

They were gifted writers and many of their books were bestsellers. And they have persuaded many Americans -- Barack Obama definitely included -- that progress means an ever bigger government.







At home it was a time of unemployment and inflation, of bombs set off in front of the attorney general's house and on Wall Street, of labor union strikes in coal and other basic industries.


Coolidge fired the striking policemen. He explained why in a telegram to labor leader Samuel Gompers. It concluded, "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime."

"The time for disruption was over; in order for the next day to be better," Shlaes writes, "law must be allowed to reign now."




Coolidge's Republicans had small majorities in Congress and many favored big new spending programs including farm subsidies and bonuses for veterans. Coolidge said no, with vetoes that were sustained.

At the same time, he pressed Congress for tax cuts. After Coolidge won a full term in 1924 the top income tax rate was reduced from the wartime 70 percent to 25 percent.


That helped Coolidge achieve budget surpluses every year, surpluses that he used to pay down the national debt.


All the political indicators -- random-sample public opinion polls had not yet been invented -- suggest he would have won a second full term. And would have been in office when the stock market crashed in October 1929.

The New Deal historians depict the prosperity of the Coolidge years as illusory. In their view the binge would inevitably be followed by the hangover.

More recent economic historians have suggested that policy mistakes by the Federal Reserve were the prime cause of the deflationary downward spiral. The onerous Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 may have been a culprit, too.


