Amity Shlaes's "Coolidge," reviewed by Robert Merry (Books, Feb. 9), is a fine biography that ought to help gain some respect for this neglected president who, with Warren Harding during the 1920s, managed the astounding feat of cutting both taxes and spending about 50%, while paying down 30% of the national debt and achieving the past century's lowest peacetime unemployment rate—1.8% (1926).
I suggest there were three important factors that favored Harding and Calvin Coolidge, advantages no president has had in decades.
The 1920s was a time of peace. After Harding cut the military budget following World War I, the U.S. didn't become involved in a major hot or cold war. Nor did we maintain bases around the world or face national security risks that could mean larger military budgets.
Second, there weren't any big entitlements that make domestic spending politically almost impossible to control. Perhaps the closest thing to an entitlement at the time was a bill to provide additional compensation for World War I veterans, but Harding courageously vetoed it less than two months before the 1922 congressional elections. His top priority was to make the fastest possible transition from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy.
Third, there weren't government employee unions—a highly organized lobbying force to resist proposed spending cuts and generate relentless pressure for higher spending.
Until these issues are addressed, it seems unlikely that any president will be able to achieve and sustain big spending cuts.
If runaway federal spending propels the U.S. toward the kind of financial crises that have hit Greece, we will need to rediscover those financially astute chief executives Harding and Coolidge, who knew how to promote rapid private-sector economic growth, jobs and prosperity.
Amity Shlaes's hagiographic paean to Calvin Coolidge needs a good dose of reality poured on it ("The Coolidge Lesson on Taxes and Spending," op-ed, Feb. 19). Her general argument that the prosperity of the 1920s was due to the fiscal actions of Coolidge neglects the fact that federal government expenditures and taxes were but about 5% of GDP for most of Coolidge's administration. To argue that the tax cuts engineered by Coolidge and the incentives they created were the fulcrum for the 1920s prosperity is little short of ridiculous.
The introduction of the automobile was a major cause of prosperity. Auto production rose from about one million units in 1920 to more than four million in 1929. With this came the need for a great deal of investment to enable the increased output but also the infrastructure to support it and the changes in housing patterns it made possible, including a new highway grid. Second was the introduction of the radio and, third, the growth and expansion of movies. It was this investment that was an important part of the booming 1920s, not the Coolidge fiscal policy, although it supported it. If one looks for a hero to explain the prosperity of the 1920s, it should be Henry Ford not Calvin Coolidge.
Gail E. Makinen
Ms. Shlaes forgets that her heroes, Coolidge and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, were completely baffled by the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, Coolidge told his barber that "the big men of the country have got to get together and do something about it. It isn't going to end itself. We all hope it will end, but we don't see it yet." In 1932 Mellon also had grown remarkably modest. He said, "None of us has any means of knowing when and how we shall emerge from the valley of depression . . . but I do know . . . a day will come."
The lesson for today is that American voters like tax and spending cuts in good times, but they will not stand for hands-off government years after economic disaster hits.
Paul A. London
Even if a modern version of Silent Cal emerges and is prepared to handle the basic impediments to spending restraint, there are several new hurdles to leap: the media, welfare-state dependency, the righteous indignation of America's victims and a celebrity-obsessed culture. Modern media would rip to shreds a reserved, "obstructionist" Coolidge clone, while pop culture would portray him as a heartless bumpkin. Mitt Romney was skewered for mentioning the nation's growing dependence on Washington. Meanwhile, Democrats play on victimhood and "America is the world's richest nation and must do more," cards that were not in the Roaring '20s deck. The American spirit of Coolidge's day might very well remain in hibernation until the nation no longer is the wealthiest on the planet and is forced to do less.