Book: Calvin Coolidge
Author: David Greenberg
Pages: 159
Date: 2/21/25
I chose this book because I always admired what I had heard about Coolidge (which wasn’t much), his pro-business, no-nonsense policies & laisse-faire approach to government. I wanted to learn more about him and how he became the 30th president of the United States.
I learned the following from this book:
1) He held 520 presidential press conferences, meeting with reporters more regularly than any chief executive before or since. He attempted to meet with them twice per week on a regular schedule of Tuesday & Friday.
2) Coolidge was very unrevealing of his personal thoughts and feelings. According to a scholar’s analysisof 22 of Coolidge speeches, the president used the word “I” only once in 52,000 words.
3) He had a hands-off, solitary style of governing and delegated a great deal. His first “rule of action was to never do anything that someone else can do for you.”
4) His laisse-faire approach favored regulating business lightly, cutting taxes, containing federal expenditures and using budget surpluses to reduce the debt. In his first full year as president, his US budget proposal was the smallest since before WW1, with reduced spending in nearly every department. Current presidents could learn so much from Coolidge!
5) When Coolidge was governor of Massachusetts, he restructured the state government, consolidating in a single year more than 100 agencies into fewer than 20. DOGE could learn a lesson from him!
6) When Coolidge took office in 1923, the two income tax brackets were 4% & 8% and only on a taxpayer’s income that was in excess of $68,000 in 2006 dollars. Unfortunately during the 20’s, local property taxes were high and consumed more than a quarter of the average farmer’s income.
7) Coolidge believed that the “advantage of a class cannot be greater than the welfare of a nation.” It was for this reason that he
8) Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone once visited Coolidge at his boyhood home during a summer vacation as the same time. This is similar to Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk visiting Trump in Florida at the same time.
9) Charles Lindbergh completed the first transatlantic solo flight in May of 1927 during Coolidge’s term as president. When he visited Washington DC on June 11th to meet the president, many government employees could not attend as Coolidge refused to declare an official holiday, explaining that he had already extended too many half-holidays to federal workers. This is so different than now when government employees can get a paid day off due to too much snow!
10) Although Coolidge deserved some of the blame for the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent Great Depression, not all the blame should be apportioned to him. The real reasons were listed below:
a) Too much margin trading on the stock market made it act like a Ponzi scheme. It was the Federal Reserve banks that failed to stop these loans & loose lending.
b) The second reason was the loose money supply. The Fed kept interest rates low for too long, only raising interest rates from 3.5% to 5% in February 1929. While Coolidge did not set the rates or keep them low (The Fed is an independent body), he likewise did not say anything against it.
c) Coolidge favored a fiscal policy that encouraged speculation and ignored inequality. His tax cuts had given more investors more money to feed the market, pushing the healthy investment of the mid-1920’s to the gambling that followed in the late 20’s.
d) Addressing the problem of inequality would have meant taking on the farm crisis. Farmers did not tend to enjoy the prosperity of the 1920’s, but Coolidge did not agree with the farm bloc on how to help their debt-strapped constituents.
e) The fifth factor that contributed to the Depression was the imbalance in global trade and credit, which wiser tariff and currency policies might have helped remedy. The high debt that European countries still had after WWI were exacerbated by the high import tariffs that the US had in place – which led to a burden on foreign economies, a risk for American banks and ultimately a recipe for trade wrecking international retaliation.
f) The sixth factor was the demise of the gold standard in international trade whih contributed to the global financial problem. In the 20’s, many European nations had abandoned the gold standard allowing their currencies to float in value. Because the US had not, American creditors still insisted on being paid in dollars or gold. This led debtor nations to pay in gold bullion, creating an influx of gold into the US that fueled the explosion of credit that underlay the feverish US speculation the last years of the decade.
Coolidge died in his home from a heart attack in January of 1933, four years after giving up the presidency to Hoover, who was his Commerce Secretary.
I learned the following that will increase my prospect for success after (and during) prison:
1) Less is more – In terms of conversation, Coolidge tended not to say much. When he did speak, he did not ramble on, but got straight to the point. This has helped me in prison as I am not one of the guys doing much talking. I tend to stay to myself, do my exercises, read my books and go to the library. This has tended to give me some respect in the prison as somone who doesn’t get involved in other people’s business and as a result, fellow inmates leave me alone.
2) Simplicty & thrift – The first morning I awoke in prison, I got up and made my bed. This immediately put me in a category of someone who took care of themselves. Relative to others, I do not spend much at commissary – eating the food that is available to me in the chow hall. There are others who, for one reason or another, tend not to eat as much in the chow hall and as a result have to buy most of their food in the commissary, which can be expensive. Some people are always borrowing from others to do this and getting into debt in prison is never a good thing to do. I keep a decent monetary balance on my books and use this money for phone calls and emails – which I consider to be more thrifty and appropriate.
3) Work hard – Coolidge tended to work hard writing his own speeches and did much of the repair work around his family home in Vermont, even while he was president. I tend to “do the work” in prison by doing my sit-ups and push-ups, as well as reading an average of a book every two days and then writing my book reports on them. It has become so much of a habit, that now my cellmates are exercising more, reading more and I am helping one of them with his GED. I have become a role model for others.
Vocabulary words:
anachronism – the state or condition of being chronologically out of place.
avuncular – suggestion of an uncle in kindness or geniality
bromidic – lacking in originality
cavils – to raise trivial objections
garrulous – rosy, rambling, pointless or annoying talkativeness
homiletic – relating to conversation, discourse; a short sermon
nihilism – a viewpoint of traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless & useless.
paean – a joyous song or hymn of praise, tribute, thanksgiving or triumph.
palaver – to talk profusely or idly.
ratiocination – reckon; to reason
recrudescent – breaking out again; renew.
zeitgeist – the general intellectual, moral and cultural climate of an era.
