Posted on 02/11/2013 8:47:32 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Why we need another Coolidge presidency. The man had that common sense brilliance that America lacks today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5puwTrLRhmw
He liked "Silent Cal."
Why was he called “Silent Cal”?
Is it because he always kept his mouth shut?
Did Clarence Thomas learn a thing or two from him?
Too many people don’t want a president anymore. They want a dictator in all but name who will give them goodies and tell them to behave like the immature adults they are.
I guess if you want another Great Depression than a new Coolidge is the way to go.
Thought we were going to discuss the “Coolidge Effect”....
As Vice-President, Coolidge and his vivacious wife Grace were invited to quite a few parties, where the legend of "Silent Cal" was born. It is from this time that most of the jokes and anecdotes involving Coolidge originate. Although Coolidge was known to be a skilled and effective public speaker, in private he was a man of few words and was therefore commonly referred to as "Silent Cal."
A possibly apocryphal story has it that Dorothy Parker, seated next to him at a dinner, said to him, "Mr. Coolidge, I've made a bet against a fellow who said it was impossible to get more than two words out of you." His famous reply: "You lose." It was also Parker who, upon learning that Coolidge had died, reportedly remarked, "How can they tell?"
Coolidge often seemed uncomfortable among fashionable Washington society; when asked why he continued to attend so many of their dinner parties, he replied, "Got to eat somewhere." Alice Roosevelt Longworth, a leading Republican wit, underscored Coolidge's silence and his dour personality: "When he wished he were elsewhere, he pursed his lips, folded his arms, and said nothing. He looked then precisely as though he had been weaned on a pickle.
As President, Coolidge's reputation as a quiet man continued. "The words of a President have an enormous weight," he would later write, "and ought not to be used indiscriminately."
Coolidge was aware of his stiff reputation; indeed, he cultivated it. "I think the American people want a solemn ass as a President," he once told Ethel Barrymore, "and I think I will go along with them." However, he did hold a then-record number of presidential press conferences, 520 during his presidency. Some historians would later suggest that Coolidge's image was created deliberately as a campaign tactic, while others believe his withdrawn and quiet behavior to be natural, deepening after the death of his son in 1924.
RE: “Mr. Coolidge, I’ve made a bet against a fellow who said it was impossible to get more than two words out of you.” His famous reply: “You lose.” It was also Parker who, upon learning that Coolidge had died, reportedly remarked, “How can they tell?”
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The above stories are beauts.
I wonder how long his State of the Union speeches were....
RE: I guess if you want another Great Depression than a new Coolidge is the way to go.
Coolidge and Harding almost had their great depression in 1920.
Read here to see how the Harding/Coolidge administration prevented it from becoming worse, eventually leading the country OUT OF IT and into the ROARING TWENTIES:
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-depression-youve-never-heard-of-1920-1921#axzz2Kc41NGWn
The Great Depression of the 1930’s were the Hoover and Roosevelt depression ( especially the latter, who exacerbated it ).
Coolidge was the last real President of the United States. All those that followed were connected to or controlled by the political aristocracy.
After Harding died suddenly in 1923 while on a trip to the West, the taciturn Coolidge became president, and he went on to be elected in his own right in 1924. Coolidge's aims differed little from Harding's: Indeed, he told the Post's McLean that he aimed to carry out Harding's plans "to perfection." But where Harding had relished the limelight, Coolidge shrank from it. Where Harding had led, Coolidge now delegated. As vice president, the New Englander had struck Washington socialites with his silence, and as president he continued to do so... Thrifty to the point of stinginess, Coolidge eschewed attention and insisted the White House do so as well. Observant Washingtonians noted that the food at the White House became less good and that the liquor no longer flowed as it had in Harding’s day. Coolidge kept the White House kitchen on such a tight budget that he drove out the housekeeper who had served there since the Tafts' day. He so irritated many in Congress that lawmakers overrode some of his vetoes. In frustration, he resorted to the pocket veto, which could not be overridden. In total Coolidge issued 50 vetoes, among them 30 pocket vetoes. And he declined to run for reelection in 1928, forgoing a near-certain chance at victory... Sometimes it takes more strength to be small than to be big, and that was true in Coolidge’s case.
Landon mounted a lackluster and disorganized campaign. He wasn't quite New Deal Lite, but he wasn't going to win whatever he did.
This is a show biz country nowadays and it expects its leader to be some kind of showman or movie star. Somebody as quiet and self-effacing as Coolidge won't be elected president any time soon.
Coolidge was an outstanding president on economic matters, what in the Reagan years would come to be called a "supply sider." The individual most responsible the tax cutting and government frugality policies in the Coolidge years was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. The results were the biggest economic boom in American history as of that time.
Amity Schlaes has proven to be an excellent writer on American history, critiquing events from a modern day conservative/libertarian perspective. I was impressed with her politically incorrect history of Roosevelt's New Deal, titled (perhaps facetiously) "The Common Man," and look forward to reading her "Coolidge."
Coolidge mentions the federal debt as the “Astounding sum of $7 billion”.
I would rank him on par with Washington and Jefferson. In fact Jefferson was a comparatively big spender next too Coolidge.
Thanks for the ping!
I listened to the audio several times, and my take was that the seven billion dollars was not the debt, but rather the entire annual expenditures of the federal government!
To try to compare it to today's dollars, we can roughly assume that a dollar in the 1920s was the equivalent of $20 now. So the entire federal budget then was $140 billion in today's dollars. Even if the federal government had spent at the same per capita rate today as it did back then, it would only be spending $420 billion in today's dollars, since the population has roughly tripled. In other words, even correcting for population increases and inflation, the federal government today spends about nine times what it did in the Coolidge era - and yet Coolidge was thinking that it was too much! Of course, you had no entitlements back then.
Based on this Inflation Calculator:
http://www.westegg.com/inflation/
What was $7 Billion in 1923 would be $91 Billion today.
Still a huge drop in the bucket compared to the gigantic and horrendous annual expenditures we have today.
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