On “The Farmer and the Nation,” Part 1

December 9, 2013December 12, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / 3 Comments

President and Mrs. Coolidge outside the La Salle Hotel during their visit to Chicago, 1925.

To say that President Coolidge’s speech before the American Farm Bureau Federation in 1925 was received with skepticism would be an understatement. The 5,000 people assembled in Chicago to hear what the President would say and learn what was ahead for agriculture were neither warm nor receptive. Efforts to empower government control of agriculture had already lost in 1924 despite the energetic support of Agriculture Department Secretary Henry C. Wallace. Unfortunately, Secretary Wallace died suddenly that year and the push for government-subsidized farming was defeated. Congressional support would fall short again in 1926. When the movement gained enough steam to pass, landing on the President’s desk, first in 1927 and again in 1928, Coolidge would veto both attempts for very principled reasons. His vetoes would stand while the policies he articulates here would set the course for American farmers for years to come.

Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Harding and Coolidge until his sudden death in 1924, Henry C. Wallace is pictured here tending to one of his Jersey cows.

Yet, long before the Congressional battles and Presidential vetoes, Coolidge stood before this gathering of farmers, ranchers, processors, advertisers, the men and women of “agribusiness” to lay out his views on the Nation’s “farming problem.” Coolidge does not receive very high marks from most historians when it comes to agriculture policy. However, the principles he explains here deserve a more honest hearing and respectful appraisal than they have been given today or enjoyed by the audience at the time.

Facing a barely subdued hostility, President Coolidge demonstrated not only his calmness under heat but also the political and personal grit for which he was known all his life. He began with a sweeping reflection on the unique and extraordinary position earned by agriculture in America. He started with praise, not criticism, for the Nation’s incredible success. It had been an incredible transformation in agriculture from what in the Old World had been “uncultured peasants” and “serfs” beholden to work land owned by the Crown. People depended on government to supply their basic subsistence. In contrast, Coolidge reminded his audience, “Agriculture holds a position in this country that it was never before able to secure anywhere else on earth.”

The preceding seventy-five years had brought agriculture to a position unknown in history. “It has become a great industrial enterprise, requiring a broad knowledge in its management, a technical skill in its labor, intricate machinery in its processes, and trained merchandising in its marketings. Agriculture in America has been raised to the rank of a profession.” Coolidge rushes to his point, again reminding his listeners that agriculture “does not draw any artificial support from industry or from Government. It rests squarely on a foundation of its own. It is independent.” Farming in America did not achieve so historic a place by government direction, determining for the individual what he will plant, how much it is worth and where it will be sold. The movement to relinquish the initiative and independent oversight exercised by the farmer would destroy the basis on which agriculture could improve.

As with any great sector of our economy, the “very eminence” of agriculture presented “increasing exactions and difficulties.” The “industry” and “ability” needed to triumph over those obstacles does not come by surrendering the precious independence of the farm to bureaucratic “expertise.” “Whatever other obstacles the American people have had to meet and overcome, of every station in life, they have never permitted themselves to be hampered by a condition of dependence.” President Coolidge, mincing no words, made plain: government controls do hamper, shackle, and restrict people at the worst possible times, when individuals need the freedom to resolve situations quickly and energetically with one’s own judgment, not as Washington slowly allows decisions on its theoretical timetable. “Unencumbered by any special artificial support,” Coolidge admonished, farmers “have stood secure on their own foundation” as opposed to the terms spelled out for them by a central command and control of production and prices. “America is not without a true nobility, but it is not supported by privilege. It rests on worth.”

It is in “our farm life” that a standard of American citizenship displays itself every day. Though diverse, agriculture like America, partakes of the “same high measure of achievement and character.” Coolidge knew firsthand that the farm was not merely in the business of producing food to eat “but as a never-failing source…from which we can always replenish the manhood and womanhood of the Nation.” This was why retaining independence, refusing to resort to government salvation, remained so crucial to Coolidge.

Government dependence exacts a heavy cost upon human life. It robs the individual of her dignity and the person of his humanity. The farm had to continue liberated from the corrosive clutches of bureaucratic stagnation. After all, it was from the same stock that the people fought for and built the country. Americans could not afford to forfeit that spirit of initiative and character. That same spirit manifested itself from Concord bridge with the “shot heard round the world” to the courageous pioneers on the Prairie down to the relentless efforts by those who furnished the supplies needed to turn “the tide for the cause of liberty in the Great War.” America’s independent and rugged farmers had been there through it all. Consequently, America’s gratitude runs deservedly deep for those who farm the land.

Whereas the Old World developed from a centralized power of government to feed and furnish its social classes, reliant on the strength of its crowded cities and affluent metropolises, America was built from its farms. “America,” after all, “never fully came under this blighting influence” of Old World norms. “It was a different type of individual that formed the great bulk of our early settlers.” Gaining results by the cultivation of the soil, the men and women who formed America were not looking to or waiting upon the permission or lordship of sprawling cities or an “industrial population.” The expansive lands, “generous” standards of ownership and technology all collaborated to make possible “here the first agricultural empire which did not rest upon an oppressed peasantry. This was a stupendous achievement.” It enabled the growth of industry and population to follow, not precede, agriculture.

Poised to become the world’s source of wheat, World War intervened and created a distorted market. Europe’s demand encouraged oversupply and inflated prices. With the end of war, consumption plummeted and prices dropped. The depression of 1920 and 1921 hit farmers — still a solid 25% of the U.S. population — harder than perhaps anyone else. Yet, where many (including much of his audience) saw cause for panic and doubt, Coolidge saw the country incrementally lifting itself out of the valley so that even agriculture was making tangible improvements. It was this review of historical experience that President Coolidge transitioned to the heart of his message: “in order that by a better understanding of the method of its progress and the position it now holds we may better comprehend its needs and better estimate what the future promises for it.”

Coolidge’s choice for Secretary of Agriculture fell to William M. Jardine of Kansas. Secretary Jardine would led the counter-charge against government price controls with cooperative marketing and individual initiative.

Coolidge knew that four years of World War could not be rolled back and prices restored to their former levels. To hope for such a return to what had been abnormal conditions was unrealistic and, ultimately, would help no one. He knew pockets of agricultural endeavors still suffered. He was no Pollyanna, especially when it came to farming because he had come from one of the most remote areas of the country, Plymouth Notch. Yet, surveying the facts and figures of agriculture as a whole, there was no question circumstances were improving since the 1921 depression. Venturing out now on emotional experiments was only going to make the situation worse, not better. Conditions were improving while one timeless truth remained unchanged: life on the farm was always going to be fraught with hardship. No law could exempt anyone from that reality. “Some people would grow poor on a mountain of gold, while others would make a good living on a rock. We can not bend our course to meet the exceptions; we must treat agriculture as a whole. and if, as whole, it can be placed in a prosperous condition the exceptions will tend to eliminate themselves.”As he would argue for in the fight for tax reduction, economic policies needed to be directed at everyone, not a favored few, if the Constitution’s limitation of Federal authority to the “general welfare” of all the people was to honored.

This annoyed his listeners, many of whom, firmly believed that those struggling farmers needed government relief to find a market for what they grew and bolster prices to maintain at least a comparable value to what had been four years prior. Not everyone needed help but those who did, including wheat and cotton farmers, ought to have compensation for the losses suffered. It was unfair that industry had seemingly recovered while agriculture, again seemingly, continued to struggle. Who better qualified to answer those calls for sympathetic help than government, they asserted? The emergency demanded authority to act before agriculture collapsed.

To that baseless forecast of farming’s dire crisis Coolidge next turned. The President had not merely read government reports thrown on his desk but he had traveled the country, met its people and seen its potential. Where some saw failure and catastrophe, the impetus for government intervention, he saw a nation ready to launch into new growth in both farming and industries. It was true that America was already transitioning from a predominantly rural people to an urban population, made possible largely by the mobility of automobile ownership, yet this was “only a part of the story.” To argue for such a drastic takeover of one-fifth of the economy, as agriculture entailed at that time, by government could not be done without fully disclosing all the facts, considering the whole story not merely one side of it. To maintain a sense of doom for agriculture, warranting government step in to save it, was itself a flawed justification, an oversimplification and a gravely short-sighted cornerstone for any public policy.

The President would then explain how, as we shall see in Part 2 of our overview of Coolidge’s address, “The Farmer and the Nation.”

“Born on the Fourth of July” by Sidney M. Milkis

December 1, 2013December 1, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / 21 Comments

“Born on the Fourth of July” by Sidney M. Milkis

The latest review of both Amity Shlaes’ Coolidge and Charles C. Johnson’s Why Coolidge Matters adds a welcome take to a renewed conversation of Calvin Coolidge. Mr. Milkis, well-known author and professor with the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, has much to offer when it comes to the Progressive Era, the period generally classified from 1900 to 1929. In his critique of both books, Mr. Milkis presents the Coolidge neither author may envision but one that resembles the man described by David Greenberg, whose Calvin Coolidge, published in 2006, accepted too many of the assumptions handed down by Art Schlesinger and the New Deal gang. Greenberg unfortunately dug himself into a deeper hole with his 2011 piece further ridiculing Coolidge’s “naive faith in the gospel of productivity” as if Big Government has proven once and for all to be a reliable and permanent fixture of American life.

Mr. Milkis contributes a worthy opinion in the ongoing and overdue discussion about our thirtieth president. However, it is equally as important not to reinforce the same, old misrepresentations of what has, for far too long, been the accepted narrative regarding “Silenced Cal.” The fact that Ms. Shlaes and Mr. Johnson are questioning that narrative with meticulous research is not “revisionist” as much as it is a return to the rigorous standards of scholarship restored by Thomas Silver, popularized by Ronald Reagan, and now being revitalized by, among others, the authors Mr. Milkis has reviewed.

Mr. Greenberg and those who preceded him in defense of the New Deal have more to lose by seeing Coolidge’s principles reintroduced and expounded through the heavy lifting done by those he perceives to be on “the Right,” than they do repeating the tired shibboleth of his naivete and failure. Americans all can appreciate Coolidge not because he identified with this or that “political side” but because the principles he embodied were thoroughly and unabashedly true to the foundations of our exceptional system, declared, constituted and reaffirmed by our ancestors. As Coolidge expressed it on another occasion, “Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries…or three years…is not half so important as whether his Americanism of to-day is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.” His appeal to eternal truths of human nature and political experience should form ground on which we can all Americans can again be a united and prosperous people.

On Term Limits

November 29, 2013November 30, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / 3 Comments

On August 20, we spoke of Calvin Coolidge’s thoughts on the limits of Presidential authority. It would be another twenty years before the passage of the Twenty-Second Amendment which codified President Washington’s self-imposed custom of serving only two terms. Attempted by a handful of previous Presidents, including the most recent third run of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, it was actually shattered by Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, who would win a fourth term in 1944. After FDR’s death in 1945, Vice President Truman succeeded to the office as a majority of Americans had come to see the wisdom of Washington’s custom and move to protect it with Constitutional provision. Passing the Congress in March 1947, and securing final ratification by two-thirds (thirty-six) of the states on February 27, 1951, Section 1 of the Amendment made clear it would not apply to the current occupant, President Truman, declaring:

“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.”

Truman would be free to run again in 1952, but after losing the New Hampshire primary to Senator Kefauver, he reluctantly bowed out, announcing soon thereafter he would not be a candidate for another term. What one can do is not equivalent to what one should do.

What did Coolidge have to say about the one hundred and thirty year example set by Washington? As already noted, it would be two decades before the passage of the Twenty-Second Amendment. However, it may come as a surprise to us now that talk of formal limits on a third term were gaining steam in the months leading up to Coolidge’s notorious press conference on August 2, 1927. Few Presidential statements caused as much uproar in those years as did his “I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty-eight.” Speculation was rampant as to what Coolidge actually meant and what he would do next. If he would not be the nominee, who would?Three interpretations quickly took shape, each explained by scholars Cyril Clemens and Athern Daggett in the June 1945 issue of The New England Quarterly. First, Coolidge neither wanted nor would accept renomination for the Presidency. Second, Coolidge, while not wanting the office, remained open to the prospect if the people renominated him. Third, Coolidge wanted to be President again but played politically coy to gain support.

The final interpretation, generally held by those who perceived him to be a conniving and selfish politician, like any other, attributes motives to the man that simply do not correspond to the facts. There was no question Coolidge would have had renomination unopposed in 1928. He had two, if not three, potential challengers heading into 1924, yet openly pursued the nomination at that time, even after tragically losing his youngest son and any pride he held for the “glory” of the Presidency. He had no reason to calculate for what was readily available to him four years later. But more to the point, his words and actions — in sum, his character — do not conform to this interpretation.

He meant what he said and his respect for the institutions and duties of the Office outweighed his own importance. He never saw himself as so great or indispensable that retaining power meant more to him than preserving the integrity of a very properly limited Presidential authority. He observed the virtue of self-control. It was through this self-imposed denial of executive power that the people were best served in their constitutional system. He had served his purpose, completing the work given for him to accomplish. The time had come for others to lead. It was indeed a wholesome thing to come back to the people from which he was drawn, serving as a private individual and nothing more. He knew that liberty is safeguarded when public servants know, and abide by, naturally imposed limits.

Some would mistakenly attribute a belief that serving four more years would constitute a violation of the “third-term policy” in Coolidge’s estimation. It did not. He had only served one full term and could legitimately stand for another. He made this plain in his Autobiography, “I do not think that the practice [no third term] applies to one who has succeeded to part of a term as Vice President.” If he had, Coolidge would have served ten years, longer than any other President up to that time. He would likely agree that Truman could have pursued a second term in 1952, while concurring that his choice to retire was the right one.

President Truman at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, March 29, 1952, at which he announced: “I shall not be a candidate for reelection. I have served my country long, and I think efficiently and honestly. I shall not accept a renomination. I do not feel that it is my duty to spend another 4 years in the White House.”

The strength of our Republic, Coolidge understood, never rested on the coercion of legislation. Not even a Constitutional Amendment could correct human nature, as was evident for all to see during the fourteen years of Prohibition enforcement. It relied on the surpassing might of moral rectitude and religious character in the heart of each individual. It was this which gave force to the legal and constitutional framework of our nation, not the other way around. Our system was a moral agreement. It would fail without virtue in the people and those it chooses to lead. Laws, like people, had natural limits. As Coolidge would say of the Eighteenth Amendment, “[A]ny law which inspires disrespect for the other laws — and good laws — is a bad law.” It would prove destructive if people ignored the wisdom of self-denial by empowering one man with authority for an unlimited time.

Writing as much for the future as for the present, former President Coolidge shared the same suspicions articulated by the Founders whenever people are entrusted with unconstrained power for indefinite periods of time. “A President should not only not be selfish, but he ought to avoid the appearance of selfishness. The people would not have confidence in a man that appeared to be grasping for office. It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness. They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation which sooner or later impairs their judgment. They are in grave danger of becoming careless and arrogant. The chances of having a wise and faithful public service are increased by a change in the presidential office after a moderate length of time.”

As a Washington Post editorial is the latest in a line of calls to repeal the Twenty-Second Amendment, the argument is put forth that democratic choice has been somehow circumvented by term limits. Subjecting Presidents to third or fourth-term rejection by voters would rather supply a greater check upon their abuse of power than reinforcing Washington’s rationale, he asserts. After all the only reason for limits in the first place was political partisanship, the writer incorrectly assumes. We would ask whether this opinion writer at the Post would still maintain this argument if, as the original Amendment provided, it did not apply to the current occupant, who would still be bound to term limits? Party politics was not the reason self-applied term limitations were established over two centuries ago.

It is conveniently forgotten why Washington established this example, stating on that occasion,

“[I]t appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made…Satisfied that if any circumstances have given peculiar value to my services, they were temporary.”

For Washington, it was gratifying to him that “choice and prudence” invited him to lay down the Presidency. Though patriotic obligation did not forbid it, his wish to retire, wisdom and the people’s ability to choose did preclude it. These words, Coolidge later realized, were not unlike his own that August day in 1927. What one can do is not equivalent to what one should do. What is right for the country demands a subordination of self, these two men understood.

The power of the people to decide who leads is taken from them, whether a law exists or not, by the presumption that one man can be safely entrusted with additional power for an indeterminate time. “Emergencies” can be contrived and prolonged but experience confirms the soundness of Washington’s example. Even, as Coolidge pointed out, Presidential second terms have only served to confirm Washington’s sagacity. It is echoed in the self-denial of Coolidge, who surrendered the most powerful position in the world not because the law demanded it be done, though that would be reason enough for him. He surrendered its power because he approved of what Washington did, respected the credibility of the Office and subjected himself to the electoral judgment of the people. Free of a sitting President’s influence, however “in demand” he was, people could decide for themselves. They did so and vindicated the checks, even the “unwritten” ones, we impose on our leaders. He walked away gladly, relieved that America still regarded one of the most popular Presidents in history — himself — to be secondary to their commitment to limited government. As Clemens and Daggett ask, “Who can say that he did not choose wisely?”