What was Coolidge: Austerity and Integrity?

Answer 1

Coolidge believed in small government, and basically did not do much while in office when it came to regulating business, etc. Since his time in office was part of the Roaring Twenties, I don't know that you could call it an austere time.

Warren G. Harding and his administration were corrupt--see the Teapot Dome Scandal. Coolidge, who in his personal manner was upright and honest, brought integrity back to the White House.

Read more about him here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Coolidge

Answer 2

Calvin Coolidge was president was in the 1920s. He slept 12 hours and took naps during the day. He said never do anything that you can get someone else to do.

Coolidge was honest, but lazy and overrated. America did not have much foreign policy responsibilities during his time. The facts I think show he handled the economy poorly. Coolidge left office in 1929 (president from 1923-29). In October 1929 America's greatest depression hit. Coolidge narrowly escaped it. The President Herbert Hoover, really had been in office too short a time to have caused it; he was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Coolidge's economic policies had too big tax cuts for the very wealthy, and not enough for the masses. In short, too many people, not the very, very rich, had too little money. Without people able to buy products, business collapsed. The stock market crash was part of the Great Depression, but not all of it.

Coolidge was so sold out to big business, it is really hard for me to think of him as having integrity. His Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon actually had government workers develop ways to keep him from paying taxes! The austerity was maybe for the large number of poor, but the Roaring Twenties was not time of restraint or prudent living by the very, very wealthy that Coolidge courted so much.

Like much in politics Coolidgism may have appeared austere and having integrity on the surface. But the facts show he let Wall Street and big business run wild. The country paid a terrible price for these poor policies. However, Coolidge managed to leave office; leaving Hoover to reap, what his predecessor had sown.