The Making of a Conservative

By George H. Nash

This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of the Coolidge Review.

In 1906, Calvin Coolidge was elected to a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He held elective office in the Bay State for all but one of the next fourteen years, culminating in two terms as governor. Coolidge’s rise to prominence occurred during the Progressive Era, a time of militant reform movements and political ferment that fractured the Republican Party. It was a time also of seething labor unrest and enormous immigration. In Massachusetts, a heavily industrialized state with many factories, nearly one-third of the population in 1910 was foreign born.

How did Coolidge, an undemonstrative Yankee, steer so successfully through these choppy political seas?

Clearly his probity, devotion to duty, and unusual ability to win the trust of ordinary people across ethnic and party lines contributed greatly to his appeal at the polls. But consider two other factors, both of them ideological.

Coolidge the Progressive

First, Coolidge survived during the Progressive Era because in many ways he was a progressive himself. In 1907 and 1908, for example, State Representative Coolidge favored women’s suffrage and direct election of U.S. senators well before the constitutional amendments were enacted.

Mindful, no doubt, of the considerable number of working-class voters in his district, he supported legislation requiring one day’s rest in seven for workers, and other bills intended to ease the burdens of workingmen. He vigorously endorsed an anti-monopoly bill that would have prohibited business behemoths like Standard Oil from selling their products below cost to ruin their small competitors.

A few years later, a dangerous strike broke out among foreign-born workers in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Coolidge, now a state senator, was appointed chairman of a legislative committee to bring the two sides together. After much effort, he and his colleagues resolved the dispute on terms that gave the strikers much of what they wanted. Coolidge won ­plaudits for ­fair-mindedness.

He was no standpatter, a socialist opponent admitted. Indeed, Coolidge in his Autobiography declared that his record in the state legislature had been “that of a liberal.” And so it went as he climbed the ladder in Massachusetts politics. In 1919, as a new governor, he supported a landmark bill mandating that no woman or minor in Massachusetts could be employed for more than forty-eight hours a week. Many manufacturing interests strenuously opposed him. He signed the bill anyway.

Later that year and again in 1920, the governor approved a host of other progressive legislative measures.

For more on Coolidge’s progressivism, see John Hendrickson’s article “Coolidge’s Surprising Contribution to Progressivism”

Temperamentally Conservative

This brings us to the second ideological ingredient in Coolidge’s recipe for political success in that era. His progressivism, though genuine and persistent, was tempered by his innate circumspection and growing unease about progressive excess.

In 1910, Coolidge remarked to his father, “It is more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.” It was a theme to which he returned in the years ahead. In 1912, although sensitive to the plight of the mill workers in Lawrence, he disliked their radical leaders, who advocated an overthrow of the capitalist system. He complained privately that they were socialists and anarchists bent on “destroying all authority, whether of any church or government.”

When Theodore Roosevelt bolted from the GOP in 1912 and campaigned for president as the nominee of the new Progressive Party, Coolidge, always a steadfast Republican, remained loyal to President William Howard Taft. He was incensed when Roosevelt endorsed in principle the recall of judges by popular vote. To Coolidge, this was nothing less than an assault on the independence of the judiciary. Speaking at a Republican rally, he said that this issue made the election of 1912 “the most important since the Civil War.” He was happy when Roosevelt was defeated.

Coolidge was not pleased, however, by the drift of things in Massachusetts. By early 1914, he was alarmed by what he later called a “spirit of radicalism” arising in his state, a spirit manifested in bills in the legislature aimed “at impairing the property of employers.” In his inaugural address as president of the state senate in 1914, he forcefully appealed to what he later described as the “conservative spirit of the people.” He titled his speech “Have Faith in Massachusetts.” It was an eloquent case for a prudentially conservative approach to government that was slowly becoming ascendant in his mind.

Nevertheless—and we must not forget this—Coolidge’s support for progressive social welfare legislation did not cease in 1914. It continued as long as he held state office. The Coolidge who, as governor in January 1920, announced that it was “a time to conserve” and “to retrench rather than to reform” was the same governor who in the ensuing months approved a slew of new progressive legislation.

Turning Point

This brings us to the fateful year 1919, one of the most violent and strife-ridden years in all of American history. The specter of Bolshevik revolution abroad and of violent strikes and criminal anarchy at home greatly troubled Governor Coolidge. As the progressive tide receded and more radical assaults on the social order emerged, the experience of combating them shook him to the core of his being. They brought to center stage his fundamentally conservative beliefs in the rule of law and ordered freedom.

Without the harrowing upheavals of 1919 and the Boston police strike that made him a national figure, Coolidge would probably be remembered today as a cautious progressive, an incrementalist, a practitioner of what has been called the politics of prudence. For many years, progressive and conservative beliefs ­coexisted in his mind. But when revolutionary challenges to the American system of government erupted after World War I, his rhetoric of conservatism became more conspicuous and assertive.

It was this side of Coolidge that defined him ever after, beginning in 1920 when Americans returned to normalcy and left the Progressive Era behind.

George H. Nash is the author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 as well as a multivolume biography of Herbert Hoover.