Interview: Amity Shlaes Discusses Coolidge (With Transcript)
MR. DRISCOLL: Was there a concerted effort after World War I to step on the brakes and slow the pace of the expansion of government? And if so, how did this movement gather steam and was it called, as we would call it today, conservatism, or did it go by some other name?
MS. SHLAES: Well, this is the great topic of interest to us because there they are like us. There had been a mess; there had been ruction. Right? There had been trouble, chaos. And no one knew how it would turn out. The federal government owed a lot of money. You know, imagine a government owing a billion or two billion going to twenty-eight billion. So the increase was at an outstanding rate. The numbers weren’t the same as now but the increase was large. And then the budget had expanded mightily too.
And people wondered whether — well, would the U.S. be a creditor or a debtor nation. It might — it had often been a debtor; now maybe it was a cred — well, you know, the permanent status of the U.S.’s superpower was not acknowledged in the same way, yet.
And what did they do? I think one answer you can look at is in the Harding-Coolidge campaign of 1920: “Normalcy.” And, Ed, what did you learn normalcy was in school? I learned it was something kind of dull, right? Like the — normalcy doesn’t sound elevated or wonderful and that was the Harding motto.
But what they meant by normalcy is not we should all be normal and cogs. Right? What they meant is the environment should be normal so that we can have fun and play with new ideas, which is something very different. Predictability, the reduction of uncertainty. Coolidge as a candidate even used the phrase “uncertainty” which you hear so much today and which is also the subject of Forgotten Man. It’s less uncertainty, please. He really — it’s a theme all the way to the end of his life. You can find it in his columns post-presidency. He spoke of uncertainty.
So wow, that’s very modern as well. He got at something we thought we just learned about, right? And their aim was to reduce uncertainty. To create normalcy so that business might do what it needs to do. Not necessarily only business but business.
And then the policy that followed — in general you can count the innovations of that period. They’re astounding.
MR. DRISCOLL: And it sounds like a very, very different mindset than FDR’s constant focus on what he dubbed “bold experimentation” on the economy?
MS. SHLAES: Right. But there were Progressives then. It was — it wasn’t as if everybody, you know, I kind of hear you sighing and saying, well, of course it was different then; people were for that. But there were Progressives who wanted, say, to nationalize water and power. Right? They were around, and you know that in 1924 they got seventeen percent of the vote. Like Ross Perot, they were a big presence. They were dividing the Republican Party or so it was thought. The Democrats were thinking of going to the left; Wilson had just made the Democrats progressive — Woodrow Wilson.
So in World War I, the government had shut down the stock market, New York — the stock market was in New York, so it was shut down in New York but the federal government was there in the background. And it had nationalized the chief means of transport, the railroad, and then denationalized it messily.
There were extreme interventions of the government, as in our recent period with the crisis. And nobody knew whether we could stop the Progressive march forward and yet Coolidge did stop it. He really did. Harding started and Coolidge did most of the work. He stopped it by — just by main force, by putting his thumb in the dike or, you know, you can think of different metaphors. I see him sort of in a blocking action. Or you’ve heard — you remember William Buckley used to talk about standing athwart history and –
MR. DRISCOLL: Uh-huh.
MS. SHLAES: — and yelling stop. Coolidge was a president, not a journalist. But I see him, too, as standing athwart history, yelling stop, and using his whole political tool kit to stop.
The number — you asked about budgets just to get back to the technical. What did they do? One thing they did was say we will restore certainty. We will narrow the parameters — narrow the possibilities, the unknown unknowns, right?
The second thing they did was they passed a budget law that made it possible for the president to budget. Before that it had sort of been with different committees just coming to the executive and he never got an overview and had not the staff either to get an overview, to have a real U.S. budget. That was the 1921 law which Harding signed. And they cut taxes.
Thank you. This interview gave me hope. If Coolidge can be elected after a number of “progressive” presidents, then we can still harbor hope that conservatism can make a comeback. I’ve been feeling down because of the election and all the leftist politicizing that has happened since November, but this cheered me. I hope to be able to read this book when it come out.
I sincerely hope you’re right – even though I’m too old to wait around here for things to turn around in some election four or eight or twelve or sixteen or twenty or twenty-four years from now.
Vote fraud is so massive that we no longer have a republic. We no longer have a Constitution, or at least, not one that is enforced. We don’t have much of anything. And nobody is taking any effective stand against vote fraud.
The national Republican Party has been a false-flag operation for decades. Its purpose is to keep any conservative who respects the Constitution from ever getting the nomination.
Even supposing a conservative wins four years from now – an outcome I do not predict – the math is against us. Too much money, too many resources, and too many people’s lives have already gone down the rat hole.
In short, we owe our souls to the Red Chinese.
Thanks for the interview. Shlaes is wrong when she says “He’s not like Ayn Rand, for example, because he always tends to bring in the spiritual…”. Ayn Rand does bring in the spiritual, which to her meant pertaining to man’s consciousness, but not in the mystical / religious senas. Nor does she say capitalism is everything; it’s only everything in economics.
I am glad to see the history of Silent Cal being posted and written about. Thanks’ PJ
Silent Cal: A Mini-Documentary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGhk4ArpQB0
In a comment today on another PJ article (Roger Simon’s on Sam Tannenhaus) I said this: “Jonah Goldberg did a good job in 2007 with his book “Illiberal Fascism”, placing – with much quotation – Progressivism into the same toxic puppy basket with its siblings Italian Fascism and Marxism-Leninism and (the conceptual runt of the litter) Naziism; they all spring from the same era and impulse.”
Then I come across this about Amity Shlaes’s thoughts and it seems apropos here as well.
I strongly support Shlaes’s efforts.
It’s sad that this otherwise good scholar so misunderstands Rand. For Rand, being productive is a highly creative, spiritual enterprise. The material outcome is secondary for her.
“Silent Cow”? Computer transcription has gotten pretty amazing, but it still needs editing.
Ugh–thanks for spotting that. Fixed.
As long as I’m being picky, “undue some of his own work” is another mistranscription.
Thanks for including a transcription, though. I don’t like listening to audios/videos, so this makes it accessible for me.
Fixed also. Thanks.
I’ll be picking this up, especially after the excellent “Forgotten Man”. Coolidge was the last true Constitutional President, and his fast and loose veto pen is sorely needed today.
I’ve always told friends that if I were President, I’d veto every budget until Congress had enough votes to override me. Then we’d be about a third of the way to a sensible federal budget.
I’m surprised she compared Paul Ryan to Coolidge. They couldn’t be more different.
Ryan is a guy who has spent his entire career in DC. He went there during college to work for Jack Kemp and he never left. His entire political career has been in Washington, with no executive experience to boot. All representing a fairly small district. He’s a member in good standing of the GOP and the DC establishment, of the ruling class that Rush mentions. Him and the GOP establishment are like lips and teeth, to quote Mao.
Coolidge on the other hand was an outsider, from a small town way out in the sticks somewhere. His political career began locally, first on the city council, then he became the mayor of a small town. Then in the State house and Senate. Then Lt Gov. Then Governor. He had no real connections with the DC insiders of the day or the ” GOP Establishment”. Yet somehow he ended up on the ticket with some older, etsablishment approved(literally, they picked him in the smoke filled room) white haired Senator who some folks were worried wouldn’t make it through his term.
Fortunately for Coolidge, him and Harding were running as the out party in 1920 after 8 years of Wilson who was terribly unpopular by the end of his term as a severe depression had gripped the country starting in Jan of 1920 that saw unemployment more than double from 5% in Jan to 12% by the end of the year./ Harding/Coolidge won in a landslide over the Dem ticket of OH Gov James Cox and his VP, some asst Navy Secretary from NY named Franklin Roosevelt. Whatever happened to that guy?
Now…when I ask myself “who resembles Coolidge today? Who also spent their formative political years outside of DC, had a resume filled with executive experience instead of just legislative, had experience on both the local/municipal and the state level, was an outsider from a small town looked down on by coastal and monied elites, who also came out of nowhere to be the VP to an older, establishment Senator with white hair…”
Well, the question answers itself.