Politics & Power Quote by Calvin Coolidge

A country as a corporation: that is the sly compression in Coolidge's line, and it’s no accident it landed like a slogan. Delivered in 1925 to newspaper editors, it wasn’t an offhand quip so much as a mission statement for the post-World War I order: let markets drive, let government referee lightly, and treat prosperity as proof of national virtue. Coolidge is doing rhetorical jiu-jitsu here. He takes an abstract idea - “America” - and defines it with a concrete, almost procedural noun: “business.” The repetition is the point. It turns ideology into common sense, as if the nation’s purpose were as obvious as opening the store in the morning.

The subtext is reassurance with teeth. To industrialists and a growing professional class, it promises stability after wartime mobilization, labor unrest, and Progressive-era reform: the adults are back, the ledgers will balance, the strikes won’t set the agenda. To everyone else, it quietly narrows citizenship into productivity. If the “business” of America is “business,” then social welfare, cultural pluralism, and regulatory ambition become extracurriculars - nice, maybe, but not the main job.

Context matters because the 1920s boom made the line feel prophetic, until it didn’t. The same confidence in private enterprise that made Coolidge sound modern also made the sentence an easy villain after 1929. That’s why it endures: it’s both a crisp snapshot of laissez-faire faith and a reminder of how quickly national identity can be reduced to an economic mood.