Читать книгу The Political Thought of Calvin Coolidge - Thomas J. Tacoma - Страница 7

The path of biography has been well trodden by able historians. My enterprise has been to unearth and examine Coolidge’s principal political beliefs—his core political principles and the rationale behind the policies he supported both in Massachusetts and as president of the United States. The goal has also been to set Coolidge’s thought in clearer relief by contrasting his ideas with the dominant Progressive thinkers of the era, especially fellow presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

Coolidge has often been interpreted as a conservative’s conservative. In this telling, he was an apologist for the large corporations that dominated business during the 1920s and the embodiment of an older America, one which was fading from the scene and passed with him into the dust bin of history in 1933. The political party structure and divisions which had lasted since the Civil War came to an end during Coolidge’s lifetime: the age of Republican domination in national politics ended abruptly with the success of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.

This book challenges that understanding of Coolidge. A more careful study of his political thought, one which relies more on his actual words and ideas than on what his critics wrote about him, reveals the portrait of a reformer and responsible statesman, a Burkean Americanist. Coolidge took his political ideas from his vision of humane civilization (discussed at length in chapter 3). On one hand, this was a departure from the principles of the American founding. Coolidge was not looking, in the final analysis, to the truths of the Declaration of Independence, the principles espoused by Hamilton, Madison, or Adams, but to a modern notion of “civilization.” This should not be surprising—civilization was the watchword of the era, as much as progress. In fact, the argument of this book is that Coolidge was far more moderate a Republican than most studies of him have recognized.

Coolidge’s Americanism was clear in every speech he gave and book he wrote: he loved the American regime that he had inherited, and he defended its institutions all his life. But what does it mean to associate Coolidge with Burke?

It does not mean that Coolidge was a devoted reader of Edmund Burke, nor that Coolidge consciously imitated Burke in his political 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.