Anyway, here’s a great review of her latest tome. This time she’s pretending to be a historian and biographer instead of a historian and economist. But like her book on the great depression, it’s apparently just as obviously a thinly disguised propaganda piece:
That project lately has been picking up steam, and a new biography by Amity Shlaes should provide a full head of it. Shlaes, the author of a recent polemic about the Great Depression, “The Forgotten Man,” runs the Four Percent Growth project at the George W. Bush Center, but “Coolidge,” her monument to the 30th president, is less an economist’s brief or a historian’s appraisal than a Puritan’s parable. What Coolidge’s aide C. Bascom Slemp said of his president could also be said of Shlaes: that his fervor for budget-cutting was “based on the stern judgment of the moralist.”
This is apparent from the book’s opening sentence: “Debt,” Shlaes intones, “takes its toll.” She begins by telling the story of a great-grand-uncle of Calvin Coolidge, a Vermont farmer named Oliver Coolidge, who spent some time in debtor’s prison in 1849. There is no evidence that this remote episode had any particular meaning for Calvin Coolidge. But for Shlaes it is an opportunity to inveigh against the evils of debt, and two pages later she brings her point home like a blunt instrument. “There have been times,” she writes, “when the American people, like Oliver Coolidge, lost heart, feeling themselves locked in a prison of their own making. There have been times when debt pinned down the United States as it once pinned down Oliver.” Lest even this appear too oblique, Shlaes suggests that Calvin Coolidge’s “perseverance . . . may well help Americans now turn a curse to a blessing or, at the very least, find the heart to continue their own persevering.”
This is history-as-therapy, or biography-as-advocacy. Either way, it is a questionable use for the substantial research that Shlaes has done into a president who deserves a richer portrayal than he typically gets; even in his own time, Coolidge lent himself to easy caricature as a tight-lipped, taciturn New Englander. Shlaes has an eye for detail, and her portrait of Coolidge is not without nuance. But she is ultimately intent on a different kind of caricature — Coolidge as role model. This is the sort of biography that just comes right out and says it: Its subject is a “hero.” Not just a hero, but “a rare kind of hero: a minimalist president, an economic general of budgeting and tax cuts.”
“Economic heroism,” Shlaes adds, perhaps sensing resistance, “is subtler than other forms of heroism and therefore harder to appreciate.”
Not for Shlaes. One must search far and wide in the literature to find anywhere such a romanticization of the act of cutting federal outlays. This reveals itself in passages that would make even Paul Ryan blush, passages tinged with the stilted sort of eroticism one sees in Ayn Rand novels. “Together,” Shlaes writes, “the new president and his budget director [Herbert M. Lord] cut, and then cut again. . . . Even when he and Lord thought they could not cut more, they still cut.” Shlaes describes the flurry of tax-cutting that Coolidge undertook with his Treasury secretary, the financier Andrew Mellon, in similarly breathless terms: The cuts they proposed in late 1925 were “like so many Christmas tree ornaments for the coming season: estate taxes and gift taxes, as well as taxes on cars, mahjongg sets, yacht use, and brokers were all coming down, as well as taxes on both cigars and cigar holders.” (In fairness to Shlaes, sometimes a cigar tax cut is just a cigar tax cut.)
In Shlaes’s rendering, the apparent drivers of the economic growth of the 1920s just happen to align with the priorities of present-day Republicans: tax cuts, budget cuts, deregulation, a deference to business as the instrument of the public interest. These were the policies, Shlaes insists, that made the ’20s roar — that made the economy boom, “a glorious surplus” arise and tax revenue spike. “By lowering rates on the wealthy,” Shlaes tells us, “the Treasury had actually collected more from them.” Again, lest you miss the talking point: “People understood now that lowering taxes might often be the better move.” Most important, Coolidge — who in 1925 famously declared that “the chief business of the American people is business” — had freed the private sector from its constraints. Shlaes, stirred to lyricism, writes that “commerce could do anything and touch any place now that it was, finally, aloft.”
“commerce could do anything and touch any place now that it was, finally, aloft.”
And who says conservatives aren’t funny?
I’m not much a student of Freud or Jung, but the right wing habit of eroticizing economics simply cannot be denied. It’s just plain creepy.
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