Amity Shlaes > Quotes

“I regard a good budget as among the noblest monuments of virtue.”
― Amity Shlaes, Coolidge

“Who is the forgotten man...? I know him as intimately as my own undershirt. He is the fellow that is trying to get along without public relief... In the meantime the taxpayers go on supporting many that would not work if they had jobs.”
― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or in the better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X…. What I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who never is thought of…. He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays…. —WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER, YALE UNIVERSITY, 1883”
― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“Isn’t it a strange thing,” he asked Barton, “that in every period of social unrest men have the notion that they can pass a law and suspend the operations of economic law?”
― Amity Shlaes, Coolidge

“Under Coolidge, the federal debt fell. Under Coolidge, the top income tax rate came down by half, to 25 percent. Under Coolidge, the federal budget was always in surplus. Under Coolidge, unemployment was 5 percent or even 3 percent. Under Coolidge, Americans wired their homes for electricity and bought their first cars or household appliances on credit. Under Coolidge, the economy grew strongly, even as the federal government shrank. Under Coolidge, the rates of patent applications and patents granted increased dramatically. Under Coolidge, there came no federal antilynching law, but lynchings themselves became less frequent and Ku Klux Klan membership dropped by millions. Under Coolidge, a man from a town without a railroad station, Americans moved from the road into the air. Under Coolidge, religious faith found its modern context: the first great White House Christmas tree was lit, an ingenious use for the new technology, electricity. Under Coolidge, the number of local telephone calls went up by a quarter. In Silent Cal’s time, Americans learned to chatter. Under Coolidge, wages rose and interest rates came down so that the poor might borrow more easily. Under Coolidge, the rich came to pay a greater share of the income tax.”
― Amity Shlaes, Coolidge

“We have no money to bestow upon a class of people that is not taken from the whole people,” he continued; the individual was going to lose out to the group.”
― Amity Shlaes, Coolidge

“Coolidge had ladled out his share of mockery, especially in college, but could see now that attack politics yielded poor results. The best way to win was to stick to the issues and forgo any personal attacks or name-calling. Civility would be his rule from now on. He would try it out in his next campaign, for the office of state representative in Boston.”
― Amity Shlaes, Coolidge

“The big question about the American depression is not whether war with Germany and Japan ended it. It is why the Depression lasted until that war. From 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, government intervention helped to make the Depression Great.”
― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“Coolidge believed higher taxes were wrong because they took away from men money that was their property; he believed lower rates were good precisely because they encouraged enterprise, but also because they brought less money. Low rates starved the government beast.”
― Amity Shlaes, Coolidge

“It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.”
― Amity Shlaes, Coolidge

“It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly and for the most part sincerely assured of their greatness,”
― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“One should never trouble about getting a better job. But one should do one’s present job in such a manner as to qualify for a better job when it comes along.” The”
― Amity Shlaes, Coolidge

“In New York, Italian Americans became symbols of success; one of these, the half-Jewish Fiorello LaGuardia, represented the state as a Republican in Congress. Another proud group were his cousins, the Jews, both the older German Jews and the newer East European Jews. Jews at the time had a general belief in charity and taking care of one another: “All Israel is responsible for one another.” In addition, they were aware of a specific history in New York; Peter Stuyvesant had asked the Dutch West India Company to ban Jewish settlement, but the company had allowed Jews to stay as long as the Jewish poor “be supported by their own nation.” The colonial Jews had pledged that they would, and the commitment was still alive. As late as the 1910s, philanthropist Jacob Schiff said that “a Jew would rather cut his hand off than apply for relief from non-Jewish sources.”
― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“Surveying the travails of the thirtieth president, some writers have suggested that those personal defeats are the essence of the Coolidge story. They err. Coolidge’s is not a story of “Yes, but.” It is a story of “But yes.” For at every stage, Coolidge did push forward, and so triumph.”
― Amity Shlaes, Coolidge

“Roosevelt won because he created a new kind of interest-group politics. The idea that Americans might form a political group that demanded something from government was well known and thoroughly reported a century earlier by Alexis de Tocqueville. The idea that such groups might find mainstream parties to support them was not novel either: Republicans, including the Harding and Coolidge administrations, had long practiced interest-group politics on behalf of big business. But Roosevelt systematized interest-group politics more generally to include many constituencies—labor, senior citizens, farmers, union workers. The president made groups where only individual citizens or isolated cranks had stood before, ministered to those groups, and was rewarded with votes. It is no coincidence that the first peacetime year in American history in which federal spending outpaced the total spending of the states and towns was that election year of 1936. It can even be argued that one year—1936—created the modern entitlement challenge that so bedevils both parties only.”
― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“Once, on a walk with the president, Senator Selden Spencer of Missouri tried to cheer Coolidge by pointing to the White House and asking, in a joking tone, who might live there. “Nobody,” Coolidge replied, “they just come and go.”
― Amity Shlaes, Coolidge

“In autumn 1937, the New York Times delivered its analysis of the economy’s downturn: “The cause is attributed by some to taxation and alleged federal curbs on industry; by others, to the demoralization of production caused by strikes.” Both the taxes and the strikes were the result of Roosevelt policy; the strikes had been made possible by the Wagner Act the year before. As scholars have long noted, the high wages generated by New Deal legislation helped those workers who earned them. But the inflexibility of those wages also prevented companies from hiring additional workers. Hence the persistent shortage of jobs in the latter part of the 1930s.”
― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“But there are many fields in which Coolidge surpassed other men and other presidents and set a standard. Most presidents place faith in action; the modern presidency is perpetual motion. Coolidge made virtue of inaction. “Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation,” he told his colleagues in the Massachusetts Senate. “It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones,” he wrote to his father as early as 1910. Congress always says, “Do.” Coolidge replied, “Do not do,” or, at least, “Do less.” Whereas other presidents made themselves omnipresent, Coolidge held back. At the time, and subsequently, many have deemed the Coolidge method laziness. Upon examination, however, the inaction reflects strength. In politics as in business, it is often harder, after all, not to do, to delegate, than to do. Coolidge is our great refrainer.”
― Amity Shlaes, Coolidge

“Other new institutions, such as the National Recovery Administration, did damage. The NRA’s mandate mistook macroeconomic problems for micro problems—it sought to solve the monetary challenge through price setting. NRA rules were so stringent they perversely hurt businesses. They frightened away capital, and they discouraged employers from hiring workers. Another problem was that laws like that which created the NRA—and Roosevelt signed a number of them—were so broad that no one knew how they would be interpreted. The resulting hesitation in itself arrested growth.”
― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“Most presidents place faith in action; the modern presidency is perpetual motion. Coolidge made virtue of inaction.”
― Amity Shlaes, Coolidge

“Justice George Sutherland had led the Supreme Court in a sweeping rejection of the minimum wage in the District of Columbia. In his opinion—the case was called Adkins—Sutherland said that the minimum wage infringed on the individual’s liberty to contract with his employer. The Sutherland opinion fit in with Coolidge’s own general attitude, that the individual should have primacy—“All liberty is individual,” he had said in a speech in 1924.”
― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“Any man of energy and initiative in this country can get what he wants out of life. But when initiative is crippled by legislation or by a tax system which denies him the right to receive a reasonable share of his earnings, then he will no longer exert himself and the country will be deprived of the energy on which its continued greatness depends.”
― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“Back in 1910, word of the rise of the skyscraper in New York had panicked congressmen, who promptly zoned height limits for buildings in the District of Columbia, so that no private building could ever overshadow the Capitol.”
― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine…what A, B, and C shall do for X.” But what about C? There was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C to the cause. C was the forgotten man, the man who paid, “the man who never is thought of.”
― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“Others were of humbler background: those farmers who found themselves forced to kill off their piglets in a time of hunger because FDR’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration ordained they must;”
― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“While still young, Walter was fired for organizing a rally for Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party. When, in 1931, Henry Ford sold the production equipment of the Model T to the Soviet Union, Walter and Victor went over to teach Russian workers how to run assembly lines.”
― Amity Shlaes, Great Society: A New History

“Applying his own elegant algebra of politics, Sumner warned that well-intentioned social progressives often coerced unwitting average citizens into funding dubious social projects. Sumner wrote: “As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine…what A, B, and C shall do for X.” But what about C? There was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C to the cause. C was the forgotten man, the man who paid, “the man who never is thought of.”
― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“The New Yorker magazine’s cartoons of the plump, terrified Wall Streeter were accurate; business was terrified of the president. But the cartoons did not depict the consequences of that intimidation: that businesses decided to wait Roosevelt out, hold on to their cash, and invest in future years.”
― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“Hoover had also created a Division of Simplified Practices, whose job it was to standardize and harmonize the distressinly fractious and unresponsible manufacturing and construction sectors. In those days roads were often still paved in brick, and brick was a typical example: sixty-six different sizes were being produced by manufacturers when Hoover ordered research on the topic. This was sheer waste, as far as the utilitarian Hoover was concerned. He therefore pulled the nation's paving-brick firms into a room and settled the matter; the range of sizes dropped from sixty-six to eleven. Emboldened, Hoover also looked into brick for homes; here he claimed victoryoutright, for the number of sizes went "from forty-four to one," the praiseful Irvin reported. Then there were beds. Seventy-four different sizes were available; as a result of encouragement from Hoover, the figure went down to four" (page 37)”
― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness.”
― Amity Shlaes, Coolidge