Hendrickson: Calvin Coolidge, A Forgotten Champion of Labor

“The Full-Dinner Pail” was a campaign slogan utilized by President William McKinley and other Republicans to symbolize support for working Americans. It is often assumed that Republicans are opposed to labor, but this notion is false. President Donald J. Trump’s America First policies were pro-labor. Whether unshackling businesses from excessive regulations, cutting tax rates, and pursuing trade agreements that place the interests of American workers first, President Trump was working to improve the lives of workers across the nation. J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy and current candidate for the Republican Senate nomination in Ohio, is campaigning on a similar agenda of placing workers and families first. President Trump and Vance are just two recent examples of conservatives who are campaigning and fighting for pro-labor policies. Nevertheless, these policies have a historical track record of success and providing opportunity, most notably those of President Calvin Coolidge. 

Calvin Coolidge is most often remembered for his dry wit, silence, and conservative economic and foreign policies, but he is not often remembered as a friend of labor. Coolidge himself was an example of the Protestant work ethic, who viewed work as honorable. As Coolidge stated:

I cannot think of anything that represents the American people as a whole so adequately as honest work. We perform different tasks, but the spirit is the same. We are proud of work and ashamed of idleness. With us there is no task which is menial, no service which is degrading. All work is ennobling and all workers are ennobled.

Coolidge acknowledge the importance of Labor Day when he stated that “this high tribute is paid in recognition of the worth and dignity of the men and women who toil.”  In addition he argued that he could not “think of any American man or woman preeminent in the history of the nation who did not reach their place through toil.” Coolidge’s family upbringing built into him the understanding of hard work, thrift, and the dignity of work. He also built the value of work into his own family as demonstrated by his son Calvin Coolidge, Jr., who worked in the tobacco fields while his Father was President. When other boys were astonished to see the son of a President working in the tobacco fields, one of the boys remarked to Calvin Jr., that “‘if the president was my father, I wouldn’t be working here,’” and Calvin Jr., replied “‘you would, if your father were my father.’”

Even before Coolidge assumed the presidency in the aftermath of death of President Warren G. Harding, the late economic historian Robert Sobel wrote that “probably no Governor in the nation had more experience with strikes than had Coolidge in 1919, and he was considered pro-labor.” As Governor of Massachusetts Coolidge won national recognition for his handling of the Boston Police Strike, when he intervened and famously stated that “there is no right to…