Civility to one’s opponents, certainty, restraint, federalism, economy, thrift, and respect for faith: these and other Coolidge ideals are needed today.

The ‘Scrooge’ Who Begat Plenty

By Amity Shlaes

Debt takes its toll. To no one had this ever seemed clearer than to a 61-year-old farmer named Oliver Coolidge, who languished in Woodstock Common Jail in Windsor County, Vermont, in the spring of 1849. Oliver was behind bars because he owed a neighbor, Frederick Wheeler, $24.23. He had not honored a contract because he lacked the money tohonor it. Now his debt had climbed to $29.48 because the justice of the peace had ruled that he had to carry the costs of the creditor, $5, and a fine of 25 cents for the serving of papers.

Oliver’s fate was all the more troubling because some of his relations were faring well. The Coolidge name enjoyed respect throughout Windsor County, in the neighboring state of Massachusetts, and across the rest of New England. Carlos Coolidge, a distant cousin, was serving as governor of Vermont. Coolidge’s older brother, Calvin, owned the family farm at Plymouth Notch, a hamlet not far from Woodstock. Oliver’s rage built as he thought of his brother. Over the years Oliver had deeded land or land rights to Calvin: one of the properties involved had been called the limekiln lot.

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• It is hard for modern students of economics to know what to make of a government that treated economic weakness by raising interest rates 300 basis points, cutting tax rates, and halving the federal government — so much at odds is that prescription with the antidotes torecession our own experts tend to recommend.
• It is harder still for modern economists to concede that that recipe, the policy recipe forthe early 1920s advocated by Coolidge and Harding, yielded growth on a scale to which we can aspire today. 
• As early as the 1930s, Coolidge’s reputation and way of thinking began their decline. Collectives and not individuals became fashionable. 
• Sensing such shifts, Coolidge at the end of his life spoke anxiously about the “importance of the obvious.” 
• Perseverance, property rights, contracts, civility toone’s opponents, silence, smaller government, trust, certainty, restraint, respect for faith, federalism, economy, and thrift: these Coolidge ideals intrigue us today as well. 
• After all, many citizens today do feel cursed by debt, their own or their government’s. 

Knowing the details of his life may well help Americans now turn a curse to a blessing or, at the very least, find the heart to continue their own persevering.

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