as different, as outlined in this conversation.

“Do you mean to say,” Coolidge replied, “that a man who has been in public life as long as you have bothers about attacks in the newspapers?” “Don’t you?” Hoover retorted, citing a savage critique of Coolidge in a recent issue of the American Mercury. “You mean that one in the magazine with the green cover?” Coolidge answered; “I started to read it, but it was against me, so I didn’t finish it.” Imbued with an “emotional need to take things easy,” Coolidge, wherever possible, tried to avert stress and risk. Hoover, in his own words, had a “naturally combative disposition” and an eagerness to take command.*

Which do you think had the better method?

GHN: For presidential peace of mind, probably Coolidge. Ronald Reagan seems to have been similarly impervious to harsh criticism. But Coolidge and Reagan were rarities. From my research and observation it appears that very few of our political leaders have been as thick-skinned as they sometimes professed to be. A sizzling book could probably be written about revenge as a motive in presidential decision-making.

5. SC: Herbert Hoover’s archive in West Branch, Iowa and at the Hoover Institution on the one hand and Calvin Coolidge’s in Plymouth Notch or Northampton’s Forbes Library on the other form a contrast. Herbert Hoover’s archives are copious, humidity conditioned, and full of staff. Calvin Coolidge’s looks like a poor cousin. How did that come about? After all, Hoover was president for a shorter period than Coolidge.

GHN: From George Washington to Calvin Coolidge, most presidential papers have ended up in the Library of Congress. In the late 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt broke with this pattern by creating a separate library for his own papers; it was constructed on his estate in Hyde Park, New York, and opened in 1941. He donated the new structure and his papers to the federal government. Building on Roosevelt’s precedent, in 1955 the U.S. Congress formally created the Presidential Library system. Since then every former president has erected a presidential library, and today all of them are administered by the National Archives and supported by federal funds.

Meanwhile Herbert Hoover, who had placed his own papers in his Hoover Institution at Stanford University, decided in 1960 to divide his papers and deposit a portion of them in a Hoover Presidential Library built near his birthplace in Iowa. This library, too, is part of the federal system.

So every president after Coolidge has come to have a distinct presidential library owned by the federal government and sustained by taxpayer money. Several years ago, the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Room at the Forbes Library in Northampton, which holds some of Coolidge’s original papers as well as microfilm copies of the Coolidge Collection in the Library of Congress, was renamed the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum. But it is not a part of the National Archives system and receives no federal funds.