WASHINGTON — I am indebted to Amity Shlaes for gently
correcting a joke of mine that dates back to July 8, 1972. On that
date in the New York Times I joshed that President Calvin
Coolidge “probably spent more time napping than any President in
the nation’s history” and therefore was a successful president. My
joke was a play on an earlier joke by H. L. Mencken, and now Shlaes
has corrected both of us. She has written a very impressive
biography titled simply Coolidge wherein
she never mentions Cal’s naps but rather what made him one of the
most successful presidents. He reversed the economic insolvency of
President Woodrow Wilson, and set the economy on the road to
growth, a road made rocky by Cal’s successor, President Herbert
Hoover, and rockier still by Hoover’s successor, Franklin
Roosevelt.
Though one would not know it today, Coolidge presided over a
very successful economy in the 1920s. Vice President Coolidge came
to the presidency on the death of President Warren G. Harding in
August 1923 and won the presidency outright in 1924 with 54 percent
of the vote over the Democrat, John W. Davis, who had 28.8 percent
of the vote, and the Progressive, Robert M. La Follette, who won
just 16.6 percent of the vote. Moreover, Coolidge had won every
race he ever contested from his first run for city councilman in
1898 to the governorship of Massachusetts in 1918, usually by
astoundingly large margins. His combination of civility,
effectiveness, standing by the law, and, as president, tax cuts,
budget balancing, and growth was wildly popular with American
voters, as was his singular asset, taciturnity.
He even outdid President Ronald Reagan on the economy. Reagan
inherited President Jimmy Carter’s anemic economy. He cut taxes and
with Paul Volcker as his guide cut inflation. He put the economy on
a growth curve for years thereafter. Yet, as Shlaes points out, he
failed to reduce the deficit — though he did reduce it as a
percentage of GDP — and he failed to cut the federal budget.
Coolidge did. In fact, he cut the top income tax rate to 25
percent, three percentage points lower than Reagan’s historic 1986
tax cuts, and the economy grew. Coolidge reduced the national debt
from $28 billion to $17.65 billion with a combination of economies
and tax cuts. He actually balanced the budget. When, in 1929, he
returned to his Massachusetts home he left the federal budget
smaller than it was when he had arrived in 1921. Of equal
importance, the economy was now solidly growing.
The unemployment rate that was at 5.7 million in July 1921 had
dropped to 1.8 million. Manufacturing had climbed by a third since
1921 and iron and steel production had doubled. Finally, the
revenue acts of 1921, 1924, and 1928 represented strong growth
despite tax reduction. Something was working.
Coolidge’s secretary of the treasury, Andrew Mellon, called it
“scientific taxation.” Today we would call his tax plan supply-side
economics. By cutting marginal tax rates Coolidge and Mellon goaded
economic activity and raised tax revenue. Yet through all the years
of his presidency Coolidge along with his secretary of the treasury
Mellon had to fight off big spenders, not only the Democrats but
also those Republicans infected with a kind of influenza for Big
Government called progressivism. There were great projects such as
the hydroelectric project called Muscle Shoals and there were noble
gestures such as the veterans’ pensions that kept the pressure on
the Administration to spend and tax and burst the budget.
Cal resisted most of these impulses with his pocket veto and
fifty vetoes, but it wore him down. In 1927 he cryptically signed a
message to the world, “I do not choose to run for President in
Nineteen Twenty-Eight.” Hoover ran and returned the progressive
impulse to Washington.
So, Ms. Shlaes, I was wrong. Coolidge was a great man but not
because of his napping. He accomplished what he accomplished by
cutting taxes and cutting budgets. It took a lot of energy and it
took fortitude.
