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. ]

David Frum invokes Coolidge to challenge the notion that politics is all about messaging:

You know whose White House was really, really terrible at communications? Calvin Coolidge’s. “Silent Cal” notoriously refused to talk to anybody at all. The story goes that, when still governor of Massachusetts, he was seated at a dinner beside a Boston society woman who liltingly insisted: “Now governor: My husband has bet me $20 you wont say even three words to me. What do you answer to that?” Coolidge: “You lose.”

Coolidge won 382 electoral votes and 54 percent of the vote when he ran for re-election in 1924. Had he sought a third term in 1928, he would have won even more crushingly.

Why? The Coolidge boom.

A few thoughts:

1. Materialist interpretations of history and current politics seem to have carried the day in almost every corner of the commentariat. If the only issues in every election are the objective status of “peace” and “prosperity,” as Frum suggests, then there’s not much room left for ideas and political conviction.

Call me naive, but that sort of interpretation strikes me as simplistic, if pleasantly empirical. By positing that political outcomes can be deduced from empirical realities (i.e. the state of the economy), it reduces a confusing, maddening, and often incoherent political process to a set of nice firm metrics. Comforting, I suppose. And defensible, according to many political scientists. But I’m still dubious.

2. I’m also not persuaded by Frum’s invocation of the mythically silent Cal. After all, Coolidge wasn’t really so silent — he had plenty to say, if only on a limited number of occasions.

It’s fair to say, in fact, that far from being “terrible,” Coolidge was actually quite good at communications. Successful messaging requires that a president know when to talk and when to keep quiet. Over-exposure is a real threat for denizens of the White House. Coolidge, I think, understood that less was sometimes more.

3. More to the point, however, I’m not convinced that Coolidge’s 1920s communications strategy (which was, in some ways,  a throwback to nineteenth century White House messaging) is relevant today. We live in a very different world, especially when it comes to communications technology and mass media.

Coolidge may have been one of the first presidents to explore the utility of mass media, as historian David Greenberg has noted in his fine and admirably brief biography. The ostensibly Silent Cal was a progenitor, of sorts, for the Great Communicator himself, Ronald Reagan.

But while Coolidge’s career may hold lessons for modern politicians, it can’t tell them how to navigate the modern 24-7 news cycle. How would Coolidge have handled the unquenchable thirst of modern media outlets for news, commentary, and invective? We’ll never know.

And somehow, even if he figured out what to do with CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, I’m pretty sure that Coolidge would have found the notion of “social media” unintelligible.

And repulsive, if he ever figured it out.