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Home , Boston Police Strike, Calvin Coolidge, Coolidge effect, John Coolidge, Plymouth Notch Cemetery

Calvin Coolidge A tale of two Coolidges

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential

This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: was born on the Fourth of July, 1872, in Plymouth Notch, . He died in 1933, just a few years after leaving the presidency. And he's buried on top of a hill in his small hometown near the Green Mountains. His body rests silently beside many others in his family, including his 16-year-old son who died in the .

WILLIAM JENNEY: This is William Jenney, the regional administrator with the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation. And we are standing in front of President Coolidge's gravesite here at the . It is a very simple grave site. It's on a steep hill. This land was too steep to farm, so they put it to another practical use.

Notice on the gravestone itself, it says his name with his birth and death dates, but nothing else to indicate anything special other than the presidential seal at the top. Some people are surprised to see such a simple gravesite for a president. But it's very appropriate for him. He did say in his autobiography that, 'We draw our presidents from the people. I came from them. I wished to be one of them again.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: For this episode, I have a special tour guide. So, with me in the studio is Steve Pearlstein.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Hi.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning economics columnist for The Washington Post, and Steve has also been my mentor here. He started the 'On Leadership' section. We've had a lot of conversations about leadership over the years. So, one thing that we're going to explore in the episode is how his legacy has changed over time and also how it's a lot more nuanced than this image of Silent Cal. Here we go.

I'm Lillian Cunningham with The Washington Post.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: And I'm Steve Pearlstein.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And this is the 29th episode of “Presidential.”

PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Alright, Steve. So, Calvin Coolidge, was in the White House from 1923 -- when Warren Harding died -- until 1929. And he's been treated for many of the decades that followed his time in the White House as basically a caricature of a weak president. But more recently, something has happened with his legacy where he's become an admired conservative icon.

So, in order for us to understand and explore this counter-narrative that has begun to spring up about him, why don't you first, Steve, just walk us through what the traditional narrative of Calvin Coolidge has been over the years.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: So the stick-figure portrait of Coolidge is first that he was a man of very few words. 'Silent Cal.' It was said that when he opened his mouth, a moth came out. And there's the story of the woman sitting next to him at a dinner party who said, 'Mr. President, my friend bet me that I couldn't get you to say three words here tonight.'

To which the president is said to have immediately replied, 'You lose.' So, his quietness, his parsimony with words, was part of it -- 'Silent Cal' -- but also not only did he not say much, but that he didn't do anything -- that he was the original of the 'Do Nothing' presidents.

So [his reputation was that he] said nothing, did nothing, was ridiculously conservative in his view of government, basically. ‘Best thing for government to do is to get out of the way.’ And he's also viewed as someone who is lazy, took naps every afternoon, was really just an accidental president.

The editor of The Nation wrote upon his assuming the presidency -- which he did because of the death of his predecessor, Harding – “I doubt if the presidency has ever fallen into the hands of a man so cold, so narrow, so reactionary, so uninspirational, so unenlightened or who has done less to earn it than Calvin Coolidge.”

At least certainly among the more liberal academic crowd, that has been the view of Calvin Coolidge.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Well, and he also precedes the , and there has been a storyline that his presidency played some key role in setting us up for that.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: [The narrative is:] It was his inaction. It was his kowtowing to the business interests that allowed the to roar, that allowed the great stock market bubble to get created. It's this excessive period of laissez faire that caused the Great Depression.

And in a sense, Coolidge is this sort of anti-FDR. If you think the was great, if you think the New Deal was the thing that modernized the United States and set it on the course to become the greatest power in the world and the greatest society in the world, then you have to dislike and you have to make fun of Calvin Coolidge.

Because he was --

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: The opposite.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: He set up the things that led to the Great Depression. So, there was a lot of politics involved, I think, in ridiculing Calvin Coolidge.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: There's been this movement under way, though, particularly in conservative circles, to really paint a new portrait of Coolidge. So, Steve, you decided to look into this new portrait for the episode, and you did three interviews.

One is with a former presidential candidate who thinks Coolidge was, in fact, a skilled politician. Another interview you did was with a professor who gives more context to why Coolidge developed this silent persona. And the third conversation you had was with a biographer who argues that Coolidge actually does have a pretty strong economic legacy.

So who's this first interview with, Steve?

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Among those who've really come to appreciate Coolidge's skill is another former politician, whom I've known actually most of my life. Like Coolidge, he served as a member of the Massachusetts legislature. Like Coolidge, he served as governor of Massachusetts. And like Coolidge, he ran as a candidate for president of the United States.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And that man is:

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Mike Dukakis.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Alright, so let's take a listen.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Well, thanks for doing this.

MIKE DUKAKIS: Good to be with you.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Calvin Coolidge became vice president; and then President Harding died unexpectedly in office, and he became president. And a lot of people at that time barely knew who he was, and they never expected that. You have looked at his history and you've concluded that he really wasn't so accidental. Talk about Calvin Coolidge as a politician -- as a Massachusetts politician.

MIKE DUKAKIS: Nobody gave this to Coolidge. He was a kid from Vermont who went to , settled in Northampton. And in his own interesting way, in a democratic Irish Catholic ward of Northhampton, he went out -- as did I -- rang every single doorbell and knocked on every door in his district and was elected to the Massachusetts legislature.

And subsequently, he went on to be elected to the Senate, to become the Senate president, and then lieutenant governor and governor. And so, our career paths in many ways were really quite similar. He was also a grassroots politician -- spent lots of time out with people -- and was remarkably progressive. We think of Coolidge these days as being a conservative guy, when he was a very progressive governor and part of the progressive movement of the time.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: And so, as a good Republican, progressive Republican, Coolidge actually

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 supported women's suffrage. He supported the right to join unions. He supported legislation for shorter work weeks and child labor laws and minimum wages. He supported the idea of an old age pension, what we now know as social security.

MIKE DUKAKIS: Strongly for that. And as the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, he strongly supported universal health insurance for the people of Massachusetts. In fact, one of his friends got a hold of him and said, 'Cal, aren't you going a little overboard here?' But people like Coolidge at the time thought that working Americans and their families ought to have access to decent health care. And he said so.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: So, his record on labor issues was so good that, in fact, he was asked to mediate a big strike in Lawrence in 1913. Talk about that.

MIKE DUKAKIS: The IWW strike was one of the great labor struggles in this country, as well as in the state of Massachusetts. And it wasn't going anywhere and it was very tough and it was very angry -- and it was Coolidge, as senate president, who went up to Lawrence and basically told those mill owners that they ought to pay their workers another 25 cents an hour.

And 25 cents an hour in those days was a lot of money. We don't think of Coolidge as somebody who would do that kind of thing. Point in fact, he did. And again, it was another reason why I think he was so popular.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: You know, it appeared as if it was an accident that he got nominated for vice president -- because the two leading contenders basically fought to a draw. He became president because President Harding died unexpectedly. But in politics, is that luck or do you essentially make your own luck in politics?

MIKE DUKAKIS: It's a little bit of both. He never would've been there had it not been for the fact that he had carved out a very impressive record, both as a legislator and as the governor -- probably because he was the governor in charge of the state's response to the police strike, which was, as you can imagine, national news and very important. Coolidge, who was a strong labor guy, was extremely reluctant to step in and in effect to break the union, but just felt that he had to do so. It gave him enormous national publicity. Without the , he might never have been a candidate for vice president.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: The strike got out of hand, did it not? I mean, things got pretty dicey there in Boston for a while.

MIKE DUKAKIS: He tried very hard to mediate it. He had good relationships with the unions, generally -- really worked to try to settle it and couldn't do it, and only then said that there was no right to strike in effect against the public interest.

But it wasn't for lack of trying to settle that thing before. In fact, Boston discovered that it was unprotected, that mobs were ransacking department stores in downtown Boston. And at that point, Coolidge had to call up the National Guard and he did.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Interestingly, after this strike was over, after it'd been broken and the striking policemen had been fired, he actually spent some time and effort trying to get them other jobs. But he didn't give them their jobs back. And that was something that mentioned

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 4 when he fired the air traffic controllers quite famously in the early 1980s when they went out on strike. He essentially asserted the same rule -- that nobody has the right to strike against the public interest.

MIKE DUKAKIS: Anyplace, anytime.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: What's the job of Senate president like in the Massachusetts legislature?

MIKE DUKAKIS: It's one of the three most important jobs in the state government, the others being the governor and the speaker of the house. It may sound decisive, but he's got to create consensus among his members. Otherwise, he won't get anything done. And I think Coolidge was a nice combination of that -- principled, strong views, quite progressive, but also somebody who understood that you've got to talk with your members, listen to your members, be responsive to your members. Democrats, as well as Republicans.

It says a lot about his ability to reach out to people, to bridge differences, to encourage and persuade people to work together on things. And again, that's a side of Coolidge that we don't hear much about when it comes to his national career.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: OK, so Harding dies. Coolidge finds out he's going to be president.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: He finds out while he's actually visiting his father back home in Plymouth Notch. And his father, being a in Vermont, actually swore him in by candlelight. They did not have electricity at the house. And they found out because someone called the general store in Plymouth Notch, and someone ran over from the general store to the Coolidge house to inform him that he had become president of the United States.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, this is 1923 -- the year that Coolidge becomes president. And we already heard from your conversation with about how Coolidge was possibly more prepared for the presidency and a more skilled political operator than history has usually given him credit for. So, what about his character and his leadership style did you find out, Steve?

Actually, before you do that. I know you listened to some of the episodes, Steve, where I ask this question. Normally, I ask this question of historians, but since you did all the interviews, I'm going to ask it of you.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Alright.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, I've been set up with this guy Calvin Coolidge. What do you think, Steve? What should I expect? What's my date going to be like with him?

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Quiet. You're going to have to do most of the talking.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And I'm going to have to pay?

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: No, no. He would never let you pay, but he wouldn't spend very much, either. You're probably not going to drink too much; although, actually I have to tell you, Lily, his biggest vice is he loved to smoke cigars. So, I don't know whether you want to go on a date with a guy who likes to smoke cigars.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 5

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: No, not really.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: But he wasn't all that playful. I will tell you one thing -- that if you had gone out with Calvin Coolidge, and he sort of got sweet on you, he could be a very jealous suitor and not all that respectful. I have to tell you this, Lily. I'm not sure that he'd be your sort of guy. When he decided not to run for re-election, , his wife, heard about it from the press. He didn't --

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Oh my God.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: He didn't even talk to her about it.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, this image of him as a silent president really is accurate, then.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: There is one historian who I also talked to, Lily, who thinks there's more to the story of 'Silent Cal.' The story of the Coolidge presidency is also one of a great personal tragedy involving the death of the president's favorite son, Calvin Jr.

According to Robert Gilbert, what to some appeared was a lack of energy on Coolidge's part -- or at least a lack of interest in government -- might, in fact, have been a fairly serious case of a mental illness. Robert Gilbert is a professor emeritus of political science at Northeastern University. Professor Gilbert, thanks for joining us.

ROBERT GILBERT: Thank you for having me.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Calvin Coolidge is known, perhaps, best as 'Silent Cal' -- as sort of a 'Do Nothing' president, who took long naps and went away from Washington in the summer for three months at a time and believed that the government that did the least was the best kind of government.

You suggested that that is a misunderstanding of him.

ROBERT GILBERT: I do think that Calvin Coolidge is a very different kind of president from most other presidents. Most presidents, I think, have been of the same type throughout their presidency. They were passive or they were active throughout their entire presidency. But in Calvin Coolidge's case, at the beginning of his term, he was a very active president. He was very deeply involved in his administration. He was very concerned, very interested in what was going on in the country and what was going on in the world. He was very much in charge and very much in control of his own administration.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Like what kinds of things did he propose during that year?

ROBERT GILBERT: Well, we tend to think of Calvin Coolidge as being very, very passive and very, very conservative. But what he proposed to Congress was not conservative. He did recommend the tax cut, and he's known for that. But he did much more than that. He urged the expansion of the civil service system. He urged the enactment of environmental legislation -- oil slick laws. He urged the establishment of reformatories for women and young men serving their first prison term. He urged that Congress provide expanded healthcare for veterans.

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This is not the image that we have typically of Calvin Coolidge. He urged that Congress set up a separate Cabinet-level department of education and welfare. Coolidge made 30 identifiable requests to Congress during that first annual message.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: And did most of those things get enacted into law?

ROBERT GILBERT: A number of them did, yes. A number of them did.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Talk about his work work ethic. Was he somebody that goofed off a lot or --

ROBERT GILBERT: No. Well again, his presidency is sort of bifurcated. At the beginning of his term, he worked very, very hard. Mrs. Coolidge, for example, said he’s always working. He's always reading. He's always getting ready for a meeting.

But when the crisis of his life descended on him, namely the death of his favorite son -- he had two sons, and Calvin Coolidge, Jr. -- when Calvin Coolidge Jr. died in the summer of 1924, Coolidge’s whole behavior changed. His whole personality changed. I feel quite certain that he was really a clinically depressed president, and a number of psychiatrists agree with what I've suggested. He showed the signs of clinical depression. In fact, for the rest of his term, he never really recovered.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: So, let's go back a bit and talk about how Calvin, Jr. died.

ROBERT GILBERT: Yes. In 1924, Coolidge's two sons lived in a boarding school. And in June, they came back to the White House to spend the summer or at least some weeks of the summer with their parents. And every day, the boys would play tennis. One day, John Coolidge, the oldest son, arrived at the tennis courts but his brother wasn't there. And John went back to the White House and asked his mother, 'Where is Calvin?' And they went up to the brother's bedroom, and the brother was sick.

He said, 'I don't feel well.' They called the White House physician, and the White House's physician immediately came. And the White House physician said to Coolidge's son, 'What do you mean, you don't feel well?' Calvin Coolidge, Jr. said, 'I don't know, but I have a blister on my toe. I got a blister on my toe after playing tennis over the last two days.'

And the doctor said, 'Let me see the blister.' And as soon as the doctor saw it, he was concerned because the blister was large. It was very deep red. It seemed to be infected, and also, he saw that there were red streaks running up the boy's leg.

And he immediately said, 'The president's son is suffering from blood poisoning.' And there were no treatments at the time. And within a few days, the boy died. And this was the crisis of Coolidge's life. He blamed himself for the boy's death.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Why would he blame himself?

ROBERT GILBERT: He said, 'If I weren't president, he would not have been playing on the White House tennis courts. It's my fault that he died.'

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 7 Of course, it wasn't. But he really blamed himself for the boy's death. ‘If I hadn't wanted to be president, my son would be alive. My favorite son would be alive.’

There were two Coolidge presidencies. One of them saw Calvin Coolidge as a very activist, very involved, very competent president. But the second Calvin Coolidge, the clinically depressed Calvin Coolidge, was the Calvin Coolidge that everyone remembers -- a president who did nothing, a president who barely ever spoke.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: So, talk about the symptoms of the depression as they were observed by family or staff.

ROBERT GILBERT: According to the people in the White House -- according to John Coolidge, according to Grace Coolidge, who made comments about her husband -- Coolidge late in his term had a ferocious temper, and this runs contrary to the image that most people have.

Most people think that he never spoke. But, in point, in fact, he spoke a lot. He always spoke a lot. But in the latter portions of his presidency, specifically after his son died and after he was reelected as president, he frequently flew into rages -- yelling and screaming at staff members, for example. Even yelling and screaming at Mrs. Coolidge. He humiliated Mrs. Coolidge in front of guests and in front of staff members at the White House.

Before the son died, this sort of thing never happened. He was contained. He was controlled. After the son died, he was uncontrolled and uncontained. As a matter of fact, some of the employees described him as being insane. They actually believed that he was insane.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: It was said that Calvin Coolidge used to nap a lot in the White House.

ROBERT GILBERT: After Calvin died, he would go to bed earlier and get up later. He's one of the only presidents in American history who slept as many hours that he did, and he would also take naps throughout the daytime. Some historians have said that Coolidge spent maybe half of every workday sleeping.

In those days, it was just looked on as a sort of peculiarity of the president. Now, we would look at it differently. Now, psychiatrists, for example, would say these are signs of clinical depression.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Were there any other events in his life or any other signs that he was inclined toward depression?

ROBERT GILBERT: When he was a child, his mother died. And he was very, very close to his mother. And he writes about walking in the winter, in the freezing Vermont winters, to visit his mother's grave. So, he was depressed after his mother died. This was the first depression, perhaps, of his life. And very soon after his mother died, his sister died, and she was his closest companion. She was a young child. They think maybe she died of appendicitis. So, he had three significant losses and showed signs of depression each time.

He writes in his autobiography that when Calvin, Jr. died, the power and glory of the presidency went with him.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: How -- after Calvin, Jr. died -- did relations between Coolidge and the Congress

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 8 and the Cabinet change, if at all?

ROBERT GILBERT: The relations between Coolidge and the Cabinet and Coolidge with Congress changed immediately. Virtually with the death of Calvin Coolidge, Jr., Coolidge became disinterested. He never gave a in person again. The number of press conferences dramatically declined. When he held press conferences, he really couldn't respond to the questions that the reporters were asking, and would say to them, 'I really don't know enough to respond to your questions.'

Before the son died, he certainly never did this. Before the son died, the press got the impression that he was knowledgeable, that he was on top of things, that he was the boss. After his son died, the press found him to be distracted and to be really a nonfunctioning president.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: So, this is really a badly misunderstood president in your opinion.

ROBERT GILBERT: Well, yes, I think that Coolidge's reputation as president has been mocked and demeaned by scholars for years, for decades. And I'm certainly not saying that Calvin Coolidge would have been one of the greatest presidents if his son hadn't died. But I think he would have been a very different president than the president that we know. If that boy had not died, or if that boy had died much later in his term, I think Coolidge's reputation now as president would have been much better.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, Steve, for several decades following Coolidge's time in the White House, the portrait that really stuck with him was the last one we just heard described, right? The portrait of him as an ineffective, passive president.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: It's in recent years that people have really come to reassess him.

Partly that's just a natural thing that happens in history, where the people who are down all of a sudden get a different look; and the people who are up also get a different look. But the other thing is: I think we've come to a different appreciation about the cycles of the economy.

We have booms and busts, that's true. But there's a tendency among historians to ascribe that to political policies, to government policies. When in fact, a lot of the times, the cycles of the economy have more to do with technology. And the 1920s, it turns out, was a period of incredible technological advance and adoption of technology.

We're talking about electricity. We're talking about radio. We're talking about the automobile and the telephone. All these things became commonly used by businesses and households during the 1920s, and it was because of that primarily that the economy boomed. And because the economy boomed, the stock market boomed. And Coolidge had the sense to basically let it happen -- to get out of the way.

Certainly, in terms of this revisionist approach to Coolidge, Lily, the historian who's most associated with that is Coolidge's most recent biographer, a journalist. Her name is , and she teaches at King's College these days in , where I caught up with her. And we talked mostly about Coolidge's economic policy.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Alright, let's take a listen.

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STEVE PEARLSTEIN: You really caught the wave in terms of the new interest in Calvin Coolidge -- the revisionist idea that maybe he wasn't as do-nothing and as feckless as people thought. This really began with Ronald Reagan.

AMITY SHLAES: Ronald Reagan undug a portrait of Coolidge and put it in this prominent space -- the Cabinet. That meant not only he could see, not only outsiders could see it, but members of the Cabinet would see it.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: But also part of the Reagan resuscitation of Calvin Coolidge was the economic philosophy: the philosophy of supply-side economics -- that you could cut taxes and still maintain revenues, that you could unleash a technological advance and economic growth by , that government should not be running big deficits and should not have large debt.

Coolidge famously said, 'I am for economy. After that, I am for more economy.’ He was a notorious tightwad and penny-pincher.

AMITY SHLAES: Coolidge became president in the . One of the progressive impulses was organization, merit, doing things systematically instead of ad hoc and politically.

And in 1921, before Coolidge, Harding led the country in passage of a budget law that aimed to give the executive some more authority over the budget so he could look at it all at once, instead of in pieces from mendicant.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Because in the old days, each department submitted its budget to the Congress, right?

AMITY SHLAES: That's right. Each department would submit its budget. The president would see it. Congress would see it. It’s as if -- imagine you're a parent and each kid comes to you with a long, sad story…‘And therefore, I need a car.’ And you say, 'My heart breaks for you, you get a car.' And then the next child comes in, and pretty soon, you've bought more cars than you can afford. So, this law unified the budget and created an office -- the office of the budget director.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: He cared a lot about cutting spending. He had a weekly meeting, in fact, in which he himself spent -- what is it? -- an hour, an hour and a half every week going over individual spending items.

AMITY SHLAES: Oh, and Coolidge made some theater out of this. You didn't use all of the pencil? Well, the government spends thousands on pencils. I'll take your stub back. I'll take that half battleship back. I'll take whatever you're not spending.

This was a new culture. And what you're really doing is saying no -- not only to Congress, but to the Cabinet. So, before the Cabinet meeting on Friday, Coolidge had a budget meeting with his budget director -- Dawes was the budget director. And then came Herbert Mayhew Lord, also from the military. And they would plan how to say no.

As a parent, one knows it's easy to say yes when you're unprepared, but hard to say no. In order to say no, you need preparation and knowledge. He would get this briefing before the Cabinet meeting, so he could say no in the Cabinet meeting. That was important to him, and it worked.

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For this book, we quantified how many times Coolidge met with this gosh-darn budget director, and it was often. Maybe once a week. That's a lot. That meant Coolidge was devoted to the idea of budgeting, and he had picked that up in Massachusetts.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: So, in these meetings with Lord and with Dawes -- who ultimately became vice president, did he not?

AMITY SHLAES: Yes. And that was a budget symbol. If you run Mr. Scrooge as your vice- presidential candidate, what does that tell the country about your intentions?

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: So what are the kinds of things that they would cut?

AMITY SHLAES: Well, on the minutiae level, they cut pencils spending. Let's not telephone veterans, let's send wires, that's cheaper. So you want to imagine total minutiae -- sort of "beneath the president," and yet the president is is involved.

And in order to cajole and harass the departments into spending less, they created the 2 Percent Club -- for that department that actually cut its budget 2 percent above and beyond what the executive was demanding. And after a while, the country was growing. They couldn't get 2 percent out of the departments anymore, so they went to the 1 Percent Club.

And then after a while, they couldn't get 1 percent out of the departments. imagery came to their minds, and they created a Woodpecker Club -- for that department that pecks away at its budget here and there.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Can you imagine today a president who took an hour a week to sit down and figure out ways to eliminate a program, spending, whatever? You can't even imagine it, and yet, it might actually be great politics.

AMITY SHLAES: It's not only great politics, it's great economics. But his goal politically was to cut the government. Today when we cut government, we speak of reducing the increase, because of the way we budget -- which is a little hard on the voter. That makes the voter feel something's not honest and transparent about the whole thing, when you only reduce the increase. When he said cut, Coolidge actually cut.

So, if you look in the books, you'll see the budget was lower than when he came in, even though the economy grew, the population grew.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: And the debt was reduced. In fact, he ran a surplus every year that he was president.

AMITY SHLAES: Yes. Well, I think I would put it this way. Wilson, at the end, then Harding, then Coolidge had a campaign to reduce the enormous war debt -- which was a huge share of the U.S. economy, something we had never imagined.

And Coolidge just kept going on the crusade that Wilson and Harding had started, getting this debt down by one third. Then, in addition to that, you had the annual deficit, which is operating. And Coolidge had a surplus every year. That was important, too. The standing of the U.S. in the world

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 11 was not so clear at that time.

We're oblivious now because it's all about us. We're the currency of the reserve, we're the center of the world. Our deficit doesn't seem to matter, we tell ourselves. At least at that time, had we run wide deficits, we might have lost standing, and more money would have gone over to England.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: So, let's talk about taxation, particularly the income tax. The income tax had just come in during the Wilson administration. So, it just began in 1915. And in those days, it was just a tax on very rich people. Most people didn't pay the income tax. So, then came in, and taxes were raised. Not only did the top rate go as high as 70 percent, but many, many millions of households actually wound up paying in income tax to pay for the war.

So, now we're after the war, and the Republicans stood for reducing those taxes. Talk about Coolidge and taxes. What was his attitude toward taxation?

AMITY SHLAES: He believed that too much taxation was immoral, because it stole freedom from people. People don't have a choice about taxation and that irked him. He said, 'I want to cut spending so there can be more freedom.’ It wasn't that it was black and white to Coolidge. He didn't say, 'No taxes at all.' But each additional tax that was added, or each dollar of tax, he saw a diminishment of freedom. So, he focused on that margin more than many other presidents.

But he's also concerned that if you cut a rate too low, well, the government might not get money enough to cover the expenses it does have. It might run a deficit --

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Which would be worse.

AMITY SHLAES: Which would be worse.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: So taxes are bad, but deficits are worse.

AMITY SHLAES: This is all going on in his head, right? And if, in turn, you raised too much money -- say with taxes -- you get more. Then, he thought, well, then Congress will spend it and establish new precedents of spending. So, imagine the nightmares of Coolidge's sleeping hours, right? There are all these things to avoid, and he wakes up in a sweat.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Now, his secretary of the Treasury, who he inherited, was , who was the third richest man in the United States. Now, Mellon had a slightly different attitude. He called it scientific taxation.

AMITY SHLAES: And he saw this sort of pragmatically. Let's rationalize taxation, so we get the most money with the least pain. What did he mean? He had observed in railroads that if you charge a high freight, then the trains found another path to take. So, sometimes you could lower the freight rate and get more traffic, and they knew traffic would offset the losses from the lower rate.

So, Mellon had this idea: scientific taxation. Let's charge what the traffic will bear. Let's tinker with the rate until we find the optimal rate for getting money -- because Mellon, as treasury secretary, wanted to get money. And this made Coolidge distinctly nervous. But he went along because Mellon knew what he was doing.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 12 STEVE PEARLSTEIN: So, this is exactly the same argument that we have today in terms of budgeting. As the Democrats say, 'Well, if you cut taxes, you're going to cut revenue.' And they take an almost arithmetic view. ‘If you cut taxes 10 percent -- tax rates -- then you're going to get 10 percent less money.’ Whereas the Republicans say, 'No, you need to use dynamic scoring.' You have to see that if you lower the rate, you might get more economic activity and actually not lose revenue or as much revenue as you would think.

And how did that turn out?

AMITY SHLAES: That turned out -- they precisely ran that experiment. This was an ambitious experiment, because the income tax was new -- the income tax was like a toy everyone wanted to try. It was new and it very quickly was outpacing the old source of revenue, the tariff. So, suddenly, it was better than the tariff. I don't think anyone had dreamed that it could be a better engine than the tariff for revenue, and now it was.

So, they launched this experiment. So, they cut and cut. And as they cut, they got more money -- at least more than they expected. It was a beautiful experiment in what, in modern times -- but they didn't use this phrase -- would be called supply-side economics.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: The liberal view of Coolidge is that, he, like Harding and Hoover together, engaged in the kind of economic policy, pushed the kind of economic policy that caused the stock market to boom and then to crash, and that, in effect, they caused the Great Depression.

Is that right?

AMITY SHLAES: We should not blame Coolidge for the Great Depression. Just because he preceded it does not mean he caused it. That's a logical fallacy, conceivably. Coolidge believed that the stock market was the business of the stock market -- and maybe of its regulator, New York State.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: There was no SEC at the time.

AMITY SHLAES: There was no SEC at that time. As governor of Massachusetts, he had been involved with a financial scandal called the Ponzi scheme because Mr. Ponzi was in Massachusetts some of the time. He believed these were state problems.

Why did he believe that? Because he believed in states, but also he believed that if the stock market paid for its own trouble itself, it would learn a lesson and wouldn't go near the fire again. But it had to pay, from time to time, to remember not to overstep or grow bubbles or whatever.

The life of Coolidge is about concurrent to the life of the Dow. The Dow Jones Industrial Average came on line around the time Coolidge came out of college -- the mid 1890s. So, in his life, he saw the stock market crash a lot. The crash of 1903, the Dow was down 34 percent. The crash of 1907, Dow was down 41 percent.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: The stock market was very volatile at that period.

AMITY SHLAES: The stock market, in Coolidge's experience, was volatile and it always came back up. So he expected -- one can argue, and there's some evidence for it -- that the stock market would crash. It was disturbingly high. Someone like Coolidge -- well, he had expected the stock

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 13 market to be about 100, and suddenly it was 200. And then, as he's leaving office, 280 and then 380.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: So, then, if that didn't cause the Depression, what did cause the Depression?

AMITY SHLAES: I argue the Depression was multi-causal. There's the monetary factor that has spoken of.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: The Federal Reserve.

AMITY SHLAES: That the Federal Reserve was too loose and then too tight and then insufficiently loose. That's a factor. International elements were a factor. We imposed a bad tariff under -- Smoot-Hawley -- and that angered Europeans and hurt trade.

And I also argue that the busy hand of government generated heavy uncertainty, so that business froze. Taxes were very high. They were raised significantly in the Great Depression period under the New Deal. Recovery is like an animal or a human. It makes decisions. Every year, from 1929 to 1940, the recovery made a decision to stay away.

And each year, it's slightly different reasoning on the part of the recovery. That doesn't go back to Coolidge, though. It's extremely hard to pin the Great Depression on Coolidge. It's only the power of chronology that makes us want to do it.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: If you look at who is in totality -- cutting of spending, , low taxes, particularly on capital -- he sounds pretty much like today's Republican conservatives. Is Calvin Coolidge the father of modern conservatism?

AMITY SHLAES: Today's Republican conservatives don't cut government. They might talk about it, but they don't do it. They would like to do it. Maybe it's not their fault they cannot do it. But Coolidge is more conservative fiscally than the Republican or the Democratic Party. He resisted Washington.

One of the questions we have at the Coolidge Foundation is whether Coolidge should have an office in Washington and whether Coolidge would have liked that. The national government -- he was suspicious of it. Washington is the city of 'Yes.' It's the city of spending. And here he was, the king of 'No.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I'm curious, Steve, what will stick with you -- or what you've taken away or what you've reevaluated -- for having gone through this exercise of thinking about Calvin Coolidge?

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Well, I guess the thing that sticks in my mind is: So, his view of the presidency was actually quite limited. I mean, one way to look at it -- the way many people do -- is that he just was so anti-government that he didn't want the president to do anything.

But I think the fairer way to think of it is that he was just a very humble man. And there was a humility about himself that he didn't think the president should do those things because it was very egotistical to do it. He had a pretty bad relationship in the end with Herbert Hoover, who he thought was just a terrible egotist.

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And the reason he thought Hoover was an egotist is that: Every time there was a problem, Hoover wanted to rush out and come up with some government program for it. And it was mostly a lack of humility, as much as anything else, that bothered him about that approach to things.

I'm sure he would have been horrified by the New Deal. But it wasn't as much an ideological thing as it was a sort of --

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Temperamental.

STEVE PEARLSTEIN: Temperamental thing. [He thought:] It's very unhumble to think that you, as president, can fix everything. You know, some things just can't be fixed. They have to take their course. I mean, he once said, “It's a great advantage to a president, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he's not a great man.”

And I think that was really his approach to the presidency.

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