On Thrift

January 16, 2014January 17, 2014 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

Ben Franklin, painted by Joseph S. Duplessis, 1778.

“The third week of January has been designated as a time for considering the advantages of thrift, perhaps in part because it follows the birthday of Benjamin Franklin.

“Thrift does not mean parsimony. It is not to be in any way identified with the miser. The thrifty person is one who does the best that is possible to provide for suitable discharge of the future duties of life. In its essence it is self-control. Industry and judgment are required to achieve it. Contentment and economic freedom are its fruits.

“Most frequently we identify the thought of thrift with various institutions that have been provided to make it effective…But the main principle is saving today something that will be useful tomorrow. The whole theory of conservation is included. Money is only an incident.

“Just at present we need to apply the principle to saving and increasing the strength of our governmental and social structure as well as our economic fabric. We must not squander these precious possessions. And, above all, a wise thrift now calls for the expenditure of money to save people” — Calvin Coolidge, January 17, 1931.

The reader is generally right on board with Mr. Coolidge until that very last sentence. How can the economical “Silent Cal” be advocating “expenditures” to meet the worsening depression? Was he inconsistent? Was he succumbing to contradiction with his own record or what he would write throughout his daily columns about the need for a return to greater economy by government?

As Charles Willis Thompson observed in his book, Presidents I’ve Known and Two Near Presidents, Coolidge possessed an exceptional gift for style as one of very few Presidents who were true literary men (pp. 369, 370-1). Yet, there was something peculiar about the way he expressed his thoughts. While he packed more substance into fewer words than the vast majority of public officials have, there was something more than economy of expression. Thompson, in his quest to understand Coolidge, found that “he never said or wrote anything that did not have a certain peculiarity about it. That peculiarity was that there was always at least one sentence which made you say as you read idly through, ‘Hey, what’s that? Let me read that again.’ It hit you between the eyes. When you read it again you stopped for a while to think about it” (p. 361). The closing thought of his piece on thrift is that kind of sentence. It seems to go against everything he just said. That is what compels us to dig further, think deeper and reach beyond a surface appraisal of the man, his mind and what he is saying to us here.

So, what did he mean? On the very next day, he employs our word “expenditure” yet again. His subject, though, is not government acting through the public Treasury but the American Red Cross. Coolidge had confronted in previous articles and would again nine days later the “delusion” that governments spending money to “revive business” never yields the prosperous results promised to everyone. It requires borrowing money we do not have and expecting “salvation” to come out of deeper debt and increasing waste. It only postpones the very prosperity governments claim will finally arrive if we simply spend more.

Coolidge was not talking about public expenditures when he spoke of thrift on January 17. He was referring to the driving force of the marketplace, you and I, not the government. Recovery begins with us. Government needs to save money and strength at the same that “a comparatively small expenditure made now will avert a possible future calamity.” The notion that emergencies, real or contrived, demand expansive plans and exorbitant costs has failed throughout history, whether it is called the “Square Deal” (Teddy Roosevelt), the “New Deal” (Teddy’s cousin Franklin), the “Fair Deal” (Harry Truman) or the “Great Society” (Lyndon Johnson), the result is the same trail of avoidable destruction to real people’s lives. Coolidge meant private charity, local support by the individuals, civic organizations and institutions we sustain with time and monetary resources. These “expenditures” are what “save people,” not the latest extension of unemployment benefits, another stimulus package or postponing budgetary cuts that hurt dependence but need to be done for a sane, self-sustaining and solvent future.

When Coolidge spoke of spending to save, he was not succumbing to a politician’s obfuscation of language, he was reminding us of what he had been saying from his earliest days in public service, “Government cannot relieve from toil…The normal must care for themselves. Self-government means self-support.” It is by spending ourselves and our resources in the service of others locally as free men and women that saves lives, not merely consenting to a government as it confiscates the means of “someone else less deserving” in order to redistribute to those it deems “more deserving.” If we are to remain free, we are called upon to exercise the obligations which accompany that freedom. It is in the practice of thrift, manifested by individuals in both saving and spending, that we and those who most need help receive it without recourse to government expenditures.

Wagon Ride in the Black Hills, South Dakota, 1927

January 16, 2014February 25, 2014 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

Wagon Ride to the Game Lodge, South Dakota, 1927

President and Mrs. Coolidge getting settled in for their wagon ride to visit former Governor Samuel McKelvie, who lived in a cabin beside Slate Creek, South Dakota.

President and First Lady back aboard the lumber wagon after it got stuck along the trail en route to the Game Lodge. Calvin, it was remembered, got out and put his shoulder to the wagon, helping push it out of the ruts and back in motion. How many Presidents would have done that? Notice in the second picture he has removed his suit jacket, leaving it clean for their arrival.

President and First Lady back aboard the lumber wagon after it got stuck along the trail en route to Slate Creek. Calvin, it was remembered, got out and put his shoulder to the wagon, helping push it out of the ruts and back in motion. How many Presidents would have done that? Notice in the second picture he has removed his suit jacket, leaving it clean for their arrival. He could have been driven in a car, he chose to ride in the wagon.

Their destination, the Game Lodge, Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Their home that summer, the Game Lodge, Custer State Park, in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

On Science and Morality

January 14, 2014March 16, 2014 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

As the 7th of January marked the well-known “Have Faith in Massachusetts” inaugural speech of Coolidge’s presidency over the Massachusetts Senate beginning in 1914, one hundred years ago, the profound observations of that address find reiteration at the end of his life with equal force and persuasive insight. Coolidge remained philosophically consistent, unchanged even after a long career of public service could have diluted his sense of himself or surrendered convictions in the name of “practicality.” Moral rightness and wrongness were very real to him. Their existence kept him coming back to God for strength to walk humbly and lead righteously. He retained a firm grasp of principled reality that helped navigate through many a political “thicket.” To the end, he kept his commitment to the existence of truth and the inability of man, through his own power, to remove moral responsibility and repeal Divine law.

“For more than a generation we have been worshiping science and glorying in its application to our physical needs. No one should underestimate the value of our advance in knowledge or fail in due appreciation of those who for no reward and little recognition have unselfishly devoted themselves to years of research, which had enormously contributed to the comfort, convenience, health and material power of their fellow men. But all the wonders with which science has surrounded us merely tell us what we can do, they do not reveal what we can be. Of themselves they add nothing to our moral power and are indifferent to the higher aspirations of the soul.

“Science alone furnishes no guarantee of progress. It can be used, as many of us have seen, for evil and destruction. It gives us quantity but we also need quality. If we want to increase our knowledge of liberty and patriotism, of justice and mercy, of self-sacrifice and charity, of salvation and immortality, of any of the ideals which raise men above themselves, we turn to literature.” As Coolidge made clear earlier in this same article, his training for life, from very early on, included “the most important book in the world,” the Bible.

Coolidge continues, “Give a man all knowledge of material forces and with it he may involve himself and all the world in complete ruin, but plant a noble thought and a moral purpose in the human mind, and not only are they incapable of being used for any evil design but they have a contagious power of their own for immeasurable good. Without them there is little which is capable of supporting and advancing civilization” (“Books of My Boyhood,” published in Cosmopolitan, October 1932).