Comments for Silent Cal

Comment on Calvin Coolidge, Tea Partier? by Bob Jakoubek

Bob Jakoubek — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:21:50 +0000

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.

Comment on Calvin Coolidge, Tea Partier? by Joe Thorndike

Joe Thorndike — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:46:33 +0000

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.

Comment on Calvin Coolidge, Tea Partier? by Bob Jakoubek

Bob Jakoubek — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:13:20 +0000

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.

Comment on More on Curtis by Multi-Level Marketing Success

Multi-Level Marketing Success — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:53:11 +0000

Can you provide more information on this? take care

Comment on The Case for Coolidge by Kai

Kai — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:00:03 +0000

Thank you for posting, it always is good to see Cal receive some accolades. It’s not really a new insight that the criteria set for presidential greatness favors those presidents who steered the nation through times of turmoil, and disfavors those who kept the nation out of crises. If the criteria set were adjusted to reward those who kept the country out of wars and presided over periods of prosperity that actually reached the average citizen, I’m certain Coolidge would be rated very highly. And while I can’t produce empirical data on this, one speculates that the average historian’s political leanings tend to be liberal/progressive, further damaging Coolidge’s chances of recognition.

Comment on Hail to the Chief (Dog) by Bob Jakoubek

Bob Jakoubek — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 19:26:33 +0000

Part of the problem is the scarcity of sources. If Theodore Roosevelt hadn’t written so many letters there wouldn’t be so many books about him. This leads me to wonder why there hasn’t been an effort–or perhaps there has been one–to publish in their entirety the transcripts of Coolidge’s press conferences as president. In 1964, of course, Robert Ferrell & Howard Quint published The Talkative President, a remarkable book. They wrote that their selections amounted to about one-sixth of the transcripts at the Forbes Library. I won’t go out on a limb and say that their publication in full would do to Coolidge what the release of the LBJ telephone tapes has done for Johnson’s historical reputation, but their availability either in print or online would be an important step.

Comment on An Interview with George H. Nash by Bob Jakoubek

Bob Jakoubek — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:20:36 +0000

Years ago, comparing the two men, the historian Robert K. Murray observed: “Coolidge reflected the views of finance capitalism, Hoover of industrial capitalism.” That seems to get at the heart of it.

Comment on An Interview with George H. Nash by Jim Cooke

Jim Cooke — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:01:14 +0000

This is a fascinating and valuable interview. Thank you!
It is good to have the differences between Coolidge and Hoover set out so clearly.

Yet, I’ve always questioned Hoover’s story about Cal ignoring H. L. Menken’s little”magazine with the green cover” that so upset HH but not impassive “Silent Cal.” Personally, I believe Coolidge was sensitive to criticism and may have been pulling Hoover’s leg pretending not to be. Perhaps President Reagan possessed such calm. If he did — it would be a rare quality in any actor.

Just this morning, I read the obituary of Louis Auchincloss. It references an unpublished text on President Coolidge. I would give several Coolidge Dollars to read it! I hope, one day — it will be available. In it, we might find a Puritan’s take on another Puritan. The existing Presidential Series book on Coolidge suffers from much ill-concealed condescension.

Comment on Coolidge Awards the Congressional Medal of Honor by Jerry Wallace

Jerry Wallace — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:59:56 +0000

President Coolidge awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor to four individuals during his Presidency. The recipients were as follows:

BREAULT, HENRY. Torpedoman Second Class, U.S. Navy. Presentation: 8 March 1924. Citation: For heroism and devotion to duty while serving on board the U.S. submarine 0-5 at the time of the sinking of that vessel.

EDWARDS, WALTER ATLEE. Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy. Presentation: 2 February 1924. Citation: For heroism in rescuing 482 men, women and children from the French military transport Vinh-Long, destroyed by fire in the Sea of Marmora, Turkey, on 16 December 1922.

LINDBERGH, CHARLES A. Captain, U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve. Presentation: March 21, 1928. Citation: For displaying heroic courage and skill as a navigator, at the risk of his life, by his nonstop flight in his airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, from New York City to Paris, France, 20-21 May 1927, by which Capt. Lindbergh not only achieved the greatest individual triumph of any American citizen but demonstrated that travel across the ocean by aircraft was possible.

RYAN, THOMAS JOHN. Ensign, U.S. Navy. Presentation: 15 March 1924. Citation: For heroism in effecting the rescue of a woman from the burning Grand Hotel, Yokohama, Japan, on 1 September 1923.

For more information, see http://www.history.army.mil/moh.html .

Comment on Cruising in the Snow by Jerry Wallace

Jerry Wallace — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:04:51 +0000

My comment does not pertain to Cal, but to the Mayflower. Those interested in this presidential yacht have undoubted read of its large solid-marble bathtub. President Taft, a large man, is usually credited with having had it installed. This is incorrect, however. Ogden Goelet, a wealthy man (he held box #1 at the Metropolitan Opera House), had the yacht built. Perhaps, like Taft, he was a man of bulk, for the vessel is described in a 1903 newspaper account as coming with a tub “cut from a solid block of fine marble.” Mr. Goelet died on board the vessel in 1897 at the age of 46. He widow sold the yacht to the Federal government during the Spanish War. T. R. was the first president to make use of it. In his writings, Dr. Joel Boone referred to the Mayflower’s tub; see Milton F. Heller’s The Presidents’ Doctor (New York: Vantage Press, 2000), p. 35. President Coolidge took his first Potomac River cruse on the Mayflower on September 15, 1923, a little over a month after taking office. It offered him a venue where he could relax with family, friends, and political associates. I wonder if Cal liked to take a dip in that oversized tub.