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

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.

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.

Judge Learned Hand

On my personal blog (which I’ve just resurrected after losing ALL of my old posts in a server meltdown), I’ve posted a short item on Google’s now-famous tax avoidance activities.

Which is all neither here nor there, in Coolidge terms, except that I included a quotation from Judge Learned Hand, a Coolidge appointee and one of the most sensible people ever to talk about the murky morality of tax paying and tax avoidance. As Hand wrote in 1947:

“There is nothing sinister in so arranging one’s affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands. Taxes are enforced exactions not voluntary contributions, to demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.”

C-Span has posted a short clip from the August 3 Coolidge event at the Library of Congress. Organized to mark the publication of Why Coolidge Matters, the event doesn’t seem to be available in its entirety anywhere on the web (despite suggestions from the LOC press release that it will be.) But the clip is worth a quick look anyway.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlwGmXJTAro]

My dog Hoover

Just in passing (and a few weeks late), I’d like to note Mona Charen’s column on Coolidge. Two unrelated thoughts occur:

1. I love the fact that Charen named her dog Coolidge. She and I apparently share a personality quirk: we name our pets for presidents. I call my dog Hoover (sorry, Amity — I know you’re not a fan, but I couldn’t resist the vacuum allusion for my hungry labrador). And my erstwhile cat (who ran away when we rudely moved from Washington to Charlottesville) was named Truman (sorry again). Next up? Eisenhower, I think.

2. Why are conservatives the only people writing about Coolidge? I know its naive, but I wish people would take history on its own terms, rather than always looking for a usable past. Sure, Coolidge has some obvious contemporary salience — I understand why many people would like to establish him as a mythic hero of sorts. But he’s also just plain old interesting, not least because he’s so under appreciated. It’s puzzling to me that liberals don’t pay more attention to him. Hell, they don’t even both to attack him. What’s with that?

The Presidential Yacht, U.S.S. Mayflower

As much of the East Coast remains paralyzed by snow, it’s worth recalling that Calvin Coolidge was made of sterner stuff. A born and bred New Englander, Coolidge was not one to be cowed by a few snowflakes. In November 1924, he boarded a yacht in the Potomac River for a weekend cruise, unfazed by an early season snowstorm. As the Washington Post observed:

“Mr. Coolidge has shown a liking for the river trips and the sudden change in the weather made no change in his plans for the cruise. Despite the storm, he intended to remain out until tomorrow morning.

The president and his guests — imcluding David H. Blair, commissioner of internal revenue — boarded  the Mayflower using a covered walkway, avoiding the slush-covered deck.

Coolidge lit the first National Christmas Tree in 1923. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Today, President Obama and his family presided at the annual White House tree lighting ceremony, a Christmas tradition dating back to the Coolidge Administration.

On Christmas Eve in 1923, Calvin and Grace Coolidge lit the tree during a 5 p.m. ceremony. The tree, a 48-foot balsam from Vermont, was donated by Paul D. Moody, president of Middlebury College. It was decked out in 2,500 electric lights, donated by the Electric League of Washington. Standing near the foot of the tree, Coolidge lit the bulbs with the push of a button.

In a recent column for the Washington Examiner, Gene Healy of the Cato Institute suggests that Barack Obama could learn a thing or two from Calvin Coolidge. In particular, the president might take a lesson from from Silent Cal’s modesty.

Calvin Coolidge, a genuinely humble man and a fine president, wrote in his autobiography that it was “a major source of safety to the country” for the president “to know that he is not a great man.”

Healy’s got a point, albeit one suffused with a dollop of wishful thinking. Yes, it would be nice of modern presidents weren’t consumed by their own grandeur.  But were their predecessors ever really so humble?

I might buy the argument that George Washington was humble. After all, not many men turn down an offer to be king. But then again, Washington didn’t either.

Still, Washington had an appreciation for both opportunity and responsibility. He knew when it was time to step up, but he also knew when it was time to step down. That’s a fine thing, and every one of his successors — save one  – has followed his lead.

But that doesn’t mean Washington was humble. Indeed, plenty of evidence suggests that his character included plenty of vanity and ambition. And I think it’s fair to say that every other president has been similarly infused with a keen appreciation of his own self-worth.

Which brings us back to Coolidge. Was he really humble? Well, maybe. Certainly, his governing style suggests that he didn’t consider himself indispensable to any situation.

But Coolidge was also a deeply ambitious politician who managed his career and public image with the utmost care. His was not an accidental presidency, either in origin or execution. The “Silent Cal” trope captures something important about Coolidge, but it also obscures his goals, ambition, and skill.

Coolidge, I think, believed deeply in his own capacity and character. I think he yearned to be president and did what was necessary to win — and keep — the job.

What’s striking about Coolidge is not his humility, but his respect for things larger than himself. Coolidge had faith in Coolidge, but he also had faith in America, its people, and its political institutions. In that sense, I think the title of his campaign book, Have Faith in Massachusetts, is revealing. Deep down, I think Coolidge believed he was a great man — or at least a pretty damn impressive one. But he believed that America was much greater.

So readers: tell me what you think? Was Coolidge humble?