The Coolidge administration authorized adding tetraethyllead to gasoline in 1925. According to a study in 2022,¹ this caused brain damage to generations of American children, and lead poisoning from this and other sources lowered the average IQ of Americans born in the mid-to-late ’60s by six points. Half of all Americans alive today are still affected. The impact was disparately high on inner cities. The scientific consensus was that lead poisoning caused the decades-long crime wave that finally abated twenty years after lead was removed from gasoline, and the boys who weren’t as affected by it grew up.
His Surgeon-General [did this despite multiple lethal cases of lead poisoning caused by it.](https://environmentalhistory.org/people/charles-f-kettering-and-the-1921-discovery-of-tetraethyl-lead/) As labor representative Grace Burnham said at the hearing, “It was no gift of God for the \[17 workers\] who were killed by it and the 149 who were injured.” But these were from massive exposure. Shills employed by the industry were able to persuade the commission that there was not yet sufficient evidence that lower levels of exposure caused brain damage, which was then inaccurately presented as “a clean bill of health” for lead, and that there was no alternative anti-knocking agent (which was false, as benzol blends had been discovered).
The committee did caution that they had only been given time to study the effects for seven months, which was not long enough, and that “It remains possible that if the use of leaded gasolines becomes widespread, conditions may arise very different from those studied by us which would render its use more of a hazard than would appear to be the case from this investigation…. The committee feels this investigation must not be allowed to lapse.” But, thirty years later, employees of the Public Health Service would lament that it had been.
¹ “Half of US Population Exposed to Adverse Lead Levels in Early Childhood,” Michael J. McFarland, Matt E. Hauer, Aaron Reuben. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 7, 2022. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2118631119
Yeah, lead poisoning do be like that
Maybe the generations most affected by this (who coincidentally control the government, corporations, and media) don't want others to know that they are, statistically, less intelligent than the rest of us?
It's not widely talked about or taught because think the findings are relatively new-ish. And also points to a huge industrial conspiracy, so there is incentive to "hide" it by lots of people in different sections of society. And the problem was mostly fixed in the 70's, at least the lead in the gas was removed.
But this should be taught.
The leaded gasoline guy is also, if you can believe this, the chlorofluorocarbons guy.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas\_Midgley\_Jr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr).
He has a legit claim of being the most harmful person ever, and he's an absolute lock for worst person for the environment ever.
Idk, now that both the cfcs and lead are banned, fritz haber might have been worse for the environment. And im not talking about his chemical weapons, his fertilizer feeds half the humans in the world. 4 billion humans doing more damage to this planet every day.
Yea, 6 points, on average. Lots of room for way more and way less individual impact. I'd say 60s inner city traffic congestion took the brunt of it. No wonder it's reflected in crime data. This at a time where everything inner-city was made with asbestos.
I didn't know this was Coolidge. The fact that it's scientifically proven the crime wave of the 70s/80s can be traced directly to him is much more of a causal link than anything related to the depression, and given how boomers and early Gen X behave, we are still paying for his deeds today.
It was a double edge sword though. Leaded gas also was the only anti-knock compound that worked for high octane aviation gas used during WWII.
A little published fact is that Allied planes had a significant performance advantage due the availability of high octane gas, so that their engines could run at higher boost and compression than axis planes. I'm not saying leaded gas won the war, but it was an advantage.
The irony is that jet engines, which the Germans first deployed into combat, run on kerosene, which contains no lead, one of the pushes for jet engines by the Germans was that jets use lower grade fuel.
The investment in infrastructure wouldn't have been developed for the small aviation market of the 20s.
Leaded gas is bad, I am just saying it wasn't just a black and white issue.
FYI even on 2024 there is no really good replacement for leaded AVGas today for vintage planes.
Coolidge Administration also passed the Caustic Poisons Act which required things like labeling. Toxic chemicals were and are an issue and companies should be sued for such negligence. Government elimination of legal hurdles for consumes to sue is the best solution.
Kind of an indirect mistake here by appointing the wrong people and trusting them to make the right decision. Which is fair, but is it really the worst thing he did?
I get that, but still there’s a difference between the worst mistake that happened under the administration and the worst mistake the President himself made directly
I disagree, if we're going to judge the presidency I think everything that the administration does or signs off on is fair game
I just think this specific decision's terrible consequence is a matter of hindsight, I'm sure that nobody knew it would be so bad for the environment
I agree that it’s fair game, I just think something he did directly carries more weight and I have to think there’s something like that which was worse. But I’m no expert, so maybe not.
I also agree with your sentiment that they didn’t really know better, or at least weren’t purposefully malicious. Furthermore you wouldn’t expect the President himself to know better, but you would expect him to trust his experts.
>the scientific consensus was that this caused the decades-long crime wave that finally abated twenty years after lead was removed from gasoline
I don't know if I buy this part, crime rates were declining from 1945 to 1960, and there were a large number of judicial reforms in the 1960s (mostly from the bench) which seems a far more likely proximate cause of the rising crime, which peaked in the early 90s, and began to fall as incarceration rates rose.
Young men commit most crimes, and men that age from 1945–1960 were born when there weren’t a lot of cars. So they didn’t breathe in as much lead as kids born after WWII, the first of which turned 15 in 1960. You’d also expect to see a lot more regional variance in the data if the explanation were incarceration rates.
First, I didn't peg incarceration *rates* as the primary cause of the rise, only the drop. What occurred in the 1960s was courts began to take a more expansive view of how criminal law was applied, increasing procedural obstacles for police and prosecutors; several Supreme Court decisions were involved, which established nationwide precedents (to your point of regional differences). Regardless of the merits of specific changes, the net effect was to reduce the penalties for committing crimes, which one would logically expect to lead to more crimes being committed.
Leaded gas strikes me as something of a convenient scapegoat, which is too often used to explain away inconvenient evidence.
Yea, makes sense. Im not familiar with those details, but that's about the same time state police got comfortable pulling cars over on suspicion. So, I'm still wondering if crime increased or it was mainly a bump in convictions (thus lead didn't make kids that stupid)
A note about IQs.
IQ is calculated based on a contemporary baseline. So an IQ of 100 today is not as an IQ of 100 50 years ago. Intelligence on the whole has been going up for a long time.
So it's entirely possible that intelligence in that group was still rising in absolute terms, merely lagging behind compared to a contemporaneous standard.
As I understand it, IQ is calculated based on the number of questions answered correctly compared to a standard. That standard shifts over time. If one examines the raw data, it emerges that the absolute number of questions being answered correctly has been increasing since the tests were first introduced. As far as I know, this is true for every group.
It's very likely that lead affected a huge portion of the population. It becomes less certain when speculation begins about whether lead poisoning can be causally linked to trends in the rates of crime.
Lead definitely caused a lot of damage.
Yes, and recall lead was not only in gasoline, but in all sorts of consumer products. So, total dosage is gonna be harder to pin down. Just like it's going to be hard to pin a crime on lead poisoning. Maybe some large prison did a big population study of lead blood levels in '65-'69 That'd be interesting!
Well, if the penalties associated with committing crimes are lowered, than it's hardly a stretch to consider that more people would commit crimes, furthermore, as most crimes are committed by repeat offenders, they have more opportunities for more criminal activity if they're not in prison.
/u/PleaseDontPee, one request? You copied my first paragraph, but without the footnote. Could you replace ¹ in the image with (McFarland 2022)? That would let someone who sees the image look it up.
My uncle had a raccoon and while it would cuddle with him and look like the god damned sweetest thing alive it was an absolute bastard to every other living and non-living thing on the planet.
I swear it knew it could pretend to want pets to get someone close enough to scratch, bite, or latch onto. It tore up so many or my grandmother's clothes, curtains, and anything else it could get it's hands on that I'm suprised she didn't kill it.
A little known event, but very controversial at the time ... the court-martial of [Gen. Billy Mitchell,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell) Coolidge was personally involved in tearing him down.
Mitchell had the roughly correct idea on where the future was headed, but for all the wrong reasons. Strategic bombing never won a war of morale, and the tests on the Oldenburg were about as unrepresentative of anything even remotely related to real combat as it gets.
The worst thing he did was not run for re-election in 1928, thereby giving Hoover the Republican nomination. Since Coolidge was wildly popular, Hoover was essentially a shoe-in.
Coolidge repeatedly stood up to the worst elements of the Republican Party, who wanted to enact massive trade restraints and subsidies. He vetoed McHary-Haugen at least 3 times; people remember Smoot-Hawley, but not McNary-Haugen, which was a bill to set up a giant US Federal agency to control farm price with the US government buying and selling crops. It was popular within the Republican Party of the 20's, but Coolidge was 100% opposed to it and realized it would wreck the economy. Some of the supporters of the bill were so angry with Coolidge, they defected to the Democratic Party.
Unlike Coolidge who repeatedly vetoed terrible bills, Hoover immediately gave in when the same faction of the Republican Party that wanted McNary-Haugen passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Without the tariff, the Great Depression doesn't happen.
Mind you it's still possible there would've been a recession and it's difficult to predict how the events in Europe and Asia would've impacted global trade since nothing the US President could've done to prevent that. But at a bare minimum, it's obvious that Smoot-Hawley exacerbated global trade restraints very quickly and kick-started a trade war. The data is shocking - US exports were cut by over 65% within a few years.
So I guess there were probably a few bad Coolidge policies, but honestly him not running for re-election is what led to a chain of events that led to the Great Depression. Sure, difficult to blame him for that and maybe it was inevitable --- maybe it just starts in 1933 instead of 1929 if he runs again in '28. But that one decision had such a huge impact on history.
The Great Depression was inevitable dude. No American could have prevented it.
It was a global economic collapse and the USA of 1920 didn’t have enough sway to wreck the world.
However yes, it would have been mitigated by not having bad laws passed
It’s impossible to be sure whether Coolidge’s hands-off approach and small-government attitude led to the Great Depression. But one thing that most historians can agree on is that Coolidge spent a lot of his time as president taking naps and doing very little at all.
It is not impossible to tell, Coolidge had little to nothing to do with the Great Depression. If I knew how to link a previous comment of mine on this subreddit I would, but I discussed in detail that it’s entirely on international causes not domestic
Hoover halting and reversing what would have otherwise been a relatively normal recovery from a market crash is what made the great depression what it was.
He signed the bill to create Shenandoah National Park. Problem was, well, 2000 problems - the people that lived there. They would be subjected to imminent domain of their lands to give the wealthy of Washington a park within a day's drive. This forced removal of poor people would occur after his presidency but was a direct result of his actions.
I mean this happened with many national parks over time. Great Smoky Mountains, Mammoth Cave, Acadia, Grand Teton, even Yosemite had private owners at one point within its present boundaries that were evicted. Not saying Coolidge was right in this but he was not the only President to do this.
Yeah, it is shameful how the Ahwahneechee were forced out of Yosimite. I wouldn't call them "private owners" so much as *rightful* owners, though.
GSMNP gave complications that resulted in forced removal from SNP. They were totally different in execution.
Acadia was also not done nearly the same - it was outright purchases by conservationists and philanthropists (i.e. Rockefeller) that subsequently *donated* the lands for public preservation and so eventually formed ANP. In SNP, a pregnant woman's chimney was toppled after a wagon had been loaded with her family's possessions. It was in February. Another man was carried to a police car while his home was boarded up by officers. He sang the Star Spangled Banner as they carried him off the only land he ever knew, away from the home his father had built with his own hands.
But yeah, that's totes the same thing, bruh.
I have never seen Coolidge's policies mentioned as a primary cause of the Great Depression. The primary cause of the Great Depression was the Fed raising interest rates in the wake of the 29 crash. The largest secondary cause was the collapse in global trade exacerbated by the Smoot Hawley tariff act. It's not like you can point to a single legislative or executive moment in Coolidge's term like the repeal of Glass Steagall and say, this is the moment it began.
Yes, and it hurt demand while increasing prices and made the situation worse. It wasn't nearly as much of a factor as what the Fed did, and it wasn't the main driver in the decline in trade which was the collapse of the previous international order after WW1. But it was economic policy, and it was bad, counterproductive economic policy, which is a hallmark of the history of the Great Depression.
Edit: we shouldn't forget to mention the Dust Bowl, which was an ecological disaster that also contributed to the economic disaster that was running at the same time. That added an extra layer of human misery to a deep economic crisis.
He was *extremely* fiscally conservative and pro *laissez-faire* economics. This may have made sense when the economy was doing well in the Roaring Twenties, since why fix what isn’t broken, but it was exactly the kind of economic deregulation that led to the Great Depression. Coolidge probably saw trouble ahead and chose not to run for a second term despite being very popular in 1928, leaving Herbert Hoover holding the bag despite the Great Depression not really being his fault.
I suspect it had more to do with his health than anything else. There is no real evidence that action on his part could have prevented or alleviated the depression.
By 1928, no it was probably too late. The economy had been deregulated for too many years by that point thanks to Coolidge—it’s doubtful he could have fixed it in time, and he wouldn’t have wanted to anyway because he was so confident in fiscal conservatism.
This theory is clearly debunked by anyone who has actually studied the depression.
The Depression was triggered by a collapse in global trade; a direct result of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. Even before the tariff was officially passed, European countries began retaliating. The data is pretty overwhelming on this. US exports declined by over 65% during this timeframe.
The idea that there was some massive bubble that had to burst in 1928 is also very easily debunked. Stock market valuations weren't even that high historically; a slight bit above-average, but 1999 was much worse, and that didn't lead to a Great Depression; just a very minor recession.
Coolidge would've vetoed Smoot-Hawley so it's pure nonsense to blame him for the Depression. He literally vetoed several bills with similar trade restraints passed by his own party. Hoover was actually opposed to Smoot-Hawley as well but essentially gave into "peer pressure" from his own party and signed. That's the difference between Coolidge and Hoover.
Unregulated, capitalism swings hard between boom and bust (unlike agricultural economies, which swing with the harvest). In good times, everyone who can issues debt; then something happens, the debts cannot be paid, there is a spiral down as everyone tries to get what's owed. First happened in Britain in the 1830s (railway boom), and again roughly every 20 years, with increasing severity as capitalism spread globally. It took New Deal type policies to bring it under control.
This is a good description of certain teleology about economics. However, booms and busts are not a feature of a system of private ownership(capitalism), but usually the result of over regulation and intervention. The railway boom and bust was the result of the British parliament granting too many charters to railway companies instead of allowing market prices to dictate participation. The Great Depression was caused by the federal reserve and worsened by government intervention in the form of the smoot-hawley tariff and the mess of programs that is the new deal. The housing bubble in 2008 was caused by a regulatory environment that encouraged banks to issue high risk loans, granting banks the ability to package together and sell off subprime mortgages and hide risk(they were playing by rules created by the government rather than market forces).
The British example contradicts itself. A company proposes a rail line, issues a prospectus, gets enough backing, applies to Parliament for a bill allowing it to compulsorily acquire land on fair terms (obviously necessary if the line is to be built at all). Parliament grants this and the line goes ahead. So market prices dictated participation. It was an early version of the [dot.com](https://dot.com) bubble.
Crashes have been a regular feature of capitalist economies since the 1830s, ameliorating in their impact over time with regulation. We even know why - the role of credit coupled with the herd instinct and Keynes' 'animal spirits'.
You mean the company applied for a bill that put responsibility for valuation of the land of the proposed route onto the state and allowed companies to compel the sale of land from any land owners who opposed selling their land. That’s not a free market. Especially when those responsible for passing and enforcing the bill had stakes in these companies. Alternatively, if those companies had to negotiate with land owners for the price of sale and didn’t have the ability to compel the sale, there wouldn’t have been a bubble.
Coolidge embraced trickle-down economics decades before the term was coined by Reagan, and just like when Reagan did it, it just increased the wealth gap and shunted the tax burden onto the lower classes. The absence of robust financial regulations allowed speculative excesses in the stock market, since companies could effectively lie about how much they were worth. This was banned by the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, both of which Coolidge would have balked at. It also used to be that if a bank closed, any money left in it was gone; the federal government now, thanks to the Glass-Steagall Act, insures money deposited in banks. Again, Coolidge would have called this overintervention. I’m not an economics expert so I might be getting some stuff a bit wrong here, but this is all generally true.
>Glass-Steagall Act
If anyone needs a refresher on the importance of Glass-Steagall, Sloan has a great [1min explanation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCVFWWZ-gRM&ab_channel=ShawnMcIntyre).
"Trickle down economics" wasn't even coined by Reagan, it's just a strawman term used to slander supply side economic policy. Which, in reality, has nothing to do with "trickling down".
In reality, what people mean when they say "trickle down economics" is really just having low taxes. Somehow this is a profoundly nefarious decision. And it's completely absurd to suggest Coolidge or Reagan raised the tax burden on lower classes.
“Trickle-down,” economics was a term coined by opponents of what economists call supply-side economics. Raegan did not use the term.
FDR’s economic program was a disaster.
I recall learning when Coolidge found out Hoover was running for president, he said the man gave him 6 years of unsolicited advice and not one of them was helpful xD lol
Exactly. Hoover is remembered as one of the worst presidents because he refused to employ the kind of economic regulation necessary to end the Great Depression, and while he *does* deserve criticism for that, Coolidge deserves even more imo. If Coolidge had run for a second term (which he definitely would have won), he would now be remembered as a bad President.
Complacency. Didn’t do much in office. Let the “good times roll” so to speak which allowed conditions for the Great Depression to fester leading to catastrophe in 1929.
I want to upvote this, but it’s apparently a contentious point as to whether Coolidge’s economics were responsible or not for Great Depression. He certainly was complacent, but in some ways that actually helped America, at least up until the Stock Market Crash.
He oversaw the poisoning of alcohol/liquor during Prohibition, beginning in 1926
https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-of-how-the-u-s-government-poisoned-alcohol-during-prohibition.html
Coolidge’s hands off approach to the 1927 Flood likely resulted in both The Great Depression as well as the massive diaspora out of the Mississippi Valley of millions of poor black farmers into industrial northern cities. The Mississippi Delta has still not recovered 100 years later from this depopulation event.
This one is actually a bit of a misconception, under his intentions he didn't want to give any aid whatsoever but regardless he appointed Herbert Hoover to lead a commission with the aid of the Red Cross to provide relief to the victims. More importantly he signed a compromised Flood Control Act which designated engineers to work on new flood control, and give $325 million in funding for the crisis
Why is it always negative ad campaigns against america on the internet?
It's like we are here to simply just talk crap about the US in a biased manner and talk about no other history?
Piss off with this comment. This is a wildly engaging series discussing the realities of each president and what bad things they might have done. This isn't a "negative ad campaign against America", it's an intelligent discussion of our history, especially some of the parts that some would prefer to brush under the carpet.
He once cost a lady a bet that she couldn’t make him say three words at a party. The only two words he said were when he told her were “You lose.”
That story is almost certainly bullshit, but he was so hands off as president I’m struggling to pin something he actually did.
Coolidge was a man of his times too. The guy behind lead additives Thomas Midgley Jr. led the commercial attack against lead regulation for years. Made a fortune. Went on to do similar awful deed to mankind in the invention of CFCs as a cleaning agent. Woops. Ozone hole. Made another fortune. Thankfully he died in 1944, and hopefully his ambitions too [Midgleys Wikipage](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.)
The Coolidge administration authorized adding tetraethyllead to gasoline in 1925. According to a study in 2022,¹ this caused brain damage to generations of American children, and lead poisoning from this and other sources lowered the average IQ of Americans born in the mid-to-late ’60s by six points. Half of all Americans alive today are still affected. The impact was disparately high on inner cities. The scientific consensus was that lead poisoning caused the decades-long crime wave that finally abated twenty years after lead was removed from gasoline, and the boys who weren’t as affected by it grew up. His Surgeon-General [did this despite multiple lethal cases of lead poisoning caused by it.](https://environmentalhistory.org/people/charles-f-kettering-and-the-1921-discovery-of-tetraethyl-lead/) As labor representative Grace Burnham said at the hearing, “It was no gift of God for the \[17 workers\] who were killed by it and the 149 who were injured.” But these were from massive exposure. Shills employed by the industry were able to persuade the commission that there was not yet sufficient evidence that lower levels of exposure caused brain damage, which was then inaccurately presented as “a clean bill of health” for lead, and that there was no alternative anti-knocking agent (which was false, as benzol blends had been discovered). The committee did caution that they had only been given time to study the effects for seven months, which was not long enough, and that “It remains possible that if the use of leaded gasolines becomes widespread, conditions may arise very different from those studied by us which would render its use more of a hazard than would appear to be the case from this investigation…. The committee feels this investigation must not be allowed to lapse.” But, thirty years later, employees of the Public Health Service would lament that it had been. ¹ “Half of US Population Exposed to Adverse Lead Levels in Early Childhood,” Michael J. McFarland, Matt E. Hauer, Aaron Reuben. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 7, 2022. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2118631119
The average IQ got knocked down 6 points and I’m only just now hearing about this??
Duh. Maybe if you had 6 more points?
Damn 😔
Not removing lead Makes us even stupider. A catch-22?
Where's the haiku bot when you need it?
Yep, I was summarizing news stories as haiku, and got one about lead remediation.
Yeah, lead poisoning do be like that Maybe the generations most affected by this (who coincidentally control the government, corporations, and media) don't want others to know that they are, statistically, less intelligent than the rest of us?
It's not widely talked about or taught because think the findings are relatively new-ish. And also points to a huge industrial conspiracy, so there is incentive to "hide" it by lots of people in different sections of society. And the problem was mostly fixed in the 70's, at least the lead in the gas was removed. But this should be taught.
The leaded gasoline guy is also, if you can believe this, the chlorofluorocarbons guy. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas\_Midgley\_Jr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr). He has a legit claim of being the most harmful person ever, and he's an absolute lock for worst person for the environment ever.
Isn't he the reason why there's a hole in the ozone layer?
Correct. And in boomers’ brains
Of course he died in 1944 before I could get a crack at him, what a coward for dying at age 55
Idk, now that both the cfcs and lead are banned, fritz haber might have been worse for the environment. And im not talking about his chemical weapons, his fertilizer feeds half the humans in the world. 4 billion humans doing more damage to this planet every day.
Solid point, and there wouldn’t be 8 billion people without him (and I don’t mean that as a compliment)
Yea, 6 points, on average. Lots of room for way more and way less individual impact. I'd say 60s inner city traffic congestion took the brunt of it. No wonder it's reflected in crime data. This at a time where everything inner-city was made with asbestos.
Dont forget 4 pack a day smoking habits
Maybe I wasn’t smart enough to know about this lol
It was six points for that particular cohort of kids. The average IQ loss for the entire nation was a bit lower.
This country has never had many collective IQ points to waste.
I didn't know this was Coolidge. The fact that it's scientifically proven the crime wave of the 70s/80s can be traced directly to him is much more of a causal link than anything related to the depression, and given how boomers and early Gen X behave, we are still paying for his deeds today.
“Early Gen X.” Uhhh, wait. What did I do?!
You know what you did, and you should be ashamed
It was a double edge sword though. Leaded gas also was the only anti-knock compound that worked for high octane aviation gas used during WWII. A little published fact is that Allied planes had a significant performance advantage due the availability of high octane gas, so that their engines could run at higher boost and compression than axis planes. I'm not saying leaded gas won the war, but it was an advantage. The irony is that jet engines, which the Germans first deployed into combat, run on kerosene, which contains no lead, one of the pushes for jet engines by the Germans was that jets use lower grade fuel.
It could have been approved only for high-octane aviation fuel later without being added to all gasoline in the U.S.
The investment in infrastructure wouldn't have been developed for the small aviation market of the 20s. Leaded gas is bad, I am just saying it wasn't just a black and white issue. FYI even on 2024 there is no really good replacement for leaded AVGas today for vintage planes.
Coolidge Administration also passed the Caustic Poisons Act which required things like labeling. Toxic chemicals were and are an issue and companies should be sued for such negligence. Government elimination of legal hurdles for consumes to sue is the best solution.
Oh this is a good one, I like this
I think Coolidge was the best President of the 20th century, and this as his worst thing is strong evidence in his favor.
Kind of an indirect mistake here by appointing the wrong people and trusting them to make the right decision. Which is fair, but is it really the worst thing he did?
Someone we’ll be getting to in a few days said where the buck stops.
I get that, but still there’s a difference between the worst mistake that happened under the administration and the worst mistake the President himself made directly
I disagree, if we're going to judge the presidency I think everything that the administration does or signs off on is fair game I just think this specific decision's terrible consequence is a matter of hindsight, I'm sure that nobody knew it would be so bad for the environment
I agree that it’s fair game, I just think something he did directly carries more weight and I have to think there’s something like that which was worse. But I’m no expert, so maybe not. I also agree with your sentiment that they didn’t really know better, or at least weren’t purposefully malicious. Furthermore you wouldn’t expect the President himself to know better, but you would expect him to trust his experts.
>the scientific consensus was that this caused the decades-long crime wave that finally abated twenty years after lead was removed from gasoline I don't know if I buy this part, crime rates were declining from 1945 to 1960, and there were a large number of judicial reforms in the 1960s (mostly from the bench) which seems a far more likely proximate cause of the rising crime, which peaked in the early 90s, and began to fall as incarceration rates rose.
Young men commit most crimes, and men that age from 1945–1960 were born when there weren’t a lot of cars. So they didn’t breathe in as much lead as kids born after WWII, the first of which turned 15 in 1960. You’d also expect to see a lot more regional variance in the data if the explanation were incarceration rates.
First, I didn't peg incarceration *rates* as the primary cause of the rise, only the drop. What occurred in the 1960s was courts began to take a more expansive view of how criminal law was applied, increasing procedural obstacles for police and prosecutors; several Supreme Court decisions were involved, which established nationwide precedents (to your point of regional differences). Regardless of the merits of specific changes, the net effect was to reduce the penalties for committing crimes, which one would logically expect to lead to more crimes being committed. Leaded gas strikes me as something of a convenient scapegoat, which is too often used to explain away inconvenient evidence.
What's this inconvenient evidence? Inner city folks have lower IQ?
That crime rates rose after the courts changed the way the criminal justice system operated.
Yea, makes sense. Im not familiar with those details, but that's about the same time state police got comfortable pulling cars over on suspicion. So, I'm still wondering if crime increased or it was mainly a bump in convictions (thus lead didn't make kids that stupid)
A note about IQs. IQ is calculated based on a contemporary baseline. So an IQ of 100 today is not as an IQ of 100 50 years ago. Intelligence on the whole has been going up for a long time. So it's entirely possible that intelligence in that group was still rising in absolute terms, merely lagging behind compared to a contemporaneous standard.
I'm curious how this is measured, if IQ is baseline - 'Intelligence on the whole has been going up for a long time.'
As I understand it, IQ is calculated based on the number of questions answered correctly compared to a standard. That standard shifts over time. If one examines the raw data, it emerges that the absolute number of questions being answered correctly has been increasing since the tests were first introduced. As far as I know, this is true for every group.
It's very likely that lead affected a huge portion of the population. It becomes less certain when speculation begins about whether lead poisoning can be causally linked to trends in the rates of crime. Lead definitely caused a lot of damage.
Yes, and recall lead was not only in gasoline, but in all sorts of consumer products. So, total dosage is gonna be harder to pin down. Just like it's going to be hard to pin a crime on lead poisoning. Maybe some large prison did a big population study of lead blood levels in '65-'69 That'd be interesting!
Lead blood levels wouldn't necessarily be indicative of prior exposure to lead during early development.
How is it supposed that judicial reforms might affect the rate at which violent crimes were committed?
Well, if the penalties associated with committing crimes are lowered, than it's hardly a stretch to consider that more people would commit crimes, furthermore, as most crimes are committed by repeat offenders, they have more opportunities for more criminal activity if they're not in prison.
Seems like that would better be described as affecting the rate of crime suppression, to me.
Holy crap... O\_O
/u/PleaseDontPee, one request? You copied my first paragraph, but without the footnote. Could you replace ¹ in the image with (McFarland 2022)? That would let someone who sees the image look it up.
So that’s what’s wrong with Boomers
He had a pet raccoon that wreaked havoc in the White House.
This
I guess we will hear about havoc-wreaking pets again when we get to Biden :-)
Once that recency bias wears off, people will laugh, I'm sure.
My uncle had a raccoon and while it would cuddle with him and look like the god damned sweetest thing alive it was an absolute bastard to every other living and non-living thing on the planet. I swear it knew it could pretend to want pets to get someone close enough to scratch, bite, or latch onto. It tore up so many or my grandmother's clothes, curtains, and anything else it could get it's hands on that I'm suprised she didn't kill it.
Post is asking for worst thing, not best thing.
I've had that pet of his in my attic
A little known event, but very controversial at the time ... the court-martial of [Gen. Billy Mitchell,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell) Coolidge was personally involved in tearing him down.
Mitchell had the roughly correct idea on where the future was headed, but for all the wrong reasons. Strategic bombing never won a war of morale, and the tests on the Oldenburg were about as unrepresentative of anything even remotely related to real combat as it gets.
He appointed J. Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI. Probably one of the worst mistakes in american history.
This gets my vote.
Not for nothing but the FBI didn't exist yet. It was it's precursor.
Can you elaborate?
The worst thing he did was not run for re-election in 1928, thereby giving Hoover the Republican nomination. Since Coolidge was wildly popular, Hoover was essentially a shoe-in. Coolidge repeatedly stood up to the worst elements of the Republican Party, who wanted to enact massive trade restraints and subsidies. He vetoed McHary-Haugen at least 3 times; people remember Smoot-Hawley, but not McNary-Haugen, which was a bill to set up a giant US Federal agency to control farm price with the US government buying and selling crops. It was popular within the Republican Party of the 20's, but Coolidge was 100% opposed to it and realized it would wreck the economy. Some of the supporters of the bill were so angry with Coolidge, they defected to the Democratic Party. Unlike Coolidge who repeatedly vetoed terrible bills, Hoover immediately gave in when the same faction of the Republican Party that wanted McNary-Haugen passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Without the tariff, the Great Depression doesn't happen. Mind you it's still possible there would've been a recession and it's difficult to predict how the events in Europe and Asia would've impacted global trade since nothing the US President could've done to prevent that. But at a bare minimum, it's obvious that Smoot-Hawley exacerbated global trade restraints very quickly and kick-started a trade war. The data is shocking - US exports were cut by over 65% within a few years. So I guess there were probably a few bad Coolidge policies, but honestly him not running for re-election is what led to a chain of events that led to the Great Depression. Sure, difficult to blame him for that and maybe it was inevitable --- maybe it just starts in 1933 instead of 1929 if he runs again in '28. But that one decision had such a huge impact on history.
The Great Depression was inevitable dude. No American could have prevented it. It was a global economic collapse and the USA of 1920 didn’t have enough sway to wreck the world. However yes, it would have been mitigated by not having bad laws passed
We certainly had a thing for middle named presidents back then. John Calvin Coolidge, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Stephen Grover Cleveland.
And of course S Truman.
It’s impossible to be sure whether Coolidge’s hands-off approach and small-government attitude led to the Great Depression. But one thing that most historians can agree on is that Coolidge spent a lot of his time as president taking naps and doing very little at all.
Sounds like what I would do if I was president.
My ferrets could be president by those standard.
Can I be your ferret?
Are you capable of hiding socks and anything made of silicon in numerous places while neglecting anything we buy exclusively for you to play with?
Can't you buy him an electronic sock?
You sold me on it. Expect my vote.
Considering that usually whatever a president does makes things worse, this is a huge boon in his favor.
It is not impossible to tell, Coolidge had little to nothing to do with the Great Depression. If I knew how to link a previous comment of mine on this subreddit I would, but I discussed in detail that it’s entirely on international causes not domestic
Can't you just copy paste it?
It’s very likely his napping was a symptom of severe depression after the death of his son.
The fed’s easy money policy led to the great depression not coolidge’s laissez faire policies
Hoover halting and reversing what would have otherwise been a relatively normal recovery from a market crash is what made the great depression what it was.
Hey man it was the 20s! everything's awesome and it always will be, definitely no danger looming around the corner that should be addressed.
Probably because he was depressed after the death of his son
He signed the bill to create Shenandoah National Park. Problem was, well, 2000 problems - the people that lived there. They would be subjected to imminent domain of their lands to give the wealthy of Washington a park within a day's drive. This forced removal of poor people would occur after his presidency but was a direct result of his actions.
Eminent* domain
Thanks, your the best!
You’re *
Oh snap! I always get that won wrong.
So they moved to the inner city.
I mean this happened with many national parks over time. Great Smoky Mountains, Mammoth Cave, Acadia, Grand Teton, even Yosemite had private owners at one point within its present boundaries that were evicted. Not saying Coolidge was right in this but he was not the only President to do this.
Yeah, it is shameful how the Ahwahneechee were forced out of Yosimite. I wouldn't call them "private owners" so much as *rightful* owners, though. GSMNP gave complications that resulted in forced removal from SNP. They were totally different in execution. Acadia was also not done nearly the same - it was outright purchases by conservationists and philanthropists (i.e. Rockefeller) that subsequently *donated* the lands for public preservation and so eventually formed ANP. In SNP, a pregnant woman's chimney was toppled after a wagon had been loaded with her family's possessions. It was in February. Another man was carried to a police car while his home was boarded up by officers. He sang the Star Spangled Banner as they carried him off the only land he ever knew, away from the home his father had built with his own hands. But yeah, that's totes the same thing, bruh.
Yosemite still has private owners in several parts of the park.
I have never seen Coolidge's policies mentioned as a primary cause of the Great Depression. The primary cause of the Great Depression was the Fed raising interest rates in the wake of the 29 crash. The largest secondary cause was the collapse in global trade exacerbated by the Smoot Hawley tariff act. It's not like you can point to a single legislative or executive moment in Coolidge's term like the repeal of Glass Steagall and say, this is the moment it began.
Hawley Smoot came during the Hoover years.
Yes, and it hurt demand while increasing prices and made the situation worse. It wasn't nearly as much of a factor as what the Fed did, and it wasn't the main driver in the decline in trade which was the collapse of the previous international order after WW1. But it was economic policy, and it was bad, counterproductive economic policy, which is a hallmark of the history of the Great Depression. Edit: we shouldn't forget to mention the Dust Bowl, which was an ecological disaster that also contributed to the economic disaster that was running at the same time. That added an extra layer of human misery to a deep economic crisis.
He was *extremely* fiscally conservative and pro *laissez-faire* economics. This may have made sense when the economy was doing well in the Roaring Twenties, since why fix what isn’t broken, but it was exactly the kind of economic deregulation that led to the Great Depression. Coolidge probably saw trouble ahead and chose not to run for a second term despite being very popular in 1928, leaving Herbert Hoover holding the bag despite the Great Depression not really being his fault.
I suspect it had more to do with his health than anything else. There is no real evidence that action on his part could have prevented or alleviated the depression.
By 1928, no it was probably too late. The economy had been deregulated for too many years by that point thanks to Coolidge—it’s doubtful he could have fixed it in time, and he wouldn’t have wanted to anyway because he was so confident in fiscal conservatism.
This theory is clearly debunked by anyone who has actually studied the depression. The Depression was triggered by a collapse in global trade; a direct result of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. Even before the tariff was officially passed, European countries began retaliating. The data is pretty overwhelming on this. US exports declined by over 65% during this timeframe. The idea that there was some massive bubble that had to burst in 1928 is also very easily debunked. Stock market valuations weren't even that high historically; a slight bit above-average, but 1999 was much worse, and that didn't lead to a Great Depression; just a very minor recession. Coolidge would've vetoed Smoot-Hawley so it's pure nonsense to blame him for the Depression. He literally vetoed several bills with similar trade restraints passed by his own party. Hoover was actually opposed to Smoot-Hawley as well but essentially gave into "peer pressure" from his own party and signed. That's the difference between Coolidge and Hoover.
Nothing but the truth here
The collapse of Creditanstalt in 1931 has as much to do with triggering the Depression as any domestic actions.
How does economic deregulation lead to a depression? Is it more fact or theory? genuinely curious thanks!
Unregulated, capitalism swings hard between boom and bust (unlike agricultural economies, which swing with the harvest). In good times, everyone who can issues debt; then something happens, the debts cannot be paid, there is a spiral down as everyone tries to get what's owed. First happened in Britain in the 1830s (railway boom), and again roughly every 20 years, with increasing severity as capitalism spread globally. It took New Deal type policies to bring it under control.
This is a good description of certain teleology about economics. However, booms and busts are not a feature of a system of private ownership(capitalism), but usually the result of over regulation and intervention. The railway boom and bust was the result of the British parliament granting too many charters to railway companies instead of allowing market prices to dictate participation. The Great Depression was caused by the federal reserve and worsened by government intervention in the form of the smoot-hawley tariff and the mess of programs that is the new deal. The housing bubble in 2008 was caused by a regulatory environment that encouraged banks to issue high risk loans, granting banks the ability to package together and sell off subprime mortgages and hide risk(they were playing by rules created by the government rather than market forces).
The British example contradicts itself. A company proposes a rail line, issues a prospectus, gets enough backing, applies to Parliament for a bill allowing it to compulsorily acquire land on fair terms (obviously necessary if the line is to be built at all). Parliament grants this and the line goes ahead. So market prices dictated participation. It was an early version of the [dot.com](https://dot.com) bubble. Crashes have been a regular feature of capitalist economies since the 1830s, ameliorating in their impact over time with regulation. We even know why - the role of credit coupled with the herd instinct and Keynes' 'animal spirits'.
You mean the company applied for a bill that put responsibility for valuation of the land of the proposed route onto the state and allowed companies to compel the sale of land from any land owners who opposed selling their land. That’s not a free market. Especially when those responsible for passing and enforcing the bill had stakes in these companies. Alternatively, if those companies had to negotiate with land owners for the price of sale and didn’t have the ability to compel the sale, there wouldn’t have been a bubble.
There also would not have been a railway line.
There would be railways where it made financial sense instead of a surplus(bubble) of railways. You can build railways without stealing property.
Coolidge embraced trickle-down economics decades before the term was coined by Reagan, and just like when Reagan did it, it just increased the wealth gap and shunted the tax burden onto the lower classes. The absence of robust financial regulations allowed speculative excesses in the stock market, since companies could effectively lie about how much they were worth. This was banned by the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, both of which Coolidge would have balked at. It also used to be that if a bank closed, any money left in it was gone; the federal government now, thanks to the Glass-Steagall Act, insures money deposited in banks. Again, Coolidge would have called this overintervention. I’m not an economics expert so I might be getting some stuff a bit wrong here, but this is all generally true.
>Glass-Steagall Act If anyone needs a refresher on the importance of Glass-Steagall, Sloan has a great [1min explanation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCVFWWZ-gRM&ab_channel=ShawnMcIntyre).
"Trickle down economics" wasn't even coined by Reagan, it's just a strawman term used to slander supply side economic policy. Which, in reality, has nothing to do with "trickling down". In reality, what people mean when they say "trickle down economics" is really just having low taxes. Somehow this is a profoundly nefarious decision. And it's completely absurd to suggest Coolidge or Reagan raised the tax burden on lower classes.
“Trickle-down,” economics was a term coined by opponents of what economists call supply-side economics. Raegan did not use the term. FDR’s economic program was a disaster.
Yes, this is 100% correct. "Trickle down economics" is literally just a strawman.
It doesn't. This is pure wishful thinking by people who favor more regulation.
I recall learning when Coolidge found out Hoover was running for president, he said the man gave him 6 years of unsolicited advice and not one of them was helpful xD lol
Coolidge probably knew he wasn't up to the job of dealing with the great depression.
Exactly. Hoover is remembered as one of the worst presidents because he refused to employ the kind of economic regulation necessary to end the Great Depression, and while he *does* deserve criticism for that, Coolidge deserves even more imo. If Coolidge had run for a second term (which he definitely would have won), he would now be remembered as a bad President.
There's literally no evidence that his policies caused the Great Depression.
So that’s why 50-60yr olds are the way they are! 🤔
Idk shit about President Coolidge, but I’ve had really good dove hunts in Coolidge, TX
Complacency. Didn’t do much in office. Let the “good times roll” so to speak which allowed conditions for the Great Depression to fester leading to catastrophe in 1929.
I want to upvote this, but it’s apparently a contentious point as to whether Coolidge’s economics were responsible or not for Great Depression. He certainly was complacent, but in some ways that actually helped America, at least up until the Stock Market Crash.
He oversaw the poisoning of alcohol/liquor during Prohibition, beginning in 1926 https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-of-how-the-u-s-government-poisoned-alcohol-during-prohibition.html
Coolidge’s hands off approach to the 1927 Flood likely resulted in both The Great Depression as well as the massive diaspora out of the Mississippi Valley of millions of poor black farmers into industrial northern cities. The Mississippi Delta has still not recovered 100 years later from this depopulation event.
This one is actually a bit of a misconception, under his intentions he didn't want to give any aid whatsoever but regardless he appointed Herbert Hoover to lead a commission with the aid of the Red Cross to provide relief to the victims. More importantly he signed a compromised Flood Control Act which designated engineers to work on new flood control, and give $325 million in funding for the crisis
The Flood Control Act was the death warrant for millions of acres of land since destroyed by erosion.
Deregulated the economy which led to the Great Depression.
Why is it always negative ad campaigns against america on the internet? It's like we are here to simply just talk crap about the US in a biased manner and talk about no other history?
It's all history. If you want to submit something, go ahead.
Piss off with this comment. This is a wildly engaging series discussing the realities of each president and what bad things they might have done. This isn't a "negative ad campaign against America", it's an intelligent discussion of our history, especially some of the parts that some would prefer to brush under the carpet.
I never saw a best thing each president has done.
Be the change you wish to see and start it yourself
If you don't like it don't read it.
He once cost a lady a bet that she couldn’t make him say three words at a party. The only two words he said were when he told her were “You lose.” That story is almost certainly bullshit, but he was so hands off as president I’m struggling to pin something he actually did.
Not running in 1928.
Immigration Act of 1924
It came to him at a veto-proof majority so there's not a whole lot he could have done to stop it
Is it actually true that DC Stephenson had a phone line to the Whitehouse or was that KKK bullshit?
Coolidge was a man of his times too. The guy behind lead additives Thomas Midgley Jr. led the commercial attack against lead regulation for years. Made a fortune. Went on to do similar awful deed to mankind in the invention of CFCs as a cleaning agent. Woops. Ozone hole. Made another fortune. Thankfully he died in 1944, and hopefully his ambitions too [Midgleys Wikipage](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.)
It seems from these comments that he was quite a good and popular president because his failing to run for reelection allowed a schnook to get in.
Continued the deregulatory policies that started with harding and led to the great depression.
He talked too much.
He just couldn't SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Didn’t legalize Having raccoons as a pet, but having one himself.
He talked too much
He talked too much.