Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Watch the Video

In today’s episode, Amity Shlaes reveals how your student can get a full-ride scholarship to any accredited college or university in the U.S. through the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation!

Amity is the Chairman of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, which exists to ensure that this inspirational president and his morals are not lost to history.

Beyond the scholarship, we’ll discuss why Coolidge deserves to be elevated to the top tier of presidential greats and how Coolidge's principled, limited-government approach to the presidency stands in stark contrast to the big-spending activist federal government that has become the norm in modern times.

To learn more, visit https://coolidgescholars.org/

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us someone I've just gotten to know in the last year or so, and it's been a real thrill because of the things she's involved with that I enjoy. Her name is Amity Shlaes. Welcome.

Amity Shlaes:
So glad to be with you.

Marlin Detweiler:
It's good to see you again. I look forward to seeing you again this winter with other things. But for now, I want to hear you talk a little bit about your background to give people a little context. You currently serve with the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation as its chairman, I believe. Is that correct?

Amity Shlaes:
That is correct.

Marlin Detweiler:
Tell us a little bit about yourself personally and how you got to this point in your life.

Amity Shlaes:
Well, I got here. Thank you. And thank you to all the families who are joining us and endeavoring to educate their children, which is always exciting, fun, and a long haul. I'm an economic historian. That is how I got here. But I'll speak a little bit about that. Just very briefly, Marlin. I grew up in Chicago around the University of Chicago, which is a university of inquiry. It's okay to ask a question at the University of Chicago, and it was and still is to some degree.

I went to college at Yale and became a young reporter, writer, or editor. All those jobs I held at the Wall Street Journal and worked there for many years, just about two decades. That led me to economic history because when one goes to work for an institution, even if it's Merrill Lynch or Fidelity, when asked what's this about – What is the SEC? What is the FTC? What is the 5% rule? What are all the things one encounters when working in the financial world in whatever situation? And the journal editors were very much in the present, as newspaper people are. Well, that's just the way the road goes. When this happens, say a company buys 5% of another company.

Well, then we write a two-inch story. And finally, I decided to find out where this all came from, and much of it came from American statute in the 1930s. What was the creation of the SEC? Of the Fed? What was the New Deal? So I became an economic historian. After I left the journal I served under Robert Leroy Bartley, who, alas, passed too early.

He was the editor of the editorial page and made it what it is. If you enjoy the editorial page now of the journal, it was created by Bob Bartley and continued by Paul, his protégé. I worked there, and then I went as a financial columnist. Excuse me. There's a siren here in Washington, so we'll give it a pause.

I was a financial columnist on political economy for the Financial Times of London for half a decade, and also at Bloomberg. I served as a senior scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, always delving into economic history, and wrote a couple of books. The one many readers know is Forgotten Man, which is the history of the 1930s. And that's where I come from.

Marlin Detweiler:
That's wonderful. Now, how did you go from the Wall Street Journal to the Coolidge Foundation?

Amity Shlaes:
Well, after I wrote The Forgotten Man, a history of the 1930s, the headline on the story of the '30s is They Broke It. That is, the government broke our economy. But what was unbroken before they broke it? What was it in America that made it prosper all the periods before the Great Depression? And if you go back to that, you come to Calvin Coolidge.

You could write a book about the '20s. You could write a book about the man who made the '20s. I chose the latter. People like to hear people stories. So I turned to Coolidge, and I found in him a worthy subject. He's a difficult person to write about because his papers, ephemera, letters, and correspondence are scattered.

He doesn't have a great presidential library the way modern presidents do. And that is mainly because he didn't want it that way, Marlin. He didn't want to take government money to have himself glorified. He had a real modest streak. He was even a little sanctimonious about that. Sanctimony is also a sin. And as a result, it's hard to find his papers.

But the Coolidge family is very helpful. The Coolidge site, the state of Vermont, has quite a beautiful collection of Coolidge items, and I'm very grateful to them. The Vermont Historical Society, which is in Barry, Vermont, has wonderful letters from his family. And, of course, the Library of Congress and the archives have something.

So I was able to piece it together and write his bio. And then I thought, this is a wonderful man. He's ranked, I don't know, in the 20s or 30s. He should be in the top ten. And I went on the board of the Coolidge Foundation and eventually became its chairman.

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay. Tell us what the Coolidge Foundation does. What do you promote? What do you seek to accomplish?

Amity Shlaes:
It's quite simple. Since secondary schools, except ones in your world, sir, neglect Calvin Coolidge, our job is to share Coolidge and his values with other Americans. Which means they learn about his bio, particularly young Americans who don't get standard history in public schools or many private schools. So, his bio, who he was, he was the 30th president when he served, and so on.

But mainly his values. He was a determined federalist. When he could, he spoke of the United States in plural. "The United States are" not "is." And that was because he emphasized the states. He said the United States are inviolate only insofar as states. Arizona is inviolate. He was talking about a new state, Arizona.

He was a determined federalist. He actually cut the federal budget, which today presidents don't do. If they manage, maybe they might cut the increase in the rate of growth of the federal government. He actually cut it, and he cut the federal debt. So he's very interesting. When we started at the foundation, we thought we should get to young people.

That was important. We thought we should get these messages out. So we created the Coolidge Scholarship, which is a full-ride scholarship for academic merit. We do have some homeschool winners, by the way, in case you're wondering. It's incredibly competitive. There are over 4,000 candidates right now for four scholarships or five. In addition to that, we have a senator's program for the top 100.

So if a child is inducted into the senator's program of the Coolidge Foundation, in the application process, students are required as applicants to write two research essays about Calvin Coolidge. Each year, we're the proud parents of about 8,000 essays by America's 16-year-olds on tough questions in Coolidge's life, such as, why didn't he go to his own state when it had a natural disaster?

Or why did he cut the tax rate to 25%? Was it for the rich? Our essay questions require research, and they're really hard. So in that way, we educate about 4,000 American top students each year. And then when a child wins, if he wins a scholarship, he wins a real golden ticket to college. Everything paid wherever he wants to go.

If he becomes a senator. He's already in our or she's already in our community. And we do lots of things with the senators. The kids love the senator program, and they stay with us just about forever when they can. We have Coolidge House in Washington, to which we invite them. We have a great conference on the Declaration, if you're hot for that, in early January. We've just confirmed that justice, by the way, very eminent people will be speaking, so your children will not be bored at this conference. Sometimes it helps for young people to actually see the lives of people instead of seeing them on TV or Zoom. The scholarship is a big draw for us.

We also have a new debate director and a debate program that's really exciting. If you'd like to organize a debate in your territory, we debate the square traditional way about modern topics such as, was the COVID lockdown productive? We have tough questions. And kids really like that because it gives them a chance to play with ideas and maybe make some arguments again that they might not hear in school or try out what they've heard from their parents or read.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, what was it for you? I tell you what, I don't know where to go. You mentioned so many things in a couple of paragraphs there. Let me just say my first real exposure to Calvin Coolidge was through the scholarship program by being asked to be on a panel to review some of the applicants. I believe I was involved at a semifinal level, where there were, I think, ten groups, like the one I was on, reviewing students to narrow it down for the finalists for you and your team to then determine.

And it was remarkable what we saw. It was right up the alley of the kind of education we were providing. And so I appreciate you plugging that because I think our students would enjoy being part of that process. So you plugging it is something that I applaud because I think it is a really wonderful way for students to learn, to argue, to improve their writing and to express their thinking about things that we think are important to Veritas. So thank you.

Amity Shlaes:
There are no preferences in this program, and I wouldn't know which were your students because we really do try to make it as objective as we can, out of fairness to them. But if there's a teacher who would like to, you know, with the student applies, you'll see the essay questions.

And we do have material we supply to the kids that is primary sources so they can get at the real issue in the question. If they just Google the question, they might, for example, see Coolidge's tax rate was 25%. Wait, doesn't that help the rich? Wait a minute. When Coolidge cut the taxes, the rich paid a greater share of taxes because they were more active and invested more and therefore had more taxable activity.

Many schools don't convey that. And many high school teachers haven't worked on that. So we supply the material for the student to inform himself. And it's not that hard because the way we lived a century ago was more intuitive, a common law way, a respectful way, a way that respected commerce in particular and business activity.

So when someone made money, we didn't assume he was a demon. We saw that he might give back in charity. I know in your crowd, there's a lot of important charity. But also, creating work for someone is a good thing to do for him as well. So when you employ people, you're doing good for the world.

You don't have to wait to give back till you're old. You're already giving back by hiring people and involving them in interesting work.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Well, to the scholarship application in particular, I could tell that the process in and of itself would be remarkably rewarding. Some of the opportunities for those to succeed and go to the level of being a senator or even a scholarship recipient makes it simply that much more valuable. But the process itself was obviously a valuable one. You could see how the students grew through that process. Yeah, I couldn't recommend it more. It was wonderful.

Amity Shlaes:
Oh, thank you. Well, it's two and a half essays about Calvin Coolidge. So, dear parents, that ends up being about 20 or 30 hours of work for the kid. So be prepared for that. But they're learning something they ought to learn in class anyway. One day I'd like to publish all the students' essays.

We're very jealous of their privacy, so I have to get permissions from the kids. We do have a magazine for our children—I'm sorry to call them children, so let's say secondary school students and college students—where they mix with adults. They're writing with the great names of their era, right side by side with them. We have a book club for them. And so on...

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, taking the Coolidge Presidential Foundation as a whole, looking back in 20 years from now, back to today, what would you want to be able to say that you accomplished? What do you hope to accomplish in this time frame?

Amity Shlaes:
Well, that's a wonderful question, and I'm so grateful you're focusing on this. This has been my ten year’s effort. Founding a college costs hundreds of millions of dollars. The Coolidge is essentially a workaround—an alternate community without having to get accreditation, dorms, fire department approval, state approval. It's a club, a community, a friend group with beautiful sites.

Here in Washington, you can see Coolidge House behind me. It was the home of John Thompson Mason, the nephew of George Mason. And, of course, we have in the lovely state of Vermont, the Coolidge homestead site, which we hope you visit in Plymouth. What I hope is that we can award 12 scholarships a year.

So that's 12 full rides. We have 48 offspring—Coolidges—in college at any time. Twelve is a magic number for friendship. As those of you who've been in a frat or a seminar class know, the 12 become close to each other. I fully expect that the young Coolidges will lead the world.

I don't know what party they'll be in, and I don't care, but it will be a good party, and they'll make it better politically. So 12 a year, and we are endowing that, which is contrary to the culture right now. Nobody wants to give to endowments because maybe their intent won't be honored. That is possible.

But we have a very strong board and a very strong president, Matthew Denhart, who you met, Marlin. So for at least two generations, I'd say we'll be a good investment. You protect, and so that's my goal, endowing 12, and that's less than building two buildings at some universities.

Marlin Detweiler:
I love that. That's great. You mentioned a story from Calvin Coolidge's presidency. You mentioned a local disaster that happened. Unpack that story for us because I think that is a wonderful story for us to hear in the here and now when we are so quick to dole out money, regardless of political party. We're spending money like there's no tomorrow. And he had a very different take.

Amity Shlaes:
Yeah. Well, right now, resources don't feel scarce because we have a sort of strange monetary idol or euphoria right now, but that can't last. Coolidge was not drunk, and he was not euphoric. He saw with clear eyes that money is a scarce resource for the federal government and for families. He came from a farm town, and his culture was specific to that.

If you have parents who are reading English, Irish, or Scottish philosophers, he was like Edmund Burke. Burke had a famous incident in Bristol, which he represented, where he said, "I'm now a national lawmaker, and it's not my job to represent your economic interests alone. When I'm in Parliament, it's my job to represent all of England when I make decisions, it would be wrong for me to play favorites with my old home.”

Of course, that attitude was Coolidge's. When he was president, he wasn't president of his old home, Vermont, or his other old home, Massachusetts. He was president of the United States. So as U.S. president, he had to act in the interest of the U.S.

As it happened, when he was president, there was a terrible national disaster, the great flood of the Mississippi in 1927. It was worse than Katrina, and Coolidge did not go down. Why? People said, "Well, if it were his own town—he wasn't from the South—but if it were his own people, he'd go. What's wrong with him?" He's cold. Well, there was a very specific reason. First of all, the state has to invite Washington into its house when it has a disaster. That's also why President George Bush, 43, hesitated before going to Louisiana during Katrina. He needs the invitation of the governor because the president, and Coolidge was a meticulous constitutionalist, is not commander in chief domestically, only abroad.

So he said this is the state's job and we’ll send the Red Cross, which was a little bit connected, you know, had the government sponsorship in that period, though it was a charity. And I'll send the Commerce secretary, but I'm not going to go because I also don't want to be overridden when Congress passes an expensive spending bill on floods. And there's a snapshot of me helping the people at a disaster, then the compelling nature of the human distress, which was real, will cause a law to be passed. That's not in all of our interest and will later cause other distress, that is too much spending. So he didn't go. He was criticized roundly. And people said, well, if it were Vermont, he would be going. Well, sort of biblical retribution, or it felt like it.

There was a flood in Vermont that year. Let's test the guy as if he were Job. That's sort of the way it must have felt to Coolidge, and his own little streets, you know, very near him. The bridges were washed away, and he was from a poor part of Vermont, often flooded. They used to call a little flood the tear fresh sometimes. Anyway, Vermont was devastated. Actually, the lieutenant governor was killed when he tried to get out of his car. The waters were rushing so hard.

So people said, of course, Coolidge would go, and he did not. Oh, he's a cold turkey, right? He's a cold jerk. He's not even going to. This old man has no heart. Yeah, not at all.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. You can’t win in either circumstance.

Amity Shlaes:
You can't win. But he really felt that he shouldn't show favoritism. And he also would be forced to increase some spending there. He was overridden often at this point, but he didn't want to do it. He didn't want to be the man who took his finger to stick to the water metaphor out of the dike, right? So he was trying to restrain federal spending, and there were all these laws, you know, when we think of the Army Corps of Engineers, that kind of national activity to work in natural disasters.

So he didn't go. He sent Herbert Hoover, the commerce secretary, who liked to jump in. Anyway, Hoover was a great rescuer. And I think the Vermonters understood. They said there's one line: he can't do for his own what he didn't do for others. Yeah. And a year later, he went back and sort of wrote a poem of a speech, very short, where he expressed his love and pain over the flood in Vermont.

All the bridges were destroyed, all the Christmas trees were washed away. And Christmas trees, pine trees, are a big harvest for Vermont, which is, as we say, a poor state. And he said, Vermont is a state I love. And he spoke of the brave little people of Vermont who teach the rest of us what fortitude is in their own efforts.

So it was a different kind of reaction. You could say Burkean, you could say what you want, but also a very American reaction to the limits of government, really.

Marlin Detweiler:
Showed the limits in a way that I would consider to be a real blessing. There's another story that maybe shows his sense of humor and the fact that he was a man of few words. Do you know what story I'm talking about?

Amity Shlaes:
Yes, I do, but just remember, no one makes it to the US presidency if he's shy. Maybe he was an introvert. President Obama is an introvert. President Wilson was an introvert. I think Ike was an introvert, too. But he was not shy. He didn't like to talk. He didn't grow up in a talky family.

But he also knew that if he talked, he would end up giving money away or favors. Right. So if you cut something short, the mendicant goes away after a point. In this story, Coolidge vetoed 50 bills. His favorite veto was the pocket veto because you don't have to speak about it. Write a message. You can just kill that bill, spending mostly.

There's a famous social party story. He was sitting next to a lady in Washington, and she said, I made a bet I can get you to say more than two words tonight. And he said to the lady, you lose.

Marlin Detweiler:
I just thought that was hilarious when I first heard that. I can't imagine a sitting president sitting there knowing that he can't say another word for the rest of the night. There aren't any presidents that could have done that but him.

Amity Shlaes:
Well, you know, we all know that type. They're just not on television. And in fact, Mr. Bartley, I used to work for the great editor of the Wall Street Journal, didn't talk a lot. I think the conversations went in grunts, and I discovered pretty fast that the more garrulous the editorialists, the less productive he was. The productivity of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, regarding individuals, was in an inverse proportion to the amount they talked.

The more silent someone was, the more productive. And those of you who come from a farm background will recognize Coolidge very easily. Farmers don't flop over. They don't tell you everything the first time they meet you. They put their money under the mattress. Coolidge came from that background.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. And he practiced that his entire life. It's remarkable. I've told people this before, and I'll say it again. If you're not familiar with the character with which he led our country, he is somebody to become familiar with.

Amity Shlaes:
Well, yes. And when I wrote the Coolidge biography, I'm his biographer. It's called Coolidge. It's long, but he's worth it. I struggled with what to put at the beginning. One thing I could have put at the beginning, which would have been better, probably—books authors go back and see what they did wrong after—is that Coolidge chose not to run again when he could.

He was like George Washington. And I know you and your children, parents, studied George Washington's farewell address. He said, it's time to go. I've seen Hamilton, you know, and Washington chose to go for the good of the polity and to limit, what can we say, the growth of autocracy. Coolidge said it's a great safety for the country for the president to know he's not a great man, that he's just a servant.

So I should have made that the beginning of the book. But the beginning of the book is about debt and that may yet become a better beginning as we come to confront our debt. So that's the reason to read about Coolidge’s debt and restraint.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. A very different mindset than what we've seen in recent decades. Tell us a little bit more. How does a student find the scholarship application?

Amity Shlaes:
Well, it's Coolidge. I think it's Coolidgescholars.org. Let me see. Coolidgescholars.org. Okay. That's one place. Teachers look at it. These juries are blind to each other. That's how serious we are. So we take what they get, and then we have the top 10 or 12 and a fine jury evaluates.

That jury is chaired by Governor Jim Douglas of Vermont, a former governor of many terms. And we're very square about it. Our main problem is we don't have enough scholarships to go around. So we do award the top 100 Senator status, and they put that on their college application.

Marlin Detweiler:
It was remarkable to me. I forget. How many candidates did we evaluate as a semifinalist?

Amity Shlaes:
You evaluated 10 or 12.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. And we were picking two.

Amity Shlaes:
Yes, sir.

Marlin Detweiler:
If I remember correctly, there was unanimity for those top two. If not, it was very close to unanimous. And there was certainly consensus with what we did. We did not discuss the candidates prior to the day that we met to finalize that vote. It was a pretty remarkable process. And it was not an easy process because there was so much talent in the applications that we got.

Amity Shlaes:
It's almost heartbreaking. One could say, I think the scholarship, because it lured so many candidates, should be the goal. But if you're running a business, think about it this way. Do we want to widen or deepen our relationship with our students, get more students? I would like to serve at least by widening the top 100 candidates because they're all pretty good by the time they get to a jury.

I believe young persons – So let's just say this. I have four children myself. If you want your child to be exposed to traditional values, you don't always have to send that child to a conservative school. Sometimes it helps, but you don't have to. You just have to be sure the child is exposed to those values because traditional values are common sense, and you have to show them.

This is important too, the people who have succeeded. Well, some of those people have been conservative, even senators, even presidents, even now. Someone you may not know, Congressman French Hill is a big supporter of ours. He's from Arkansas, and he's conservative. He believes in a restrained fed. That's a big case for him.

He'd be a wonderful leader of our country, I think. But nobody knows about Congress. They just get this sort of TV cartoon version of people yelling. We have many successful business people. We have a lot of entrepreneurs in our culture who understand the importance of property rights and government restraint, but aren't allowed a stage to say it on when the kids turn on the TV or watch on the computer.

So kids get the impression there's no future in standing up for what have been America's values most of our history. But there is. Even in institutions reviled by many conservatives, there's a future. So we're not afraid to walk the halls of power. I think the country's going through a phase, but it's not over and done in apocalypse mode yet.

I think we should be less fearful. So we're hopeful our students will walk in all different places. We have students everywhere. We have at least one student at Grove City. We have students applying to Hillsdale. I don't know if we have senators at Hillsdale, but I would guess we do.

We have students in Texas, maybe at the University of Austin. We have students at the University of Texas at Austin. We have students at Stanford. We have students at MIT, and we have students at Baylor, you name it. And all those students have Coolidge in their hearts, and they have common sense in their hearts. As long as they know traditional values may be honored someday and they understand traditional values, they appreciate them and they are not afraid.

Marlin Detweiler:
That's a wonderful place to stop. And we need to. Amity, thank you so much. This has been wonderful.

Amity Shlaes:
Thank you. And congratulations to all parents for putting in the effort with their kids and going on this education adventure that is parenting, especially when you're homeschooling.

Marlin Detweiler:
Absolutely, folks. Thank you for joining us at Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. We hope to see you next time. Bye bye.