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Churchill and the Presidents: Calvin Coolidge
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | July 22, 2015
- Category: Churchill and the Presidents Explore
President Coolidge (2 August 1923 – 4 March 1929)
Seated next to President Coolidge at a White House dinner, a woman is alleged to have told him she had made a bet that she could get at least three words of conversation from the notoriously taciturn “Silent Cal.” The President supposedly replied: “You lose.”
This is a misrepresentation, since Coolidge actually said a great deal. He wrote his own speeches, and held more press conferences than any other president. Nevertheless his taciturn reputation contrasts with the voluble Churchill. Though both could be described as classic liberals (Coolidge actualy championed much “progressive” legislation), they disagreed vehemently. Churchill found as much fault with the Reublican Coolidge as he had the liberal Democrat Wilson.
The war debt issue
Churchill years as Chancellor of the Exchequer mainly align with Coolidge’s presidency. Churchill’s focus was on Britain’s war debt, which Coolidge insisted be repaid. Meanwhile, the U.S. made loans to Germany, trying to shore up the shaky Weimar Republic. The money moved on a kind of carousel.
Churchill wrote that this was “a severe and improvident condition for both borrower and lender.” Coolidge’s retort was famous: ‘They hired the money, didn’t they?” Churchill retorted: “This laconic statement was true, but not exhaustive…. Transfer of goods and services…are not only just but beneficial. Payments which are only the arbitrary, artificial transmission across the exchange of such very large sums as arise in war finance cannot fail to derange the whole process of world economy.”
By 1928 the argument had become acute, and Coolidge became vocal: “It is sometimes represented that we made a profit out of the war,” he declared. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” The war had cost America “half her national wealth…. No citizen of the United States needs to make any apology to anybody anywhere for not having done our duty to the cause of world liberty.” Toward Europe “we have accepted settlements of obligations, not in accordance with what was due, but in accordance with the merciful principle of what the debtors could pay.”
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“My blood boiled at Coolidge’s proclamation,” Churchill wrote his wife. “Why can’t they let us alone? They have exacted every penny owing from Europe; they say they are not going to help; surely they might leave us to manage our own affairs.”
To the British cabinet Churchill was even more censorious: Coolidge, he wrote, had “the viewpoint of a New England backwoodsman. The crudity and amateurish character of this utterance is likely to offer his successor an opportunity for doing something different….Mr. Coolidge will soon sink back into the obscurity from which only accident extracted him.”
Naval disagreements
Coolidge did nothing to improve his standing in Britain by calling for another naval conference in 1927, then announcing a massive naval expansion. “Winston talked very freely about the USA,” wrote a visitor to Chartwell. “He thinks they are arrogant, fundamentally hostile to us, and that they wish to dominate world politics. He thinks their ‘Big Navy’ talk is a bluff which we ought to call. He considers we ought to say firmly that we must decide for ourselves how large a navy we require, and that America must do the same.”
Coolidge’s naval program seemed again to threaten British relations, the historian John Charmley wrote. Vice-Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman privately characterized American policy “as wanting to ‘get a good election cry for Coolidge by saying they had not only made a further peace move, but also twisted the British Lion’s tail by making him reduce his cruiser strength.’”
Coolidge’s deft diplomacy
But historian Peter Calvocoressi disagreed: “Such was the seriousness of the rift and exchange of recriminations that only the exercise of considerable efforts by President Coolidge and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin halted the downhill slide of Anglo-American relations, by snatching the issues from the hands of the feuding naval experts and rebuilding political common sense.” *
And Bridgeman was wrong about Coolidge’s personal agenda. In August 1927, the President shocked Americans by announcing, in the midst of peace and plenty: “I do not choose to run.” Good, said a still-unmollified Churchill: “His successor has the advantage of starting with the American attitude to Europe at its very worst, and it is hardly in human nature that he should not try to strike a different note and achieve solutions beyond his predecessor’s scope.”
In the event, more ominous developments than naval rivalries were soon to envelope Coolidge’s successor, and Winston Churchill with him.
Endnote
* Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint and John Pritchard, Total War: Causes and Courses of The Second World War (Revised Second Edition, Pantheon, 1989), 694.