Free Coolidge by Amity Shlaes Page B

revenue vehicles had been paired in legislation, the former being the Republicans’ preferred device for collecting federal revenue. Democrats opposed the tariff, reasonably enough, on grounds that it tended to work by hurting the poor and consumers—a sound assessment, since consumption of goods subject to tariffs such as sugar and coffee took up a greater portion of the little man’s budget. The second vehicle, the income tax, was put forward by a new voice, William Jennings Bryan, a lawmaker from Nebraska who edited the Omaha World-Herald . William L. Wilson, a Democratic congressman from West Virginia, was among those shepherding the legislation through. The new income tax, a 2 percent levy, was designed to fall on those who earned over $4,000 a year, far more than, for example, the earnings of Coolidge’s father. Wilson argued that it was not a class tax but rather “an effort, an honest effort to balance the weight of taxation in this country.” Republicans and classical liberals and even New Englanders certainly ought to be for the tax, Wilson said, for another reason: it was simple. One of the great New Englanders, William Graham Sumner, had described an income tax as a “simple form of taxation” that was preferable to other kinds of taxes. Said Wilson: “New England taught that doctrine to the South and West and therefore has no right to come up today and complain because her own teaching has been used against her.”
    But Coolidge saw that others would not concede William Wilson’s points. Justin Morrill, a senator from Coolidge’s own Vermont, thought Wilson had it backward on the question of budgets and the faith in the U.S. fiscal house. Income taxes were to be avoided because they were a symptom of fiscal weakness, “the resort only of nations which are always wrestling with financial deficits.” “Surely,” Morrill went on, “we cannot afford to decorate the annals of our Republic with a vile copy of this foreign excrescence.” He sought to reveal the income tax for what it was: an unapologetic blow against the rich of New England, whose citizens would bear a full two-thirds of the burden. Yet a third group of income tax opponents made a more fundamental case: that the income tax was unconstitutional. The Constitution stated that Congress had the power to tax, but only “without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” Many lawmakers took this to mean that states must be taxed evenly, regardless of their population.
    Young Coolidge was not sold on the income tax either. In tones softer than Morrill’s but still definite, he objected in a February 1894 letter to his father, “I do not like an income tax, it taxes the land and the crops at the same time, it is too expensive to collect.” The college junior theorized that “no man’s income is permanent enough to admit of taxation, it will easily be a source of corruption.”
    Coolidge’s political awakening took place at a time when the United States was first waking up to new questions itself. One was the income tax, which would indeed become law in 1894; but another was the question of whether a factory worker as contrasted with, say, a farmer was due something different from government. Before industrialization, there had been no one unemployed in the modern sense: a farmer could be underemployed, and he could be broke, but he was not out of work in the definitive way that a factory hand is when the gates of a factory close. But now people were not finding work.
    In March 1894, Coxey’s Army, a band led by an Ohio man named Jacob Coxey, started as five hundred unemployed and then grew, headed toward Washington, D.C., passing through Homestead, Pennsylvania, at one point. In the spring of 1894, as well, employees of the Palace Car Company went on strike in Illinois after Pullman reduced their wages. But it was hard to compare past and present; there were not even always good numbers. In