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.

Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin calls to mind Calvin Coolidge with his bold effort to curtail the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions in his state. Now seems the right time to show our readers this photograph of Coolidge, grace under pressure, during the 1919 Boston Police Strike. Coolidge backed up state and local officials who laid off the policemen. It was a hard call, but Coolidge believed the line had to be drawn. The image below is from the National Archives.

According to Joshua Spivak at Reuters, Coolidge has yet another (almost unique) claim to fame:

“Only two mayors have ever been elected president – Grover Cleveland of Buffalo and Calvin Coolidge of Northampton.”

Is this true? Hard to believe. Teddy Roosevelt certainly ran for mayor of New York (he placed third, I think), and he famously served as the city’s police commissioner.

Coolidge inspecting the state militia he called in during the police strike. Photo from the Prints Department of the Boston Public Library.

Can’t let this date slip past without remark. And since I have no remarks, how about a picture? I’ve always liked this one.

Amity has a column in today’s Wall Street Journal evaluating the role of public unions in American society. Along the way, she offers a nice summary of the Boston police strike:

Many people assumed that public unionism was emasculated for good by the city of Boston’s refusal to rehire striking police officers after the Boston Police Strike of 1919. The circumstances of the strike were such that it was nearly impossible not to side with the patrolmen. Police wages were not keeping up with inflation. Their working conditions were appalling. When the police went on strike, the city and state delayed before calling in outside help and the city descended into riots and chaos.

Calvin Coolidge, then Massachusetts governor, saw the strike as inexcusable and rejected the idea that any blame be assigned to authorities. Any failure to adequately respond, he said, “cannot justify the wrong of leaving the city unguarded,” which furnished the opportunity for riots. He then made it clear the policemen would not get their jobs back. “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time,” he said.

Amity strikes the right balance here, I think. As she says, it’s hard not to sympathize with the patrolmen — before the strike. But it’s even harder to disagree with Coolidge about the importance of law and order. Some things are non-negotiable, and public safety is one of them.

For my money, though, the real villain of the police strike wasn’t the union and its leadership (who were left with few alternatives to a walkout). And it certainly wasn’t Coolidge. Rather, the culprits were Boston city officials, who broke one promise after another and left many patrolman in near poverty. Their dishonesty and ineptitude was the real crime, provoking a civil disaster that was wholly and completely avoidable.

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.

Joe’s point about the policemen is something I tried to capture in my Coolidge article, but did it inadequately. This is the great tension of all such battles. The Boston police were right. They were underpaid. What one might call the “hard-ass-ness” of Curtis, what we call being like Scrooge, is what always makes conservatives look bad. Sometimes deservedly so.

Back in September, when I was blogging about the Boston police strike, I meant to post something about Dennis Lehane’s historical novel, The Given Day. The book tells the story of several characters living in Boston at the time of the strike, including a well-connected young policeman, Danny Coughlin.

As a work of historical fiction, The Given Day is really quite extraordinary. Lehane has a remarkable gift for period detail and dialog — no small thing, given the propensity to exaggerate Irish accents in almost every fictional treatment of the city. Lehane does a truly fine job of bringing early 20th century Boston to life.

The book also makes a passionate argument on behalf of the strikers. Generally speaking, Lehane portrays city and state officials as hapless, venal, uncaring, heartless, and incompetent. Coolidge makes a few brief cameos, never to much effect, but his role remains implicitly central as Lehane crafts his ringing indictment of police commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis.

In her review of Lehane’s book, Janet Maslin drew attention to its depiction of Curtis:

“The Given Day” creates a particularly chilling portrait of Boston’s police commissioner, Edwin Upton Curtis, as a dangerous has-been with no regard for the safety, dignity or vulnerability of his cops.

That’s a fair assessment of Lehane’s treatment of Curtis, and to my mind, a fair assessment of Curtis, too. The police strike was avoidable, as almost everyone involved (including Coolidge) was well aware. But rather than trying to defuse the situation, Curtis made it worse.

The Boston police had a long list of legitimate grievances, including scandalously low pay and poor working conditions (as Amity noted in her recent Forbes article). The patrolmen, loosely organized as the Boston Social Club, had been negotiating with city officials for years. In return, they got a series of excuses and half-met promises.

To be fair, city officials were struggling with chronically tight budgets and dysfunctional political institutions — not to mention the economic upheaval of World War I.  But the hard fact remains: Boston cops had been treated shabbily for years.

Many city and civic leaders were aware that something had to be done. Even as the prospect of a strike loomed large in the summer of 1919, hopes for a compromise ran high. But Curtis showed scant interest in finding common ground. Eager to assert his authority, he seemed intent on confrontation.

Once the police had crossed their Rubicon and begun the strike, different issues were in play. Coolidge had  was determined to establish the primacy of law, order, and political authority. But we can admire his stand and still lament the need for it. The Boston police strike was an avoidable tragedy. The blame for it must be shared by the strikers (who played fast and loose with the public’s right to safety) and city officials (who refused to address complaints that even they acknowledged to be legitimate).

Coolidge and General John J. Pershing on the steps of the Massachusetts State House, Feb. 25, 1920

In February 1920, General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing visited Boston and posed with Coolidge on the steps of the Massachusetts state capital.

Pershing, who had led the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, was a national hero at the time, and some Republican activists were trying to draft him for a 1920 presidential run.

Coolidge, on the heels of his performance in crushing the Boston police strike, was also a rising star in national Republican circles.

Incidentally, Pershing’s nickname, “Black Jack,” derived from his stint in the 10th Cavalry Regiment, a unit composed of African American soldiers and white officers. The nickname was a sanitized version of a more offensive nickname bestowed on Pershing by West Point cadets.

Three brief thoughts on a visit to the Boston Public Library Exhibit Commemorating the 1919 Police Strike:

1) This is one of the most civilized libraries in the world. Charles McKim made a house of angels with all this pink Tennessee marble. You get the feeling in this library, that the architects and founders of this library knew they were right.

2) Relatedly, the documents of this small exhibit remind that Coolidge, in standing firm against the striking police was hardly standing alone. Today a political leader who fought back against public sector workers would have the support of — Rush Limbaugh, or the Washington Times which is to say, not the establishment. Then the establishment backed the leaders up.

3) A document from the strike (supportive of Coolidge) speaks about “Americanism” and defending it. The strikes were perceived as an action inspired by abroad, which in fact they were — with the Russian revolution so fresh and on everyone’s mind.