Coolidge's legacy

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By

Calvin Coolidge

by David Greenberg, Times Books, $20, 202 pages

On Tuesday, Sept. 9, 1919, Boston policemen voted to strike. They wanted to unionize; management wouldn't allow it. That evening more than 1,100 of the 1,500-plus cops walked off their beats. News of the walkout spread and "looters and hooligans" gathered in South Boston, the North End and the West End.

It began innocently enough, but as David Greenberg writes in "Calvin Coolidge," "After midnight, the tomfoolery escalated into riots." Windows were smashed, shops raided, three men died. Mayor Andrew Peters called out the state militia, which couldn't stop the violence. By Thursday, the governor called the full state guard, which did.

Police Commissioner Edwin Curtis fired the striking cops and began hiring replacements. American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers sent a telegram to Peters and Gov. Calvin Coolidge protesting the firings. The governor didn't budge. "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time," wrote Coolidge.

According to Mr. Greenberg, Rutgers historian and columnist for Slate, those 15 words changed everything. Coolidge went from a reasonably successful pol to a rising star. He won reelection by more than 100,000 votes and was nominated for vice president by the Republicans at their 1920 convention.

The Massachusetts governor's decision made him popular with middle-class voters who distrusted aggressive unionism. Mr. Greenberg peers through the lens of public relations at the Boston strike and Coolidge's subsequent actions as governor, vice president, and -- following the death of President Warren Harding -- president. He argues that our 30th president's small-government, pro-business policies were ill-considered but well sold.

He's half right. Harding and Coolidge ran after World War I. Taxes were high, wartime measures were still in place and dissenters sat rotting in jails. Republicans promised to return the country to "normalcy," which sounded OK to voters.

They kept that promise. The government let dissenters out of prison, scaled back or scrapped wartime restrictions (such as the Army's absurd claim that it owned all radio frequencies), froze federal spending and reduced the national debt. Taxes were cut four times during Coolidge's six years in office. With wartime surtaxes still in place, the top tax rate was about 70 percent when he became president, 20 percent when he retired.