President Calvin Coolidge, Who Presided Over the Prosperous Roaring 20s, Has No Idea How to Fight the Great Depression That Followed

The first letter of Coolidge on the Depression that we can ever recall seeing

The decade following World War I, known as the "Roaring Twenties," was a time of unprecedented prosperity in the United States. The nation's total wealth nearly doubled between 1920 and 1929, manufactures rose by 60 percent, and most people lived in homes lit by electricity. They made more money than they ever had before and, spurred on by the new advertising industry, spent it faster, too – on washing machines and refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, 12 million radios, 30 million automobiles, and untold millions of tickets to the movies, that ushered them into a new fast-living world of luxury and glamour their grandparents never could have imagined. Meanwhile, at the polls and in the workplace, women had begun to assert a new independence. It was the era of Jazz and Art Deco, Babe Ruth, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Charles Lindbergh, of wonderful madness. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before in America.

Warren Harding died in 1923, and Calvin Coolidge was President for the balance of the era. Coolidge was quiet, respectable and frugal, but with a touch of amiability, and provided a comforting symbol of old-fashioned responsibility and virtue amidst the wildness going on around him. The policies of Coolidge, who remained popular throughout his presidency, were guided by his strong belief in private enterprise and small government. He cut taxes, limited government spending and filled regulatory commissions with people sympathetic to business. He also rejected U.S. membership in the League of Nations and set high tariffs on imported goods to protect American industry. And although rural America was in a recession and did not enjoy the prosperity affecting the rest of the country, Coolidge twice vetoed farm relief bills, and killed a plan to produce cheap Federal electric power on the Tennessee River.

After his term in office ended on March 4, 1929, Coolidge returned to his home in Northampton, Massachusetts. The former president was courted by a number of news organizations to write columns or articles of varying formats. He finally settled on the New York-based McClure Newspaper Syndicate, maybe because that firm’s chief, Richard H. Waldo, was more persistent than most. It was a lucrative deal for both parties, but especially for the former president who received a weekly advance of $3,000. He wrote a daily syndicated column – “Calvin Coolidge Says” – for McClure for exactly one year, from June 1930 to June 1931. While Coolidge adapted to the work quickly and at first even looked forward to his daily task, he soon tired of it and did not renew the contract after one year, even though newspapers were clamoring for more Coolidge. The reasons he gave were that he felt he’d covered every subject, that the daily deadline was too confining, that he was uneasy about the amount of his income in times of depression, and that, with the 1932 elections looming, he did not want to argue partisan politics. As we see below, there may have been an additional (and perhaps more relevant) reason.

Meanwhile the Great Depression was overrunning the country. Although starting with the stock market crash in October 1929, the effects of the Depression were not felt by the mass of people until 1930. Throughout the latter part of that year and the first half of the next, the impact bobbed up and down, though with a downward trajectory. However, thereafter the Depression deepened, and 1931-33 were the years of despair and deprivation.

Typed letter signed, on his letterhead, Northampton, Mass., December 15, 1931, to Waldo, showing he had no idea of how to get the country out of the Great Depression. “I have your letter with enclosures for which I wish to thank you. The state of the country is apparently not pleasant and I do not know of anyone who knows what to do about it. I am going to be out of town in different places beginning Thursday and I suppose I am going to be working on the portrait the first part of next week. It is always a pleasure to see you but I hesitate to confer with you these days for fear you might entice me into tying myself up in newspaper work. I thought last June when I finished that there were more hopeful signs, but apparently new elements developed which dissipated most of the help. You might write me again the first of the week.”  Waldo's response is written on the back of Coolidge's letter.

Thus, the man who presided over the nation for the years preceding the Depression, as the underlying problems developed, and who left his successor Herbert Hoover to handle the nation’s worst-ever economic crisis (which arrived just seven months into his term), admits here he had no solutions, advice or ideas to offer to combat it, and that in fact no one knew what to do. Having nothing to offer as the disaster accelerated, Coolidge may well have opted out of continuing his newspaper column because he wanted to escape the daily necessity of having to opine on the Depression.

Coolidge avoiding writing much about the Depression in his correspondence, and reading this letter it’s easy to see why. In fact, this is the first Coolidge letter about the Depression that we can recall seeing in all of our years, nor does a search of public sale records going back 40 years disclose even one.