Amity did a commentary item for Marketplace radio yesterday, suggesting Coolidge as a model for current policymakers. I’ve included an excerpt below.

Coincidentally, I did an interview for Marketplace on Friday, exploring the history of tax rates. My comments on Coolidge ended up on the  cutting room floor (to use an anachronistic metaphor), but I suspect Silent Cal readers might be interested in the subject anyway.

Anyway, here’s the excerpt from Amity’s commentary. Link to the audi and ful text is at the end:

As presidents go, Calvin Coolidge is an unlikely hero. Conservatives focus on him far less than they do on Ronald Reagan, and after all, Coolidge served a long time ago, from 1923 to 1929. Coolidge said “no” so often that he was trashed as lazy even by his own peers. Today, Coolidge is held in such low esteem by most Americans that if they remember anything, it is his nickname: Silent Cal.

But Coolidge did three things that stand out today, especially from our budgetary perspective. The first was to monitor federal spending — personally, with his own pencil, and intensely. As president, Coolidge met with his budget director every Friday at 10:00 a.m. Once cuts had been made, Coolidge made more. Coolidge monitored every penny spent down to the salt and pepper on the dinner table. The housekeeper at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Miss Riley, managed to cut her outlays from $11,667.10 one year, down to $9,116.39 the next. “Very fine improvement,” the president wrote in a note to her.

More at: Looking to President Coolidge for budgetary perspective

David Pietrusza

C-Span has posted more video from the October symposium sponsored by the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation. In today’s episode, David Pietrusza speaks on Coolidge’s political philosophy.

On NPR this morning, linguist John McWhorter compared the pro-business rhetoric in President Obama’s speech to the Chamber of  Commerce with similar language from Calvin Coolidge.

McWhorter based his comparison on this comment from Obama:

In addition to making government more affordable, we’re also making it more effective and customer-friendly. We’re trying to run the government a little bit more like you run your businesses — with better technology and faster services. So in the coming months, my administration will develop a proposal to merge, consolidate and reorganize the federal government in a way that best serves the goal of a more competitive America.

According to McWhorter, this sounds a bit like Coolidge’s famous suggestion that “the chief business of the American people is business.” But as McWhorter explained, Coolidge didn’t seem quite so intent on coddling business leaders:

What’s interesting about that statement is that he [Obama] is implying that the government will change its ways to suit the preference of business, as opposed to, for example, a rather similar speech in intent that Calvin Coolidge made in 1925. And this is the one where he made the famous quote, ‘The chief business of the American people is business.’ And what’s interesting is the complete difference in tone. In his speech, Obama used the words ‘we’ and ‘us’ 66 times. Coolidge in his speech used ‘we’ and ‘us’ just 28 times.

Asked whether he was suggesting that Obama was  ”chummier” with business than Coolidge, McWhorter said yes.

So does this mean Obama was being chummier in his speech than Coolidge, one of the most famously pro-business presidents in U.S. history? “That is precisely what I’m saying,” McWhorter says. Presidents nowadays, he says, “cannot be as saliently pro-business as Coolidge was. Obama has to be more coded.”

C-Span has posted the video for the dedication of the Coolidge Museum and Education Center last August.

At the October 7  symposium on Coolidge — sponsored by the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation and hosted by the John F. Kennedy presidential library — historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony offered his thoughts on Grace Coolidge.  C-Span recorded his talk (as well as all the others delivered that day), but only now have they got around to showing it.

I’ll keep you posted on other videos from the event as they become available.

Coolidge got some surprising attention from Salon.com in its coverage of the No Labels political start-up. Not wholly accurate attention, to be sure. And certainly not in the service of a cause that Coolidge would support. (The author, Alex Pareene, is basically arguing against the notion of civility in politics, or at least against the utility of organizations devoted to it.)

Here’s what Pareene has to say about Coolidge:

Rich self-declared independents, we have been trained to believe, have no ideology. But the ones who support Mayor Bloomberg and fund centrist organizations like this tend to be conservative Democrats — or, more accurately, Calvin Coolidge Republicans. Coolidge was the original reasonable moderate! Silent Cal supported an invisible regulatory state and anti-lynching laws. (Only one of those priorities survived filibusters, of course — a tax cut for the rich has always been easier to get through Congress than protections for a minority group.) And his pro-business policies led to so much growth, for everyone, until … they didn’t, not long after his powerful commerce secretary succeeded him as president.

There’s an element of truth hiding in here somewhere: the notion that Coolidge was devoted to civility.

But in fact, Coolidge demonstrates that civility is not fundamentally “unserious” (to use Pareene’s terminology). And it’s not anti-political. Rather, civility can bolster meaningful politics.

Civility does not mean easy, empty, split-the-difference compromise. It does mean treating your opponents like decent people, rather than enemies of the Republic. It does mean making room for reasonable debate about the role of government, rather than tossing around words like “fascist” and “socialist.”

Seriously, why do we tolerate name-calling and gross exaggeration in the political arena? If it happened at our dining room tables, we’d be aghast. Or in our classrooms. Or anywhere.

OK, call me naive. And let me have it — I can almost hear you folks gnashing your teeth…

Coolidge delivering his first State of the Union address on December 6, 1923. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Today marks the 87 anniversary of Calvin Coolidge’s first State of the Union address. The speech also marked another “first” — the dawn of the radio era in presidential rhetoric. According to the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, Coolidge’s address was the first to be broadcast by radio — a move that reflected the soaring popularity of radio receivers. In 1923, there were 2.5 million receivers in private homes across the nation. Three years earlier, there had been fewer than 5,000.

The speech itself is remembered for its indication that Coolidge would continue the policies of his predecessor, Warren Harding. Reflecting my abiding interest in 1920s-era taxation, let me offer this quick selection:

For seven years the people have borne with uncomplaining courage the tremendous burden of national and local taxation. These must both be reduced. The taxes of the Nation must be reduced now as much as prudence will permit, and expenditures must be reduced accordingly. High taxes reach everywhere and burden everybody. They bear most heavily upon the poor. They diminish industry and commerce. They make agriculture unprofitable. They increase the rates on transportation. They are a charge on every necessary of life. Of all services which the Congress can render to the country, I have no hesitation in declaring to neglect it, to postpone it, to obstruct it by unsound proposals, is to become unworthy of public confidence and untrue to public trust. The country wants this measure to have the right of way over any others.

Forgive me for pointing out (again), that Coolidge was willing to walk the walk when it came to fiscal conservatism. He never suggested tax cuts that weren’t “paid for” with spending cuts. As he put it (and I test your patience by repeating it, yet again), “the taxes of the Nation must be reduced now as much as prudence will permit, and expenditures must be reduced accordingly.”

Contemporary deficit hawks should emulate that kind of honest, candid budgeting.

The full transcript of Coolidge’s speech is available from the Miller Center.

Reason magazine has posted a short item on Why Coolidge Matters. Katherine Mangu-Ward begins by noting that Coolidge was the only president sworn in by a notary.

This seemingly incidental historical fact was apparently enough to spur the National Notary Association to pour considerable resources into Why Coolidge Matters: How Civility in Politics Can Bring a Nation Together, a new glossy coffee-table book filled with celebrity testimonials and sepia-toned snaps that feature Silent Cal.

The resulting grab bag of low-key Coolidge worship is odd but curiously satisfying. Former Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis praises Coolidge’s grassroots organizing. Black Republican activist Ward Connerly revels in Coolidge’s “minimalist view” of his own abilities. And Sen. John Kerry D-Mass. declares: “America Needs a New Coolidge.” The man may have a point.

Writing for Salon.com, Coolidge biographer David Greenberg, a professor of history at Rutgers, has noted Sarah Palin’s interest in Coolidge.

A reader who knew only the author and title of Sarah Palin’s new book, “America by Heart,” would in all likelihood be able to predict many of the delights contained within: self-justifying accounts of her behavior on the 2008 campaign, snarky jabs at President Obama, paeans to the Alaska grizzly. Rapturous words for Calvin Coolidge, however, would probably not be among the expected finds. And yet peppered through Palin’s new volume of ruminations lies a handful of admiring references to our 30th president. The oddity is worth pondering.

Obviously, Greenberg is no Palin fan. But he does display a cautious (if not uncritical) appreciation for Coolidge. “To most people today,” he points out, “Coolidge is little more than a cartoon. If he’s remembered at all, he’s the grim-faced ‘Silent Cal,’ the man said by Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice to have looked as though he had been weaned on a pickle.”

In fact, though, Coolidge was a president of real accomplishment, Greenberg contends. As evidence, he cites both the Dawes Plan for European debt relief and the federal government’s response to the 1927 Mississippi flood. (He also mentions, but does endorse, Coolidge’s economic policies.)

Greenberg points out that Palin’s interest in Coolidge hardly makes her unique, especially among Republicans.

For decades, since the arrival in power with Ronald Reagan of so-called movement conservatives, Coolidge has been a patron saint to the right — a symbol of patriotism and piety, of hard work and thrift, and not least of low taxes and minimal government. When Reagan moved into the White House in 1981, he removed the portraits of Thomas Jefferson and Harry Truman in the Cabinet Room and put up those of Dwight Eisenhower and Coolidge instead.

Greenberg explains the Coolidge boom as a two-part phenomenon:

Coolidge retains this mystique because he reconciled two different strains of conservatism and two different factions of the Republican Party. His approval of the decade’s kinetic capitalism pleased Chamber of Commerce types. But economic growth also has a way of unleashing cultural change, and Coolidge’s flinty New England virtue reassured traditionalists worried about moral decay during a time of the “new woman” and the “new Negro,” of the Scopes trial and jazz. “We were smack in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, with hip flasks, joy rides, and bathtub gin parties setting the social standards,” wrote Edmund Starling, Coolidge’s Secret Service agent and daily walking companion. “The president was the antithesis of all this and he despised it.”

At the same time, however, Coolidge was a remarkably modern president, especially when it came to public relations. As Greenberg relates:

Despite his reputation for silence, moreover, Coolidge was a skilled speechmaker — a prizewinning orator as a student and the last president to write most of his own remarks — and he excelled especially at the patriotic homilies that Sarah Palin seems to admire.

Overall, Greenberg’s take on Coolidge may not sit well with Silent Cal’s contemporary admirers (including many readers of  this blog, no doubt.) But Greenberg does show a willingness to take Coolidge seriously as a political figure — rather than treating him as some sort of nameless, faceless, do-nothing presidential potted plant. And that’s something we should all be grateful for.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., unfairly maligned presidential biographer

Seems that the folks at the National Review are eagerly awaiting Amity’s biography of Coolidge. In a list of “Best Presidential Biographies,” we find:

Calvin Coolidge, by Robert Sobel. Learn why so many conservatives admire Silent Cal. I’ve heard that Amity Schlaes is working on a Coolidge biography. It promises to become the standard. There’s also the out-of-print Coolidge and the Historians, by the late Thomas B. Silver. After reading it, you will never again trust another word written by Arthur Schlesinger. For something less conventional, try John Derbyshire’s outstanding novel, Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream.

I think we’re all eager to read Amity’s take on Coolidge. I plan to be first in line (at least as soon as Amazon offers a preorder link).

But I feel the need to offer some words in defense of Schlesinger. Say what you will about his treatment of Coolidge, it would be a tragedy if people decided to “never again trust another word” written by him. Sure, he was a New Deal fanboy (and a Kennedy fanboy, too, for that matter). And his work was not always dispassionate.

But then, neither is the work of any biographer. Show me a biography that doesn’t fall into the “pro” or “anti” camp for its subject, and I’ll show you a biography that no one wants to read. Passion and opinion are what animates historical writing. You don’t have to  agree with the opinions behind a book to still learn a lot from it.

As for Schlesinger, let me say (as someone who has spent way too much of his adult life reading about the New Deal), he did a fine job with Roosevelt. There are other New Deal books I like better, to be sure. But his are still great.

And if you just can’t stomach his FDR cheerleading, then let me suggest what may be Schlesinger’s best work: his biography of Andrew Jackson. Like the New Deal books, his Jackson bio is anything but evenhanded. Indeed, it’s really just a New Deal book in disguise. But it’s still a damn good book and an even better read.

Anybody want to take issue with this?