On Separate Classes

August 18, 2013August 18, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / 1 Comment

“There is yet another manifest disposition which has preyed on the weakness of the race from its infancy, denounced alike by the letter and the spirit of the Constitution, and repugnant to all that is American, the attempt to create class distinctions. In its full development this means the caste system, wherein such civilization as exists is rigidly set, and that elasticity so necessary for progress, and that recognition of equality which has been the aim and glory of our institutions, are destroyed and denied. Society to advance must be not a dead form but a living organism, plastic, inviting progress. There are no classes here. There are different occupations and different stations, certainly there can be no class of employer and employed. All true Americans are working for each other, exchanging the results of the efforts of hand and brain wrought through the unconsumed efforts of yesterday, which we call capital, all paying and being paid by each other, serving and being served. To do otherwise is to stand disgraced and alien to our institutions. This means that government must look at the part in light of the whole, that legislation must be directed not for private interest but for public welfare, and that thereby alone will each of our citizens find their greatest accomplishment and success” — Governor Calvin Coolidge, formally accepting Republican nomination as Vice-President, July 27, 1920.

More than ten years later, in the midst of economic downturn, Garet Garrett would echo the same point through his column in the Saturday Evening Post. In articles like, “There Goes Mine,” written in 1932, Garrett attacks the fallacy that economic classes are both fixed and permanent. He refers to the resentment during depressions of car ownership and how confidence in one’s ability to move upward from poverty to prosperity remains entirely within each person’s reach. Coolidge and Garrett both understood that liberty means opportunity, an opportunity that is not coincidental but directly due to our unique political and economic system as founded. Margaret Thatcher, the late British prime minister, grasped the significance of this truth better than have many Americans. She observed that when opportunity is maximized, class distinctions diminish and the disparity between “rich” and “poor” decreases, contrary to every economic “expert.”

As all three realized, however, the opposite holds true every time socialism is allowed to set policy, be it locally or nationally. For the Left, as Thatcher noted, it is better for the poor to stay poor “provided the rich were less rich.” Such a view summarizes modern liberalism. It is the Left’s animus against success and its vested interest in perpetual victim-hood which drive its agenda. It is never about rising to higher aspirations or striving for greater ideals. It is about exchanging our independence for the security they provide, a security of marginal existence.

Coolidge, Garett and Thatcher all knew what the Left denies to this day: policies that maximize individual opportunity remove class distinctions automatically and enable equality on the basis of each person’s determination and potential. Modern liberals would have us all equally poor, feeling guilty of ever rising above the marginal, dependent and miserable and call that “progress.” Incapable of fixing the problems Coolidge’s policies addressed, all that is left for modern liberalism is to keep the class warfare going, to provoke violence, and to project its failures onto those striving to heal and reunite us with the freedom of a truly classless society envisioned by our Framers.

On those Roaring Twenties

July 18, 2013August 13, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

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.”

On Open Doors and Isolation

June 29, 2013August 12, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

When one approaches the literature that has accumulated over the years about the 1920s, it is found that narrow templates and hostile stereotypes have been allowed to define the decade. This is not honest scholarship, especially when those definitions are passed down as the final word on the matter. Repeating approved doctrines deprive us and future generations of the wealth of insight taught by the Coolidge era. By skipping over Coolidge far too many refuse to acknowledge that a profound and successful political philosophy exists outside the limits and failures of the “New Deal” and all of its legislative offspring. The 1920s are simply not worth studying, it is asserted, because they were an era of greed, hyper-capitalism, “underconsumption,” American isolationism and worship of “big business” (as if none of those conditions ever existed in the administration that swept to office in 1932). Any attempt to return to the primary sources and reappraise the time period is simply “reactionary” or “revisionist,” as if Schlesinger and the long train of “historians” after him were merely reporting the facts without a shred of bias for the policies of F. D. R.

Chief among those accepted templates forced onto the 1920s are: (1) Isolationism and (2) Alliance with “Big Business.” A return to the original sources written by those who developed policy and implemented it during the Harding and Coolidge years, such simplistic frames of reference do not hold. A fascinating letter written to President Coolidge by none other than Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, on November 8, 1923, illustrates a far different policy underway at the time. Secretary Hughes is explaining the distinct difference of America’s “Open Door Policy” regarding America businesses abroad. The President’s approach, expressed in giving complete confidence to his Secretary to direct the Department, makes clear that Hughes was acting entirely with Coolidge’s authority.

Secretary Hughes writes, “From time to time there has been some dissatisfaction expressed in business circles because this Department’s attitude toward American business interests in the foreign field differs somewhat from the attitude in similar matters of the British, French and other European governments. The latter are not loath to interfere politically in support of the business interests of their nationals to a degree which is not followed by this Department.” Hughes was articulating an avowed refusal to thrust American businesses on other countries to the chagrin of several of our own businessmen, despite the potential fallout at the polls. He goes on, “Our position is that we are always ready to give appropriate support to our nationals in seeking opportunities for business enterprise abroad, but we do not undertake to make the government a party to the business negotiations or use political pressure for the benefit of private interests in order to obtain particular concessions, or intervene in favor of one American interest as against another. We are persistent in our efforts to maintain the open door policy, or equality of commercial opportunity, but we do not attempt to assume obligations for the government, expressed or implied, which under our system we could not undertake to discharge.” The open door was not for forcing American business on the world, it was for other nations to maximize opportunity for commerce without government favoritism, ours or theirs.

The Turkish government’s patronage of national petroleum companies was closing that open door for opportunity and hindering a free market. Instead of deploying the pressure of politics, however, the Coolidge administration strove to keep that door open to any and all, without negotiating favoritism for American businesses. It was the exact opposite of what Burton Folsom calls “political entrepreneurship.” Under this policy, “big business” had no special advantages to get established overseas. There were no “secret deals” between government and business with Hughes at the helm. Businesses were to approach one another and negotiate as equals with the strength of their own resources and if they failed to persuade foreign investors, the door remained open for someone else to succeed without government there to “strong-arm” a deal.

Disappointing as it was for some in business, Hughes commended the advantages of keeping the door open. “American companies which might prefer a policy of more direct interference on their behalf by the government are inclined, in my opinion, to overlook the fact that American prestige and reputation for fairness has been enhanced, and consequently business opportunities of our nationals have been increased, by the correct policy which this government has followed. I find that in many parts of the world, American business is welcomed largely because foreign countries realize that they can deal with American interests on a business basis without fearing political complications.” The “political intrigues” and “difficulties” that would ensue through closing the door to opportunity, whether by rewarding favored companies or by punishing undesirable industries, vindicates the wisdom of this policy.

The conferences that pervaded the decade on a host of foreign relations problems combined with the direct lines of friendship rebuilt by men like Dwight Morrow in Mexico, Charles Dawes and Frank B. Kellogg in Europe, Henry Stimson in Nicaragua and the Philippines, Sumner Welles and Secretary Hughes toward the Latin American states and many others help to correct the grossly mistaken belief that America retreated from the world under Coolidge. It was as involved as ever. Instead of embracing aggression and propaganda as its weaponry, however, these leaders of the Coolidge era demonstrated what patience, impartiality, service and understanding, with the resolve to protect America’s ideals, can accomplish.