Amity Shlaes, Coolidge, 576 pp., $35.00.

AMITY SHLAES, the economic historian who almost single-handedly forced a reappraisal of the 1930s with her best-selling The Forgotten Man, now sets out to do the same for Calvin Coolidge, one of our forgotten presidents—and, where not forgotten, imperfectly remembered or purposely misrepresented.

In Where They Stand, his book on presidential performance, Robert Merry, editor of this magazine, writes of Calvin Coolidge and his low standing among historians:

By the standard of voter assessment, he merits respect for retaining the presidency after his nineteen-month incumbency [after succeeding Warren G. Harding, who died in office] and then retaining it for his party four years later. He presided over peace, prosperity, and domestic tranquility for nearly six years. . . . and Coolidge detractors might inquire whether their ratings stem from the fact that he was among the twentieth century’s most concise exponents of limited government.

Although Coolidge’s economic policies are held by some to have created an unsustainable boom that led to the Great Depression, the argument that Coolidge bears responsibility for that economic calamity is more theoretical than provable. And in fact, the debate about what brought on the Depression remains unresolved, along with arguments about whether the measures taken to combat it worked in significant ways or just exacerbated the problem until it was resolved by World War II.

But what is not theoretical is the prosperity that buoyed our nation during the Coolidge administration, as documented by Shlaes in this impressively researched and engagingly written chronicle of a successful president and his administration. In the process, she brings one of our more admirable presidents back to life, both as a man and as a representative of a fast-fading era.

As an old-school Republican and a Yankee from the days before New England became a quaint theme park for the pretty people, Coolidge believed in economy in all things, including language. And Shlaes wastes no words. Despite the length and heft of her volume, there’s no padding, no political or ideological skywriting, no invented drama. She shows us the man as he seemed—and wanted—to be and allows the life, the words, the actions and policies, the politics and the country itself to carry the story.

“There are plenty of personal events in Coolidge’s life,” writes Shlaes, “many of them sad ones, but he was principally a man of work. Indeed, Coolidge was a rare kind of hero: a minimalist president, an economic general of budgeting and tax cuts. Economic heroism is subtler than other forms of heroism and therefore harder to appreciate.”

In Coolidge’s personal life, writes Shlaes, from boyhood on, he “brought saving to a high art. Coolidge was so parsimonious that he did not buy a house in Massachusetts even after he became governor, so careful that the Coolidges owned no car until after he achieved the presidency, so strict about money that his son John never forgot it.” When the father became president, writes Shlaes, his younger son Calvin Jr. was working in a tobacco field in Hatfield, Massachusetts. Some friends suggested they wouldn’t be working anymore if their fathers were president. The boy replied, “If your father were my father, you would.”

As president, Coolidge applied his commitment to thrift and fiscal responsibility to the federal budget “with a discipline sadly missing in his well-intentioned predecessor, Warren G. Harding.” Under Coolidge, Shlaes points out, the federal debt was reduced: “The top income tax rate came down by half, to 25 percent,” and “the federal budget was always in surplus. Under Coolidge, unemployment was 5 percent or even 3 percent. . . . wages rose and interest rates came down so that the poor might borrow more easily. Under Coolidge, the rich came to pay a greater share of the income tax.”

And think about this: “When in 1929 the thirtieth president climbed onto a train at Union Station to head back home to Massachusetts after his sixty-seven months in office, the federal government was smaller than when he had become president in 1923.”

SHLAES GUIDES us through the early years in some detail, from his birth as John Calvin Coolidge (the John is gradually shed) in 1872 in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, to John and Victoria Coolidge, through his boyhood in Plymouth, helping his storekeeper father and attending public school, then to the Black River Academy in Ludlow, Vermont, from which he graduated. He was admitted to Amherst College in Massachusetts, where after a slow start he hit his stride, graduating with honors in 1895. In his senior year, he entered a national essay contest sponsored by the Sons of the American Revolution and won first prize, a gold medal worth $150.

Upon graduation, he read law in a firm in Northampton, Massachusetts, a town that would become his home. In 1897, he passed the bar, opened a law office and began his involvement in Republican Party politics. He was appointed to the city council in 1900, elected and then reelected city solicitor, and appointed county clerk of courts in 1903.

In 1904, now chairman of the Republican City Committee in Northampton and rising in his profession, he still couldn’t find the wife he wanted. Apparently he didn’t have an easy way with women. “Perhaps the right girl would know to break through herself and get to him, first,” Shlaes writes. “Finally, she did.”

Coolidge was living in a rooming house, with women nearby at Smith College and the Clarke School for the Deaf. One morning, still in his underwear, he planted his hat on his head and began shaving. He was startled by a peal of female laughter coming through his open window. The laugher was Grace Anna Goodhue, a teacher at the Clarke School. She’d seen him shaving in his hat while watering the flowers outside her dormitory. “Soon she sent him a pot of flowers, and he sent her his calling card. Their first date was at a political rally at Northampton City Hall.” And a year later, in 1905, they married.

Of the match, a friend of Coolidge observed: “Miss Goodhue had taught the deaf to hear; now she might be able to teach the mute to speak.”

Shlaes writes, “Six and a half years younger than Calvin, Grace was graceful, like her name. . . . She made friends everywhere.” A Coolidge acquaintance called her “a creature of spirit, fire and dew,” and Shlaes reports that other men “also found Grace stunning, and were stunned to find that she favored the quiet lawyer.”

But favor him she did, and that remained the case throughout their married life, with Grace supplying the brightness, enthusiasm and joy in each day that was perhaps lacking in his. (Alice Roosevelt Longworth would observe that he looked like he was “weaned on a pickle.”) He provided stability, certainty and accomplishment. To be sure, there were tragic interludes, most notably the death of Calvin Jr. from blood poisoning—a death, as Shlaes points out, with parallels to the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son in the White House. But their marriage remained solid.

ONCE MARRIED, Coolidge rose steadily—to the state legislature in 1907, mayor of Northampton in 1910, the Massachusetts state senate in 1912 and senate president in 1914, lieutenant governor in 1916 and governor in 1919. As governor, he won national attention for his stand during the Boston police strike, with his telegram to Samuel Gompers resonating with voters across the country: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.”

At the 1920 Republican convention in Chicago, Coolidge arrived as Massachusetts’s favorite son, but party leaders chose Ohio’s Warren G. Harding as their presidential standard-bearer. After disagreements among leaders and delegates, however, Coolidge emerged as the unanimous vice presidential choice. Once elected, Coolidge kept a low profile and maintained a discreet distance from what would become a scandal-ridden administration. Harding himself was not a venal man, but he surrounded himself with people who were.

In fact, writes Shlaes, he was ultimately the victim of his own congenial temperament. “Harding, winningly rueful as always, even quoted his own father at a press conference to explain his troubles. It was good that Warren had not been a girl, his father had said. He would always be in the family way—because he couldn’t say no.”

On the night of August 2, 1923, while visiting John Coolidge in Plymouth Notch, Calvin and Grace retired early. There was a knock on the door (there was no phone service), his father answered, then woke them with the news: President Harding had died in San Francisco. A special phone line was installed; Coolidge prepared a statement of condolence; he consulted with Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes. As Shlaes reports, “By kerosene lamplight, before a small group, . . . in a small town far away from even the county seat or the state capital, a new U.S. president was sworn in by his father [a notary public].”

The Coolidges went back to bed, then drove to Rutland in the morning. “At Rutland, a crowd of two thousand waited; the chief superintendent wanted to supply a special train, but the Coolidges preferred to take the 9:35.” As he left Vermont, Coolidge looked ahead with simple confidence. “I believe I can swing it,” he said.

And swing it he did, dedicating the remainder of the first term to cleaning up the messes left by Harding, then proceeding to bring the federal budget under control. In 1924, he was elected president in his own right, campaigning on a platform of reducing taxes, cutting the federal debt, passing protective-tariff legislation, rejecting farm subsidies and enacting the eight-hour work day. It was an upbeat campaign, emphasizing peace and prosperity, effectively making use of the medium of radio for the first time, and with enthusiastic support from figures like Will Rogers and Al Jolson, who traveled to Washington to sing “Keep Cool with Coolidge” on the White House lawn.

Coolidge won handily, beating Democratic former West Virginia congressman John W. Davis and the Progressive Party candidate, Wisconsin senator Robert LaFollette.

During his first full term, Coolidge’s emphasis was on encouraging economic prosperity; working closely with his budget director to cut costs and collaborating with his secretary of the treasury, Andrew Mellon, to cut taxes; and pushing the Revenue Acts of 1924 and 1926 through Congress. In 1923, when President Harding died, the national debt stood at more than $22 billion. When President Coolidge left office six years later, the debt had been reduced to less than $17 billion. He had restored integrity to the nation’s financial balance sheet by cutting the war debt and steadily reducing tax rates. Day by day, much like a Yankee storekeeper, he kept track of government operations, scrutinizing expenditures and cutting wherever possible. He exercised direct control over the Bureau of the Budget, which he had created, and periodically spoke to the nation by radio, giving an account of his management of the national enterprise.

Add to the unprecedented prosperity the protracted period of peace, and it seemed unthinkable that Coolidge wouldn’t run for a second full term and win in a landslide. But that was not on the agenda. Coolidge, in his distinctive Yankee way, had said no. And having said no, there would be no changing his mind, no matter how hard his party’s leadership pleaded.

In 1927, the Coolidges spent much of the summer at a lodge in South Dakota. It was here, writes Shlaes, that Mrs. Coolidge and a trusted Secret Service agent went for a long hike and apparently got lost. Their extended absence caused the president some irritation and provided gossips with the only potentially salacious tidbit ever served up by the Coolidges, a close and unshakably married couple. The president and his wife were received enthusiastically by Dakotans, many of whom had migrated there from eastern states such as Vermont (among them Coolidge relatives) with many of the same economic problems. From the summer White House near Rapid City, Coolidge awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross to Charles Lindbergh, approved the work at Mount Rushmore and gave a much-needed boost to a variety of projects. The Coolidge visit, writes Shlaes, “was a crucial one for the South Dakota economy.”

DURING THAT summer, Coolidge was at the top of his game, enjoying unusually high national popularity, sure to win his election to a second full term in the coming year. On August 2, the fourth anniversary of Coolidge taking office, he and Senator Arthur Capper drove into Rapid City for a press conference. Meeting reporters, “Coolidge became downright chatty,” talking about his record on peace, the reduction of the national debt and tax cuts. Reports Shlaes, “After the press conference Coolidge waved the reporters off, but mentioned casually that they might want to come back a little later; he would have an announcement.”

Coolidge had given his confidential stenographer a note with instructions to make copies on twenty small slips of paper. “The slips were folded. At the conference itself, Coolidge asked a simple question: ‘Is everybody here?’ He then handed the reporters the slips.” They contained just twelve words: “I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty eight.”

And that was it. No further comment, and reporters stampeded to move the story. The reaction, national and international, was predictable and especially intense among Republicans, who mounted campaigns aimed at persuading Coolidge to change his mind. But he had made his decision.

“New Englanders relished their independence,” writes Shlaes, “which was why Coolidge had said, ‘I do not choose,’ emphasizing his own authority.” She quotes Edmund W. Starling, head of Coolidge’s Secret Service detail: “Nothing is more sacred to a New England Yankee than this privilege as an individual to make up his own mind.”

And when he left office and turned the White House keys over to his successor, Coolidge could take pride in his conscientious and frugal economic stewardship. And what of other areas? In foreign policy, Coolidge was neither an isolationist nor an internationalist idealist. America’s involvement in World War I, an essentially senseless venture, had left it with a crushing debt that his administration successfully paid down. His primary foreign-policy concerns included keeping the United States free from entangling foreign alliances and strengthening its commercial relations, especially with Latin America. There were important U.S. commercial interests in Honduras and Venezuela, with troops to safeguard our interests in the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba. At times, U.S. policies in Latin America were heavy-handed—so much so, in fact, that Coolidge attended a Pan-American conference in Cuba to assure America’s southern neighbors of the U.S. commitment to good relations.

Shlaes provides a vivid account of the trip: Early in 1928, as the USS Texas steamed into Havana Harbor, “the people of Cuba gathered to mount the greatest welcome they had ever given a foreign leader.” At the conference, in addition to President Gerardo Machado of Cuba, “leaders from twenty-one Latin American nations were also in attendance.” In his remarks, “Coolidge spoke of respect, democracy, and law,” as well as in favor of “the principle of self-government for Latin American nations.” He spoke against force and for the need to heed “the admonition to beat our swords to plowshares.” Estimates were of as many as two hundred thousand people celebrating the visit in the streets of Havana. According to the Associated Press, “It was a spectacle such as this American President has never before participated in and recalled to mind the clamorous entry of Woodrow Wilson into Paris.” Cubans, writes Shlaes, “like the citizens of so many other nations, were not merely glad to undertake a common project with the United States. They were eager to do so. All they were waiting for was an invitation.” One result: Secretary of State Frank Kellogg issued a white paper arguing against military intervention in Latin America.

Kellogg, along with French foreign minister Astride Briand, later gave his name to the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which renounced war as a means of conflict resolution. The treaty was signed in 1928 in Paris by fifteen nations (and later by most of the world’s nations) and ratified by the U.S Senate after intense debate, 85-1. For the administration, it was both a political and diplomatic victory. “The vast majority of the United States had wanted this treaty,” writes Shlaes, as had many of the smaller nations of the world. Coming as it did on the eve of W. H. Auden’s “low dishonest decade,” the treaty has faded into history as just another ineffectual attempt to bring peace to the world. But at the time it was considered a great achievement. As Shlaes writes, “The treaty had value as law, as precedent, as a model. If the United States leaned on law, the restless nations of the world might do the same.”

For his efforts, Kellogg received a Nobel Prize, as did Vice President Charles Dawes for his work on behalf of post–World War I currency stabilization in Germany. Two Nobels—not bad for an administration not often credited with an imaginative foreign policy.

AS COOLIDGE’S White House departure neared, he expressed doubts about the future—and about the abilities of his successor to deal with it. Shlaes summarizes his thinking: “The downturn was coming. But bad policy, especially Hoover’s spending policy, would make any downturn worse; the deficit Hoover ran might cause investors to lose confidence in the United States and gold to go to Europe. Then the recession would worsen.”

As predicted, during his first term, “Hoover had spent more money than he should have; he had spent like a Democrat. But that spending hadn’t been enough.” Yet Coolidge had even less faith in Hoover’s Democratic challenger, Franklin Roosevelt, to set things right. As Shlaes writes, “Coolidge was concerned that economy—savings—might not occur, whatever the candidate had promised. . . . There was another problem: the Democrats would pursue action for action’s sake, continuing where Hoover had started.” In Coolidge’s words, “That only means more experimenting with legislation.”

In a speech at Madison Square Garden in support of Hoover’s reelection in 1932, Coolidge

opened with a lengthy defense of Hoover and warned against switching horses in the middle of a race. But Coolidge also got to a more philosophical point. Roosevelt might mention the forgotten man, but he could not claim to be the only one who would serve him. . . . the GOP had done its part for the forgotten man: “Always the end has been to improve the wellbeing of the ordinary run of people.”

Shlaes adds, “Roosevelt attacked the rich, but his attack seemed odd, coming as it did from a wealthy man. More loyal than he felt, Coolidge defended Hoover, noting it was important to remember that Hoover came from a common background: ‘He was not born to the enjoyment of generations of inherited wealth.’”

After Roosevelt won, writes Shlaes, Coolidge told a friend, “I feel that I no longer fit in with these times.” The country was turning, and New England and all that it symbolized were passé or worse. “Even Robert Frost, who had felt himself unassailable, now sensed that he was wrong for what he called ‘these times.’” It was the dawning of the age of the ideologue. Shlaes quotes Isidor Schneider, writing in the left-wing Nation, as accusing Frost of replying to contemporary ideas “with know-nothing arrogance.”

Shlaes recounts that on January 5, 1933:

The newspapers greeted Americans with stories of the incoming administration. . . . Now it seemed that Roosevelt would take greater license than other Presidents. ‘Plan Free Hand for Roosevelt,’ read the headline on page one of The Wall Street Journal. Coolidge went to the office but did not feel well; around ten his secretary, Harry Ross, drove him home.

When, around lunchtime, Grace went upstairs and called to him, he did not respond. She found him dead in his dressing room. Writes Shlaes, “He had been shaving, just as he had been the first time she saw him that day through the window on Round Hill.” But this time, there was no laughter.

The funeral was “astonishingly simple for a former president.” There were few guests—among them Al Smith, Bernard Baruch, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Hoovers and old friends. “There was no eulogy, no address, just two hymns. . . . Even in the duration of the event, Coolidge made himself present: the service lasted only twenty-two minutes.”

Al Smith observed that Coolidge’s greatest accomplishment was “to restore the dignity and prestige of the presidency when it had reached ‘the lowest ebb in our history.’” He added that Coolidge was “in the class of presidents who were distinguished for character more than for heroic achievements.”

“But everyone knew,” writes Shlaes, “even on that Northampton day in January 1933, that sometimes character mattered more than achievements; or that the achievements of character might not always be evident at first.”

In his life and service to his country, Calvin Coolidge championed many of our once-basic national ideals, among them “civility to one’s opponents, silence, smaller government, trust, certainty, restraint, respect for faith, federalism, economy, and thrift,” all concepts not always reflected today in our politics, our economic thought or our dealings with one another.

Amity Shlaes, in this splendid and highly readable study, makes a powerful case for a reevaluation of our nearly forgotten president and the old American verities and virtues he personified.

John R. Coyne Jr. is a former White House speechwriter and the coauthor of Strictly Right: William F. Buckley and the American Conservative Movement.

Pullquote: In 1923, when President Harding died, the national debt stood at more than $22 billion. When President Coolidge left office six years later, the debt had been reduced to less than $17 billion.Image: Essay Types: Book Review