The Political Thought of Calvin Coolidge. Thomas J. Tacoma

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СКАЧАТЬ career. To the contrary, there is no evidence that Coolidge read or reflected at length on Burke’s life or works. However, there is substantial conceptual overlap in their thinking and their approach to politics, which justifies labeling Coolidge a Burkean. Coolidge and Burke shared a kindred spirit in their understanding of political reform, perhaps most fundamentally in their dispositions to conserve, even while they sought to build up their respective regimes. Society was complex, and sudden, radical reforms were destabilizing and dangerous. Burke taught that the British constitution was a creature of slow growth and organic development. Coolidge spoke similarly of American society. They conceived of politics and political reform in terms of multi-generational labor. The words of Edmund Burke in the Reflections on the Revolution in France that “people will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors” found their abridged parallel in Coolidge’s affirmation that “no people can look forward who do not look backward.”^[22] There was substantial conceptual overlap in drawing a distinction between civilization and barbarism. This theme was fundamental and explicit for Coolidge, implicitly assumed by Burke. Similarities in their thought extend to other areas: both interpreted the American War for Independence as an organic development from its Anglo-American culture. Likewise, both defended the existence and utility of political parties during times when they were viewed with suspicion.^[23]

      Moreover, Coolidge’s rhetoric sometimes employed natural-law ideas and modes of thinking, but like Burke, he was skeptical of speaking of natural rights in the abstract. For example, even though Coolidge often praised the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, he remained silent on the meaning of its opening paragraphs. Furthermore, on at least one occasion, Coolidge unequivocally attacked the idea of natural rights. When he accepted the Republican nomination for vice president in 1920, Coolidge went out of his way to say that no man had any rights by nature: “Men speak of natural rights, but I challenge anyone to show where in nature any rights ever existed or were recognized until there was established for their declaration and protection a duly promulgated body of corresponding laws.”^[24] In this speech, only two paragraphs later, Coolidge explained that “society to advance must be not a dead form but a living organism plastic [sic], inviting progress.” This echoed the Burke of the 1790s, condemning abstractions as a danger to the historical order of civilized nations. This was precisely what Coolidge was saying. His attack on natural rights came during the tumultuous years that followed the conclusion of World War I. Socialism, communism, and anarchism appeared to be on the rise in America and throughout the world. Like Edmund Burke criticizing the French revolutionaries, Coolidge’s denunciation of natural rights was therefore an attack on radical ideologies which he believed would bring the extremism of the French or Russian revolutions to the United States.

      However, Coolidge repeatedly affirmed his own beliefs in unchanging, universal laws that governed all times and all places. In other words, as much as his ideas overlapped with Burke’s, he was also drawing on the American tradition and the American founding. To be sure, Coolidge never totally rejected the political philosophy of natural rights and social contract of the American founding generation. Coolidge’s foreign policy addresses occasionally invoked the natural rights of all men. In at least one speech, he unambiguously claimed that all the peoples of the earth, and with them all nations, have natural rights in accordance with the Declaration of Independence: “We should not forget that all nations as well as individuals have natural and inalienable rights ‘of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ in the words of Jefferson.”^[25] If anything, this indicates Coolidge’s clear heritage from Lincoln and the founders—his Americanism. Consequently, the phrase “Burkean Americanist” seems best to capture or describe Coolidge’s thought.

      As a question of intellectual history, Coolidge scholars might inquire how and why Coolidge acquired his political ideas. Mundane factors though they be, geography and intellectual history point us in a helpful direction. Coolidge hailed from Vermont; he was a son of the New England political tradition. He studied at Amherst, an evangelical-turned-modernist college dominated by the semimystical influence of philosopher Charles Garman. In addition, Coolidge recorded that he devoted his law-office days to reading Chancellor Kent and Joseph Story, his evenings to the political speeches of Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate. These factors collectively suggest that his thought may have synthesized New England Whig ideas with modern psychology and liberal theology, joined together in the mind of a Republican Party loyalist. To be clear, Coolidge’s ideas are best understood as a synthesis of the old American Whig tradition, modern psychological beliefs as taught by Charles Garman, and Republican Party orthodoxy as mediated through the Burkean and Americanist teachings of Anson Morse. This is the proper interpretation of Calvin Coolidge’s political thought. The full meaning of these ideas will be unpacked in the chapters to come.

      A Note on Methodology

      This book is not and does not intend to be an intellectual biography of Calvin Coolidge. I do not attempt in every instance to provide the full context of his every statement or stray remark, nor to present them as they developed over time in strict chronological order. Though historians, among others, may repudiate any examination of ideas that takes place without a complete survey of their historical environment, I can only point to them for my own justification to the sharper insights of wiser political thinkers than I.^[26]

      Nevertheless, the very real criticism of studying Coolidge a historically deserves a fuller answer. Careful readers will note that throughout the following chapters, I quote from numerous Coolidge speeches and bring together ideas that were separated by a distance of many years when he first said them. How can it be proper to study Coolidge’s political thought in this way, as if he never matured or changed in his views? To these I give a simple response: Coolidge was a remarkably consistent thinker. Every student of Coolidge has noted his consistency. Coolidge wrote his own speeches and chose his words with care. When Coolidge repeated a phrase, even decades after its initial use, it is clear from the text and context that he referred to the same ideas in the same light. In other words, by reading through everything that Coolidge wrote, readers can discern that the content of his ideas remained substantially unchanged for decades.^[27] This is not to say, however, that Coolidge’s ideas underwent no change or development. Those shifts are noted, when significant, in the chapters to follow.

      My goal, and my method of realizing it, has been to bring together Coolidge’s numerous statements on a given issue. This first involved reading Coolidge’s complete works. Once collected, I sought to disentangle the various concepts woven together throughout speeches, and by sifting them, to present them as logically as possible. For example, Coolidge regularly referred to the American founding, even in speeches on other subjects. Yet his remarks in such speeches often illuminated his view of the founding better than a full speech on an individual or event from the founding era. Consequently, by bringing such remarks together, I believe that I have been able to reconstruct more fully what Coolidge thought about politics and civilization, and how his ideas stood relative to the Progressive currents of his day.

      Chapter 1 sets the stage for examining Coolidge’s political thought by surveying the principles of Progressivism as they stood during his own day. Progressives recognized that life in the United States had changed, due in large part to industrialization and the growth of huge cities. As a consequence, Progressive reformers responded by rejecting the political theory of the Declaration of Independence and the forms of the Constitution as they sought to solve America’s problems through pragmatic experimentation. This chapter analyzes the theoretical background informing the Progressive revolution in the science of politics—its philosophic roots—and identifies particularly the rise of the historical school, philosophic pragmatism, and the social gospel theology as the keys to understanding progressive era ideas. Finally, the progressives were successful in implementing many of their reforms, especially at the state level. This, then, was the context in which Coolidge operated, and these ideas provide some contrast with his own.

      Chapter 2 looks more particularly at Coolidge’s education, especially the influence of two of his Amherst professors. The СКАЧАТЬ