Quoting the words of Calvin Coolidge, Gov. Spencer Cox's annual State of the State Address leaned into the uneasy zeitgeist felt across the nation — both economically and politically. As he's done in the past, he celebrated Utah's reputation and culture and held it up as part of what could help the nation. His speech celebrated a central theme of virute.
"America desperately needs a return to virtue," he said. "You could say America needs a return to Utah."
The governor used his speech to again remind lawmakers there are too many bills, but also a checklist to run through bills he felt would help the state: A push to improve Utah's literacy and get more students to read at grade level, a bell-to-bell ban on cellphones in school, a push to fix housing and a declaration that "Utah will not become a state of renters" and a push to continue funding the state's approach to homelessness.
"Our mission is to make Utah the worst place in the country to camp on the street — and the best place to get help," Cox said.
The governor brought his speech to a close on familiar themes. He celebrated Utah's success, he lamented the coarseness of our politics and the chasing of economic goals that are seen to weaken families. And he ended on a message of what he would say to his
8-year-old self who visited the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.
"I wanted to tell him to keep learning, to keep working, to keep improving, to serve and sacrifice for others, to pursue true happiness, to have faith in Utah and to never lose hope in the idea of America."
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Gov. Spencer Cox’s State of the State address, transcript as prepared for delivery by the Office of the Governor, Jan. 22, 2026.
Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Lt. Gov. Henderson, Abby, Gabe, Utah’s public servants, and my fellow Utahns: thank you for being here tonight.
I want to start by congratulating the two new members of our House of Representatives: Representative Leah Hansen and Representative John Arthur and our newest member of the Senate, Emily Buss. Please join me in welcoming them.
Our time tonight is short, and so, as usual, I’ll ask that you hold your applause until the end of my remarks.
…
I was eight years old the first time I left Utah.
I grew up in a small farming town, and we didn’t travel — my parents just didn’t have the money. Salt Lake City, fewer than a hundred miles away, felt like the edge of the world.
But I had an uncle — the only one to move away from Utah, who lived in Washington, D.C. One year, he helped make it possible for our family to come and visit.
So I got on an airplane for the first time, flew across the country, and found myself standing in the nation’s capital.
We toured the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, and went to the top of the Washington Monument. And at every site, for an eight-year-old kid who thought the Orem mall was the coolest building ever constructed, I was overwhelmed in the best possible way.
But it was Thomas Jefferson who left the deepest impression on me.
Standing in the Jefferson Memorial, I looked up at the words carved into stone: I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
I remember feeling, even at that age, that the story of America mattered. That these ideas weren’t abstract — they were alive. And they were demanding something of me. Something of us.
I didn’t know exactly what I would do with that feeling. But I knew I wanted to understand it better. I wanted to learn about the founding of our country — about the Constitution, and about what made this whole experiment work.
…
On July 4, 1776, the United States declared its independence from the British Empire with perhaps the greatest, most consequential, and most radical sentence ever written: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Conventional thinking today defines “the pursuit of happiness” as something like the pursuit of
pleasure or materialism. But that’s not what the Founders meant. They were drawing on an older tradition, shaped by the Stoics and Enlightenment thinkers, that saw happiness not as something consumed, but something practiced.
To the Founders, the pursuit of happiness had everything to do with character. It was the result of self-mastery, moral formation, and a life oriented toward purpose and service.
Happiness wasn’t feeling good — it was being good.
You’ll remember that Benjamin Franklin made a list of 13 virtues he believed were essential to a good life — seemingly “old fashioned” ideals like Order, Temperance, Justice, Frugality, Industry, Humility, Sincerity and Moderation. He kept a small notebook and tracked his own behavior, day by day, marking where he fell short and where he improved. It wasn’t about perfection. Franklin failed at many of those virtues. It was about trying a little harder to be a little better every day.
Franklin reached a simple conclusion. “Without virtue,” he wrote, “man can have no happiness in this world.” And he wasn’t alone. Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and Madison all believed that the Republic could only survive if her people were educated and virtuous. That understanding was passed down to Lincoln and Frederick Douglas. To Martin Luther King Jr., too.
You see, virtue was never a footnote in the American experiment. It was the foundation.
But it wasn’t just individual moral character that concerned the Founders. They knew those same virtues must be applied to governing. Madison and Hamilton, specifically, understood that personal self-government was necessary for political self-government.
While wisely implementing a series of checks and balances to protect us from our worst impulses, the Founders knew we couldn’t succeed as a nation without virtuous leaders. We needed a constitutional framework, but we also needed moral character: legislators, executives and judges who could rule their passions and limit their thirst for power. Leaders humble enough to listen and learn from others, while seeking common ground.
My fellow public servants, you are those leaders. Or at least I hope we are striving to be.
…
Now, I recognize that the last thing you want is an, admittedly, deeply flawed member of the executive branch lecturing you on character. So tonight, I will share some insights from my second favorite senate president.
Before he was president of the United States and before he was a governor, Calvin Coolidge was the president of the Massachusetts Senate. In 1914 he gave a most profound speech to his fellow legislators.
It is titled “Have Faith in Massachusetts” and I have provided each of you with a copy tonight.
Coolidge begins with an appeal to our better angels. “The welfare of the weakest and the welfare of the most powerful are inseparably bound together,” he said. While over 100 years old, his lessons about the importance of representative government and the critical role of the judiciary feel prescient for our time.
Perhaps my favorite line had to do with the legislature’s relationship to the executive branch.
“Don’t hurry to legislate,” he said, “Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation.”
You’ve heard me raise concerns about the number of bills passed each session — a massive increase over the past two decades, and we are still working to implement the 582 bills passed last session. I so appreciated Representative Stephen Whyte, who had several bills he was planning to run this year. However, after calls to different cabinet members, he was able to find solutions and drop those bills. And godspeed to Representative Okerlund with his very popular bill to limit bills. We love small government.
Coolidge called upon his fellow legislators to have a, “broader, firmer, deeper faith in the people.” He railed against selfish lawmakers, and instead advocated for, “statesmen, who ministered to the welfare of the citizens ... representing their deep, silent convictions."
“Do the day’s work,” he counseled. “If it be to protect the rights of the weak, whoever objects, do it. If it be to help a powerful corporation better to serve the people, whatever the opposition, do that. Expect to be called a stand-patter, but don’t be a stand-patter. Expect to be called a demagogue, but don’t be a demagogue. Don’t hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don’t hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table. Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.”
Tonight I am excited to highlight some of the incredible bills you are working on that will significantly improve the welfare of the citizens of Utah.
…
Nearly half of our third graders are not reading at grade level — and too many of those children never catch up. That should concern us because reading is how people learn to think and govern themselves. A society that cannot read cannot reason together, and when reasoning breaks down, power rushes in to fill the void.
Our goal is this: every child reading well, early, and with confidence. That means high standards and individualized support for struggling readers. It means families, schools, and the state pulling in the same direction.
Literacy is moral infrastructure — and if we want our children to grow up and live free, purposeful lives, we must give them a strong foundation today.
Thank you especially to Senator Ann Millner and Representative Karen Peterson for taking the lead on these critical reforms.
…
Now, housing. If Utahns are to achieve the American dream, feel rooted, think long term, and invest in their neighborhoods and communities, buying a home must be within reach. Right now, too many Utahns are doing everything right — working hard, raising families, serving their neighbors — and still wondering if they will ever be able to afford a place to call their own. This weakens trust and frays the bonds that hold us together.
Utah will not become a state of renters.
We must pull every lever to increase the supply of housing — reform zoning, streamline permitting, support infrastructure, and encourage innovation. If we want strong, stable, connected communities throughout Utah, we have to build more homes. That means less government, not more.
Thank you, Representative Roberts and Senator Fillmore, for your leadership on this issue.
…
Relatedly, across the nation, and here in Utah, homelessness is growing — driven by addiction,r mental illness, and the devastating spread of fentanyl.
Real compassion doesn’t leave people trapped. It tells the truth and restores agency.
Accountability is not cruelty — it is respect for human dignity.
That’s why we are going after those trafficking fentanyl, while expanding treatment, recovery, and pathways back to stability for the people who are struggling. We’re starting with chronic homelessness — helping with mental illness and breaking the vicious cycle of addiction and crime. Our mission is to make Utah the worst place in the country to camp on the street — and the best place to get help.
Thank you for working together to find ongoing funding that supports a systemic approach for restoring order to Utah’s streets through accountability, compassion and recovery. And thank you for letting me take one of your own, Representative Tyler Clancy, to lead this effort starting in March.
…
Now, social media. We cannot preserve agency, virtue, and happiness if we outsource the moral formation of our children to algorithms designed for addiction. Phone-based childhoods are reshaping attention, sleep, relationships, and mental health — not because parents don’t care, but because this is a problem that no single family can solve alone.
The role of government here is not to punish innovation or police thought, but to establish commonsense guardrails, and hold the most powerful companies in human history accountable for their actions.
This is about protecting the next generation’s capacity to focus, to relate, to read, to think, and to choose a meaningful life. It’s about giving them their childhood back.
That’s why we need a bell-to-bell phone ban in schools across Utah. Let’s give the school day — the full school day — back to kids to learn, connect, and be kids again.
Thank you Senator Fillmore and Representative Welton for taking the lead on a bell-to-bell phone ban.
Preserving agency in a digital age may be one of the most important moral responsibilities of our time. We must do as Jefferson, and swear “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
And what social media companies do, without a doubt, is tyranny over the minds of our children and grandchildren — and well, us adults too.
…
But, perhaps more important than all the great bills we pass this session, are the bills we don’t pass. Understanding the limits of legislation was Coolidge’s greatest lesson. He knew that virtue could never be conveyed via laws or government. “The people cannot look to legislation generally for success,” he said. “Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act or resolve.
Government cannot relieve from toil. It can provide no substitute for the rewards of service.”
We will never solve all our challenges with more laws. This great experiment in self-government demands — well — more self-government. And for that we must return, once again, to virtue.
…
Now, my friends: this is a very special year.
As we celebrate 250 years since the Declaration, it’s clear that America has had a remarkable run. That may seem inevitable in hindsight, but even the founders had their doubts. It may surprise some of you to learn that, by the end of their lives, many of the founders thought the experiment was failing or had already failed. As one expert wrote, “[President] Washington became disillusioned … because of the rise of parties and partisanship, Hamilton because … the federal government was not sufficiently vigorous or energetic, Adams because he believed that the American people lacked the requisite civic virtue for republican government, and Jefferson because of sectional divisions that were laid bare by conflict over the spread of slavery.”
None of us are immune from these feelings of pessimism or despair. Yet today, the remarkable outcomes of the American experiment are all around us. This country has delivered prosperity at a scale never before seen, has become the global center of innovation, has built the world’s most powerful military, and has exported its culture around the world.
Patiently built in an unforgiving desert, our state has become perhaps the greatest success story of the American experiment. We’re consistently ranked the best place in the nation to start and grow a small business. We’re a family-first state that leads in upward mobility, showing that
where you start does not have to determine where you end. And for three years in a row, Utah was ranked the number one state in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, not by dominating one category, but by succeeding across the board.
And yet, dark clouds are building all around us. What do we do when the world feels like it’s moving too fast, when contempt is everywhere, when every week feels like a decade’s worth of history? What happens when we drift from the virtue and moral foundations necessary for the experiment in self government to survive?
We see it in a growing sense of loneliness and isolation, even as we are more digitally connected than ever before. We see it in rising anxiety, depression, addiction, and despair — especially among young people, even though they have more material opportunity than any generation in history.
We see it in both major political parties and those who represent us at the national level, making a mockery of Franklin’s virtues — rewarding grift, rejecting decency, and wantonly tearing down the very institutions that made us the envy of every nation.
We see it in a culture that rewards outrage. Where attention is captured not by what is true or good, but by what is loud or divisive.
We see it in an economy that increasingly profits not from helping people build lives of meaning, but from keeping them scrolling, gambling, borrowing, and consuming — at the expense of their health, their families, and their future.
The result is a troubling paradox: we have never had more — and yet too many Americans wonder why we’re doing any of this in the first place.
During this time of turmoil, it might be instructive to look to another time and another celebration of our Declaration of Independence. Let me take you back 100 years to the 150th anniversary of our nation.
The year 1926 must have felt a bit like today. Having survived a global pandemic and a world war, the country found itself at a time of incredible technological change, booming material wealth — but not for everyone — and radical political shifts. Things were getting cheaper, faster and better: cars and planes shrunk the world, and the radio brought news, music, and politics into every home. And yet, many people felt adrift. The country was straying from its moral foundations. The Roaring 20’s could hardly be described as a time of virtue.
On that anniversary day 100 years ago, the president of our country stepped to the podium in Philadelphia to celebrate America’s success and to issue a warning. Oh, and that president just happened to be Calvin Coolidge.
Look, even Calvin Coolidge probably thinks this is too much Calvin Coolidge. But stick with me here.
He said, “We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These
did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first.”
“Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the [Founders] who created it.”
“We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed.”
In other words, and more succinctly, if America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.
My friends, we are so fortunate to live in this state at this moment. I submit that no state in this nation and no people in this country better reflect Franklin’s virtues than ours. Here we still believe in those old-fashioned concepts of order, temperance, justice, frugality, industry, humility and, yes, even moderation. Of course we have flaws, and we, too, sometimes drift from those virtues. But I’m grateful to be surrounded tonight by people who love their enemies, still believe in our better angels, and try a little harder to be a little better every day.
America desperately needs a return to virtue. You could say America needs a return to Utah.
A couple months ago I found myself once again standing inside the Jefferson Memorial, with Abby, my best friend and wife of 29 years, at my side. And even though I’ve visited countless times, I still felt that same sense of wonder as I read those sacred words of self-evident truths and creator-endowed unalienable rights. In my mind's eye, I could see that 8-year-old boy who couldn’t believe he was in that sacred place, assuming he would never return. I wanted to tell him so many things … like not to worry about the hair loss stuff, or that girl in 9th grade.
But mostly I wanted to tell him to keep learning, to keep working, to keep improving, to serve and sacrifice for others, to pursue true happiness, to have faith in Utah and to never lose hope in the idea of America.
So tonight, as we begin the 2026 legislative session, in the 250th year of the American experiment, I echo the words of Senator Coolidge.
Have faith in America. Have faith in Utah. And always — have faith.
Thank you.
