Silent Cal said little and ran one of the loudest budget records in history

Some presidents are loud and leave little behind. Calvin Coolidge was the other kind. He spoke so rarely that Americans gave him a nickname for it, Silent Cal, and then went on to elect him to the White House with one of the biggest margins of his era. His critics, who were many and literate, wrote him off as a small man for a big job. Then somebody checked the ledger.

Here is what the ledger says. Under Coolidge, the federal government ran a surplus in every year of his presidency. It paid down a big share of the national debt. It cut the top income tax rate from 73 percent, where it stood when he entered the vice presidency, to 25. And he did all that while vetoing, again and again, the bills that would have spent more. A quiet man with a loud budget record.

I'm going to tell you the whole story, because Coolidge is one of those figures whom both fans and critics get wrong. Fans make him a saint. Critics make him a sleepwalker. He was neither. He was a man with a philosophy, and the philosophy is worth examining on its merits, including the places where it fell short.

The man from Plymouth Notch

John Calvin Coolidge was born on July 4, 1872, in the tiny village of Plymouth Notch, Vermont. He went to Amherst College, studied law in Northampton, Massachusetts, and rose steadily through local and state politics there: city council, mayor, state legislator, Lieutenant Governor, and in January 1919 Governor of Massachusetts.

He became Vice President in March 1921 and President on August 3, 1923, when Warren Harding died. The news reached him at his father's farmhouse in Plymouth Notch, where his father, John Coolidge, a notary public, administered the presidential oath. Some of the most pointed images in American politics are domestic ones. This is one of them: a vice president sworn in as President by his own father in a Vermont farmhouse, by lamplight.

He won a full term in 1924. Three years later, he handed reporters a slip of paper saying he did not choose to run in 1928, and left office on March 4, 1929.

Boston, 1919: the principle

Coolidge first got national attention because of a strike. On September 9, 1919, most of the Boston police force walked off the job, demanding better pay and the right to belong to a union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. That night, the city descended into looting and disorder. The Police Commissioner, Edwin Curtis, had already suspended the leaders of the walkout, and he fired the strikers. Governor Coolidge called out the State Guard to restore order.

A few days later, the head of the AFL, Samuel Gompers, wrote to the governor asking for the strikers to be reinstated. Coolidge's reply included a line that went into the language: "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time." He supported the commissioner, the striking officers were never rehired, and a new force was recruited. Coolidge was re-elected governor that November by a wide margin, and the incident made him a national name.

Look at the structure of the argument, because it will come back. Coolidge did not say that workers have no rights. He did not say that unions are un-American. He drew a line around one kind of employment: the people whose job is to protect everyone else. A police officer, like a soldier, holds a public trust. Walking off the job when the city needs him is not a labor dispute. It is a breach.

The honest critique of Boston

A fair account has to add something. The police had real grievances. Their pay had not kept pace with wartime inflation, their hours were long, and the conditions in some station houses were miserable. A conservative should be able to say both things: the strike was wrong, and the complaints behind it deserved to be heard. Coolidge never gave an inch on the strike itself. A government that expects discipline from its employees owes them a decent wage and a fair hearing, so that the next generation does not need to strike.

The ledger

When Coolidge took over the presidency, the budget system created in 1921 was brand new. Charles Dawes had been the first Director of the Bureau of the Budget under Harding, and Coolidge kept the discipline going with Brigadier General Herbert Lord as Director. In the Coolidge White House, the budget was not an annual formality. The President personally pressed the department heads to hold spending down, and Lord held regular meetings with agency officials to keep them in line. For the story of how the country got that machinery, see How Washington learned to budget, from the 1921 act to the 1997 deal.

The results are in the Treasury's own tables. Federal spending stayed in the neighborhood of three billion dollars a year throughout the mid-1920s, essentially flat. The government ran a surplus in each year of his presidency. And the surpluses went to pay down the debt that the First World War had built. The gross federal debt was about $22.3 billion at the end of fiscal 1923 and about $16.9 billion at the end of fiscal 1929. Subtract and you get about $5.4 billion in reductions; divide by the starting figure and you get a drop of roughly 24 percent, close to a quarter, in six years. (Check the exact figures in the Treasury's historical tables; I give them to show the scale.)

Compare that with the instinct of modern Washington, in which the debt grows through good years and bad. If you want the big questions about the debt in plain terms, try twelve questions about the national debt, answered straight. Coolidge's answer to those questions was simple: spend less than you take in, and use the difference to pay what you owe. Is that too simple? It certainly was not easy. And I'd note a point that fits the moral argument in A Balanced Budget Is a Moral Argument Before It Is an Accounting One: debt is a claim on the future, and he thought it dishonorable to hand children a bill their parents had run up.

The tax cuts, with the arithmetic

Coolidge worked with his Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon, to push down the rates that the war had pushed up. Here is the staircase for the top income tax rate:

The 1926 act also cut the estate tax and repealed the federal gift tax. A later act in 1928 trimmed corporate taxes.

Work out what that staircase means for the last $1,000 a top earner made. In 1921, at 73 percent, he paid $730 and kept $270. In 1925, at 25 percent, he paid $250 and kept $750. That is a difference of $480 on each extra thousand dollars, and $750 divided by $270 is about 2.8, so he kept nearly three times as much of that last dollar. The argument for cutting was exactly this: the higher the rate on the next dollar, the less reason to earn it or to invest it. The argument against is that the cuts mostly helped the rich. I'll give the critics this: at the very top, they did. But Mellon's counter was that when rates were so high that people hid income in tax-exempt bonds, the government collected less than it would at lower rates, and that more of the tax burden fell on the wealthy once the loopholes narrowed. Economists still fight about how much of that claim is true. If you want to see the whole sweep, from this decade to later ones, there is a comparison in Republican tax cuts side by side, from Harding all the way to Trump.

The vetoes

Spending restraint means little without the power to say no. Coolidge said no often. Two of his vetoes illustrate his thinking.

The soldiers' bonus. In May 1924 Congress passed a bill giving veterans of the First World War an "adjusted compensation" certificate, a delayed bonus. Coolidge vetoed it. Congress overrode the veto within days. He argued that patriotism that is bought and paid for is not patriotism. You can disagree, as Congress did. What matters is that he held to a principle even when it was popular to abandon it. For other cases where Congress overrode a President, see Five vetoes Congress overrode and what each showed about presidential power.

The McNary-Haugen farm bills. Farm prices had slumped after the war, and farmers, especially in the Midwest, were hurting. The McNary-Haugen bill would have had the government buy surplus crops, sell them abroad at world prices, and charge farmers a fee to cover the losses. Congress passed it twice, and Coolidge vetoed it in February 1927 and again in May 1928. His reasoning was that it amounted to price fixing, that guaranteeing a high domestic price would encourage more production and a bigger surplus, and that it would raise costs for other Americans. Farm-state Republicans were furious. The argument over what government owes farmers did not end with Coolidge; it runs through From the 1933 Farm Act to Freedom to Farm, How the Safety Net Got Built and Eight Myths About Farm Subsidies That Both Parties Keep Repeating.

Two laws he signed that deserve notice

An honest profile includes what a president's reputation tends to leave out.

On June 2, 1924, Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act, which made all Native Americans born in the United States citizens. It was long overdue. Citizenship was not the same thing as the vote, though; some states kept Native Americans from the polls for decades more.

Later that same spring he signed the Immigration Act of 1924, which set national-origin quotas, and the Border Patrol was created that year as well. The quota system fell hard on people from southern and eastern Europe and shut out most Asian immigration, and it is a part of the Coolidge record that his admirers rarely mention. Judge it by the standards you use for any law. The full account is in The 1924 Law That Built the Quota System and the Border Patrol.

The critique that deserves an answer

So here is the question that every Coolidge defender has to face: if the policy was so wise, why did the whole thing come apart?

The honest answer has two parts.

First, the boom was uneven. Farmers never shared in the prosperity of the 1920s, with prices down and debts high and foreclosures a constant worry. The Coolidge record has a hole in it exactly where the McNary-Haugen vetoes sit. A philosophy of restraint did not make a farmer whole, and a conservative who claims that the 1920s were golden has to explain the farm belt.

Second, the stock market crash came in October 1929, within eight months after Coolidge left office. In his final message to Congress in December 1928, he said the country could look to the future with optimism. He was wrong, or at least he missed the signs. The Federal Reserve's credit policy of the late 1920s, the speculation in stocks bought on borrowed money, and much else played a part, and the best economists still argue over how much blame the 1920s boom deserves for what followed. It would be unfair to pin the Great Depression on him, and equally unfair to credit his budgets with a prosperity that ended badly. If you want to see how that crisis was handled, the next chapter is Seven myths about Herbert Hoover the do-nothing president.

What to take from Silent Cal

I would offer three things.

1. A budget is a statement of values. Coolidge understood that you cannot say you value the next generation and then borrow from it. A conservative's test of any spending proposal should be the same: who pays, and when?
2. Restraint is a skill. It is easy to say you will cut spending. It is hard to veto a popular bill. Look for leaders who have done the second.
3. A philosophy has to be honest about its blind spots. His critics were right about farms, and right that he did not see the crash coming. A movement that cannot admit that has nothing to teach.

He said once, in a speech to newspaper editors in 1925, that the chief business of the American people is business. People quote that line as an insult. Read the rest of the passage, and you will see that he was describing a nation of people who produce, buy, sell, invest and prosper. He thought government's job was to leave that alone and keep the books honest. You may think he was only half right. But he was at least half right.

The bottom line

• Coolidge ran a surplus in every year as President, held spending roughly flat and paid down roughly a quarter of the national debt. Those are checkable claims, so check them at the Treasury.
• His tax cuts took the top rate from 73 percent in 1921 to 25 percent by 1925. On the last $1,000 of income, that is the difference between keeping $270 and keeping $750.
• His principle in Boston, no strike against the public safety, still holds. So does the fair addition: the officers' pay and conditions deserved better.
• Do not hide the weak spots: farm distress, the immigration quotas he signed and a crash that arrived within eight months of his departure.
• When someone tells you restraint is easy, ask which popular bill they ever vetoed.