What was coolidge prosperity

When the financial relations between Germany and the Allies needed to be straightened out, it was General Charles G. Dawes and Owen D. Young who headed the necessary international commissions--not only because their judgement was considered wise, and impartial as between the countries of Europe, but because the United States was in a position to call the tune.

Americans were called in to reorganize the finances of one country after another. American investments abroad increased by leaps and bounds. The squat limestone building at the corner of Broad and Wall Streets, still wearing the scars of the shrapnel which had struck it during the explosion, had become the undisputed financial center of the world. Only occasionally did the United States have to intervene by force of arms in other countries.

The Marines ruled Haiti and restored order in Nicaragua; but in general the country extended its empire not only by military conquest or political dictation, but by financial penetration. At home, one of the most conspicuous results of prosperity was the conquest of the whole country by urban tastes and urban dress and the urban way of living. The rube disappeared. Girls in the villages of New Hampshire and Wyoming wore the same brief skirts and used the same lipsticks as their sisters in New York.

The proletariat--gradually lost its class consciousness; the American Federation of Labor dwindled in membership and influence; the time had come when workingmen owned second-hand Buicks and applauded Jimmy Walker, not objecting in the least, it seemed, to his exquisite clothes, his valet, and his frequent visits to the millionaire-haunted sands of Palm Beach. It was no accident that men like Mellon and Hoover and Morrow found their wealth an asset rather than a liability in public office, or that there was a widespread popular movement to make Henry Ford President in The possession of millions was a sign of success, and success was worshipped the country over.

Business itself was regarded with a new veneration. Once it had been considered less dignified and distinguished than the learned professions, but now people thought they praised a clergyman highly when they called him a good businessman.

College alumni, gathered at their annual banquets, fervently applauded the banker trustees who spoke of education as one of the greatest American industries and compared the president and the dean to business executives. The colleges themselves organized business courses and cheerfully granted credit to candidates for degrees in the arts and sciences for their work in advertising copywriting, marketing methods, elementary stenography, and drug-store practice. Even Columbia University drew men and women into home-study courses by a system of follow-up letters worthy of a manufacturer of refrigerators, and sent out salesmen to ring the door bells of those who expressed a flicker of interest; even the great University of Chicago made use of what Andre Siegfried has called "the mysticism of success" by heading an advertisement of its correspondence courses with the admonition to "DEVELOP POWER AT HOME, to investigate, persevere, achieve.

The Harvard Business School established annual advertising awards, conferring academic eclat upon well-phrased sales arguments for commercial products. It was not easy for the churches to resist the tide of business enthusiasm. The Swedish Immanuel Congregational Church in New York, according to an item in the American Mercury , recognized the superiority of the business to the spiritual appeal by offering to all who contributed one hundred dollars to its building fund "an engraved certificate of investment in preferred capital stock in the Kingdom of God.

Christian Worship Increases Your Efficiency. Christian F. Reisner, Pastor. In every American city and town, service clubs gathered the flower of the middle-class citizenry together for weekly luncheons noisy with good fellowship.

They were growing fast, these service clubs. Rotary, the most famous of them, had been founded in ; by it had , members and boasted of--as a sign of its international influence--as many as 3, clubs in 44 countries. The number of Kiwanis Clubs rose from in to 1, in ; the Lions Clubs, of which the first was not formed until , multiplied until at the end of the decade there were 1, of them. Nor did these clubs content themselves with singing songs and conducting social-service campaigns; they expressed the national faith in what one of their founders called "the redemptive and regenerative influence of business.

It was a popular note, for in hundreds of directors' rooms, around hundreds of conference tables, the American businessmen of the era of Coolidge Prosperity were seeing themselves as men of vision eight eyes steadfastly fixed on the long future. At the end of the decade, a cartoon in the New Yorker represented an executive as saying to his heavy-jowled colleagues at one of these meetings: "We have ideas.

Possibly we tilt at windmills-just seven Don Juans tilting at windmills. The service club specialized in this sort of mysticism: was not a speaker of before the Rotarians of Waterloo, Iowa, quoted by the American Mercury declaring that "Rotary is a manifestation of the divine"? Indeed, the association of business with religion was one of the most significant phenomena of the day. When the National Association of Credit Men held their annual convention at New York, there were provided for the three thousand delegates a special devotional service at the Cathedral of St.

John the Divine and five sessions of prayer conducted by Protestant clergymen, a Roman Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi; and the credit men were uplifted by a sermon by Dr. Parkes Cadman on "Religion in Business. So frequent was the use of the Bible to point the lessons of business and of business to point the lessons of the Bible that it was sometimes difficult to determine which was supposed to gain the most from the association.

Fred F. French, a New York builder and real-estate man, told his salesman, "There is no such thing as a reason why not," and continued: "One evidence of the soundness of this theory may be found in the command laid down in Matthew vii:7 by the Greatest Human-nature Expert that ever lived, 'Knock and it shall be opened unto you. French salesmen had immeasurably strengthened their own characters and power, so that during this year they will serve our stockholders at a lower commission rate, and yet each one will earn more money for himself than in nineteen hundred twenty-five.

Yet in other cases it was not so certain that business was not the standard, and Scripture complimented by being lifted to the business level. Witness, for example, the pamphlet on Moses, Persuader of Men issued by the Metropolitan Casualty Insurance Company with an introduction by the indefatigable Doctor Cadman , which declared that "Moses was one of the greatest salesmen and real-estate promoters that ever lived," that he was a "Dominant, Fearless, and Successful Personality in one of the most magnificent selling campaigns that history ever placed upon its pages.

Barton sold Christianity to the public by showing its resemblance to business. Jesus, this book taught, was not only "the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem," and "an outdoor man," but a great executive. Nowhere is there such a startling example of executive success as the way in which that organization was brought together.

He would be a national advertiser today. Because he was the author of the ideal of service. The Gospel According to Bruce Barton met a popular demand. Under the beneficient influence of Coolidge Prosperity, business had become almost the national religion of America. Millions of people wanted to be reassured the this religion was altogether right and proper, and that in the rules for making big money lay all the law and prophets.

Was it strange that during the very years when the Barton Gospel was circulating most vigorously, selling and advertising campaigns were becoming more cynical and the American business world was refusing to exercise itself over the Teapot Dome disclosures the sordid history of the Continental Trading Company? Perhaps; but it must be remembered that in all religions there is likely to be a gap between faith and works.

The businessman's halo did not always fit, but he wore it proudly. So the prosperity band-wagon rolled along with throttle wide open and siren blaring. But what of the man on the driver's seat, the man whose name this era bore? He did not have a jutting chin, a Powerful Personality, or an irresistible flow of selling talk. If you had come from Timbuctoo and found him among a crowd of Chamber of Commerce boosters, he would have been the last man you would have picked as their patron saint.

He had never been in business. His canonization by the hosts of quantity production and high-pressure salesmanship was a sublime paradox--and yet it was largely justified. Almost the most remarkable thing about Coolidge Prosperity was Calvin Coolidge.

He was a meager-looking man, a Vermonter with a hatchet face, sandy hair, tight lips, and the expression, as William Allen White remarked, of one "looking down his nose to locate that evil smell which seemed forever to affront him. In private he could be garrulous, but in public he was as silent as a cake of ice.

When his firmness in the Boston police strike captured the attention of the country and brought him to Washington as Vice-President, not even the affable warmth of the Harding Administration could thaw him. The Vice-President has to go to many a formal dinner; Coolidge went--and said nothing. The hostesses of Washington were dismayed and puzzled.

Coolidge became President, and still the frost continued. Nor did this silence cloak a wide-ranging mind. Coolidge know his American history, but neither he nor his intellect had ever ventured far abroad. Go through his addresses and his smug Autobiography , and the most original thing you will find in them is his uncompromising unoriginality. Calvin Coolidge still believed in the old American copybook maxims when almost everybody else had half forgotten them or was beginning to doubt them.

By Jerry L. Wallace President Warren G. Harding speaking at the burial of the Unknown Soldier. On the platform with him are Mrs. Harding and Vice President and Mrs. Calvin […].

It is with great sorrow that the Coolidge Foundation reports the passing of longtime Trustee, Thomas F. Tom, whom our community knows well from his loyal presence at the […]. Wallace An excerpt from Mr. This March 4th marked the th anniversary of Calvin […]. Massachusetts was hit hard. By […]. By John Hendrickson In a speech honoring the veterans who fought and fell at the Battle of Gettysburg, President Calvin Coolidge not only addressed the need for national security and protecting veterans, but he also stated that a strong economy was just as necessary as national defense in securing the nation.

Coolidge's foreign policy also fell into some disrepute when it became clear that his signature achievements, including the Dawes Plan and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, did little to prevent the rise of Nazism in Germany or the resurgence of international hostilities. The peace of the s faded almost as quickly as the prosperity.

But Coolidge also led the nation, if passively, into the modern era. He was a bridge between two epochs. In the conservative s, Coolidge regained some of his stature, at least in conservative circles. President Ronald Reagan returned his portrait to the Oval Office. Reagan also praised Coolidge's political style and hands-off leadership for producing seven years of prosperity, peace, and balanced budgets. Nevertheless, scholarly opinion looks upon the Coolidge presidency with skepticism, ranking him relatively low among American chief executives in terms of his administration's positive impact and legacy.

He is better understood as a transitional figure between the 19th century and the 20th. He embodied the small-town values of thrift and industry and a philosophy of minimal government, but at the same time he celebrated the economic boom over which he presided, and he embraced the new media of the modern culture.

Coolidge's domestic legacy can generally be described as conservative. His main concern was to sustain the economic prosperity that was returning when he took office. He favored a light hand in regulating business, strove hard to balance the budget even managing to run a surplus , and cut the national debt. His fiscal restraint led him to veto two bills, both popular in Congress, that would have given bonuses to veterans--only to see them passed with a two-thirds majority.

The centerpiece of Coolidge's domestic agenda was his tax cutting. He championed the Revenue Acts of and , a pet issue of his Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, the wealthy Pittsburgh industrialist whose "trickle-down economics" would later fall into disrepute. The Revenue Acts sharply reduced income taxes, especially surtaxes on the wealthy taxes on most Americans were already very low.

They also cut gift, excise, and inheritance taxes. At the time, many observers credited the cuts for what was widely called the "Coolidge Prosperity": robust growth, rising wages, declining unemployment and inflation, and a bull market. In fact, such propitious conditions probably had more to do with the effects of wartime spending and economic mobilization several years before. It would be unfair to blame Coolidge for sharing the prevalent optimism of his time.

In retrospect, however, it became apparent that his policies contributed to the stock market crash of and the Great Depression that followed. His fiscal policy encouraged speculation and ignored inequality, as the flow of dollars into the pockets of the wealthy helped tip the healthy investment of the mids into the gambling that followed.

His hands-off regulatory policy took its toll especially in the financial arena, where the dangerous practice of margin trading was allowed to flourish unrestrained.