After the Flood
By Griffin Hon
This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of the Coolidge Review.
When natural disasters strike, Americans expect the president to leap into action, providing relief and federal support to affected states and communities. But it has not always been so.
In 1927 two natural disasters—both floods—struck the United States. One devastated the Mississippi Valley, while the other affected Vermont, President Calvin Coolidge’s home state. The floods displaced more than 700,000 Americans and caused immense destruction.
Yet in both cases, President Coolidge pushed back against calls for extensive federal involvement. He did not visit either flood site.
Coolidge knew his “inaction” would appear inhumane. But he refrained from involving the federal government not out of indifference or cruelty but rather owing to his firm commitment to federalism.
Coolidge’s Federalism
Coolidge understood that the president has his responsibilities and governors have theirs—never to overlap. The president could wage war against other nations, but he mustn’t intrude on his own governor’s territory, even to manage a flood response. These responses were the states’ “just obligations.”
What was President Coolidge afraid of? Rather than the expenditures of intervention, it was the precedents at risk of being broken, and the trends at risk of being established.
In 1887, Congress passed a relief bill that would allow the federal government to purchase seed grain for Texas farmers who had endured a horrible drought. President Grover Cleveland vetoed the bill. He did so not out of callousness; he acknowledged the “distress and destitution” the farmers had suffered. Nor did he veto the bill because he thought relief would prove ineffective.
Rather, Cleveland concluded, “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit.”
To Coolidge, the floods were no different. They represented inevitable “hazards of the elements” that didn’t necessitate breaking tradition and “sacrificing [the] vested rights” of localities to manage local issues. The president also understood that intervening after the floods could create the expectation for federal support in future situations.
Unlike the remote national government, local actors could respond efficiently to the needs on the ground.
Another concern was taxes. When Coolidge was a boy, he attended a town meeting with his father in their hamlet of Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Some locals proposed to raise the tax rate to reduce the town’s debt, which had grown after a disastrous freshet. Young Calvin noticed that his father did not vote to increase the tax rate. When he asked why, the elder Coolidge explained that he “did not wish to place so large a burden on those who were less able” to pay.
The lesson stuck with Calvin Coolidge. As president, he rejected recovery-intended tax increases, believing them to be “unfair” to taxpayers. Only the affected should bear the burden of expenses, Coolidge concluded.
Let Locals Lead the Way
Coolidge didn’t quixotically expect locals to resolve everything, however. He sent Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to mobilize local efforts, much as President Theodore Roosevelt, in 1905, had sent the surgeon general to New Orleans to help local health officials dealing with a yellow fever epidemic. Hoover coordinated evacuations, searches for missing persons, and dysentery relief. He further devised a system of regional “dictators of resources” who implemented local resource solutions, and he rallied local, private motor companies to build plywood relief boats.
President Coolidge also endorsed the Red Cross, with his speeches generating millions of dollars in donations. He told the press that the Red Cross “gives its assistance to needs that arise directly from the flood,” since the organization had “staff representatives and agents at concentration points who work through local chapters and committees.”
In other words, unlike the remote national government, local actors could respond efficiently to the needs on the ground. It was a lesson he had first learned in independent, self-governing Plymouth Notch. Direct federal expenditures were futile without locals to lead the way.
Calvin Coolidge lived within his means, and he governed likewise. His limited intervention after the floods of 1927 preserved our federalism and Jeffersonian self-government. Truly, Coolidge’s strength often lay not in what he did, but in what he did not.
Each year thousands of high schoolers write essays about Calvin Coolidge as part of their application for the Coolidge Scholarship. Griffin Hon, named a Coolidge Scholar in 2023, adapted his application essay for the Coolidge Review.