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In a Library of Congress blog, Ellen Terrell tells us that a quote often attributed to President Calvin Coolidge – “The business of America is business” – is an abbreviation.
What Coolidge actually said to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington D.C. on January 17, 1925 was this: “After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.”
Terrell adds a codicil to her correction: “Given that the speech was before a news trade group, Coolidge was talking about the role of the press in a modern, democratic America and included warnings about the evils of propaganda. But more specifically, he was talking about the role of the press in free-market America.”
For conservatives in the U.S. squaring up against their opposite number, neo-progressives and socialists, the correction may be a distinction without a difference. “While the quotes themselves may differ,” Terrell tells us, “for many, the sentiment behind both may not differ all that much.”
The chief point in both politics and business is to leap out in front of a trend or fashion and exploit it for profit, political or economic, remembering always there is nothing as temporary as a fashion.
In moving tax resources from private assets to public treasuries, onward to heavily invested public schools, politicians almost always revert to a business vocabulary: taxes plowed into public education, for example, are “investments” – even when they do not pay expected dividends. Schools open to the public – Why do we not regard them as public schools as well? – such as Catholic schools and charter schools are not quite as hampered by restrictions impudently imposed by the state upon traditional public schools. These schools therefore, free of creative shackles, can more easily reject temporary pedagogical fashions such as the wholesale abandonment of phonics as a useful tool in advancing literacy, reading and spelling.
We are reminded, circa 2026, that reading and math scores in many public schools have dropped precipitously over the past few decades, that student numbers are down, that colleges have been forced to offer remedial courses to illiterate public school entrants, and that investments in public education should never be reduced – not ever – simply because the tax dollar investment has not returned sufficient educational profits.
Mark Greenberg
This columnist, now retired, first met realtor Mark Greenberg in connection with the Simon Foundation, a home and training facility for unwanted dogs.
“In 2004,” according to his bio, “Mark and Linda Greenberg began devoting much effort to the development of a no-kill animal shelter and in 2010, after the expenditure of over $5,000,000, a 36,000 square foot shelter was built in Bloomfield Connecticut which is the culmination of a decades-long mission by the Greenbergs to rescue animals.”
Greenberg pointed out one of many rescued dogs now safely tucked into immaculate kennels, well trained and well fed, and said without a shiver of disgust, “This one is now doing very well. He was a particularly bad case when he came to us. He was repeatedly stabbed and came to us full of holes. He looked like someone had been using him as a dart board.”
Then and now, Greenberg “has been actively engaged in the real estate business in the New York Metropolitan area and Connecticut for over fifty years,” according to his business site, Mark Greenberg Real Estate.
Greenberg’s name popped up recently in a Hartford Courant news story, “CT company’s massive suburban office complex sold. For a sliver of $150M it cost to build.” The story should serve as an object lesson outlining the practical differences between business and politics.
We all know from alarming vacancy rates in Connecticut’s large urban areas that the insurance business in what used to be called the “insurance capital of the world,” Hartford, has taken a crippling hit, somewhat like the dog in the Simon Foundation facility. The vacancy rate in Connecticut’s capital city is an astounding 31.9%.
Pressed between a rock and a hard place, The Hartford Insurance Group, has been forced to unload part of its assets for pennies on the dollar: “A massive suburban office complex — once a major satellite location for one of the area’s most recognized employers — has sold for a stunning 5% of the nearly $150 million it cost to build in the late 2000s and represents a further sign of the depth of the office property woes in the region.”
Greenberg scooped the property up and has plans for it. In neo-progressive folklore, Greenberg should have stuffed his pillows with the profit and slept the sleep of the just continuing, socialist economic engineer U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont screams at us from every political pulpit in the Northeast, to grind in the dirt the faces of the poor and destitute.
Windsor Connecticut’s approach to solving economic problems, thankfully, is more forward looking than that of socialist engineers wedded to outworn slogans – “Eat the rich!”, “Seize their unearned assets”, “Get thee to a Gulag” -- and false solutions.
“We needed to take a new approach,” said Windsor’s director of economic development Patrick McMahon.
“The town, the Courant tells us, “moved to amend its zoning regulations to allow for greater flexibility for those who want to convert older office properties into residential or mixed-use redevelopments, with Greenberg a vocal proponent of the changes…The complex already has two tenants: Insurer Aflac occupying about 32,000 square feet and WM, the former Waste Management, leases about 60,000 square feet, with the building’s occupancy now coming in at a little over 20%... Greenberg said he already has another tenant lined up… Chubb, the global property and casualty insurer, is under contract to relocate a local office from Simsbury to 1 Griffin Road North, as of Jan. 1, Greenberg said. Chubb would occupy 53,000 square feet, Greenberg said.”
Coolidge, a native of Vermont, had it right all along: “After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.”
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