On Their Anniversary

October 4, 2013February 16, 2014 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

Today marks the anniversary of Calvin and Grace Coolidge, having shared twenty-seven years, three months and one day married happily. Two fine boys, John and Calvin Jr., were bestowed to them and while Calvin never lived to see their first grandchild, Cynthia, he took great joy in the life that began for him and Grace in October of 1905.

To those who knew the couple best, like Mary Randolph (Grace’s social secretary) and Mrs. Hills, one of Grace’s dearest friends, it was understood how deeply and profoundly they loved each other. Mrs. Hills was a very keen observer of the Coolidges and she could see past the outward reticence of Mr. Coolidge, knowing without a shred of doubt that he adored his wife. For Calvin, she said, “a pat on his wife’s shoulder was the equivalent of a bear hug from a more demonstrative man” (according to Ross, Grace Coolidge and Her Era 188). Mary Randolph also saw the real affection and value Calvin held for his wife, saying, “[S]he was the sunshine and the joy in his life–his rest when tired–his solace in time of trouble. Deep indeed, went the roots of Calvin Coolidge, and they were close bound about that wife of his, and the children.”

Ishbel Ross recounts a few of the occasions Miss Randolph observed Coolidge’s love for Grace during her years beside the Presidential couple: “As soon as he stepped from the elevator on the second floor and approached their private apartments he would call for Grace. If she happened to be out he would go straight to Miss Randolph’s alcove and ask where she was. Then he would watch for her from the window. Light would break across his grave face as he turned back toward the elevator to meet her on her return” (188; Randolph, Presidents and First Ladies 40).

When rumors circulated in Washington that these two were to divorce after the White House, it troubled and appalled them that something so far from the truth could gain credence. They never harbored such inclinations. Their commitment to be faithful to each other was for life, nothing less. Coolidge himself recounts their courtship and marriage in his Autobiography, “From our being together we seemed naturally to come to care for each other. We became engaged in the early summer of 1905 and were married at her home in Burlington, Vermont, on October fourth of that year. I have seen so much fiction written on this subject that I may be pardoned for relating the plain facts. We thought we were made for each other. For almost a quarter of a century she has borne with my infirmities, and I have rejoiced in her graces” (94). Lest there be any confusion about how much Calvin cherished his excellent wife, he once told his good friend Bruce Barton: “A man who has the companionship of a lovely and gracious woman enjoys the supreme blessing that life can give. And no citizen of the United States knows the truth of this statement more than I.”

On Autocracy and Bad Decisions

September 26, 2013September 27, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

“Of course it would be folly to argue that the people cannot make political mistakes. They can and do make grave mistakes. They know it, they pay the penalty, but compared with the mistakes which have been made by every kind of autocracy they are unimportant” — Calvin Coolidge, quoted from Adequate Brevity, p.76.

The people do make mistakes in the selection of their leaders. Elections cast the longest shadows, it seems, when bad decisions are made. We are still groping to calculate the costs of the 2008 election, not to mention the two which have occurred since that time. No political persuasion can seriously deny the fact that elections have real and enduring consequences.

It is what Coolidge is saying, in his inimitable way, between the lines that speak volumes. Coolidge would observe on other occasions that if self-seeking, unfit and complacent representation exists in Washington it is because those same vices reside in the voters who put them in office. The voter who never takes the time to learn the substance of the candidate will find the politician never takes the time to responsibly represent that voter.

Still, Coolidge was no cynic, even when it came to politics. He saw the fundamental difference between the conscientious and the careless to come down to one key ingredient: does the officeholder trust the people he represents? Trust is not the blind suspension of one’s judgment. Coolidge would remark on another occasion, “This does not mean that the opinion of constituents is to be ignored. It is to be weighed most carefully, for the representative must represent.” What the people “think determines every question of civilization.” Yet the officeholder has a more sacred obligation to uphold his oath. Constituents can be wrong. They can demand things they should not have. The commitment to keep faithfully to the Constitution and the laws compel him or her with a force outmatching even the most respectable opinion against it. This conscientious struggle to honor their oaths is not the dilemma in Washington. Theirs is a grave listening problem.

Trust is more than a regard or respect for the people one represents. It has nothing to do with personalities. The condescending arrogance of far too many officeholders seem to block out an honest view of problem. It has everything to do with distrust of liberty. It means nothing to convene a town hall meeting without an unwavering faith in what America is. To do otherwise is form without substance, cover truth with an attractive lie. Trust demands loyalty to as well as confidence in the republican design of our system. It is more than carefully-timed expressions of courage to be dispensed with when the time to fight on principle comes.

Coolidge is saying the autocrat does not know he is wrong. He never detects the gravity of his errors because he never experiences the price for them. He is never wrong. Numbed to reality, he is desensitized to the pain of his own actions. He knows better than the governed. His judgment is superior to the wisdom and political sense of the people or their institutions. He continually doubts the ability of the people to govern themselves, exercising their liberties responsibly. He must do it for them. It is too dangerous a world without him or her. They need him to furnish security, stability and surety from the hazards and risks of an unrestrained mob. If his objectives fall short, it is because the people are too stupid to know what is good for them in his or her superior judgment. They failed the autocrat, not he them. Such is the road to serfdom, as Frederick von Hayek coined it. Such is the way to train the people for the yoke.

Coolidge, fully aware that “[a] large part of the history of free institutions is the history of the people struggling to emancipate themselves from unrestricted legislation,” kept an abiding faith in the people to know far better than any autocrat what was best for them. He kept his confidence unshaken that the people are justified with the freedom of making their own choices and will ultimately make the right determination. They would make mistakes, personally and politically, but never learn the surpassing worth of liberty if insulated from not only its risks but also its rewards. Through permanently-affixed training wheels, autocratic authority demands both the eradication of opportunity and the removal of distinctions in order to preserve power. Not even the most foolish mistake by the people could compare with the trail of devastation realized throughout history when a conceited and self-deluded autocracy is at helm.

On Bureaucracy and Functional Government

September 23, 2013September 23, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

When President Coolidge spoke to those gathered at the illustrious College of William and Mary in 1926, he reminded his listeners of what makes government function. For government to work, it must be local and accountable. Established by the earliest arrivals from the Old World, the experiences with bureaucratic authority taught the colonists that government centralized (and thereby removed from the problems it attempts to fix) never works. For this reason, as government advanced from colonial to state forms, bureaucracies had no part in the drafting, passage or implementation of state constitutions, laws and standards.

It was up to the towns, cities, counties and ultimately states to make government function. It is the cradle of true states’ rights and the basis for a genuine national unity. The one-size-fits-all approach always succumbs to its own inherent weaknesses. In the process of forming their own governments, Americans learned how liberty is only possible when the ability to make decisions is preserved at the local and personal level. Anything more and government, even in the name of compassion and efficiency, becomes inhuman, destructive and incompetent — the murderer of what Coolidge earlier called an individual’s “self-direction,” known also as freedom.

Experience has actually proven, so that Coolidge could truthfully say, “No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.” Liberty and local self-government cannot be separated as with a clinical incision to the body politic. This is why transforming government into the expansive, all-encompassing State it is today, whatever the intentions, always kills the liberty exercised by the individual.

The most adept planners fail not because someone disrupts the plan from its certain success nor because the plan can only work with the right kind of people in charge. The plan fails because it is inherently flawed. It attempts to liberate humanity by denying its humanness. Forced to conform to an unrealistic set of approved behaviors, government is stripped of any human quality, turning what is supposed to be the humane agency of free individuals, the “expression of the life” by a sovereign people, into “a cold, impersonal machine.” No longer the personal involvement of individuals deciding their own affairs, government perverts to infinite layers of “expert practitioners.” An unaccountable and reckless bureaucracy takes the place of local self-determination, giving and taking away freedom with the draft of every new form and the sweep of every expert’s pen.

We see states are no longer allowed to diverge from total conformity to Federal specifications, however mundane the state matter. This administration has made clear it will sue any state refusing to march in step with the arbitrary and selective enforcement of law it exemplifies. We watch as counties, boroughs and parishes are threatened to accept designated “Federal” money or else be cut off from future “favor.” We look while cities, towns, and villages are told to adopt a complete overhaul of zoning regulations by the Housing and Urban Development Department in Washington. We then stand aghast as Washington invades our most personal decisions of child-raising, employment, education, health care, retirement, and, through the institutionalization of political correctness, what we are allowed to say in political opposition and believe in religious conviction.

Coolidge, addressing the issues of housing, food, wages, hours, conditions, justice and opportunity, placed the power for addressing all these with the welfare of all the people in his state squarely where it belonged, where the laws properly placed them — with the people themselves. It is they who bear the burdens of government, who pay its costs and activate its provisions. It was for the people of Massachusetts to decide these details of their lives because they comprised its government from little Monroe to Beacon Hill. What Coolidge said of Massachusetts could be said of governments everywhere across this Union, “Our government belongs to the people. Our property belongs to the people. It is distributed. They own it. The taxes are paid by the people. They bear the burden. The benefits of government must accrue to the people. Not to one class, but to all classes, to all the people. The functions, the power, the sovereignty of the government, must be kept where they have been placed by the Constitution and laws of the people.”

The power of these truths, the “rules of action” originating from the people from whom governments are constituted, are what make bureaucracies such an affront to civilization everywhere. Lifting power out of the hands of the people directly concerned with a given issue, bureaucracies clog the proper function of government by setting up “the pretense of having authority over everybody and being responsible to nobody.” It is the assumption of control without an equal measure of responsibility that makes a bureaucracy so destructive of local self-government and, inseparably, individual freedom. Coolidge put it in even clearer terms, “Of all forms of government, those administered by bureaus are about the least satisfactory to an enlightened and progressive people. Being irresponsible they become autocratic, and being autocratic they resist all development. Unless bureaucracy is constantly resisted it breaks down representative government and overwhelms democracy.”

There are definite issues the Federal government is simply, even at its best, not equipped to handle, being “too far away to be informed of local needs, too inaccessible to be responsive to local conditions.” It has proven unworthy of few things, yet it is still given many more to manage. As Coolidge said, “It does not follow that because something ought to be done the National Government ought to do it.” Liberty diminishes in proportion to increasingly centralized control. Where freedom is concerned, it actually is a zero-sum game.

The solution, as Coolidge analyzed this problem, remains the same now. The states can help end or irreversibly enable the dysfunction of government by bureaucracy. The rights held by states are not given them to never use just as they are not given to abuse those to whom they are accountable, the people of each state. If they are unfaithful in the exercise of delegated powers, the Federal Government is thereby invited to step in and get involved. The willing weakness of local and state government only encourages the intrusion of Federal controls.

This danger provoked President Coolidge not to absorb power, but to restore the correct balance between the people, the states and national government. He did so consistently. By vetoing the double attempts to socialize American agriculture, chopping down the Federal outlay for flood aid, cutting and cutting again the size of the Federal budget, paying down the nation’s $20 billion debt, reducing tax rates across the board and fighting the Congressional urge to spend each year’s growing surplus, Coolidge left the recipe that works when Washington is governed responsibly. It remained for the states and local decision-makers to follow that constructive lead. Far too often they did not do so, working instead against Coolidge’s program.

Local self-government cannot afford, fiscally, politically, morally, to shirk its duty a moment longer. The states cannot emulate the direction they took in the 1920s and 30s. It must be the sovereign people, through their municipal, county and state governments, who stand when no one else seems willing to stand. The alternative will hasten only more of the same disastrous consequences ahead for us already.

The way lit by Coolidge forward, back toward progress and justice, requires courage but it is the only way. It means robustly asserting local and state authority, dragging Washington back to its limited and lawful sphere of responsibilities. “I want to see the policy adopted by the States of discharging their public functions so faithfully that instead of an extension on the part of the Federal Government there can be a contraction.” The march back toward a government of the people and away from central bureaucracy starts where all good governance begins — at the local level.