On Expecting Too Much Of Government…And Too Little Of Ourselves

December 7, 2013December 7, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / 19 Comments

“If some current statements are to be taken seriously we are expecting too much from free government…We demand entire freedom of action and then expect the government in some miraculous way to save us from the consequences of our own acts. We want the right to run our own business, fix our own wages and prices, and spend our own money, but if depression and unemployment result we look to government for a remedy.

“We insist on producing a farm surplus, but think the government should find a profitable market for it. We overindulge in speculation, but ask the government to prevent panics. Now the only way to hold the government entirely responsible for conditions is to give up our liberty for a dictatorship. If we continue the more reasonable practice of managing our own affairs we must bear the burdens of our own mistakes. A free people cannot shift their responsibility for them to the government. Self-government means self-reliance” — Calvin Coolidge, October 17, 1930

“When people are bewildered they tend to become credulous. We are always in danger of expecting too much of the government. When there is distress such expectations are enlarged…That is the danger now…A large expenditure of public money to stimulate trade is a temporary expedient which begs the question…Business does not need more burdens but less. The sound way to relieve distress is by direction action [by people themselves]…The people have more power than any government to restore their own prosperity” – November 28, 1930

“Some confusion appears to exist in the public mind as to the proper function of the national government in the relief of distress, whether caused by disaster or unemployment. Strictly construed, the national government has no such duties. It acts purely as a volunteer…In the case of unemployment, relief is entirely the province of the local government which has agencies and appropriations for that purpose…Every government should spend its own money. Otherwise the appropriating agency has no control over the disbursing agency and no check on extravagance” – December 5, 1930.

“…[I]nstead of letting the market take its own course there is always a great temptation to try some artificial remedy. Of late this has run to the device of having the public treasury assume in some way the burden of absorbing the losses of those who have suffered. It is the duty of the government to provide highways and waterways…But local government must relieve the needy. In the general field of business, whether of industry or agriculture, government interference in an attempt to maintain prices out of the treasury is almost certain to make matters worse instead of better. It disorganizes the whole economic fabric. It is a wrong method because it does not work. It is better for every one in the end to let those who have made losses bear them than to try to shift them on to some one else. If we could have the courage to adopt this principle our recovery would be expedited. Price fixing, subsidies and government support will only produce unhealthy business” — December 22, 1930.

“Another proposal to be made in the name of relieving unemployment will undoubtedly be an extension of government ownership…The government has never shown much aptitude for real business…The most free, progressive and satisfactory method ever devised for the equitable distribution of property is to permit the people to care for themselves by conducting their own business. They have more wisdom than any government” — January 5, 1931.

“Left alone without the paralyzing interposition of the government, the people have a better opportunity for progress, prosperity and happiness than can ever be secured from any official bureau” – March 27, 1931.

“With the convocation of representatives of various lines of industry have come proposals for controlling and standardizing business. Almost all these suggestions are for artificial rules of conduct to save a situation from the inevitable consequences of the force of natural laws. If business is to be controlled from the outside, the liberty of action and power of initiative will be greatly circumscribed. If standardization is adopted in its entirety, the result is rigid fossilization which prevents progress. Neither the state nor the Federal governments can supply the information and wisdom necessary to direct the business activity of the nation…The experience, skill and wisdom necessary to guide business cannot be elected or appointed. It has to grow up naturally from the people. The process is long and fraught with human sacrifice, but it is the only one that can work” — May 1, 1931.

“In the end the security of nations and men must be sought within themselves by observing the command to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly” — May 12, 1931.

“The centralization of power in Washington, which nearly all members of Congress deplore in their speech and then support by their votes, steadily increases…The farmer who was the shining example of sturdy independence has intrusted the government with finding him a market. Now the wage earner is to look to the same source to find employment. Individual self-reliance is disappeared and local self-government is being undermined.

“A revolution is taking place which will leave the people dependent upon the government and place the government where it must decide questions that are far better left to the people to decide for themselves. Finding markets will develop into fixing prices, and finding employment will develop into fixing wages. The next step will be to furnish markets and employment, or in default pay a bounty and dole. Those who look with apprehension on these tendencies do not lack humanity, but are influenced by the belief that the result of such measures will be to deprive the people of character and liberty” – June 20, 1931.

“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 the Kennedy Connection

November 23, 2013November 23, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / 2 Comments

While yesterday marked the remembrance of President Kennedy’s tragic assassination by Communist Lee Harvey Oswald, it is usually not remembered what brought the President to Dallas fifty years ago. Set to address the Dallas Citizen’s Council at the Trade Mart that day, President Kennedy was not only there to bolster flagging national support for reelection — hardly certain that he would even be renominated — but he was also there to gain support for a stronger national defense and an $11 billion permanent, across-the-board tax cut. The tax cut had passed the House two months before and needed to survive the Senate. He had prepared the ground for this sharp cut since his election — taking top rates from 91% to 65% and bottom rates all the way down to 14% from 20%, also cutting corporate rates to 19.5% from 25%. It was not to be a temporary measure helping a few, it was to be permanent, helping Americans in every bracket.

Even more importantly, we need a return to the remembrance of JFK as he was instead of how modern revisionists, starting with the late Mrs. Kennedy, wish him to be. One cannot fault the widow’s grief for the loss of her husband, but, as Piereson observes, one cannot rationally join her and the chorus of voices since who have blamed America for killing the President (Camelot and the Cultural Revolution p.59, 178). They have blamed America first for every societal ill ever since.

Shortly after his death, it was she who lamented, “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights…It had to be some silly little communist. It even robs his death of any meaning.” His life had meaning but that meaning did not conform to the higher demands of an agenda already at work to recast history. In that pursuit of an alternative meaning, the modern Left could not bring itself to accept that the ideology they had courted for thirty some years had produced this heinous act. Consequently, the radical Left turned to the only conclusion consistent with their refusal to see communism for what it was — in JFK’s publicly announced conviction, a “Godless tyranny” and “evil” system (Stoll, JFK, Conservative p.64-6). America had to be the problem, they shouted. Thus began a narrative creating “Camelot,” publishing Mark Lane’s conspiratorial theories and now equating 1960s Dallas with the “angry” Tea Party movement of today. It is a fifty-year drum-beat that shrouds the truth, denying what JFK believed, in order to salvage a political worldview he never held.

As we know, an earlier son of Massachusetts, has also been the recipient of decades of mischaracterization and politically-motivated revision: Calvin Coolidge. It is recalled that Coolidge’s only electoral loss was to a Kennedy, when John J. Kennedy narrowly won a seat on the School Board shortly after Coolidge had married. When Coolidge learned his loss was due to not having children yet, he replied, “Might give me time.” He had been married barely two months.

The ties to JFK, however, go deeper. True, Senator Kennedy helped raise funds and even serve on the Board of Trustees at the Clarke School for the Deaf, working beside Grace Coolidge until her passing in 1957. Upon hearing of her death, Senator Kennedy wrote:

“As a fellow trustee of Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton I have a strong personal recollection of her untiring devotion and labors throughout her life to this most worthy cause…Since her days in the White House she continued to epitomize the qualities of graciousness, charm and modesty which marked her as an ideal First Lady of the Land” (Ishbel Ross, Grace Coolidge and Her Era, p.312).

In August 1962, President Kennedy enthusiastically sponsored the Coolidge Memorial Foundation’s efforts to promote Coolidge’s legacy nationwide. His support for both Mr. and Mrs. Coolidge speaks not only to their selfless service but also to JFK’s sincere belief that America remained exceptional and that lower taxes, economic growth, religious liberty, protection of property, the rights of the individual against the State, private enterprise, respect for law and order, moral leadership at home and abroad, opposition to unbridled government spending and the eventual defeat of socialism were principles worthy of preserving, regardless of political affiliation. To Kennedy as to Coolidge, they were principles every one of us could proudly champion because America is worth preserving. By keeping America strong, everyone is better for it. This is the Kennedy not allowed to be known by too many self-appointed gatekeepers of our history.

The speeches he gave on August 13, and December 14, 1962, and again, his State of the Union Address, January 14, 1963, embarrassed and shocked the Left of his day. According to Ted Sorenson, one of his closest advisers, Kennedy’s August 13 speech saying “no” to temporary, limited tax cuts, was “without qualification…the worst” speech he ever gave. When he laid out his argument for permanent, across-the-board cuts on December 14, attacks came from all quarters. Senator Albert Gore Sr., mystified why Kennedy was making tax cuts his top priority over health care, education and welfare programs, refused to support it. John K. Galbraith, the devoted Keynesian economist, maligned the message as “the most Republican speech since McKinley.” Galbraith’s disciple, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., excoriated any legitimate consideration of tax cuts as “full of Republican dogma” being “the worst speech the President had ever given” (Stoll p.135). Even Sorenson distanced himself from the President, comparing the substance of his message to something Hoover would say…insinuating, “…and we all know what happened when Hoover tried it.” Even former President Eisenhower decried tax reduction as “fiscal recklessness.” The suspicious distance between Kennedy and liberals of both parties came to a head on this issue in a way none other did.

This internal fight between a President, who was supposed to be of them, and an elite Left who inherited his legacy makes it all the more incredible that his plan – the fundamentals of it, anyway — became law in February 1964, three months after his death. It would validate his arguments that revenue would exceed prior levels and fixed, universal cuts would reinvigorate economic growth in a way more spending never could. Yet, his political heirs obscure that accomplishment to this day. Granted, the cuts were no where near the four Harding-Coolidge reductions in scope or intensity but it illustrated the very real power of the principle whenever championed. It would continue to fuel growth all the way until the recession of 1968. It would provide another potent demonstration for what was to be derisively called “supply-side” or “voodoo economics” when Reagan not only fought for but secured long-overdue tax cuts across-the-board in 1981.

Whether JFK was willing to expressly acknowledge his debt to Coolidge, as Reagan did, remains unsaid. It may be argued, though, that his sponsorship of the Coolidge Memorial Foundation in the midst of his 1962 battle against runaway Federal expenditures and for permanent tax cuts (in order to restore economic growth and then budget surpluses) was perhaps the best tribute he ever rendered to “Silenced” Cal.