Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge was the 30th President of the United States, serving from 1923 to 1929. He was known for his conservative economic policies and his belief in limited government intervention in business. Coolidge's presidency was marked by economic prosperity and a focus on reducing government spending and taxes. He was also known for his quiet and reserved demeanor, earning him the nickname "Silent Cal."
4 Key excerpts on "Calvin Coolidge"
eBook - ePub- Calvin Coolidge, Amity Shlaes, Matthew Denhart, Amity Shlaes, Matthew Denhart(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Intercollegiate Studies Institute(Publisher)
...The damage of tariff increases that Coolidge permitted to be levied on Cuba would be felt for many decades. Ultimately, presidents should be judged on their own terms—on whether they achieve what they set out to do. In most areas, Coolidge did achieve what he set out to do. Joblessness in the 1920s stayed low, often below 5 percent. Wages rose. Every year he forced the federal budget down some more, so that when he left office the budget was lower than when he had taken office, a record for a peacetime president. By the time Coolidge left Washington, the national debt had dropped by one-third from its postwar high, assuring American economic primacy in the world. Economic growth in the Coolidge years averaged 4 percent a year, a level we can only aspire to today. Automobiles and electricity came even to working-class families. Veterans never got bonuses on a scale they sought, but many did get jobs. Many farmers headed for the cities and found lucrative jobs in steel or auto plants. African Americans—some of those brutally displaced by the Great Mississippi River Flood—found jobs in the North. The number of lynchings nationwide dropped. In Coolidge’s time, indoor plumbing, a key marker of the escape from poverty, became the rule rather than the exception. Innovators patented new ideas at a rate still admired in the twenty-first century. Because of automation resulting from such innovation, factories could do in five days what they had previously done in six. That meant families got a gift in time as well: Saturday. Thanks to Coolidge, the 1920s, contra progressive historians, were no champagne bubble but a decade to replicate. Americans recognized Coolidge’s success. The 1924 presidential election was a tough three-party contest. The Progressive Party’s Robert La Follette gained nearly 17 percent of the vote. Yet Coolidge not only won in 1924; he pulled an absolute majority of votes, defeating the third party and Democrats combined...
eBook - ePubThe Presidential Character
Predicting Performance in the White House, With a Revised and Updated Foreword by George C. Edwards III
- James Barber(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...And Coolidge himself could wait, with utter, unflappable calm, for longer than the last of his advisors. He also managed to rationalize his independence of others; clearly his style in close interpersonal relations cut him off effectively from much of the Washington conversational froth—but also from any effective political bargaining with administrative or legislative or party leaders. He was a loner who endured in order to serve, while the nation drifted. Coolidge Emerging John Calvin Coolidge, Jr., was born in Plymouth, Vermont, on the Fourth of July, 1872, the first child, after four years of marriage, of John Calvin Coolidge and Victoria Josephine Coolidge. He was the nephew of Julius Caesar Coolidge, grandson of Calvin Galusha Coolidge, descendent of five generations of his family in a Vermont village. His mother was a quiet, delicately beautiful person, a chronic invalid since shortly after her marriage. Coolidge remembered "a touch of mysticism and poetry in her nature." His father was a big, stern-visaged man, a storekeeper and pillar of the community who had held many town offices and went to the state legislature. His son admired him for "qualities that were greater than any I possess," and accepted much paternal admonition without complaint. Calvin's early hero was his grandfather "Galoosh," tall, spare, and handsome, an expert horseman and practical joker, said to have a trace of Indian blood, who raised colts and puppies and peacocks and taught the boy to ride standing up behind him. His grandmother ("the Puritan severity of her convictions was tempered by the sweetness of womanly charity") read the Bible to him and when he misbehaved shut him up in the dark, windowless attic, "dusty with cobwebs." Calvin's younger sister Abbie, his constant playmate, was "a lively affectionate girl, with flaming red hair, who was full of energy and impressed everybody by her personality"—almost the exact opposite of her shy brother...
eBook - ePubIndustrial Relations to Human Resources and Beyond: The Evolving Process of Employee Relations Management
The Evolving Process of Employee Relations Management
- Bruce E. Kaufman, Richard A. Beaumont, Roy B. Helfgott(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...2 The United States in the 1920s Breaking with European Traditions Roy B. Helfgott DOI: 10.4324/9781315498331-3 The Roaring Twenties: Jazz, Prohibition, Laissez-Faire, and “Normalcy” It was the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age. The decade began in 1920 on an ominous note with a bomb explosion on Wall Street that killed 30 people and injured 100, but things settled down after that. America had returned to “normalcy” and was keeping cool with Coolidge, yet people craved excitement. The Census of 1920 revealed that for the first time, the United States was an urban nation, and half the population was first or second generation. People were still moving west—California’s population increased by two thirds during the decade, making it almost equal to that of Texas. The most populous states remained New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio, and the northeast quadrant continued to dominate the nation’s manufacturing and, indeed, its total economy. In politics, the Republican Party, devoted to laissez-faire, was in control throughout the decade. Disillusioned with the results of the First World War and Wilson’s failure at Versailles, the nation in 1920 elected the Republican ticket of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge by seven million votes over the Democratic slate of James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt. The Teapot Dome Scandal rocked the new administration, but President Harding conveniently died and was succeeded by the impeccably honest Calvin Coolidge. In 1924, a third party appeared on the scene when a coalition of farmer groups, liberals from both major parties, and the Socialists supported Senator Robert La Follette (Republican, Wisconsin) on the Progressive ticket, but Coolidge garnered four and a half million votes more than La Follette and Democrat John W. Davis combined. In 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover won by a tidy six million votes over the Democrats’ “happy warrior,” Al Smith of New York, who even lost some southern states because he was Catholic...
eBook - ePubThe Reagan Manifesto
"A Time for Choosing" and its Influence
- Eric D. Patterson, Jeffry H. Morrison, Eric D. Patterson, Jeffry H. Morrison(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...So I see them as together. In researching Coolidge, I also found, and this is what I will speak about today, that he had a time for choosing. There were some differences. When Reagan chose in the early 1960s, he chose to leave the Democratic Party and go to the Republican Party. In Coolidge’s case, in the “teens of the last century,” it was somewhat different. He chose to go from the progressive wing of the Republican Party to the traditional or conservative wing, and it was in both cases a big choice. And you know the line around the time he made this choice in 1919, when he too was speaking about public sector workers: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anyone, anywhere, anytime.” 1 In addition to the similarities of these two speeches and events, Coolidge’s in 1919 and Reagan’s in 1964, there was action by public sector unions in both of their cases, and in both cases this elevated the men to national status. Reagan would not have been president but for 1964, and Coolidge would not have been president but for 1919. So, I would like, just very briefly, to talk about realizations that Reagan had and Coolidge had, that were similar, that got them to the point of saying: “It is a time for choosing for me and for the country.” So I would like to talk a little bit about realizations that Reagan had and Coolidge had. This is what I identified in my work. The first realization that enabled Coolidge to do this (and Reagan) was that America is a fragile and precious place; you cannot take it for granted. You will remember Reagan in this speech talking about a Cuban refugee [who] had luck to escape from Cuba … and the refugee pointed out that the luck was not just escaping from Cuba; it was the luck of having a country to escape to. If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. As Reagan explained, this is the last stand on earth. Coolidge experienced another epiphany about the United States. He grew up provincial...
