This is the most famous misquote of Calvin Coolidge's. Where did historians get this quote and why have they used it in textbooks to get it so well known?

The real statement comes from a speech by Calvin Coolidge called "The Press Under a Free Government" which was given before the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C. on January 17, 1925. The quote is really: "After all, the chief business of the American people is business." However, Coolidge goes on to say that, "Of course the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence." He discusses journalism and the thought that the business interests of newspaper owners should not taint reporting. He continues, "American newspapers have seemed to me to be particularly representative of this practical idealism of our people."

His last paragraph in the speech shows what he really believes motivate Americans:

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.

To quote Tom Silver (Coolidge and the Historians, 1982), "Coolidge's attitude toward money-making and wealth is the commonsensical one, namely, that wealth is justified only as a means to higher ends. Wealth does provide, in its turn, the leisure and the wherewithal to pursue, for instance, a liberal education, which is among the noblest ends of man."

However, Professor Arthur Schlesinger in Crisis of the Old Order wrote, "(Coolidge's) speeches offered his social philosophy in dry pellets of aphorism. "The chief business of the American people," he said, "is business." But, for Coolidge, business was more than business; it was a religion; and to it he committed all the passion of his arid nature. "The man who builds a factory," he wrote, "builds a temple. The man who works there worships there." He (Coolidge) felt these things with a fierce intensity.

William Allen White, who knew him well, called him a mystic, a whirling dervish of business, as persuaded of the divine character of wealth as Lincoln had been of the divine character of man, "crazy about it, sincerely, genuinely, terribly crazy."

According to Sheldon Stern, in his recent essay in The New England Journal of History (Fall 1998) William Allen White repeats "the business of America is business" over ten times in his books and articles between 1925 and 1938. White's history books "had an immense impact on a young and dedicated first generation of New Deal historians and FDR biographers writing in the 1940's and 1950's," noted Dr. Stern. Of course, as Stern reveals, "the New Deal historians chose, very selectively, to discuss only those portions of White's writings which contributed to the stereotype."

This theme of Coolidge as devoted to "business, materialism, elitism and their corollaries" is carried forth in textbooks such as John Morton Blum's The National Experience, written in 1968. Recently, Nathan Miller wrote Star-Spangled Men: America's Ten Worst Presidents and called Coolidge, "high priest of the status quo. Under his hand, whatever remained of the progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson was quietly chloroformed. 'The business of America is business,' Coolidge intoned. He believed 'the man who builds a factory builds a temple,' and the 'man who works there worships there.' "

Thus the stereotypes are being perpetuated again, even when Stern criticizes Miller's book as filled with, "snipe and sneer judgments, often made without consulting the most important recent scholarship on these presidents."

What does one do to counter these misquotes? Urge textbook writers to use Sheldon Stern's fair assessment of Calvin Coolidge in their books. Read Calvin Coolidge's own words. Question speakers who use this misquote to characterize Calvin Coolidge; what are their sources? Have they seen recent scholarship? See Paul Johnson's new book, A History of the American People, or Modern Times where he noted that "No public man carried into modern times more comprehensively the founding principles of Americanism: hard work, frugality, freedom of conscience, freedom from government, respect for serious culture."