Our view of history is largely shaped by the people who write it down: the historians, and - even more so - the artists who memorialize it with vivid images. As a result, depending on the veracity of the storytellers and verisimilitude of their output, our impressions of a particular era can be quite a bit different from what people living through the era in question saw going on around them.
One of my pet peeves is our hazy collective memory of communism. If one only has pop culture as a guide (and for many people – the MTV generation, that is their only guide to the past), their view of communism centers on a crazy senator from Wisconsin who terrorized a whole nation for a decade hunting a phantom menace. In reality, though he went too far in some of his accusations, most of Joe McCarthy’s targets were in fact committed communists. And most importantly, communism was then a bloodthirsty worldwide movement that deliberately murdered over a 100 million people.
For a more positive example, take the Apollo project. Before the 1995 film, Apollo 13, everybody remembered it for Apollo 11 – the crowning achievement of the Apollo project. Apollo 13 was forgotten as the ‘screw-up mission’. After Ron Howard’s riveting film, people appreciate the heroism and greatness exhibited during NASA’s “finest hour”. “Houston, we’ve got a problem” was transformed into “failure is not an option.” And forgotten heroes like Gene Kranz and Chris Kraft are now remembered again.
For this reason, business journalist and economic historian Amity Shlaes is like a gift from heaven. For years, the myth was propagated that FDR saved America during the Depression. People in the know would of course respond with, “yeah, so why did the Depression last so long if Roosevelt did such a bang-up job?” But even we were hazy about the details. Then along comes Shlaes, who produced a readable history of the Depression, The Forgotten Man, A New History of the Great Depression. Not only did it debunk the New Deal myth, it did so in a popular format. The book sold a quarter of a million copies, was on the New York Times bestseller list for 19 weeks and has been translated into 5 other languages.
Now she has done it again with her history of Calvin Coolidge. Those of us familiar with the Calvin Coolidge story know that the American historians’ rating of Coolidge as one of the worst presidents in American history is bunk. Shlaes revisionist biography is very timely indeed because Coolidge possessed the virtues that the president who succeeds Obama should ideally possess. Coolidge was a frugal, taciturn minimalist who balanced the budget, raised government revenue by cutting tax rates and vetoed a lot of the stupid, pork barrel ideas that Congress produced during his tenure. He wrote to his father, "It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.” In fact, it is largely Coolidge’s fiscal probity that enabled FDR to run up the tab without busting the budget. Not that Roosevelt ever thanked him for it. As Shlaes wrote in the Wall Street Journal, Coolidge is a better role model for the next president than even Ronald Reagan.
Hopefully Shlaes current book is as popular as her last, and is able to restore to glory a much maligned American hero.