capitalism

On Labor

/ gouverneurmorris / 1 Comment

In Robert A. Woods’ fascinating little book entitled, “The Preparation of Calvin Coolidge,” the author recounts the numerous ways Coolidge advanced American labor. Coolidge backed policies that improved conditions for everyone, not merely one interest group over that of another. Through cutting state executive government down from 120 agencies to 19, Coolidge enabled the people of Massachusetts to keep more of their wages every week for themselves instead of sending up increasing quantities in taxes to Boston. He supported the decrease of work hours because it helped those who worked…not simply those who led unions, even though, ironically, it originally had the firm opposition of organized manufacturers. Known for his principled stand for law and order, he not only backed Commissioner Curtis for refusing to reinstate 19 police officers after they led most of the department on strike in September 1919. Having become affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, in violation of long-standing department regulations, their duty to the public became secondary to an ideological allegiance that already brought them in conflict with their sworn obligation.

Any or all of these three instances could have alienated political friends, forced Coolidge out of office or worse, led to a violent series of repercussions around the state, even the country.

1919 was hardly a peaceful year, despite the War’s end. But this was not all he encountered since the Lawrence textile and phone operators strikes could have blown into larger conflicts as well. They did not spiral out of control principally because of sound leadership. It is through good leadership that complex and seemingly insurmountable obstacles are resolved with clear and consistently applied principles. Coolidge, known by everyone for his fairness, gave partiality to none. He adhered to the law, even when it might cost him personally or politically. As such, he gained the support of those who saw past the bias and political agendas of those calling for violence, social upheaval, nationwide strikes and economic change for its own sake.

He continually lauded the glory of work. As Coolidge would observe on Labor Day in 1919, “Workmen’s compensation, hours and conditions of labor are cold consolations, if there be no employment. And employment can be had only if some one finds it profitable. The greater the profit, the greater the wages.” Such a truth needs no clearer illustration than where we stand in September 2013. If only the realization of Coolidge’s day, that “we can take from one class and give to another class” is never going to fix the problem. The problem only aggravates, as it did then, when class warfare rhetoric convinces Americans to expect fairness without freedom for all and benefits without the work to earn them.

Coolidge recognized the right to form unions by mutual agreement. Without consent, both unions and arbitration of disagreements were impossible to reconcile “with the right of individual freedom,” which could never be surrendered to any effort to equalize labor. He saw a clear distinction of responsibility when it came to those performing a service to the public, be it policemen, telephone operators or (in Reagan’s case) air traffic controllers.

This is why Coolidge told labor leaders on September 1, 1924, “Of course employment affecting public safety and public necessity is not private employment, and requires somewhat different treatment.” Those who work in public unions are not simply serving themselves, as Coolidge said on April 21, 1919, “There is another principle involved which has received very little attention, and that is the obligation that exists on those who enter the public service to continue to furnish such service even at some personal inconvenience. This obligation reaches to the highest officer or government official to the humblest employee. The public has rights which cannot be disregarded.” Such is why Coolidge endorsed resolution by peaceful arbitration — not the coercion of strikes, violence and disregard of law and orderly behavior — when disagreements occur. The “us” versus “them” rhetoric only proved increasingly hollow as tax reduction and constructive economy revealed the property owners and the laborer to be one and the same.

The emphasis on what one is entitled, rather than what one owes, misses both the importance and increased opportunity hard work affords to each person. No short cut exists. One cannot demand the fruits of toil without the effort to acquire them. The welfare of all, made clear from the earliest experiments in socialism by Plymouth colony, is never achieved by the many enjoying the rewards earned by a few. Work and the ability to keep its results have proven, through centuries of human experience, to be the means toward progress, the agency of mutual prosperity, and the continuance of civilization.

It is why Coolidge, in his address to the leaders of labor, said this,

“America recognizes no aristocracy save those who work. The badge of service is the sole requirement for admission to the ranks of our nobility. These American policies should be continued. We have outlawed all artificial privilege. We have had our revolution and our reforms. I do not favor a corporation government, a bank government, a farm government or a labor government. I am for a common-sense government by all the people according to the American policy and under the American Constitution. I want all the people to continue to be partakers in self government.”

With Coolidge, his actions matching his words, we can know that he meant it.

Image

On Being Worthy of Freedom

/ gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

Apprehensions over the future have always remained an ever-present concern for a wise and circumspect people. When Americans stop being concerned for the next generation, it will be because we are no longer free individuals. The prospects for freedom stand in greater doubt than perhaps they have for many years, but a lack of confidence in our system is only new to us, not to generations of Americans who came before us.

Any one of the hardships overcome by prior generations could have halted the experiment of self-government in its tracks. It has certainly had no shortage of critics who proclaimed “failure” and “defeat” only to be proven flatly wrong time and time again. Inequity and unfairness have been present in human history from the outset, but neither has had the power to prevent individuals of determination from accomplishing truly great things despite it. Our time is hardly the first to ask, “who is worthy of freedom?”

The Progressive Era produced an almost overwhelming array of reasons to change the way this country was established. It would answer our question with pessimism: the people were ultimately not to be trusted with freedom. It was an intelligent few who merited such power. Coolidge knew, on the other hand, freedom was safest in the hands of the people.

The charge that our system was both too wild and too unequal, compared to the “enlightened” societies of Europe, led to calls for regulation of human behavior on a scale never before known. The pursuit began to implement an efficient and intelligent approach to government that would mitigate risk, remove inequities and shepherd the people to progress.

These activists, predisposed to intense skepticism about capitalist systems, trusted government implicitly with greater and greater control. Enamored with a lopsided admiration for methods foreign to American ideals of law and liberty, these generally middle class intellectuals failed to appreciate the remarkable nature of our constitutional system. They overlooked the careful balance worked out by the Framers, infusing a disastrous measure of good intentions with a reckless accumulation of new laws.

They entrusted government with the power to supply the shortfalls of human nature with legislation. Each effort undervalued, even ignored, the unquantifiable worth of freedom. Government, endeavoring to be “smart” and “humane,” hurt those it proclaimed to help by robbing them of the dignity of free will, the moral judgment of those given sovereignty in our system.

Ours is a history of accomplishment and success because people were recognized not as subjects in service to the State but individuals whose value comes from a Divine Creator. Made in the image of God, it logically follows that the dreams, aspirations and abilities to create, construct and succeed are within every person’s power. It is that power now being denied our young people as unrealistic and unattainable. This is nothing more than the latest incarnation of those who denied Edison could harness light, the Wrights could fly and Ford could mobilize America.

The avoidable tragedy of all this is that it literally destroys the wholesome yearnings of millions for something better than marginal existence. Instead, the young are told to be content with mediocrity, cease the pursuit of success, and consign all future faith and hopes to Washington’s management. No less self-deluded than the Progressives of Coolidge’s day, this operation dehumanizes humanity. History proclaims it will ultimately fail but the cost to countless lives in the process can never be known.

Coolidge, grappling with these problems, said in 1923,

[T}he motive power of progress and reform has not come from the high and mighty but from the mass of the people…It is not the quantity of knowledge that is the chief glory of man…It is in the moral power to know the truth and respond to it, to resist evil and hold to that which is good, that is to be found the real dignity and worth, the chief strength, the chief greatness. This power, even in the humblest and the most unlettered, rises to a height which cannot be measured, which cannot be analyzed. It is this strength of the people which can never be ignored. 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…

…Unless the people struggle to help themselves, no one else will or can help them. It is out of such struggle that there comes the strongest evidence of their true independence and nobility, and there is struck off a rough and incomplete economic justice, and there develops a strong and rugged national character. It represents a spirit for which there could be no substitute. It justifies the claim that they are worthy to be free…

     …Civilization and freedom have come because they are an achievement, and it is human nature to achieve. Nothing else gives any permanent satisfaction. But most of all there is need of religion. From that source alone came freedom. Nothing else touches the soul of man. Nothing else justifies faith in the people.

Like the generation who saw beyond the narrow confines of subsistence imposed upon it by king and Parliament, it is time to refuse to participate in a supervised decline. Being taught to doubt our own judgment is merely a prelude to forfeiting the ability to make our own choices, to strive, to fail, to triumph — in short, to live free. If we are to be worthy of that freedom, we cannot surrender to this latest effort — however organized it is — to train out the moral ideals and intangible dreams of people.

Image

On those Roaring Twenties

/ gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

Image

Historian Paul Johnson

 

It is fitting that those who helped drive the Reagan Revolution forward humbly credit their inspiration to the shy, quiet man from Vermont, Calvin Coolidge. In a very real way he bequeathed the essential recipe for the successes of the 1980s. While the ingredients were not precisely followed in every respect, especially concerning the payment of debt, the principles contained such power that even Congressional spending could not slow it down.

President Reagan’s combination of political saavy, biting wit, unassuming competence and ability to cut through the complex and see the simple essence of an issue derived not merely from his life’s experiences, they found inspiration from his study of Coolidge. Reagan, after all, like several of the men and women who comprised his team of “revolutionaries,” first came to understand the world during the Coolidge Era and in the years shortly thereafter. The lessons “Silent Cal” taught in both word and action left abiding impressions on future Secretaries of the Treasury (Donald T. Regan) and Defense (Caspar Weinberger) and future Attorney General Edwin Meese III, along with many others.

Two scholars, in particular, were returning to Coolidge’s record in order to reassess his very real achievements. In 1982, Thomas B. Silver, in Coolidge and the Historians, would lead this effort and unearth most of the shoddy and partisan reporting against the thirtieth president and the 1920s. In 1984, Paul Johnson, in the sixth chapter of his Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, would roll back the shroud thrown over not only the genuine triumphs of the Roaring Twenties but also the legacy of Mr. Coolidge. As Mr. Johnson would reflect on this reserved and disciplined leader, he would not only find him to be “the most internally consistent and single-minded of modern American presidents” but he, like all of history’s great men, was not an intellectual. To Mr. Johnson, that is a very good thing because “[a]n intellectual is somebody who thinks ideas are more important than people.” Wilson and Hoover approached the world this way while Coolidge, and Reagan, did not. To Coolidge and Reagan, people were the preeminent focus of their policies. The “smartest ones in the room” miss that all-too-obvious truth. People were genuinely benefited by Coolidge’s leadership.

Johnson could accurately survey the Twenties not as an aberration of gross materialism or empty gains but as an unprecedented prosperity that was both “very widespread and very solid” (p.223). “It was,” Johnson corrects, a prosperity “more widely distributed than had been possible in any community of this size before, and it involved the acquisition, by tens of millions, of the elements of economic security which had hitherto been denied them throughout the whole of history. The growth was spectacular.”

As a direct result of Coolidge prosperity, national income jumped from $59.4 to $87.2 billion in eight years, with real per capita income climbing from $522 to $716. Millions of workers purchased insurance for the first time, a phenomenon of a healthy economy Obama is deliberately ignoring. Savings quadrupled during the decade. Ownership in fifty stocks or more reveals the vast majority were not “the rich,” but housekeepers, clerks, factory workers, merchants, electricians, mechanics and foremen. Union membership plummeted from just over 4 million at the outset of the 1920s to 2.5 million by 1932. As small and large businesses succeeded, people were able to provide holidays with pay, insurance coverage and pensions as well as other benefits, giving substance to Coolidge’s dictum that “large profits mean large payrolls” thereby making “collective action superfluous,” as Johnson observes (p.225). Home ownership skyrocketed to 11 million families by 1924.

Perhaps the most obvious index of prosperity could be seen in automobile ownership. What began as a novelty for just over 1 million Americans in 1914 (with less than 570,000 produced annually) exploded into 26 million owners with over 5.6 million autos produced annually by 1929. Air travel was fast becoming the normal mode for “regular” folks and classes were rapidly dissolving from upward mobility. In 1920 a meager $10 million was spent on radios. By 1929 that figure had surpassed $411 million, which was itself small compared to the $2.4 billion spent on electronic devices as a whole in the Twenties.

These years were not, as some would claim later, removed from an appreciation of the past. The expansion of education is “[p]erhaps the most important single development of the age” (Johnson 225). Spending on education increased four times what it was in 1910, from $426 million to $2.3 billion. But unlike today’s habit of throwing money at the problem, it brought results. Illiteracy actually went down over fifty-percent. A “persistent devotion to the classics,” with David Copperfield at the head of the list, defined the decade. Culture was reaching the homes of those who had once been the least connected Americans through reading clubs, youth orchestras and “historical conservation” movements that would restore sites like Colonial Williamsburg.

“The truth is the Twenties was the most fortunate decade in American history, even more fortunate than the equally prosperous 1950s decade, because in the Twenties the national cohesion brought about by relative affluence, the sudden cultural density and the expressive originality of ‘Americanism’ were new and exciting” (p.226).

The problem, as Mr. Johnson concludes, with the expansion of the Twenties was not that it was “philistine or socially immoral. The trouble was that it was transient. Had it endured, carrying with it in its train the less robust but still (at that time) striving economies of Europe, a global political transformation must have followed which would have rolled back the new forces of totalitarian compulsion, with their ruinous belief in social engineering, and gradually replaced them with a relationship between government and enterprise closer to that which Coolidge outlined…” More of the same policies would have prevented much of what followed in the 1930s and beyond. “[M]odern times would have” indeed “been vastly different and immeasurably happier.” The purpose served by Coolidge “minding his own business,” as he put March 1, 1929, was perhaps more a forecast of his successors than an introspection. If only Hoover had been listening more carefully. The downturn in 1929 would certainly have more closely resembled the depression of 1921 and, with the Harding-Coolidge recipe of “masterful inactivity,” have spared millions of lives the terrible suffering and avoidable loss brought on by Hoover’s spending and Roosevelt’s “New Deal.”