Politics & Power Quote by Calvin Coolidge

Coolidge isn’t praising commerce so much as embalming it into national identity. Delivered in the 1920s, as mass production and mass advertising remade daily life, the line turns a contingent economic mood into something like a civic creed: Americans don’t merely engage in business; business is what they are. That rhetorical move matters because it shrinks the idea of the citizen into the figure of the consumer-investor, and it frames prosperity not as a policy outcome but as a moral horizon.

The sentence is built like an accountant’s ledger: “producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering.” The verbs stack into an assembly line of action, making the economic cycle feel natural, inevitable, even wholesome. “Profoundly concerned” is the key softener. It gives spiritual weight to what might otherwise sound like a blunt confession of materialism. Coolidge’s intent is reassurance: in a decade of labor unrest, postwar disillusionment, and rapid urban change, he offers a simple answer to who runs the country and why. Stability will come not from grand reforms or ideological crusades, but from letting the market-minded majority do what it already does.

The subtext is also a quiet boundary-drawing. If the “American people” are defined by transactions, those outside that circuit - the unemployed, the striking worker, the immigrant viewed as “unassimilated,” the farmer crushed by falling prices - become marginal to the story or are treated as glitches in an otherwise healthy machine. It’s a presidential blessing on the era’s pro-business governance: low taxes, light regulation, and the faith that private profit can stand in for public purpose.