In retirement, private citizen Mr. Coolidge wrote to the incoming President of New York Life Insurance Company, Thomas A. Buckner, reiterating that no special treatment be given to him as a member of the Board. He must be like anyone else, tasked to meet whatever need for service he was deemed fit to render. If Buckner judged someone else better qualified for an assignment or receipt of a favor, humble Cal made sure in this letter that the job ought to go to that man every time, never out of deference to him as a former President. He insists, “Of course, I should be delighted to do anything you want. You can always keep in mind that I am not in search of any kind of an honor and anytime you think someone on the Board would like something, I hope you will always give it to them in preference to me.” Such was not calculated ingratiation, such was simply Calvin’s way however high he rose in this world’s responsibilities. In his eyes, the higher one rose demanded heavier obligation to give more not rest on the greatness of the position, past or present.

As tax policy comes to the forefront, and especially the search for new “revenue sources,” it is worthwhile reflecting on President Coolidge’s thoughts on the Constitution’s limited power to tax, when he said on December 8, 1925,

“It is a fundamental principle of our country that the people are sovereign. While they recognize the undeniable authority of the state, they have established as its instrument a Government of limited powers. They hold inviolate in their own hands the jurisdiction over their own freedom and the ownership of their own property. Neither of these can be impaired except by due process of law. The wealth of our country is not public wealth, but private wealth. It does not belong to the Government, it belongs to the people. The Government has no justification in taking private property except for a public purpose. It is always necessary to keep these principles in mind in the laying of taxes and in the making of appropriations. No right exists to levy on a dollar, or to order the expenditure of a dollar, of the money of the people, except for a necessary public purpose duly authorized by the Constitution. The power over the purse is the power over liberty.“

Thomas Woods reminds us that while many may be convinced that history is now told objectively, that we are freed of the old narratives that force certain political conclusions in this enlightened, modern era, the neglect of the lessons from the 1920s illustrate how committed policymakers still are to a deliberate “overpass” constructed across the entire Harding-Coolidge Era. Woods points out that this is no where more on infamous display than in the silent treatment given to the Depression of 1921. While James Grant in his excellent book, The Forgotten Depression, published last November, has begun the fight back on behalf of the truthful record, Woods shows why this economic struggle remains all too forgotten — It resolved by purposefully refusing the stimulus spending approach of Government that time after time after time has become the unchallenged, knee-jerk reaction to every downturn in our day. Neither was it, as Wood asserts, laissez-faire governance. Government did act, implementing the Budget and Accounting system, empowering the Comptroller, substantially reducing spending, paying on the Nation’s debt and chopping down income taxes, what would become the first of four times that decade. Nevertheless, it proved that spending does not yield the return of prosperity, cutting waste and restraining expenditures works and that by allowing the marketplace to self-correct rather than rescue the inefficient and “indispensable,” the country quickly found peace and growth again without years of suffering. Had President Harding listened to his Commerce Secretary, Herbert Hoover, whose list of government-backed remedies rivaled his actual program in 1929, there might have been a far more memorable Depression of 1921. President Coolidge would later summarize his estimate of Hoover’s blundering policy “expertise,” when he said, “That man has given me unsolicited advice every day for six years, all of it bad.” It is to the credit of men who knew, like Harding and Coolidge did, that what worked was not government largesse but discipline, not Washington saving capitalism from itself, as if it needed saving, but resisting the urge to prop up ineffective uses of capital with more of people’s money. This took perspective and maturity but it also took courage, a kind of strength less understood now in a day where celebrity matters more than character.

Woods reviews a much overlooked chapter in the Harding-Coolidge record, a record of experiences and teachable events that are already vastly neglected. It is a chapter to which we would do well to read again before another slew of stimuli, urged with the desperate tone of government-pressured “salesmanship,” rushes us ever further away from the actual antidote demonstrated under both Harding and Coolidge.

Harding and Coolidge, June 1920