Lynn Parramore makes some accusations and allegations in re Coolidge, Wisconsin, and unions on Huffington Post and Salon:
Lynn Parramore writes: “Amity Shlaes, ever the eager revisionist, has whipped up a widely parroted narrative that contains just enough truth to give it the ring of plausibility. It goes like this: Governor Scott Walker is a paragon of virtue who will soon be embraced by the American public, just like his union-crushing predecessors Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan.”
What I said was that responding firmly to public-sector union excesses was good for the popularity of both Reagan and Coolidge, and might also be for Walker. That’s because public-sector unions’ disruption of every day life is unpopular. In Coolidge’s case the issue was the Boston police, who walked off the job in violation of contract, triggering riots in Boston. Coolidge’s response was to back up his police commissioner. The policemen were fired and Coolidge declared: “there is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” This bold statement attracted notice across the country.
Lynn Parramore writes: “It was not exactly popular enthusiasm that wafted Coolidge into the White House. Actually, there was a huge orchestrated effort to push Coolidge by powerful financial interests.”
Coolidge’s action against public sector unions did win support from the Grand Old Party’s donor base. And that support did help his nomination to the vice-presidential slot. However this was not unusual. In those days party big wigs in both parties played a large role in selecting candidates. Popular enthusiasm was there. Otherwise, Coolidge would not have trounced a gubernatorial opponent in Massachusetts within months of the strike. Even President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, congratulated Coolidge, as David Pietrusza notes, writing in a telegram: “I congratulate you upon your election as a victory for law and order. When that is the issue all Americans must stand together.”
Coolidge became president because Harding died in office. But he had a chance to test popular enthusiasm in the election of 1924. In this election Coolidge won an absolute majority, notwithstanding the fact that it was a three party election.
Coolidge’s position on the police union strike made sense to the nation. There was much popular enthusiasm in that period for stopping unions that disrupted life in cities, and much support for those who dared do it. Earlier in 1919 the reforming mayor of Seattle, Ole Hanson, confronted a general strike. Hanson was hardly a reactionary caricature. The child of immigrants and self-styled progressive who had campaigned for the state legislature in earlier days on the eight-hour day for women and miners. Hanson’s response to the strikers was as vehement as Coolidge’s: “our attempted revolution in Seattle was brought about by alien agitators and criminal labor leaders who, drunk with power, believed they could start a flare here which would sweep over the country.” Hanson also blamed “the influx of antagonistic aliens.” Next to Hanson, Coolidge sounded moderate.
Lynn Parramore writes: “Coolidge’s real legacy was a huge upward shift of income during the ‘roaring twenties’ away from ordinary people to the rich and powerful, who got even richer and more powerful thanks to his regulatory and policy inactivity.”
This suggests that the 1920s were bad for workers. Union membership fell in the 1920s in part because real wages rose. Real average earnings for weekly skilled and semiskilled workers climbed to $32.60 a week in 1929 from $26.19 in 1921, the year Coolidge came to Washington. After the initial recession of the early 1920s, unemployment was below five percent, a level we envy today. By the end of the 1920s, the wealthy may have been wealthier, but, thanks in good measure to Coolidge’s tax reform, they paid a greater share of the income tax than under Democrats.
It’s possible to hang some of the blame for the market crash of 1929 on President Coolidge, just as it is possible to hang some of the blame for the dotcom crash of the turn of the millennium on President Bill Clinton. There are two areas where the economy was in trouble in that period: farms and banks were both fragile.
But it is hard to find evidence the 1920s were overall a bad decade. Lynn Parramore cites Murray Rothbard, a prominent member of the Austrian School of Economics. In fact, Austrians are the only others to trash the decade to the extent that she does. Austrians view recessions and steep unemployment as necessary reallocations to be borne stoically. This is probably not the view of Lynn Parramore or the sponsors of New Deal 2.0.
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