Coolidge sat back and let the Great Depression creep up on America. Reagan didn't. It's sad that the Great Depression has receded from memory or from being an important part of our nation's history. Next thing you know, Hoover will be viewed as an underrated President.
Maybe people are starting to use their brains and think that the Great Depression couldn't be attributed to a couple of Presidents' terms and aren't simply reguritating romanticized and painfully simplistic Democratic campaign ads from the '30s, '40s and '50s like these?
For being a forum full of people fascinated with the more in-depth aspects of politics, we should be cheering the death of "1920s Republicans caused the entire Great Depression, and FDR fixed it."
I'd argue that the five people most responsible for the Great Depression were Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Mellon, William Gibbs McAdoo, Warren P. G. Harding, and Carter Glass.
As well as Kasier Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas II and Kasier Franz Joseph.
At the end of World War I, the USSR (which came to exist solely because of the conditions created by the war), defaulted on Imperial Russia's massive debts, Germany was crippled with reparations and the economies of Germany, France and Britain were badly damaged.
The impact was indirect, but the loss of export markets for American Industry and Agriculture, left America dangerously vulnerable economically, much of the expansion excluded rural areas and was driven largely by debt fueled speculation in asset prices.
The Federal Reserve's response was misguided and let the money supply decline at a critical point, which contributed to the bank defaults accelerating, and the collapse of world trade post Smoot-Hawley, further deepened the Recession.
Coolidge had little involvement in any of these situations, which already in motion or would happen after he left. His policies boosted the economy from a macro standpoint, but the problem was and the primary critique of Coolidge was he didn't act to change the underlying factors, that would eventually cause the depression.
The problem with that is nobody understood the economy, or realized what peril lay on the horizon. It is kind of hard to therefore fault Coolidge for not addressing a problem most didn't even know existed or didn't understand the potential risks that they posed, or for world events that happened before he took office.
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