As Americans continue to struggle with a sluggish economy, policymakers could learn useful lessons from a president who served in office more than 80 years ago. That’s the view of Amity Shlaes, director of the Four Percent Growth Project at the George W. Bush Center, nationally syndicated columnist, and author of three New York Times best-sellers, including a biography of the 30th American president, Calvin Coolidge. Shlaes outlined Coolidge’s successful record for a recent John Locke Foundation Headliner event. She also discussed Coolidge during an interview with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. Here is part of that conversation.

Kokai: What should today’s politicians learn from Calvin Coolidge?

Shlaes: We think today that if a candidate is for cutting government, he’s going to lose. We also think, by the way, that cutting government doesn’t work. “Austerity,” the dreaded red letter A, right? No politician can be for it, whatever party. What Coolidge showed is that you could be for austerity and have a good result with the economy. They had 4 percent growth, like the name of my project at the Bush Center. Something to which we today can only aspire: 4 percent growth. They had very low unemployment with a policy of austerity.

And the second thing is that austerity can win. People wondered whether Coolidge, when he did run for president in 1924 — he had come [into office in 1923] after the death of a president — would he win? Would he make it? And the outstanding fact of the ’24 election is that Coolidge, as a Republican, even with a third party taking 17 percent, prevailed. He had an absolute majority, not just a plurality, beating Democrats and Progressives combined. He was enormously popular. When he didn’t run in ’28 the Republican Party, neurotic [then] as now, had a nervous breakdown. So you can win politically and economically with a policy of government austerity. That’s Coolidge’s message.