“Calvin Coolidge and Race: His Record in Dealing with the Racial Tensions of the 1920s”

February 24, 2013August 31, 2015 / gouverneurmorris / 2 Comments

This excellent essay by Alvin S. Felzenberg highlights in bold relief how courageous and characteristically sensible Mr. Coolidge was when it came to race. It is widely unknown that he was the first President to push forward a national discussion on these issues, not Lyndon Johnson or any of Coolidge’s five predecessors. But that is not all he did. He also publicly confronted the Klan in public speeches and events around the nation, he acted decisively to end segregation policies inherited from the Wilson years and he reminded Congress of their Constitutional duty to uphold equality under the law through anti-lynching legislation. Even more, his correspondence with various folks looks like a “who’s who” of minority leaders of the 1920s. He commuted the prison sentence of Marcus Garvey. He detested the veiled racism of affirmative action and made sure that his appointment of people like Perry Howard to the Justice Department were made for their character and competence not their color. He kept an open door in his pursuit of advice from attorneys like Ruth W. Whaley and educators like Howard University’s Emmett Scott, who praised Coolidge’s defense of “ordered liberty,” understood by Americans at the time as responsible self-government. “Law and order” for “blacks” was not a racist code phrase, it was that wonderful coupling of freedom with responsibility. Scott continued,

This address brought great encouragement to thoughtful representatives of the twelve million colored people of the United States. The principles above stated by you include most or all of what they hold near and dear in connection with their citizenship. The one thing for which they have struggled since the Republican Party conferred upon them … freedom and enfranchisement has been this American ideal of “ordered liberty.” The colored people suffer many disabilities among them persecution by a hooded order which seeks to exclude them from the privileges of American citizenship. They also suffer from discrimination in the Federal service and from segregation in many Departments of our government. This discrimination is a legacy which has come to your administration. They know Calvin Coolidge. They know his traditional friendship and they know of his distinguished services in behalf of their race.

Perhaps most importantly, while one President (Woodrow Wilson) was promoting a truly bigoted spin on America’s past, the novel turned film “The Birth of a Nation,” Senator Coolidge was instrumental in shutting it down in Boston theaters. His unbiased respect for all people was simply who he was, not a device to win political power. He is ignorantly attacked today as another racist relic of our prejudiced past. The truth, if actually sought however, shows that minorities had few friends as brave and loyal as Mr. Calvin Coolidge.

Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1924

February 14, 2013August 11, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / 3 Comments

President Coolidge’s first Annual Message to Congress delivered the previous year, December 6, 1923

President Coolidge would open his second Annual Message to Congress by assessing the pervasive destruction of unsound economics, declaring,

The fallacy of the claim that the costs of government are borne by the rich and those who make a direct contribution to the National Treasury can not be too often exposed. No system has been devised, I do not think any system could be devised, under which any person living in this country could escape being affected by the cost of our government. It has a direct effect both upon the rate and the purchasing power of wages. It is felt in the price of those prime necessities of existence, food, clothing, fuel and shelter. It would appear to be elementary that the more the Government expends the more it must require every producer to contribute out of his production to the Public Treasury, and the less he will have for his own benefit. The continuing costs of public administration can be met in only one way — by the work of the people. The higher they become, the more the people must work for the Government. The less they are, the more the people can work for themselves.

To restore the proper ownership of what people earn was what drove Coolidge and Mellon to insist upon Congress cutting rates across the board, fighting to eliminate penalties like the estate tax and genuinely reducing expenditures (remember this was before baseline budgeting). While the Revenue Act of 1924 retained the tax on estates (to Coolidge’s disappointment), it would continue the decrease of rates from 58 to 46% at the top and down to 1.125% at the bottom. For Coolidge, tax and expenditure reduction was a moral obligation. Higher and higher rates bore inescapable costs on everyone. Though the Federal minimum wage would not arrive until 1933 ($0.25/hr), it (like all taxes on what is earned) only harm everyone, employer and employee, rich and poor alike, shackling the future to government spending habits. Higher rates, as they had become in Coolidge’s lifetime, were an avoidable source of division for what should be a United States. As President Coolidge knew all too well, feeding class warfare as the basis for tax policy would only spread suffering and prevent the return of economic health.

On Race

February 12, 2013February 15, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / 4 Comments

When it comes to Coolidge’s views on race, it is both deliberately misleading and outright prejudicial to claim he timidly condoned animus. On the contrary, he asserted a decisive moral courage to address the progress as well as the struggles of these Americans. They were not “African-Americans” or “colored” people to him. They were Americans. He once corrected Colonel Starling for referring to a “colored gentleman.” “No,” Coolidge said, “he is a gentleman.” President Coolidge made these matters a central component in all six of his State of the Union Addresses, his Inaugural and numerous speeches and letters. Decades before Martin Luther King, it was character and every American’s determination for self-improvement that mattered. Not one’s skin tone. He despised the condescension of treating people as groups instead of as individuals. That is why he was so relentless when it came to reducing government expenditures and the tax burden, because it helped everyone have the maximum opportunity to succeed as individuals. He also knew that without working hard to better one’s self, character would erode and by shirking the responsibilities of freedom would forfeit the rewards they produce. It is best to let him speak in his own words. Here are two excerpts from letters he wrote, the first one is to Charles F. Gardner on August 9, 1924 (in response to Mr. Gardner’s statement from a newspaper clipping about a “coloured man” running for Congress, saying: “It is of some concern whether a Negro is allowed to run for Congress, anywhere, at any time, in any party, in this, a white man’s country. Repeated ignoring of the growing race problem does not excuse us for allowing encroachments. Temporizing with the Negro whether he will or will not vote either a Democratic or a Republican ticket, as evidenced by the recent turnover in Oklahoma, is contemptible.” To which Coolidge wrote:

Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or colour. I have taken my oath to support that Constitution. It is the source of your rights and my rights. I propose to regard it, and administer it, as the source of the rights of all the people, whatever their belief or race. A coloured man is precisely as much entitled to submit his candidacy in a party primary as is any other citizen. The decision must be made by the constituents to whom he offers himself, and by nobody else. You have suggested that in some fashion I should bring influence to bear to prevent the possibility of a coloured man being nominated for Congress. In reply, I quote my great predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt:

‘…I cannot consent to take the position that the door of hope–the door of opportunity–is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or colour.’

Yours very truly,

Calvin Coolidge

It is noteworthy that President Coolidge keys in on the “door of opportunity” — for that is the goal of what America is — the creation of opportunity not the guarantee of material results.

The second excerpt is from a letter written August 14 that same year to Dr. Robert R. Moton, President of The National Negro Business League, Chicago, Illinois. Keep in mind these letters were written during an election year. Offering his steady optimism for the future’s potential, Coolidge wrote:

I wish particularly to pay tribute to the League’s founder and your distinguished predecessor, the late Booker T. Washington. His vision of the problems of the coloured people was indeed that of a seer, and your League is one of the monuments of his life work…I wish to tell you of the deep impression that was made upon me by my studies of the Negro race’s achievements. In the accumulation of wealth, establishment of material independence, and the assumption of a full and honourable part in the economic life of the nation, it may fairly be said that the coloured people themselves have already substantially solved these phases of their problem. If they will but go forward along the lines of their progress in recent decades, and under such leadership as your own and many others among their excellent organizations are affording, their future will be well cared for…They will continue their efforts for educational progress and spiritual betterment; and just as they demonstrate their eagerness for such improvement, they will find themselves enjoying a constantly greater and greater support and sympathy at the hands of the whole community…

Very truly yours,

Calvin Coolidge