Not having read this lady’s book & absent any intent to do so I yet state the essay of the same title by William Graham Sumner must be better.

People like THIS in the government! Sounds frightening.

“Coolidge has been misleadingly described as a colorless
small-town Massachusetts attorney. Actually, the new president
was a member of a prominent Boston financial family, who
were board members of leading Boston banks. One, T. Jefferson
Coolidge, became prominent in the Morgan-affiliated United
Fruit Company of Boston. Throughout his political career,
moreover, Calvin Coolidge had two important mentors, both
neglected by historians. One was Massachusetts Republican
Party Chairman W. Murray Crane, who served as a director of
three powerful Morgan-dominated institutions: the New
Haven and Hartford Railroad, the Guaranty Trust Company of
New York, and AT&T, on which he was also a member of the
board’s executive committee. The other was Amherst classmate
and prominent Morgan partner Dwight Morrow. Morrow
began to agitate for Coolidge for president as early as 1919, and
continued his pressure at the Chicago Republican convention of
1920. Dwight Morrow and fellow Morgan partner Thomas
Cochran lobbied strenuously for Coolidge at Chicago. Cochran,
who was not an Amherst graduate, did not have the Amherst
excuse for working for Coolidge, and so he kept in the background.
Cochran and Morrow were happy, as prominent Morgan
men, to confine their work to the background and to push
forward as their front man for Coolidge the large, doughty
Boston merchant Frank Stearns, who did have the virtue of
being an Amherst graduate.
Secretary of the Treasury throughout all three Republican
administrations of the 1920s was the powerful multimillionaire
tycoon Andrew Mellon, head of the Mellon interests, whose
empire spread from the Mellon National Bank of Pittsburgh to
encompass Gulf Oil, Koppers Company, and Aluminum Corporation
of America. Mellon was generally allied to the Morgan
interests. Furthermore, when Charles Evans Hughes
returned to private law practice in the spring of 1925, Coolidge
offered his crucial State Department post to longtime Wall
Street attorney and former secretary of state and of war, Elihu
Root, who might be called the veteran head of the “Morgan
bar.” At one critical time in Morgan’s affairs, Root had served as
Morgan’s personal attorney. After Root refused the State
Department post, Coolidge was forced to settle for a lesser Morgan
light, Minnesota attorney Frank B. Kellogg. Undersecretary
to Kellogg was Joseph C. Grew, who had family connections
with the Morgans (J.P. Morgan, Jr., had married a Grew), while,
in 1927, two highly placed Morgan men were asked to take over
relations with troubled Mexico and Nicaragua.
The year 1924 indeed saw the House of Morgan at the pinnacle
of political power in the United States. President Calvin
Coolidge, friend and protégé of Morgan partner Dwight Morrow,
was deeply admired by J.P. “Jack” Morgan, Jr. Jack Morgan
saw the president, perhaps uniquely, as a rare blend of
deep thinker and moralist. Morgan wrote a friend: “I have
never seen any president who gives me just the feeling of confidence
in the country and its institutions, and the working out
of our problems, that Mr. Coolidge does.”
On the other hand, the House of Morgan faced the happy
dilemma in the 1924 presidential election that the Democratic
candidate was none other than John W. Davis, senior partner of
the Wall Street firm of Davis, Polk and Wardwell, and chief
attorney for J.P. Morgan and Company. Davis, a protégé of the
legendary Morgan partner Harry Davison, was also a personal
friend and a backgammon and cribbage partner of Jack Morgan’s.
It was an embarrassment of riches. Whoever won the
1924 election, the Morgans could not lose, although they
decided to opt for Coolidge.
Morgan partner Dwight Morrow became ambassador to Mexico in
1927, while Nicaraguan affairs came under the direction of Henry L.
Stimson, Wall Street lawyer and longtime leading disciple of Elihu Root,
and a partner in Root’s law firm. As for Frank Kellogg, in addition to
being a director of the Merchants National Bank of St. Paul, he had been
general counsel for the Morgan-dominated United States Steel Company
for the Minnesota region, and most importantly, the top lawyer for railroad
magnate James J. Hill, long closely allied with the Morgan interests.

However, 1928, saw inevitable changes in Morgan domination
of monetary policy. Benjamin Strong, sickly all year, died in
October, and was replaced by George L. Harrison, his handpicked
successor. While Harrison was a devoted “Morgan loyalist,”
he did not quite carry the clout of Benjamin Strong.
The Coolidge administration, too, was coming to an end.
The Morgans, again facing an embarrassment of riches, were
torn three ways. Their prime goal was to induce their beloved
president to break precedent and run for a third term. Not
being able to persuade Coolidge, the Morgans next turned to
Vice President Charles G. Dawes, who had been connected
with various Morgan railroads in Chicago. When Dawes
dropped out of the race, the Morgans turned at last to Herbert
Clark Hoover, who had been a powerful secretary of commerce
during the two Republican administrations of the
1920s. While Hoover had not been as intimately connected
with the Morgans as had Calvin Coolidge, he had long been
close to the Morgan interests. Particularly influential over
Hoover during his administration were two unofficial but
powerful advisers—both Morgan partners: Thomas W. Lamont,
and Dwight Morrow, whom Hoover consulted regularly
three times a week.”- Murray N. Rothbard, From Hoover to Roosevelt: The Federal Reserve and the Financial Elites.

From the same crowd who brought you the Depression, meet Calvin Coolidge!

Fantastic review – It is on my shelf, and once I am through with the Bastiat Collection, I intend to pick this up for reading.

“Suffice to say that during the 1920s and 1930s, the chatterers at Ivy League cocktail parties — and around FDR’s dinner table — were decidedly smitten with Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini.”

This is true for a lot of people in the 1920s especially
re Mussolini. A friend had scads of American magazines from that time. I was suprised to read the fawning tone used by article writers as they praised Italian fascism.