Leadership Quote by Calvin Coolidge

Spare, businesslike, and a little menacing in its certainty, Coolidge's line turns advertising from a tack-on expense into an organ without which the whole body of commerce dies. "Life" is doing the heavy lifting: not growth, not convenience, but respiration. Trade doesn't merely benefit from persuasion; it depends on it.

The intent fits the Coolidge-era gospel of normalcy, when government was eager to bless markets as self-justifying engines. In the 1920s, mass production was outrunning older forms of demand. Radio, national magazines, and the new science-flavored language of public relations were converting attention into a measurable commodity. Calling advertising "the life of trade" gives cultural legitimacy to that conversion. It frames persuasion as infrastructure, like roads or electricity, not as manipulation.

The subtext is a quiet redefinition of what an economy is for. If advertising is trade's lifeblood, then consumption becomes the economy's moral center, and skepticism toward marketing starts to look like sabotage. It also launders inequality into aspiration: advertising doesn't just sell products; it sells stories of belonging that make overproduction feel like opportunity. Coolidge's phrasing is politically strategic, too. It shifts the state's role from referee to cheerleader, positioning business confidence and consumer desire as the true public goods.

There's an irony here, even if Coolidge isn't winking: a president arguing that the economy survives on engineered wants. The line doesn't defend advertising so much as admit what modern capitalism had already become: a system powered as much by attention as by output.