Leadership Quote by Benjamin Harrison

A cheap coat is doing quiet violence, Harrison warns, and the real cost isn’t measured at the register. The line is a moral trapdoor: it starts with pity for the bargain-hunter, not the starving worker, flipping the usual hierarchy of sympathy. That reversal is the point. It suggests that the consumer who demands impossibly low prices has shrunk his own civic imagination; he’s the one impoverished first, even if his stomach is full.

As a president speaking in an era of industrial expansion and fierce fights over tariffs, wages, and labor power, Harrison is making an argument that sounds like paternal conscience but functions like policy rhetoric. The “coat” is a stand-in for the whole new consumer economy: mass production, distant supply chains (even then), and the temptation to treat human labor as an invisible input. By naming “man or woman,” he also points at the feminized, underpaid sectors of textile work without turning it into sentimentality. The starvation image is blunt and physical, refusing the euphemisms that typically protect comfortable listeners.

The subtext is a challenge to the American habit of mistaking low prices for progress. Harrison frames ethical consumption as a form of patriotism and social stability: if labor is crushed to satisfy price obsession, the nation’s prosperity becomes a shell game. It’s also a reminder that “cheap” is rarely neutral. Someone pays. The only question is whether the buyer is willing to notice.