Incoherent Corporate Speech

F. Scott Fitzgerald imagines corporate marriage proposals as a promising thought experiment to think through the fundamental incoherence of what was eventually to be known as corporate speech after the U.S. Supreme Court case Citizens United (2010). His autobiographical and underappreciated meditations on the film industry, The Love of the Last Tycoon (1940) and The Pat Hobby Stories (1940–1), tease out corporate expression’s difficulties and possibilities—complications that are typically overlooked in contemporary discussions of corporate speech. In Tycoon, Fitzgerald’s Hollywood executive producer imagines that he can “buy” what is in his screenwriter’s “mind.” His understanding of speech articulates Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s theory of contractual meaning and economist Ronald Coase’s literalization of “the marketplace of ideas,” anticipating the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Citizens United. But when that tycoon’s lover treats her multiple Dear John letters to him in the same literal manner—as automatic, repetitive, and commodified—the tycoon senses the flaws in his account of language. After examining Citizens United and related precedents struggling to conceptualize corporate speech, this chapter argues that Fitzgerald’s focus on the problem of repeated action reveals a basic incoherence in theories of corporate speech. Conceiving of ideas as brain content that can be bought and sold, Tycoon’s corporate executive unwittingly stumbles on the essentially impoverished nature of corporate speech as repetitive but not meaningful. Decades before corporate speech had First Amendment protections, Fitzgerald’s late fiction imagined and represented its potential problems.