On NPR this morning, linguist John McWhorter compared the pro-business rhetoric in President Obama’s speech to the Chamber of  Commerce with similar language from Calvin Coolidge.

McWhorter based his comparison on this comment from Obama:

In addition to making government more affordable, we’re also making it more effective and customer-friendly. We’re trying to run the government a little bit more like you run your businesses — with better technology and faster services. So in the coming months, my administration will develop a proposal to merge, consolidate and reorganize the federal government in a way that best serves the goal of a more competitive America.

According to McWhorter, this sounds a bit like Coolidge’s famous suggestion that “the chief business of the American people is business.” But as McWhorter explained, Coolidge didn’t seem quite so intent on coddling business leaders:

What’s interesting about that statement is that he [Obama] is implying that the government will change its ways to suit the preference of business, as opposed to, for example, a rather similar speech in intent that Calvin Coolidge made in 1925. And this is the one where he made the famous quote, ‘The chief business of the American people is business.’ And what’s interesting is the complete difference in tone. In his speech, Obama used the words ‘we’ and ‘us’ 66 times. Coolidge in his speech used ‘we’ and ‘us’ just 28 times.

Asked whether he was suggesting that Obama was  ”chummier” with business than Coolidge, McWhorter said yes.

So does this mean Obama was being chummier in his speech than Coolidge, one of the most famously pro-business presidents in U.S. history? “That is precisely what I’m saying,” McWhorter says. Presidents nowadays, he says, “cannot be as saliently pro-business as Coolidge was. Obama has to be more coded.”

Over at Townhall.com, David Stokes makes a nice point about the importance of context when evaluating political speech. Using the Shirley Sherrod episode as a contemporary hook, Stokes goes on to defend the honor and historical reputation of Calvin Coolidge.

In particular, Stokes bemoans the histriographical hegemony of Coolidge’s most famous quotation: “The business of America is business.”

In fact, as most readers of this blog probably know, that’s actually a misquote. What Coolidge actually said in his January 17, 1925 address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors was slightly different: “After all, the chief business of the American people is business.”

A quibble? Perhaps. But I think the distinction is important. The business of the American people is one thing, but the business of the American nation is something quite different. As individuals, we may all be chiefly concerned with “business”: our livelihood, wealth, and economic well-being. But as a nation, we are also concerned with something more: Much more, in fact.

The business quotation, as Stokes points out, has generally been ripped from its context — first by Coolidge contemporaries and later by critical historians. Coolidge’s speech was not, principally, about the role of business in American society. Rather, it focused on the importance of journalism in a free country.

In covering the speech, the New York Times got the story right: “Coolidge Declares Press Must Foster American Idealism,” the paper reported in its headline. Coolidge critics, by contrast, have generally gotten it wrong. Or at least only half right. To be sure, Coolidge spent some of the speech defending the role of wealth in a democratic society. But the principal burden of his address was a defense of  American idealism. As he noted near the end:

We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want very much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists. That is the only motive to which they ever give any strong and lasting reaction.

[Incidentally, Robert Sobel wrote a useful analysis of  Coolidge's "business of the American people" quotation, available online from the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation. While too critical of mainstream Coolidge historiography, the essay nicely challenges the easy caricature of Coolidge as a stooge of big business. ]

Coolidge placed great faith in the notion of the “common good.” Good government, in the Coolidge style, did not involve any sort of brokering between special interests. Rather, the wise leader worked assiduously to identify a “common interest” and pursued it doggedly. As he said in one of his most famous speeches:

This Commonwealth is one. We are all members of one body. The welfare of the weakest and the welfare of the most powerful are inseparably bound together. Industry cannot flourish if labor languish. Transportation cannot prosper if manufactures decline. The general welfare cannot be provided for in any one act, but it is well to remember that the benefit of one is the benefit of all, and the neglect of one is the neglect of all. The suspension of one man’s dividends is the suspension of another man’s pay envelope.

This was an attractive and widely shared view in 1919, when Coolidge offered it up. As CC biographer David Greenberg has observed:

This view, quite prevalent at the time, was not a reactionary position but a mainstream conservative one — and not too far even from Progressive orthodoxy. Progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson tended to believe that the proper goal of politics was to satisfy a “general interest,” and not the special interests of any particular groups.

But of course, one man’s common good was another man’s factional interest. Political leaders could — and did — disagree on the meaning of this vague but powerful notion.

For Coolidge, the most dangerous threat to the common good often came from those trying to pit one class against another. More particularly, it came from those who would demonized business and wealth, ostensibly in the service of labor and hard work.

The common good, Coolidge believed, was wholly consistent with a free and vibrant economic system. Indeed, it required economic freedom. He used an analogy to make the point:

Diffusion of learning has come down from the university to the common school—the kindergarten is last. No one would now expect to aid the common school by abolishing higher education … It may be that the diffusion of wealth works in an analogous way. As the little red schoolhouse is builded in the college, it may be that the fostering and protection of large aggregations of wealth are the only foundation on which to build the prosperity of the whole people.  Large profits mean large pay rolls. But profits must be the result of service performed. In no land are there so many and such large aggregations of wealth as here; in no land do they perform larger service; in no land will the work of a day bring so large a reward in material and spiritual welfare.

Coolidge’s notion of the common good — and the policy implications that flowed from it —  were central to his political career.