On August 2, 1927, President Calvin Coolidge ate breakfast at the White House residence with his wife, Grace, and told her, “Today I have been president for four years.” It was one of those quick, concise, and straight-to-the-point sentences she had become accustomed to hearing since their meeting in 1905. It was also something familiar to Americans, who nicknamed the 30th president “Silent Cal.”
That morning at 9:00 he had a meeting with reporters in his office. Before asking a few questions, he told the crowd: “If the conference is held again at 12:00, I may be able to make a further statement.” Curious but docile, in those long-gone days of half-politeness between presidents and the press, journalists found their way back at noon.
About an hour before the encore at the conference, Coolidge took a pencil and wrote a message on a piece of paper. He handed it to the secretary with instructions to take it to his stenographer and have him make a few copies – this will be enough for the journalists who will be at the meeting at 12:00. Being a frugal man, he suggested that the miniature statement could be copied several times on the same sheet of paper, thus using only a few sheets of paper. However, he instructed the secretary not to forward the note to the stenographer until approximately 11:50.
He really wanted to drive this story.
He asked for uncut pages to be brought to him, and before letting reporters into the office, he took scissors and cut the paper into smaller pieces. When he was almost ready, he told his secretary:
“I’ll hand it out myself; I will pass them on to journalists without comment, from this side of the desk. I want you to stand at the door and not let anyone leave until they each get a mistake so they have an equal chance.
This means “equal chance” of winning huge.
A handwritten note from the president read: “I do not decide to run for president in 1928.” Although a year has passed since the classic Broadway play (made in several film versions) “The Front Page”, the image of dozens of reporters rushing to find their phones comes to mind.
Calvin Coolidge could be re-elected if he wanted to serve another term. His anointed successor, Herbert Hoover, won a major victory in 1928, although it is clear that Coolidge was not very enthusiastic about the “Great Engineer.” This is one of those engaging “what ifs” in history – would Coolidge have coped with the onset of the Great Depression better than his successor?
Historians tend to connect the three Republican presidents of the 1920s – Harding, Coolidge and Hoover – in a way that suggests they were identical triplets separated at birth. But there were many differences – some subtle, others not so much.
Herbert Hoover, for all his speeches about “individualism,” was not the fiscal conservative that many today consider him to be. As Amity Shlaes noted in her now oft-cited book The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, Mr. Hoover’s personality was marked by a robust interventionism. “He couldn’t control his own sense of agency” and “liked to jump into action and then find a moral justification for himself.” So in many ways he helped turn the recession into the Great Depression by “intervening in business, signing crippling tariffs, and attacking the stock market.”
Ironically, if you look closely, Herbert Hoover’s approach to economics had more in common with his successor than with the two men in the White House who preceded him.
Warren G. Harding generally ranks in the bottom five when it comes to research on the effectiveness of our CEOs. In fact, Hoover is doing better than the Marion, Ohio resident. This is largely due to the scandals that came to lightweight after his untimely death in San Francisco in 1923 – the affair known as Teapot Dome. Moreover, some of Mr. Harding’s personal behavior was not very presidential. That said, he might be a saint in this respect compared to presidents who are 35 and 42 years aged.
What tends to be lost on Harding, however, is how effective he was on economic issues. When he took office as president in March 1921, he inherited a mess. Woodrow Wilson dramatically expanded the role and size of government, incurred a $25 billion debt, and cracked down on political opponents, even imprisoning some (socialist activist Eugene V. Debs, etc.).
In fact, the economic problems of the crisis of 1920–1921 were in many ways more earnest than the Great Depression a decade later. But this crisis did not last that long – fortunately. Warren Harding cut federal spending and lowered taxes. In less than two years, the nation’s unemployment numbers dropped from 4.9 million to 2.8 million, reaching 1.8 percent in 1926 under his successor, Mr. Coolidge.
Oh – and Harding freed political prisoners, even inviting Debs to the White House. He remained classier than many now remember.
By the time Calvin Coolidge became president after Harding’s death in August 1923, the country was on track to experience several wonderful years of prosperity. He was a fiscal conservative who tried to stay out of it. He knew that the government works best as a referee – not as a participant in the economic game – or as a team owner.
After being elected independently, in his inaugural speech on March 4, 1925, he told the nation:
“I want the American people to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have awards in their own industry. This is the main meaning of freedom. Until we can restore conditions in which people can keep the people’s income, we will certainly experience a very marked restriction of our freedom.
The decision to resign from running in 1928 – at the height of his popularity – surprised many. But Coolidge understood the nature of leadership and its temptations. He explained it this way:
“It is difficult for men in positions of power to avoid the disease of self-deception. They are always surrounded by believers. They are constantly and, for the most part, sincerely convinced of their greatness. They live in an artificial atmosphere of adoration and exaltation, which sooner or later weakens their ability to assess the situation. They are in serious danger of becoming careless or arrogant.”
Of course, this can never be proven, but I suspect that if Calvin Coolidge had decided to run again in 1928, he might have reacted to the initial shockwaves of 1929–1930 differently than Hoover. And maybe, just maybe, the Great Depression wouldn’t have lasted so long. And maybe, just maybe, people who should know better these days would stop trying the same aged, failed “interventionist” tactics that never really worked back then.
In any case, Mr. Coolidge died suddenly on January 5, 1933, after Hoover had been severely beaten by Franklin Roosevelt. He didn’t live to see what long-term depression was like, but one suspects he would have risked an opinion or two.
His words would be miniature and straight to the point.
