Roaring Twenties

Coolidge’s Presidency: Achievements of “Silent Cal”

Calvin Coolidge served as the 30th president from 1923 to 1929, first as the successor to the dead Warren G. Harding and then as the winner of the 1924 election. His tenure coincided almost exactly with the Roaring Twenties, and for much of the twentieth century, “Coolidge prosperity” was a watchword for the political theory that low taxes and limited government produced economic growth. The full story of the three Republican presidents is in the parent Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover cluster.

The Boston Police Strike and the Path to the Presidency

John Calvin Coolidge was born on July 4, 1872, in Plymouth Notch, Vermont — the only U.S. president born on Independence Day. He graduated from Amherst College in 1895, practiced law in Northampton, Massachusetts, and rose through the state legislature to become lieutenant governor in 1916 and governor in 1918.

Coolidge became nationally famous on September 14, 1919, when the Boston Police Strike began. About three-quarters of the Boston police walked off the job, and rioting broke out. Samuel Gompers, head of the AFL, called the strikers “my friends.” Coolidge called out the state guard and issued a statement: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” The statement was widely reprinted, Coolidge was re-elected governor by a huge margin, and the incident made him the leading candidate for the 1920 Republican vice-presidential nomination.

When Harding died on August 2, 1923, Coolidge was in Plymouth Notch. His father, a notary public, administered the oath of office by lamplight. Coolidge won the 1924 election in a landslide over the conservative Democrat John W. Davis of West Virginia and the progressive Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, who ran on a third-party ticket. Coolidge took 54 percent of the popular vote and 382 of 531 electoral votes, carrying every state outside the Solid South. The 1924 election was also the first presidential election in which most Southern women voted under the Nineteenth Amendment. Read more about the first women voters in the related cluster.

The Revenue Acts of 1924 and 1926

Coolidge’s signature domestic achievement was the pair of Revenue Acts of 1924 and 1926, drafted by Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. The two laws cut the top marginal income tax rate from 73 percent in 1921 to 25 percent by 1926. The number of Americans paying any federal income tax fell from about 4 million in 1920 to fewer than 2 million by 1926. Estate taxes and capital gains taxes were also cut.

The Revenue Acts were based on the “Mellon Plan,” the theory that lower tax rates on the wealthy would produce more investment, more jobs, and more total revenue. The results were real, at least in the short term. Federal revenue grew from about $719 million in 1921 to about $1.16 billion in 1928, even as rates were slashed. The stock market rose from a low of about 63 in August 1921 to a high of about 381 in September 1929, and the economy grew at about 4 percent per year.

The tax cuts were controversial at the time. The New York World called the 1926 act “an orgy of wholesale money-giving to the very rich.” In retrospect, the cuts increased the concentration of wealth — by 1929, the top 5 percent of American families received about 33 percent of all personal income — and contributed to the speculative boom that ended in the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. The full story of the 1920s economy boom and bust is told in the related pillar.

The Federal Radio Commission, McNary-Haugen, and Immigration

The Radio Act of 1927, which created the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), was Coolidge’s second major legislative achievement. The new medium of radio broadcasting had grown up in the early 1920s without federal regulation, and by 1927 there were more than 700 licensed stations, all interfering with each other. The 1927 act created a five-member FRC to license stations, assign frequencies, and regulate the airwaves — the model for the later Federal Communications Commission of 1934. The act also recognized commercial broadcasting and gave broadcasters the right to sell advertising, setting the template for the commercial American media of the next century. Read more about the rise of radio in the 1920s in the technology cluster.

The McNary-Haugen Farm Bill, which Coolidge vetoed in 1927 and again in 1928, is the clearest example of his commitment to limited government. The bill would have created a federal agency to buy agricultural surpluses and sell them abroad. Coolidge vetoed it twice, on the grounds that the federal government should not buy and resell crops. His veto message of May 23, 1928, was blunt: “Farmers have never made money. I don’t believe we can do much about it.” The veto was a political disaster — Coolidge’s standing in the farm belt never recovered — but the Federal Farm Board that emerged in 1929 under Hoover did not work either.

The Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act), which Coolidge signed reluctantly, limited immigration from any country to 2 percent of the number of people from that country counted in the 1890 census — a deliberate choice that favored northwestern Europe and excluded southern and eastern Europe. The act also excluded Asian immigrants entirely and established the national origins formula that would govern American immigration policy until 1965.

The 1920s were, paradoxically, a high-water mark of American internationalism, even as the country refused to join the League of Nations. Coolidge supported the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22, called by Harding and led by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, which produced the Five-Power Treaty limiting capital ship tonnage and the Nine-Power Treaty affirming the Open Door in China. The most famous diplomatic achievement of his tenure was the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, drafted by Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, which “renounced war as an instrument of national policy” and was eventually signed by 62 nations. It had no enforcement mechanism, but it was a sincere expression of the post-war hope that the great powers could resolve their differences without war.

”I Do Not Choose to Run” and the Coolidge Reputation

On August 2, 1927, in one of the most famous press conference moments in American history, Coolidge handed out a typewritten statement: “I do not choose to run for President in 1928.” The decision was partly personal — Florence Coolidge was in poor health — and partly his dislike of the political grind. It cleared the way for Herbert Hoover, the Secretary of Commerce, who won the 1928 election in a landslide.

Coolidge left office on March 4, 1929, the only 1920s president to leave office untainted by scandal. He died on January 5, 1933, in Northampton, Massachusetts, of coronary thrombosis, a few months before the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt. He was 60. His reputation has been revised many times. In the 1930s, he was a minor president. In the 1950s, a model of limited-government conservatism. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration claimed him as an ancestor. The 1920s were a brief moment in which the United States was the dominant industrial power in the world; Coolidge prosperity was real, and it was fragile. The story of Hoover’s response to the Depression is the next chapter.

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