Coolidge and the Historians

...He made his sympathy with the police abundantly clear through statements to the press (none of which is quoted or mentioned by McCoy), but he would not make concessions to those who had already broken the law...

...Their magnitude: the top surtax rate was reduced to 24 percent from 73 percent, with all other rates falling proportionately and the personal exemptions being increased...

...Sometimes I have mistrusted that it was a design to injure me politically...

...Not until Garner forced the revelation of the figures in 1930 did the country know what Mellon had done," Schlesinger writes...

...now it is well underway...

...This leaves the historian free to "criticize Coolidge without showing precisely wherein his reasoning is in error...

...Their effects: 1) revenues collected from large incomes increased sharply, producing, along with federal spending reductions, budget surpluses...

...Also never mentioned are the urgent pleas of President Wilson and his Secretary of the Treasury for a top surtax rate of 25 percent and other tax changes identical to those achieved by Mellon only several years later...

...it is at these turning points that the fundamental issues of American politics are revealed with an unusual clarity to any historian who has eyes to see...

...In preparation, no doubt, for a proper monument to the Coolidge Administration, Thomas Silver has blasted and carted away the gargoyles and rubbish heaped up by such as Nevins, Commager, Morison, Leuchtenberg, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...Scholarly rigor...

...Silver lets Schles-inger's witnesses complete the ellipses and snippets that have been wrenched from their statements, resulting in impish exposures of one brazenly bogus "quotation" after another...

...Mellon gets a larger personal reduction [from the 1925 tax proposal] than the aggregate of practically all the taxpayers in the state of Nebraska...

...Anyone else (and this includes the 1957 Pulitzer Prize Committee) with the slightest competence to read history and the slightest interest in the facts would have expected the historian to cite this source...

...Nineteen leaders of the new policemen's union were charged and convicted of violating orders, but Police Chief Curtis refrained from sentencing them, hoping they would take the opportunity to dissolve the affiliation...

...It is a strange historian indeed whose primary sources, when they get a word in edgewise, seem so regularly eager to trash the impressions he has constructed...

...McCoy, by leaving out these and other essentials of the case, simply fails to relay to his reader any notion of the principle Coolidge was standing on, which Coolidge was at pains to make clear to all of Boston...

...A lingering question about Coolidge's policies must of course be to what extent they made the Depression inevitable...

...BOOK REVIEWS According to a young Republican editor in Michigan named Arthur H. Vandenburg, Coolidge was "so unimpressive" [as Vice President] that he would probably have been denied renomination...

...Curtis had taken, and which I was supporting, because the issue was not understood, and the disorder focused public attention on it, and showed just what it meant to have a police force that did not obey orders...

...He quotes, in this vein, Senator Norris: "Mr...

...All his talk is of imaginary aggregates of money, never tax rates and their price and incentive effects...

...Speculation aside, it is self-evident that a historian like Schlesinger, who so deeply breathes class conflict and the other stale vapors of the New Deal, could only despise a man who was ever anxious to remind his fellow citizens that "business," "labor," "capital," and "agriculture" were but adjectival tags, the names of the many creative capacities expressed by the one political substantive, the people...

...In fact it would have made it more difficult to maintain the position Mr...

...Silver notes that in 1924 the average tax rate on the citizens of Nebraska was 2 percent, and that Mellon paid more in taxes than all (not practically all) the people of Nebraska...

...In 1923, people who earned less than $10,000 paid 20 percent of the income tax...

...Succeeding him came a quiet, modest, unperturbable New Englander who- while so unimpressive as Vice-President that he probably would have been denied re-nomination even for second place, had his chief survived-has captured the well-nigh universal imagination of the people in his unruffled, common sense dependabilities in the higher station which he now occupies in his own right...

...Had wages been permitted to fall as in 1920-21, had the Federal Reserve not reduced the money supply 30 percent from 1929 to 1933, and had Mellon's unburdensome tax structure remained in place, it is entirely credible that today we would only with some difficulty recall the recession of 1930...

...The IRS had fallen years behind in its assessments during the World War, and there were large refunds throughout the following decade...

...But without doubt the domestic action of the Harding and Coolidge administrations which excites the liveliest interest today is the sharp reduction in personal income tax rates (the corporate income tax rate was increased, a fact never mentioned by Schles-inger) achieved at the steady insistence of Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury from 1921 to 1932...

...Silver concludes with a warning: "the transition from the New Era to the New Deal was one of only three or four critical turning points in American political history...

...The chief facts about these tax rate reductions are, of course, not at all in question...

...He took it easy in the White House with a long nap every afternoon...

...He describes Samuel Eliot Morison's treatment in The Oxford History of the American People: If [readers] made it to page 933...

...The accurate version of his most famous aphorism is "the chief business of the American people is business...

...That Coolidge's political profit from the strike was undeserved is the thesis of every history of the eveat written since the twenties, including the relatively middle-of-the-road account in Donald McCoy's Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President (1967...

...but Grace Goodhue Coolidge appears only parenthetically in Crisis as a victim of her husband's habitual ill-temper...

...Silver begins with a survey of the Vincent Fitzpatrick is a consultant at the Nestld Coordination Center for Nutrition in Washington, D. C. COOLIDGE AND THE HISTORIANS Thomas B. Silver/Carolina Academic Press/$14.95 Vincent Fitzpatrick standard accounts of Coolidge's person...

...Needless to say, in the 1920s of Schlesinger and other historians, Andrew Mellon's plot, designed to shift the tax burden from the rich to the poor, was presumably foisted on a jazz-mad citizenry unawares...

...Neither Mellon's and Coolidge's praxeological arguments for rate reductions, nor their arguments from the experience of falling revenue at the high rates of 1916 to 1922, nor their moral arguments are mentioned by Schlesinger...

...The Crisis of the Old Order (1957) Death put its tragic hand upon President Harding before his work was done...

...Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr...

...in 1929, their share of the personal income tax was 2 percent...

...Coolidge would not concede a right to disobey orders as a means of threatening to strike any more than, later, he would concede a right actually to strike...

...Mencken for Coolidge's deft English prose), his deep and tenacious grasp of the religious and political ancestry of the Declaration and Constitution-all are as if lost in remotest antiquity...

...When many of the police did strike and the nineteen law-breakers became dozens, the public came to see Coolidge's principle for the reason he noted in his Autobiography: [Calling out the State Guard earlier] probably would have saved some property, but it would have decided no issue...

...Silver notes that all large tax refunds were published routinely in the newspapers-with names and amounts, that every penny thus refunded "behind closed doors" required a congressional appropriation, that prominent wealthy Democrats received quite their share, and that "Mel-Ion's" tax "giveaways"-according to Schlesinger, a veritable hemorrhage from the Treasury-of $3.5 billion were exceeded during the same period by additional tax assessments of $5.4 billion...

...Fastidiousness...

...What then, Silver asks, becomes of Coolidge's fabled indifference to the working man, the collapse of purchasing power caused by "unjust" tax reduction, the crisis of capitalism...

...And all those policy choices were Hoover's to make, not Coolidge's...

...if so it was only to recoil upon the perpetrators, for it increased my political power many fold...

...A long paragraph of fulsome praise follows...

...Impartiality...

...As often as not, American textbook accounts of the twenties are condensations from Crisis, and few students will detect, unaided, what Silver has wittily exposed there: a concatenation of gossip, free-floating adjectives, slovenly research, economic gibberish, and, for good measure, some vigorous, campaign-style lies...

...Arthur H. Vandenburg The Trail of a Tradition (1926) "One must wonder," writes Thomas Silver, "what induced Schlesinger to reach into this garish heap of accolades and pluck out the single parenthetical fleck of dung with which to besmirch Coolidge...

...He maintained his feeble health by riding on a mechanical horse...

...The burden of Coolidge and the Historians is that Coolidge was not what he was said to have been, that he did not do what he is said to have done, that his policies did the opposite of what it is charged they did...

...Since taxes as a whole were reduced, the indirect tax burden transmitted through prices was reduced for consumers of all classes...

...No doubt," wrote Coolidge in 1929, "it was the police strike of Boston that brought me into national prominence...

...Coolidge was unbending to the demands of the nineteen law-breaking police, even when it appeared it would finish him politically...

...In making his case that Curtis was a capricious tyrant, McCoy denies the very existence of the standing orders the police had violated...

...No reader of McCoy could possibly understand Curtis's actions...

...now it is well underway.partisan caricature had hardly begun...

...Before Coolidge and the Historians, the work of rescuing the New Era from partisan caricature had hardly begun...

...This fantasy is the basis of his Stone-Age Tiponomics, not any relevant statistics, such as these: Total Consumption Expenditures as a Percentage of Gross National Product, 1920 to 1929 1920 67.7 1921 78.4 1922 76.7 1923 73.9 1924 77.0 1925 73.0 1926 74.2 1927 75.2 1928 75.9 1929 75.7 Silver's source for these figures repudiates the Schlesinger "underconsumption theory" by name...

...As Schlesinger's attack on Mellon reaches its climax, we encounter an actual lie: that "Mellon" dispensed billions in taxpayers' money to political allies through tax refunds "behind closed doors...

...That furnished the occasion and I took advantage of the opportunity...

...Schlesinger's theory is that the (fictitious) shifting of the tax burden from the rich to the poor siphoned off the purchasing power of the masses, causing the Crash...

...Schlesinger tells us that "the main social events at the White House in Coolidge's time were his breakfasts: pancakes with Vermont maple syrup, served promptly at eight, his large white collies wandering about the room or licking the sugar out of the bottom of his coffee cup...

...For Schlesinger, insight on this intellectual statesman is to be had in lowdown poop from the White House usher, who disliked Coolidge...

...These books, in arguing for the advisability of a Mellon-style tax rate reduction now, have probably played the chief role in awakening a whole generation to the idea that Calvin Coolidge might not have been a fool...

...His cultivation ["Even as an adult he would spend evenings translating Cicero and Dante . . . (The mind simply balks when requested to produce the image of LBJ, Nixon, and Ford hunched over their Dante)"], his beautiful speeches (Silver cites the praise of Charles and Mary Beard and H.L...

...The Coolidges' marriage elicited envious comments even from the hard-boiled, for it was known for what it was, a great romance...

...The police strike was the beginning of Coolidge's national career, and most revealing of his character...

...In contrast with Harding's policy in the sharp but short depression of 1920-1921, Hoover's interventions, even into 1932, for higher and higher wage rates surely helped make his name synonymous with unemployment...

...The salient point, regarding Schlesinger, laboring on his Pulitzer Prize-winning history circa 1957, is that any historian with the slightest interest in what really happened to the tax burden from 1921 to 1929 has always had, ready-to-hand, the summaries of tax collections, by size of return, in the annual reports of the Treasury...

...And though Herbert Stein may scoff at "post-hoc-ergo-propterhoc" supply-siders and their theory of the Wall Street Crash, there is the testimony of stockbrokers themselves that they were putting in "sell" orders as early as March 1929 in anticipation of the Smoot-Hawley tariff hikes of 1930...

...These facts about the Mellon tax rate cuts have been amply laid out in several popular books in recent years, and it is worth naming them: The Way the World Works (Wan-niski), Reaganomics (Bartlett), The Economy in Mind (Brookes...

...This Commonwealth is one" was the opening sentence in Coolidge's first address as President of the Massachusetts State Senate in 1914...

...Similarly, McCoy omits a key provision of the "compromise" worked out by the Storrow Committee (a body of 34 leading Bostonians appointed by Mayor Peters), making Coolidge's refusal to go along unintelligible...

...The provision was this: "That no member of the Boston Policemen's Union should be discriminated against because of any previous affiliation with the American Federation of Labor...

...The public's overwhelming support for the Mellon tax plan is never mentioned...

...On other mornings, he ate breakfast in his bedroom while a valet rubbed his head with vaseline...

...As president, Coolidge exalted inactivity...

...2) the direct tax burden was reduced in absolute size and was shifted almost entirely to the incomes of the well-to-do...

...In 1919, Boston's police were working up to ninety hours a week, often in filthy conditions, for wages established in 1898 and unchanged even through the wartime inflation...

...Silver argues simply that no one is entitled to hold a view on the causes of the Depression who has not examined Friedman and Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States...

...In assessing Coolidge's courage, and judging just how "accidental" (Schlesinger's word) his subsequent reputation was, it is essential to know also that his position was unpopular -before the strike, the looting, and the famous telegram to Samuel Gompers...

...Schlesinger, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Crisis of the Old Order, is Silver's chief interlocutor...

...they learned that Coolidge, the second of the three "inept" Republican presidents of the twenties, was mean, thin-lipped, little, mediocre, parsimonious, not as bright as people thought, dour, unimaginative, abstemious, frugal, unpretentious, taciturn, an admirer of wealthy men, reactionary, a cynical doubter of the progressive movement, and democratic only by habit not by conviction...

...Rules forbade affiliation with any outside labor union, but the police affiliated with the AFL in August 1919...

...This is the Coolidge of orthodoxy...