Interview: Amity Shlaes Discusses Coolidge (With Transcript)
And the theme of Coolidge, you’ll notice the book is a year late, that’s because I got very interested in writing about this and exposing it for the reader because it’s so relevant. Coolidge loved that budget law and he used it in fantastic ways. We looked at all the data at how often he met with his budget man, who was General Lord, another New Englander. They met often, always before a cabinet meeting so he could be better prepared to say no. As president he said no; that’s who he was. He vetoed a lot. He was a maestro, a kind of Isaac Stern of the pocket veto which is, you know, requires some technique. This is the veto whereby the president need not write a message about why he’s vetoing it, where he actually kills the law, kills the legislation. Very hard to override a pocket veto unlike a regular veto. But you need to time it right. There are rules about when you can pocket veto. And he did pocket veto a lot. In total Coolidge had fifty vetoes.
So he told his father it is better to kill bad laws than to pass good ones. His father was a lawmaker in Montpelier, Vermont, in the State Capitol of Vermont which is Coolidge’s first home state.
So wow, that’s different. And he used — he spent enormous energy reviewing the budget. I like very much an interview when –again, he was in advance with technology — an early conference call he did with a group of philanthropists, and he told them at the beginning of the conference call that he didn’t really like to do speeches — remarks; he was tired or he sort of alluded to that. But when he heard that these philanthropists wanted to talk about budgets, his heart warmed and he was ready to speak to them because he — as he said to them, I have an obsession with budgets. I dream of sinking funds, and rates and balance sheets.
And this is exactly the kind of president we need now. We need someone who is pretty far along in the learning curve of finance and of budgets and fiscal situations. And he happened to be that because he’d been governor of a state because he was budget-minded by temperament. Temperament places into this, too.
MR. DRISCOLL: Amity, last couple of questions. I don’t know if the Coolidge book goes into this, but do you talk about how Coolidge’s reputation initially fell off after all of the very consequential events that occurred while presidents such as FDR, Truman and Ike, all very foreign affairs-oriented presidents, were at the helm.
MS. SHLAES: Is that your euphemistic way of saying the Great Depression happened so some people may think it was his fault?
MR. DRISCOLL: Well, that’s actually a different question, and that’s also a great question.
MS. SHLAES: So okay. So the first question is foreign affairs. You know, I think generally, people like heroes for presidents. And American presidents can be foreign affairs heroes, war heroes or, you know, international heroes more easily than they can be domestic heroes because of federalism. I mean you see that with Katrina, right? The Europeans said why can’t President Bush run down there, he’s commander-in-chief, and take over the South. And we know why he couldn’t run down there. He couldn’t run down there because a president can’t go in a governor’s territory so fast. He has to kind of ask. And that little hiccup that always happens when there’s a disaster that’s the federalist pause and you can get a snapshot of any executive and say he’s pausing in disaster. He’s inhumane, right? But it’s very American. It’s hard to be a superhero domestically because our federalist system doesn’t like that and that’s intentional. We didn’t want a superhero because we don’t like dictators.
In foreign affairs we’re more comfortable with that, you know, commander-in-chief, power in, power out. Coolidge was not a commander-in-chief in temperament often. I mean, there’s some examples. He was — anyway he more of another model. He was a refrainer. I call him “the Great Refrainer.” He governed through inaction and intentionally. And the result was outstandingly good. But it’s not what we’re accustomed to and, of course, there wasn’t a big war in that period. There were ugly little wars in Mexico, Nicaragua and so on.
So he wasn’t a war president. He didn’t want to be because he didn’t like war because he saw the terrible waste of it. He had been governor of Massachusetts when the troops went over and when they came home. In the book, I follow the story of a ship that was a beautiful German ship called the Crown Princess Cecilia that, you know, ran around looking for cover when World War began and we commandeered her and then she became an American ship. And she brought troops home and Coolidge welcomed the troops on that very former German ship. And then she was wasted.
And there were many, many debates about what to do with these ships from World War I and the incredible waste of it grossed him out — grossed everyone out. I mean the incredible cost of World War I didn’t go away even if the debt went down. And they swore never war again and they especially focused on the waste in human life in efficiency.
And so he was eventually a fan of international law. He signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact. He got a big treaty through in a way that Wilson had not. Interesting, compared to, you know, Wilson and Versailles and League of Nations. And we tend — that’s another area where there may be some revision to mock this treaty. This is the treaty that outlawed war. But Coolidge said well, if we can — can’t always set an example militarily maybe we can at least set one through the law. And maybe there’s some benefit to that. He was a country lawyer. So I spend quite a bit of time on that.
But he’s not a usual hero because he’s not a foreign hero, a war hero and because his heroism was in inaction rather than action often.
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.