Guest Post: Calvin Coolidge Was a President Who Understood Principle

by Jake Yonally

In his veto of a congressional salary increase, our 30th president, Calvin Coolidge, told Congress that, “No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave.” This statement truly characterizes Coolidge for who he was as a man.

Not only was he deeply concerned with tax reduction and the federal budget, he was also highly dedicated to the serving of both his neighbor and nation. Coolidge had a special understanding of public service and never swayed from his foundational beliefs. These qualities made him the beloved man that he was. Calvin Coolidge — although soft-spoken — showed immense amounts of courage in serving his nation and staying true to his fundamental convictions.

Economic Responsibility
An important way in which Calvin Coolidge showed this courage was in his approach to public service. Prior to his term as Commander-in-Chief, the government had grown unchecked for years under the Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson administrations. Wealth redistribution, government regulation, and the strength of unions were on the rise in America during this era of progressivism. Soon after stepping into the Oval Office, Coolidge promptly went on a budget- and tax-cutting spree to abolish what he referred to as “Despotic Exactions.”

Although scoffed at by many, this decrease in taxation and government spending saved the average American over $200 per year (about $1,500 today). Coolidge wanted to help the poor, and he saw that this was the only way to enact true, long-term change toward raising the American standard of living. He and his Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, referred to this policy as “Scientific Taxation.” Coolidge once said, “Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.” This informed approach was his creative service to the least of these.

It took an immense amount of courage on Coolidge’s part to abandon previous methods and take a new approach to public service. This new approach was both utilitarian and grounded in a strong respect for people’s basic human rights. Though unorthodox, his principled fiscal stewardship caused many poor Americans to succeed in achieving a better life. With the national debt being cut almost in half, the 17.5 percent increase in the nation’s wealth, and illiteracy being cut in half as well, his presidential term was a success by any standard.

Strong Principles
Although seemingly reserved, Coolidge was a man of strong principles. He called his fellow citizens to return to the proven principles of the American political tradition and encouraged them to examine their own beliefs in light of these principles. He believed strongly in the limits of social engineering, the nature of wealth, individual responsibility, and society’s dependence on moral and religious values. His ability to stand by these fundamental convictions in the face of adversity is rare among men.


In her book entitled Coolidge, Amity Shlaes refers to President Coolidge as our “Great Refrainer.” She suggests that inaction can benefit a nation more than action, as demonstrated by his numerous vetoed bills. “This was the boy with his finger in the dike, stopping a great progressive tide,” she accurately states. Throughout his life, Calvin Coolidge rejected what Bastiat called “legal plunder” and worked toward the creation not only of wealth but of beauty.

Calvin Coolidge’s messages regarding public service and his fundamental convictions have held true for almost a century. These firm principles were the groundwork for his ability to enact change for the better in America through public service. The way he thought determined the way he lived; his form followed his function. Calvin Coolidge lived by the principles that defined him. His belief system never aged. Even in the culturally diverse, globalized world we live in where people are desperate for new answers, ideas, and solutions, the simple social and moral code by which he lived remains as relevant as ever.



Jake Yonally is a high school student in Santa Barbara, California. He plays chess and enjoys reading and learning about life in a free society.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Did 'the man who invented Christmas' plagiarize Jesus?

Matthew Robert Anderson, Concordia University

Everyone knows the story of Scrooge, a man so miserly his name has become synonymous with penny-pinching meanness. Scrooge’s conversion from miser to benefactor has been told and retold since Charles Dickens first wrote A Christmas Carol in the fall and winter of 1843. Ebenezer is a wonderful character, so richly portrayed and fascinating he’s echoed in stories from The Grinch to It’s a Wonderful Life.

Pop culture has embraced both Dickens and his tale. With this season’s The Man Who Invented Christmas, Hollywood has done it again.

But who was Scrooge before he was, well, Christopher Plummer? The inspiration for the crotchety Christmas-hater may have been those who put Dickens’ own father into debtor’s prison and were responsible for young Charles working in a shoe-blacking factory.

Some Dickens scholars believe the author’s 1843 visit to sooty Manchester, or to “the black streets of London,” (as he described them in a letter to a friend) influenced him. It may be that the fable was a moral reminder from Dickens to himself, as he teetered on financial ruin. This is the theory proposed in the book by Les Standiford on which this year’s movie is based.

Did Dickens in fact invent Christmas, as we know it? Hollywood may think so, but others, like David Parker in his Christmas and Charles Dickens vehemently disagree.

Whatever your opinion, the prevailing wisdom is that A Christmas Carol isn’t particularly religious. As a professor of biblical studies at Concordia University and also a Lutheran minister, I have a different reading.

It’s true that the celebration of the season which Scrooge discovers has much more to do with generosity, family gatherings and large cooked birds, than the Nativity. But maybe those seeking explicit scriptural references in Dickens’ story are underestimating the Victorian novelist’s skill — and his audacity. Perhaps A Christmas Carol contains an alternative to the Bible rather than a simple borrowing from it. And perhaps that’s the point.

Jesus was a master story-teller

Jesus, by all accounts another master story-teller, told a parable that, stripped of Dickens’ English waistcoats, ledgers, fog and shutters, could almost be a mirror to A Christmas Carol:

“There once was a rich man. A poor man named Lazarus lived at his gate, with nothing to eat. Lazarus died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died.”

There follows, in Jesus’ tale, an exchange between the rich man, who is in torment, and Abraham, who acts as the guardian of paradise. It’s hard not to think of the innocent Lazarus as a precursor to Tiny Tim.

First the rich man asks for his own relief from hell. When that’s denied, he pleads: “I beg you, send Lazarus to my father’s house. I have five brothers. Let him warn them so they don’t come to this place of agony.” Abraham replies: “They have Moses and the prophets. They must listen to them.”

“No, Father Abraham!” cries the rich man, “But if someone from the dead goes to them, they will change” (Luke 16:19-31).

One can almost hear the chains of Morley’s ghost rattling. What would have happened if Father Abraham had said yes? Something very like a first-century version of A Christmas Carol.

Let’s not forget that the people of our western English-speaking past, especially artists and writers, were imbued with Biblical references and ideas. As Northrop Frye, among others, has argued, they lived and created in a world shaped by the rhythms, narratives, images and conceptions (or misconceptions) of the King James Bible.

Parable of Lazarus

Was Dickens familiar with Christian scriptures? All evidence points to the fact that he was more acquainted than most. Despite an antipathy to organized religion, from 1846 to 1849 Dickens wrote a short biography of Jesus for his children, titled The Life of our Lord.

He forbade that his small retelling of Jesus’ life should be published, until not only he, but also his children, had died. The “Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man” was one of eight stories of Jesus that Dickens chose to include in that volume. But in his story of Scrooge, Dickens was too much of a writer to leave Jesus’ parable as is, and his age too suspicious of scripture to leave it “unbroken.”

A Christmas Carol unites the deliciously horrific sensibility of the Gothic movement with the powerfully simple narrative style, joined to moral concern, typical of parables.

Was Dickens perhaps dozing off some Sunday while the rector droned on about Lazarus, until he wakened with a start dreaming of Scrooge? We will never know. But it’s an intriguing possibility.

Happy endings for the rich

Surprisingly, the Sunday after Dickens was buried in Westminster Abbey, Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, preaching on exactly this text, spoke of Dickens as the “parabler” of his age. Stanley said that “By [Dickens] that veil was rent asunder which parts the various classes of society. Through his genius the rich man…was made to see and feel the presence of Lazarus at his gate.”

I would go further: Dickens took the parable, and then retold and changed it, so that the rich man gets a second chance. As a privileged societal figure who had gone through financial difficulties and who cared about the poor himself, Dickens freely adapted Jesus to come up with a story that’s ultimately more about love than judgement.

When confronted with Marley’s spectre, Scrooge, unnerved but unrepentant, addresses the apparition: “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.”

The perceptive reader (or viewer) of A Christmas Carol can point a finger at Marley’s ghost and add: “Or maybe you’re an ironic but hope-filled riff on Jesus, by a famous nineteenth-century author who wanted to write his own story of redemption.”

Dickens not only invented this Christmas genre, but imagined a happy ending for himself in it. He penned an enduring story about the second chance even a rich person can receive, if haunted by persistent-enough ghosts.

The Man Who Invented Christmas (Bleeker Street Media/Elevation Pictures)

Matthew Robert Anderson, Affiliate Professor, Theological Studies, Loyola College for Diversity & Sustainability, Concordia University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

From the Archives: JFK was 'cautious, conservative' says UVA political scientist Larry Sabato

Publisher's note: Today would have been the 100th birthday of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. 

This article is drawn from my Examiner.com archives. It was originally published on Examiner.com on October 15, 2013. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

JFK was 'cautious, conservative' says UVA political scientist Larry Sabato
October 15, 2013 1:37 AM MST

On the eve of a press conference announcing new scientific evidence related to John F. Kennedy's assassination, Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia moderated a panel discussion about November 22, 1963, featuring three witnesses to the event and two authors of books on the topic.

The UVA Center for Politics hosted “The Kennedy Half Century” in the Newcomb Hall Ballroom on October 14, and Sabato hinted that the revelation the next morning at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., will be related to the acoustic evidence of the gunshots in Dealey Plaza.

The panelists were Wesley Buell Frazier, a co-worker of Lee Harvey Oswald at the Texas Book Depository; Sid Davis, a journalist for Westinghouse Broadcasting at the time who rode in the presidential motorcade's press bus; James C. Bowles, then a communications supervisor for the Dallas Police Department and later sheriff of Dallas County; former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley, author of Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA and publisher of the web site JFKFacts.org; and Henry Hurt, author of Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation into the Assassination of John F. Kennedy.

'Life after death'

After the two-hour discussion, Sabato spoke with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about his new book, The Kennedy Half-Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy, which is scheduled to be published on October 15.

The book, he said, “has been a five-year project,” which he undertook in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's murder.

Although people are quite interested in the assassination and its theories and counter-theories, Sabato emphasized that “two-thirds of the book is about President Kennedy's life, presidency, and then his legacy through nine successors.”

He defined “legacy” as “a kind of life after death. Kennedy's words and deeds were so powerful that his successors of both parties have used him to accomplish their own agendas, and some of them very cleverly.”

The best, he said, was Ronald Reagan, who “used Kennedy even better than Lyndon Johnson did. Johnson distorted the Kennedy legacy, certainly by the middle of his full term.”

Sabato said his aim in the book was “to focus more on President Kennedy's life than on his death” but he recognizes that “you can't understand the legacy until you understand the assassination because it created so much of the Kennedy myth.”

Lincoln's legacy

By way of illustration, he recounted an anecdote he discovered that “stunned” him when he came across it.

One day, Kennedy had invited a Lincoln scholar to the White House to give a lecture. He asked the historian, after the speech, whether Lincoln would be so highly regarded had he not been assassinated.

“The historian immediately answered, 'of course not' because he would have had to deal with the nitty-gritty of Reconstruction, he wouldn't have had the martyrdom conferred by assassination, and several other reasons,” Sabato explained, reporting that “Kennedy said, 'Exactly what I thought' and apparently made a comment to Jackie later on, 'well, if I'm going to die, this would be a good time.' That was shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

The same principle that affected Lincoln's legacy “applies to Kennedy,” said Sabato.

'So many women'

“Had he actually faced the challenges of the sixties, had he lived through two full terms, for one thing, his marital infidelity could have come out. There were so many women, it's amazing that it didn't come out during his short presidency. All kinds of things could have happened.”

By Sabato's estimation, Kennedy would not “be nearly as highly regarded,” in part because “presidencies tend to deteriorate in the last two or three years of an eight-year term.” Kennedy, he said, “never had to face that and he died at a peak moment of American power, economically and militarily.”

Kennedy also would not have achieved as much of the domestic agenda that was completed by Lyndon Johnson, he said.

Although Kennedy would have beaten Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election, Sabato surmised it would have been by a narrower margin than Johnson's eventual victory – “55-45 instead of 61-38.”

The difference, he pointed out, was that “Kennedy was much more cautious than Johnson by nature. He would have stopped at the Civil Rights Act. I don't think he really would have pushed for the Voting Rights Act or the Open Housing Act unless he were forced to” do so.

'Budget hawk'

As Sabato did research for his book, including interviews with people who worked in Kennedy's administration, what struck him was “just how cautious he was. He was fiscally cautious. The only reason he was worried about his across-the-board tax cut was because it would increase the deficit. He was a budget hawk in a lot of ways.”

On foreign policy, too, he was “a hawk.”

That was why Reagan cited Kennedy so often, Sabato said: “Because he could adapt that rhetoric to his fight against the Evil Empire.”

He recalled that JFK had criticized the Eisenhower administration for a “missile gap” between the United States and the Soviet Union that turned out to be non-existent, “which he later admitted after the election. He was the hawk” in comparison to 1960 rival Richard Nixon.

John F. Kennedy, Sabato concluded, “was a very different kind of Democrat. People have forgotten it. They've mixed him up with Bobby in the later years and then Teddy's career. Jack Kennedy was the moderate, or moderate-conservative, in the family.”

In the same interview, Larry Sabato commented on the current gubernatorial race in Virginia and candidates Ken Cuccinelli (R), Terry McAuliffe (D), and Libertarian Robert Sarvis.

From the Archives: Belafonte criticizes Barack Obama on civil liberties in Charlottesville

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on January 24, 2012. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Belafonte criticizes Barack Obama on civil liberties in Charlottesville

Harry Belafonte in Charlottesville - January 2012

Harry Belafonte – actor, author, singer, and political activist – appeared in Charlottesville on January 24 at a screening of his autobiographical film, Sing Your Song, as part of a community celebration of the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was a close friend and colleague of Belafonte’s in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s.

In a discussion led by University of Virginia history professor Julian Bond at the historic Paramount Theatre, Belafonte reflected on his life and career, offered his thoughts on politics, culture, education, and other topics, and criticized President Barack Obama’s record on protecting civil liberties.

‘Critical of the president’

Replying to a question posed by a member of the audience, Belafonte prefaced his remarks by promising that he would vote for Barack Obama’s re-election and would campaign for him this year.

“But recent utterings,” he cautioned with a smile, “have unsharpened my dance card to come to the White House for the next ball.”

Turning more serious, he added, “I’ve been critical of the president and I’ve let that go public.”

Referring to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which had been drafted by his friend, Eleanor Roosevelt, in the 1940s, Belafonte pointed out that the human rights record of any country “becomes the first litmus test of how we create policy in relationship to the country under examination.”

That litmus test, he suggested, has to be applied to the United States as well as any other country.

‘Patriotic treason’

Paraphrasing Theodore Roosevelt, Belafonte argued that “if a citizen finds himself at the crossroads of a moment when the people, who have been invested with the power to lead this nation, begin to betray the Constitution of this country and betray the citizens of this country, it is not only the right but the responsibility of any citizen and all citizens to raise their voice against this evil, and anyone who does not do that should be charged with patriotic treason.”

In that context, he said, Barack Obama had “laid out his mission, not with complete clarity” but with enough substance “for us to linger with hope.” Obama had promised, upon taking office, that he would end the wars – yet they continue.

In addition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Belafonte identified something else of concern.

“More important,” he said, are “the homeland security laws, which were written to such extremes that they defied imagination that anyone could have thought of those laws.”

That those laws made their way through Congress and were signed by the President, he said, “was an absolutely stunning experience for all of us, and certainly for some of us who saw it in the depth of its villainy.”

Looking out over the audience, Belafonte painted a darkly dramatic picture of the effect of laws like the USA PATRIOT Act and the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed on December 31 by President Obama.

“Anyone who is sitting in this room tonight,” he said, “could walk out of that door and be whisked away by strangers, people who you’ve never met [and] don’t know, whose task it was to apprehend you and never tell you why you’re being apprehended, never tell you what you’re being charged with, never ever give you the right to make a phone call or get the benefit of a lawyer.”

‘Deeply wrong’

If someone is willing to surrender his rights, he said, or “willing to surrender all that is precious” under the framework of the Constitution, then “something’s wrong. Something is deeply wrong.”

Belafonte then explained the importance of the system of checks and balances found in the American constitutional system.

“The House watches the Senate, the Senate watches the House, both watch the Executive, the Executive watches the House and the Senate,” and the Supreme Court is “the final arbiter” for what becomes “the law of the land.”

When that system is out of balance, however, it needs “a leader who is made of such moral courage and strength to step into this frame and put himself on the line.”

By his tone of voice, Belafonte implied that Barack Obama lacks that courage and that strength.

“It is said by some,” the activist pointed out ruefully, “that Barack Obama’s second term as President will reveal all these mysteries [and] will reveal all these good deeds. He just needs to get the second term.”

Unfortunately, Belafonte added, “I’m not quite that optimistic. I’m not too sure that what we saw in the first term will not be” much different from “what we see in the second term.”

Even with that note of pessimism, he concluded, he is “infinitely more prone to devote all of my resources into his camp” than he would be willing to support any of the potential Republican candidates seeking to unseat Obama.

With that, Belafonte left the stage so he could autograph copies of his new book, My Song: A Memoir, for several dozen local fans.

From the Archives: Holland Taylor supplies engaging on-stage portrait of Ann Richards in ‘Ann’

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on December 22, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Holland Taylor supplies engaging on-stage portrait of Ann Richards in ‘Ann’

'Ann,' a new play written by and starring Holland Taylor, at the Kennedy Center through January 15, 2012

On its way to Broadway in 2012, Ann, an affectionate portrait of the late Texas Governor Ann Richards (1933-2006), officially opened at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater on December 21 for an engagement that ends January 15.

Starring Holland Taylor, who also researched and wrote the script, the play’s setting is a college graduation ceremony, where Richards is the commencement speaker. (This kind of set-up seems almost required for one-man or one-woman shows. Thurgood, which also played at the Kennedy Center, had Laurence Fishburne as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall deliver a lecture on a college campus. A lecture is, perhaps, the most believable conceit that can explain why one person on stage talks at an audience for two straight hours.)

Holland Taylor has a long list of distinguished credits on stage, screen, and television, but today she is best known as the acerbic mother/grandmother on CBS-TV’s Two and a Half Men. Known for playing strong (sometimes headstrong) women, Taylor brings all of that attitude and edginess to her portrayal of Ann Richards.

History lesson

Richards begins by noting that she was not the first female Texas governor. That would have been “Ma” Ferguson, wife of the aptly named “Pa” Ferguson, who was elected in the 1920s after her husband was impeached and sent to prison for selling pardons to convicted criminals. “Ma” Ferguson’s winning campaign slogan was “Two governors for the price of one.”

Taylor’s script does not make the explicit connection, but this episode in Texas history may explain an aspect of Texas law that comes up in a later sequence, when in the second act Richards, who is trying to figure out what to do about the fate of a death-row inmate, complains bitterly that only the state’s parole board can grant a pardon, while the best she can do to prevent the man’s death is to issue a 30-day stay of execution.

Ann’s “commencement speech” traces her life from her childhood in a hamlet near Waco called Lakeview (“where there was no lake to view”) through her marriage and divorce and her early political career, first as a county commissioner, then as a state treasurer, and finally as governor from 1991-95, with a coda regarding her post-statehouse activities.

Along the way the audience is treated to a stream of quips, slightly dirty jokes, shaggy dog stories, and a “day in the life of the governor” when the stage is transformed from a lecture hall into Ann Richards’ office in the state capitol.

Hard work

Not shy about expressing herself, Ann says “I have a lot of opinions. Can you imagine if I were your mother-in-law? I could fix you.”

Reflecting on her work ethic, which she absorbed from her parents, Ann remembers a slogan of her local civic group: “If we rest, we rust.”

Even when the play takes a darker turn, Ann keeps her sense of humor. In discussing her battle with alcoholism, which hit her hard in her early 40s, just as her political career was about to launch, Ann says she “was like a poster child for functioning alcoholics everywhere,” because she never let her drinking get in the way of her many tasks and commitments.

At the time, she claims, being an openly alcoholic politician was something novel and noteworthy. “Nowadays,” she points out, just about rolling her eyes, “you can’t even get into a primary unless you’ve been to rehab.”

What’s missing?

Oddly enough, the play continues for two hours without Richards ever mentioning the names of her two bêtes noires, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush (who defeated her gubernatorial re-election bid in 1994).

Even more amazingly, although the play opens with a “clip” of the 1988 Democratic National Convention speech that made then-state treasurer Ann Richards a national celebrity, Taylor’s script never quotes the snarky line that made Richards famous: “Poor George! He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” That comment alone sent Michael Dukakis’ poll numbers soaring – although that may have been the high point of his ill-fated presidential campaign.

Throughout the play, and especially in the extensive “day in a life” sequence, Taylor’s Richards expresses the political and social values that animated her: concern for equality, racial harmony, gender equity, justice, and a “government that looks like Texas.”

“Life is not fair,” says Richards, in one of many epigrammatic utterings, “but government should be.”

Given the subject, it should come as no surprise that the play has a liberal bias. There’s no hidden agenda, though it was somewhat disconcerting when some in the opening night audience applauded Richards’ mocking of Second Amendment rights. (Ann speculates that her pro-gun control views were what led to her defeat for re-election.)

Despite exhibiting the rough-and-tumble life of the governor, the on-stage Taylor always looks elegant as Richards, from the famous silver beehive (“Molly Ivins said I have Republican hair”) to her businesslike jacket-and-skirt combination. In this, Taylor is ably assisted by costume designer Julie Weiss.

Production design

Other aspects of the physical production are noteworthy, as well. Scenic designer Michael Fagin has created a fluid set that benefits from projections (by Zachary Borovay) of long-ago Texas scenes and from the lighting design by Matthew Richards (presumably no relation to the title character).

Benjamin Endsley Klein took on the difficult task of directing an actress in a play of her own creation. Not to suggest that Holland Taylor is herself a diva – I have no evidence of that and suspect that it is not true – but it must be daunting to translate page to stage when the playwright is also the star.

It is clear from this production that Taylor has a great deal of respect for her subject, and also substantial affection. At the risk of committing a cliché, she embraces the role with gusto, radiating both energy and intelligence along the way.

Ann continues at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater through January 15, 2012. Ticket prices start at $54. For ticket information, call the Kennedy Center box office at (202) 467-4600 or (800) 444-1324, or visit www.kennedy-center.org. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

From the Archives: Amity Shlaes discusses significance of Calvin Coolidge at Heritage Foundation

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on February 20, 2013. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Amity Shlaes discusses significance of Calvin Coolidge at Heritage Foundation

Speaking at the Heritage Foundation on February 20, author Amity Shlaes reminded her audience, “if you want to know only one thing about Calvin Coolidge,” the subject of her new biography, “it is that when he left office in 1929” – 67 months after he had succeeded Warren Harding -- “the federal government was smaller than when he had become president in 1923.”

That singular achievement is one of the aspects of Coolidge's life that motivated Shlaes, a syndicated columnist for Bloomberg View and director of the Four Percent Growth Project at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, to write the simply-titled Coolidge, which is both follow-up and prequel to her previous best-selling book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.

“I'm on a mission of reputation-building,” Shlaes said, in light of the fact that Coolidge tends to be ranked low among historians of the presidency. She identified parallels between the time Coolidge took office in post-World War I America and the present day, when crises seemed to emerge day after day, tempting the government to “do something.”

Parallels to today

For instance, federal debt had grown by a factor of 20 since before the First World War. The times were “troubled,” Shlaes said, because thousands of returning veterans had been unable to find work and as many as one-third of them were disabled.

At the end of the Wilson administration, she explained, “the machine of government was broken. They had gridlock,” not unlike the current standoff between Republicans in Congress and the Obama White House.

In 1920, the presidential ticket of Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding and Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge ran on a platform of “no” – as Shlaes put it, “not kinder, gentler, but 'no'” to spending, to taxes, to expanding government.

During Harding's term, Congress passed the Budget and Accounting Act, which established the forerunner of today's Office of Management and Budget (OMB). For the first time, the federal government was able to invoke independent analysis of budget proposals with an overarching view of how programs added up. Previously, appropriations were made on an ad-hoc basis, which made it difficult for presidents, when asked for something, to say “no.”

Cutting tax rates

After Harding died, Coolidge continued and built upon his program of austerity. With Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, he cut the top marginal income tax rate to 25 percent, resulting in increased revenues paid to the U.S. Treasury. (No other president has been able to achieve such low marginal rates since then. Ronald Reagan, Shlaes pointed out, was only able to cut the top rate to 28 percent.)

Coolidge made cutting government into an art. He used the political skills he had honed since first being elected to public office at age 26 to veto 50 bills over six years. He also made ample use of the “pocket veto,” which requires no message of explanation and, because Congress is not in session when the president quietly rejects the bill, it cannot be overridden. Coolidge, Shlaes said, “was like an Isaac Stern of the pocket veto.”

Coolidge's use of the veto and pocket veto reflected his view that “it's better to kill bad laws than to pass good ones.” As then-prominent political commentator Walter Lippmann put it, Coolidge used “dullness and boredom as a political device,” in order to prevent bad legislation.

Bothersome Prohibition

In reply to a question posed by the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about Coolidge's role in Prohibition, Shlaes said he regarded it “as a bother.” Earlier in his career, she explained, he had seen commerce in alcoholic beverages as beneficial to local farmers and businesses. He also understood that Prohibition was unpopular among recent immigrants, and he was concerned about his party (the Republicans) losing immigrant votes – something, she pointed out, with parallels today.

Coolidge, she explained, “tried to ignore [Prohibition] as best as he could” but felt constrained to uphold it because it was the law of the land. He disfavored Prohibition because “there was too much social legislation when economic legislation is more important.”

Still, before the repeal of the 18th Amendment, Coolidge bought stock in a grocery-supply company that sold a great deal of yeast, a major component of making beer and other fermented beverages. He was betting, Shlaes said, that Prohibition would end sooner rather than later.

As it turned out, of course, Coolidge ended sooner than Prohibition. He died on January 5, 1933; Prohibition was repealed on December 5 that same year, exactly 11 months later.

From the Archives - Author Earl Dudley: from child prisoner of the Japanese to UVA law professor

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on November 21, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Author Earl Dudley: from child prisoner of the Japanese to UVA law professor

Having had a childhood that virtually parallels the story of Steven Spielberg’s 1987 movie, Empire of the Sun, retired UVA law professor Earl C. Dudley, Jr., begins his memoir, An Interested Life, with the Japanese bombing of the Philippines that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“My mother and I were injured in the first Japanese bombing of the Philippine Islands on December 8, 1941,” he told the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner in an interview. “With my parents, I was interned in the Japanese internment camps for a little over three years in the Philippines, and we were rescued by a very dramatic operation of the 11th Airborne Division on February 23, 1945.”

Dudley was one of more than 30 local and regional writers at a “Meet the Author” book signing at the Holiday Inn in Charlottesville on November 19.


‘My parents were starving themselves’

“I was only 4 when the war was over,” Dudley explained, “so I have little independent memory of my own, but I have no memory of having had an unhappy childhood. My life was sheltered. My parents were starving themselves to feed me.”

He recalled that his father, “who was about 6 feet tall and normally weighed about 175 or 180 pounds, weighed about 120 pounds when the war was over. It was an experience for the adults that involved a tremendous amount of deprivation and unpleasantness.”

Yet, he remembers that, “as a child, I had the full attention of my parents. They were prisoners and so they focused their attention on me and they starved themselves to feed me. So I don’t think I had an unhappy childhood.”

After spending one’s earliest years in a prisoner of war camp, anything after that must pale in comparison. Yet Dudley’s life was peppered with poignant moments.

John F. Kennedy Assassination

In the early 1960s, he was working as a journalist for UPI in New York. As it happens, he was on the editor's desk when President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.

He writes in his memoir about that day:

“The news of the assassination hit me, as it did almost everyone, like a punch to the solar plexus. But I had no time to grieve. I was running an international news wire with the biggest story in many years. Given the magnitude and pace of events, there was no time for a transition to a new editor, so I remained in the [editor’s] slot for most of the next shift as well…. I simply operated on instinct and somehow made it through the crisis without panicking.”

End of segregation
Dudley grew up in the South during the last years of enforced segregation. He was in the ninth grade in Northern Virginia, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” schools were inherently unequal and, consequently, unconstitutional in the case of Brown v. Board of Education.

“I was the only kid that I ever found at my Herndon High School in 1954 whose parents told him the Supreme Court got it right,” he said.

Working for civil rights, he continued, “was always a priority of mine. I organized a demonstration at the White House in the spring of 1960 in support of the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and then in later years, I did a fair amount of pro bono work for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in Washington.”

Studying at the University of Virginia Law School drew Dudley to Charlottesville and, after graduating, he clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren during the Supreme Court’s 1967-68 term.

Police pat-downs
Dudley clerked during the year the Court decided Terry v. Ohio, a case that may have relevance in the current controversy about Transportation Security Administration searches at U.S. airports.

Dudley said that case was probably the best-known of that Supreme Court term, adding that he worked on it, explaining that it “dealt with the question of police pat-downs on the street, with less than probable cause to arrest. It was very controversial case at the time and has spawned a huge, whole jurisprudence of its own.”

After two decades working for various Washington law firms, Dudley returned to Charlottesville to teach.

His classes included “mostly litigation-related courses, because that’s what I had done in practice. I taught evidence, civil procedure, criminal procedure, criminal law, constitutional law, and trial advocacy.”

Dudley retired from teaching in 2008, and now enjoys quietude and travel with his wife of more than 50 years, Louise, and his family, seven decades after a tumultuous beginning to what he calls “an interested life.”

A Belated Birthday Salute to Shirley Temple Black (1928-2014)

Earlier this week the world celebrated William Shakespeare's 450th birthday.  The Bard of Avon was born on April 23, 1564.

In the midst of the fireworks and toasting, it appears we forgot that the late Shirley Temple Black would have celebrated her own birthday that day.  She was born on April 23, 1928, so she'd now be 86 years old.
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On Valentine's Day, a few days after the former child star and diplomat passed away, the Richmond Times-Dispatch published an article I wrote about her, a tribute of sorts, titled "Shirley Temple Black: politician, diplomat, feminist."

With Ambassador Black's birthday in mind, here it is, with the citations omitted from the RTD version now hyperlinked:

When Shirley Temple Black became the State Department’s chief of protocol in 1976, her appointment was seen as an oddity because she was the first woman to hold that office. The press focused on her dimples, not her diplomacy.

A female chief of protocol no longer seems odd. In fact, eight of the 14 people who succeeded Ambassador Black in that role have been women, including the current (acting) chief, Natalie Jones, and her two predecessors.

Many of the obituaries published since Black died on Monday have focused on her childhood acting career. Black’s much longer career was in public service, beginning with an unsuccessful campaign for Congress and ending with her tenure as U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia at the close of the Cold War.

Black was not the first female show-biz figure to enter politics and diplomacy. For example, playwright Clare Boothe Luce (like Black, a Republican) was elected to Congress from Connecticut in the 1940s and later served as ambassador to Italy and Brazil.

When Black ran for Congress in a special 1967 election, she would have been the only woman in California’s congressional delegation.

“I think men are fine and here to stay,” she said announcing her candidacy, “but I have a hunch that it wouldn’t hurt to have a woman’s viewpoint expressed in that delegation of 38 men — especially since there are 10 million women in California.”

In retrospect, it was probably better that Black lost that race — although President Gerald R. Ford said later that he “thought she would make an excellent member of the House of Representatives” — because her talents lay outside electoral politics.

After her stint as Richard Nixon’s envoy to the United Nations, Ford appointed her ambassador to Ghana, at the time a sensitive diplomatic post, one that would have been expected to go to a career Foreign Service officer.

By all accounts, however, Black acquitted herself well and adapted to the mundane, routine tasks required of an ambassador. As one newspaper story about her explained in August 1975, this involved “regular staff meetings, wading through more than 200 telegrams daily from the State Department, keeping abreast of the latest U.S. policy statements, receiving visitors and at the end of a long day attending the merry-go-round of official functions and receptions which consume a large slice of any ambassador’s time.”

Despite these successes, when Black was appointed chief of protocol in July 1976, the news media — and a good many of her diplomatic colleagues — treated her condescendingly. The headline of one profile of her emphasized her dimples. As the first woman in the post, she confronted what was then called “male chauvinism” and disdain from her boss, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

“He told me he was skeptical of my credentials,” she told a reporter at the time. “As a child, he had seen my films and that’s the extent of his knowledge of me.”

Black initially found herself excluded by male diplomats in social settings simply because of her gender. After a formal dinner, when the men retreated to a private room for brandy and cigars — it sounds so “Downton Abbey”! — she would excuse herself in spite of knowing that substantive, not frivolous, conversations would take place there.

Later she chose not to leave. “I join the men for cordials and I instruct the women to follow me. There’s no room for exclusivity.” In the mid-1970s, that was taking a major stand in favor of gender equality.

Black later was nominated by President George H.W. Bush to be ambassador to Czechoslovakia at the very moment the Soviet Union’s grip on its Central European satellites was let loose.

As the communist government in Prague began to unravel, Black had the foresight to reach out to Vaclav Havel, who later became the country’s first freely elected president in nearly 50 years. By then, the media had discarded the condescension and referred to Black as “a seasoned diplomat.” One 1991 report noted that upon taking her post in Czechoslovakia two years earlier, Black “immediately made contact with Havel, then a dissident playwright. Their series of secret meetings (grew) into a firm friendship.”

That same report illuminated Black’s cheeky side. The ambassador would go out on her balcony wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with her initials — STB — “which also was the acronym of the now-disbanded Czech secret police.”

When asked what became of the STB’s secret agents, Black quipped: “Most of them are driving taxis.”

Although she will be mostly remembered as a movie star, Shirley Temple Black deserves a great deal of credit for being an unexpectedly feminist diplomat who broke the glass ceiling more than once.

Richard Sincere writes about politics at BearingDrift.com and about culture at RickSincere.com. He can be reached at ricksincere@gmail.com.

In my research for this article, I came across this interesting interview with Shirley Temple Black on NBC's Meet the Press from 1969. What's striking to me is how she comes across as nervous and tentative, not what one would expect from someone who grew up in the spotlight. To be fair, this was an early TV appearance in her role as a public official (at the time, she was a representative of the United States to the United Nations) and so she may have been unused to discussing policy issues with journalists.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Shirley Temple Black is the subject of a book published this month, The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America by John F. Kasson. Also, according to NBC29 news, Wilson Memorial High School in Augusta County (Va.) is mounting a stage version of Shirley Temple's 1945 movie, Kiss and Tell, with a cast that includes both students and teachers.

Calvin Coolidge and civility

(This article originally appeared on Virginia Politics on Demand on June 20, 2013.)

One day in 1905, while running for the school committee in Northampton, Massachusetts, future U.S. President Calvin Coolidge ran into his opponent on the street. Biographer Amity Shlaes relates the story like this:

The school committee campaign, she said,

would be a tight race: his Democratic opponent, John J. Kennedy, was someone he liked. "Calvin, I think I've got you beaten," teased Kennedy when they met. "Either way, they'll get a good man," Coolidge shot back. There was no point, he was learning, in making enemies.....

Within weeks, he did lose to Kennedy, albeit by less than a hundred votes. That was all right. A neighbor told him he had voted for Kennedy for the school post because Kennedy, at least, had children. Coolidge [then a newlywed] came back with good humor: "Might give me time."

That turned out to be the only election Calvin Coolidge lost as he made his way through the state legislature, lieutenant governor, governor, vice president, and president.

The anecdote about Coolidge and Kennedy struck me as so out of sorts with our own political times that I asked Shlaes about it when I interviewed her at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in March. What did that story say about civility in politics?

"That's the most important thing," she replied, "and I hope you write about that."

Coolidge, she explained, "was so civil."

Right now, with this book, a lot of people are trying to get me to attack other people. I don't want to attack people. We all should respect each other. One would hope all of us would hope to be like Coolidge and be fair to one another. He won without attacking and that's interesting. Coolidge won more than a dozen times but he was running for election every single year. In Massachusetts at that time, you had to run for governor [and virtually every elective office] every year.

... they had to run for office so often, that would be another way of testing their probity, wouldn't it? They got inspected by the customer -- the voter -- more often than we do [every] four years or something, right?

[Coolidge] just said, be civil, it'll pay off. It's in his autobiography, as well... He had a wicked tongue but it didn't behoove him to use it. He had a lot of kindness in his heart for all his opponents.

One could write off Coolidge's kindnesses for his opponents as mere political posing. Yet the encounter with John Kennedy was a private one; Coolidge had no points to score. He was genuinely amiable and civil with his rival, and he genuinely believed Kennedy could do just as a good a job on the school board as Coolidge could himself.

There are many adjectives used to describe Calvin Coolidge -- parsimonious, reticent, reflective -- but "obsequious" is not among them.

Twenty-first century Americans have a lot to learn from Coolidge and his era, which was just as rambunctious politically as our own, with real lines drawn on policies of public importance.

During the 1920s, there was a robust debate about the proper size and scope of government and another on the role of the United States in international affairs in the wake of the Great War. Policy differences were stark.

Yet Republicans and Democrats (and even Progressives) were able to discuss the issues of the day without devolving into the sort of tribalism we find ourselves in today. They may have had profound disagreements but nevertheless were able to conduct public business without demonizing each other.

As I said in the Richmond Times-Dispatch a few years ago, we could use a dose of Coolidge today.

'America Could Use a Good Dose of Calvin Coolidge' Revisited

Three years ago today, the Richmond Times-Dispatch published an opinion piece I wrote and headlined it "America Could Use a Good Dose of Calvin Coolidge."

Somehow that entire day's newspaper failed to be preserved on the Times-Dispatch web site. (Try it: you'll get a 404.)

A few paragraphs of the article made their way into a blog post later that day, but the whole thing has been unavailable (except in print, or perhaps on microfilm) since July 4, 2010.

I thought it might be worthwhile to revisit "America Could Use a Good Dose of Calvin Coolidge" today, given the Coolidge revival that I reference in a piece I published on Examiner.com early this morning.

In that piece, based upon an interview with the Heritage Foundation's director of American studies, Matthew Spalding, I note that a number of scholars have lately begun focusing their research and writing on the man from Plymouth Notch, Vermont:

Several books on Coolidge have been published recently, including Amity Shlaes' best-selling biography, Coolidge; Charles C. Johnson's Why Coolidge Matters: Leadership Lessons from America's Most Underrated President; the National Notary Association's similarly titled Why Coolidge Matters: How Civility in Politics Can Bring a Nation Together; and Calvin Coolidge: A Documentary Biography, by David Pietrusza.

If anything, the mood of the country in 2013 makes the headline even more relevant now than it was in 2010.

So here is my Times-Dispatch op-ed piece on Calvin Coolidge, now accessible through a Google search.

Most Americans know that two of our country’s Founders – John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – died within hours of each other on the Fourth of July in 1826, the 50th anniversary of American independence.

Fewer might be aware that, five years later, the fifth President, James Monroe, also passed away on the same date.

Fewer still know that Calvin Coolidge, our 30th President, was born on the Fourth of July in 1872.

The much underrated Coolidge is a unique American success story. First elected to public office as a member of the city council of Northhampton, Massachusetts, Coolidge climbed the ladder of government service to clerk of courts, state representative, mayor, state senator, lieutenant governor, governor, vice president, and President of the United States. No other president, before or since, has had such an extensive and varied career in elective office.

In his 2008 book, The Cult of the Presidency, the Cato Institute’s Gene Healy wrote that Coolidge is remembered “mostly for his reticence and for fiscal policies that combined Yankee parsimony with generous tax cuts.”

That “Yankee parsimony” is on display in a short film that is thought to be the first time a U.S. president appeared in a “talkie” – a movie with sound. In this four-minute clip (viewable on YouTube), Coolidge says that he wants to “cut down public expense. I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.”

“Liberty” is a theme that appears again and again in Coolidge’s speeches and essays. In 1924, Coolidge published a volume of his writings, called The Price of Freedom. For a man known as “Silent Cal,” Coolidge was unexpectedly loquacious and sage.

In his short (437-word) inaugural address as vice president, Coolidge, referring to the responsibilities of the United States Senate, said that body’s “greatest function of all, too little mentioned and too little understood … is the preservation of liberty. Not merely the rights of the majority, they little need protection, but the rights of the minority, from whatever source they may be assailed.”

Coolidge took his oath of office seriously. He believed that, under the Constitution, the authority and reach of the federal government were severely limited and that the rights of the people were expansive. And he ran a tight ship: The entire White House staff under Coolidge consisted of fewer than 40 people; the Obama White House has more than 60 working in the press office alone.

Addressing the American Bar Association in 1922, Coolidge remarked:

“So long as the National Government confined itself to providing those fundamentals of liberty, order, and justice for which it was primarily established, its course was reasonably clear and plain. No large amount of revenue was required. No great swarms of public employees were necessary. There was little clash of special interests or different sections, and what there was of this nature consisted not of petty details but of broad principles... What the government undertook to do it could perform with a fair degree of accuracy and precision.”

Then came the big “but”, as Coolidge lamented the growing size and scope of government in the previous two decades:

“But this has all been changed by embarking on a policy of a general exercise of police powers, by the public control of much private enterprise and private conduct, and of furnishing a public supply for much private need.”

After 88 years, these words could have been written yesterday.

Perhaps being “born on the Fourth of July” imbued Coolidge with a predilection to take the Founders at their word when they said they were creating a republican government of limited and specified powers. Perhaps his views simply reflected his sober, thrifty New England upbringing. Perhaps he was just unusually intelligent.

Whatever the case, we could use a solid dose of “Silent Cal” in the 21st century.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Richard Sincere is the author of Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise and The Politics of Sentiment. He blogs about politics and culture at www.RickSincere.com.

For further reference, check out my report on Amity Shlaes' lecture at the Heritage Foundation in February; my audio interview with her at CPAC; and my Virginia Politics on Demand post on Coolidge and civility.

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