Do more.
That’s what people demand of their presidents and political leaders these days. A real president, regardless of his or her political persuasion, knows how to use “the office.” A real president makes things happen. Or so goes the conventional wisdom.
But, actually, there is another model. A president can succeed through inaction, by doing as little as possible. One such president was America’s Calvin Coolidge. Calvin who? Yes, Coolidge. The best president nobody knows. From the time he took office in 1923 to the time he left in 1929, Coolidge served a philosophy that was simple and powerful: Don’t do. Coolidge was “the great refrainer.”
The leadership style matched his personal style. Coolidge did not waste words. Hence his nickname, Silent Cal. He did not grandstand. For these quiet ways, the thirtieth president of the United States absorbed much abuse. A Washington socialite, Alice Longworth, said that Coolidge looked like he had been “weaned on a pickle”—a sour, disagreeable, or unpleasant look on one’s face.
Coolidge cut a sharp contrast to Alice’s father, Theodore Roosevelt, who had served a decade and a half earlier. And what a contrast Coolidge provided with another Roosevelt, Franklin, who came just a few years later.
The great refrainer is worth getting to know because he got the kind of results men and women of action long for today. Especially economic results. He reduced government debt by one-third, cut the tax rate by half, and reduced unemployment by half. He kept unemployment low, often below five percent. Wages increased and strikes were few. Americans (and Filipinos) got electricity, Ford Model Ts, and then Ford Model As, and radios. And most remarkable of all, a shrinking federal budget. In 1926, for instance, the federal budget included $14.5 million (about $200 million today) for the upkeep of the US army, navy, and other services in the Philippines. If you have to remember just one fact about Coolidge’s presidency, let it be this: Coolidge achieved a budget surplus every year of his presidency and left the federal budget lower than he had found it.
How did Coolidge do it? First he resisted taking unnecessary action himself. Second, he imposed the same discipline on Congress. That wasn’t easy. In the early 1920s, the progressive movement was on the march. Their impulse, then and now, was always to do something. Progressive plans included more aid for agriculture, encouraging unions, increasing taxes, and nationalizing important industries, such as railroads and utilities.
Coolidge abhorred perpetual activity by government. “Don’t hurry to legislate,” he said. He blocked the progressives, and thereby blocked their expansion of government. He vetoed farm subsidies twice, even though he personally came from an area of poor farmers—rural Vermont. Coolidge was sympathetic to farmers, but helping them wasn’t the government’s function.
Coolidge also vetoed aggressive versions of the great entitlement proposal of his day, an entitlement that would have expanded the budget by billions—pension for veterans. And, he blocked the rise of militant labor unions wherever and whenever he could, a habit he had begun while still governor of Massachusetts.
Coolidge made especially good use of the pocket veto, which is the ability of the president to veto a bill by simply not returning it to congress. “It is much more important to kill bad bills,” he said, “than to pass good ones.” In total, Coolidge vetoed 50 times.
The legislation Coolidge did endorse was designed to meet the same minimalist end: restrain the government. Together with his Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon, Coolidge lowered the top tax rate from 58 percent to 25 percent, and eliminated “nuisance” taxes (which are like today’s VAT and sin taxes). Their goal was to shrink the public sector, so that the private sector could expand. And the policy worked. The economy more than doubled and tax revenue increased. By 1927, 98 percent of the population paid no income tax.
The final example of the great refrainer’s philosophy involves political sacrifice. The country liked Coolidge’s thrift. The progressives won 17 percent of the vote in 1924, but Coolidge won the presidential election with more votes than the Democrats and progressives combined. So everyone, including the Republican Party, thought Coolidge would surely run a second time in 1928. But he declined. Typical of Coolidge, he thought he had done enough.
Yes, it’s possible to criticize Coolidge. As much as he tried to avoid it, Coolidge in the end signed bills he would have preferred not to. And, the president showed a misguided penchant for protectionism, which was never a sound economic policy then and now. Some suggest that Coolidge was responsible for the stock market crash and the decade-long depression that followed after he left office. But research suggests that claim is inaccurate. In the book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shales, there is evidence that too much action by Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt put the Great in the phrase, the Great Depression, through increased government intervention and erratic policies.
It is ironic that a man of such personal modesty presided over the era known as the Roaring Twenties—the era of The Great Gatsby and the unprecedented prosperity of the Philippines’ old sugar and landed families. But that was the paradox: Coolidge was a scrooge who begat plenty.
Perhaps the day has come for today’s politicians to follow the great refrainer’s guiding rule. Where others do, don’t. And if you have to do, do less. You might just end up with a prosperous nation.