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President Coolidge, Mrs. Coolidge and Senate Majority Leader Charles Curtis on the way to the Capitol. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Today marks the 85th anniversary of Calvin Coolidge’s one and only inaugural address. Silent Cal had been president since 1923, assuming the office when Warren Harding died. But he won the job in his own right during the 1924 election, and his March 4 inauguration gave him a chance lay out his big argument for small government.
In his inaugural address — the first to be broadcast nationally on radio — Coolidge made some of the most famous (or perhaps notorious) statements of his political career. For instance, he offered a ringing indictment of excess taxation. “The collection of any taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny,” he declared.
Strong stuff, that. In fact, the vehemence of Silent Cal’s rhetoric brings to mind some of the intemperate talk we hear from modern day Tea Partiers. Legalized larceny? Sounds a lot like tyranny to me.
But Coolidge was not, by nature or philosophy, an intemperate man. Nor was he an anti-government zealot — he was committed, for instance, to big government notions of law and order. He also displayed, especially while governor of Massachusetts, a certain amount of sympathy for progressive causes, including women’s rights and organized labor. (His crushing of the 1919 Boston Police Strike notwithstanding).
But taxes brought out some of Coolidge’s most impassioned rhetoric. He believed deeply, for instance, that property rights were crucial to political liberty. “Under this republic,” he declared, “the rewards of industry belong to those who earn them. The only constitutional tax is the tax which ministers to public necessity. The property of the country belongs to the people of the country. Their title is absolute.”
Coolidge urged lawmakers to move ahead with sweeping tax reduction. The nation had effectively demanded it, he argued, by giving Republicans control of both Congress and the White House. As the GOP moved ahead with its well-established program of economy, the party had a moral responsibility to put tax cuts front and center.
The time is arriving when we can have further tax reduction, when, unless we wish to hamper the people in their right to earn a living, we must have tax reform. The method of raising revenue ought not to impede the transaction of business; it ought to encourage it. I am opposed to extremely high rates, because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, finally, because they are wrong. We can not finance the country, we can not improve social conditions, through any system of injustice, even if we attempt to inflict it upon the rich. Those who suffer the most harm will be the poor. This country believes in prosperity. It is absurd to suppose that it is envious of those who are already prosperous. The wise and correct course to follow in taxation and all other economic legislation is not to destroy those who have already secured success but to create conditions under which every one will have a better chance to be successful. The verdict of the country has been given on this question. That verdict stands. We shall do well to heed it.
- Published by Joe Thorndike in: Uncategorized
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6 Responses to “Calvin Coolidge, Tea Partier?”
Not so fast. It seems to me that the only way that you can successfully present Coolidge as the implacable foe of excessive taxation is to hold that a tariff is not a tax. Nearly every historian and economist who’s written about the Great Depression condemns the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, the highest in American history, as boneheaded protectionism harmful to recovery. However, the Fordney-McCumber tarriff of 1922, was nearly as high; the average ad valorem rate of Smoot-Hawley was 41.14, that of Fordney-McCumber 38.48. As the historian Harris Warren has written, the Fordney-McCumber rates were “already…high enough to cause a depression if a tariff can have such a result.”(1) Coolidge ardently supported and enforced Fordney-McCumber. To equalize production costs between the United States and foreign countries, section 315 of the act empowered the president to raise or lower rates by up to 50 percent. Using this authority, Coolidge raised rates on 33 items and lowered them on only 5: millfeeds, live quail, paintbrush handles, cresylic acid and phenol. “One suspects,” writes Robert Ferrell, “that the president’s puckish sense of humor had a hand in choosing the items for reduction.”(2)
(1) Harris Warren, HERBERT HOOVER AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION (New York: Oxford, 1959), p. 84.
(2) Robert H. Ferrell, THE PRESIDENCY OF CALVIN COOLIDGE (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), p. 70.
Thanks for a very nice post and a valid point. A couple of quibbles in response.
You write: “it seems to me that the only way that you can successfully present Coolidge as the implacable foe of excessive taxation is to hold that a tariff is not a tax.”
Actually, I hadn’t intended to present Coolidge in this post as much of anything — just wanted to spotlight some of his most famous comments on taxation at an opportune anniversary moment.
That being said, the fact that tariffs are, in fact, taxes is not lost on me. Take a look at a long-ago post on my other, now moribund blog: http://blog.thorndike.com/?p=6
But while tariffs are certainly taxes in an economic sense, they have long had a separate political identity. To be sure, tariff duties were a driving force behind adoption of the income tax, not to mention a range of subsequent tax debates, including some during the 1920s.
Still, I think policymakers of the era sincerely believed that an argument about tariffs was not the same as an argument about internal taxes — even if the one directly affected the other. Tariffs served a revenue function (indeed, pretty much THE revenue function for most of the nation’s first century). But they also served a variety of other ends, including industrial protection, trade regulation, etc.
All of which you know. My only point, really, is that Coolidge might reasonably have believed that being FOR high tariffs and AGAINST high taxes was entirely consistent. Especially if the yardstick of good policy was not distribution of the revenue burden (in which case tariffs were bad) but promotion of domestic industry (in which case they — and lower taxes — were good).
Coolidge was wrong about all this (since high tariffs were, as you note, a drag on the economy). But that doesn’t mean he was a hypocrite.
Which may not have been your implication in the first place. In which case I apologize for the misplaced defense of Coolidge’s integrity.
I think there’s a scene in one of S.N. Behrman’s plays from the 1930s where a character asks, “What did we all worry about before communism came along?” “The tariff, my dear, the tariff,” comes the reply. It’s amazing how much attention and passion used to be devoted to the issue.
I’m sure you’re absolutely correct about Coolidge not finding it contradictory to lower taxes and raise tariffs. After all, a belief in high tariffs got pretty close to the core of being a Republican in those days. But low, or lower, tariffs were of importance to Democrats and, as it happened, in 1924 the question was the principal, maybe only, issue to separate Coolidge from his Democratic opponent, John W. Davis.
Cheers, I see all your posts, keep them coming.
these are interesting points, but the ideological views of the tariff/trade issue has changed greatly. Back then liberals and progressives wanted low tariffs to break up monopolies and lessen the power of big business. to make up for the loss of revenue they supported a graduated income tax. The issue has changed b/c big business and monopolies are no longer compelling issues in our globalized economy.
Basically I agree with you. Except that I think liberals and progressives were also interested in keeping prices low for consumers. And while I definitely think the world has gotten friendlier for large-scale businesses, today’s liberals and progressives would still probably voice a lot of concern about unchecked bigness.
Thanks for the comments.
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