‘A rising tide lifts all boats’ is often attributed to John F Kennedy. The speech which introduced this phrase to many people was given by Kennedy in 1963, when he promised the continued defense of Europe:
As they say on my own Cape Cod, “A rising tide lifts all the boats.”
They did indeed say it in Cape Cod; “The Rising Tide Lifts All The Boats” had been the slogan of the New England Council since 1950.
What Kennedy was alluding to was the idea that what is good for Europe was good for the world. Although that speech made the saying popular neither Kennedy nor the good folk of Cape Cod in the 1950s were the originators of it.
The first example that I know of of the phrase in print is from the New Jersey newspaper The Herald News, January 1910, in a piece about the raising of funds by religious groups for missionary work:
Some inquiries are already heard concerning work at home, if so much is to be given abroad. The reply of this in charge of the campaign is that a rising tide lifts all boats.
There are other pre-Kennedy newspaper citations of the phrase, sometimes in its variant form ‘a rising tide lifts all ships’. These all refer to religious work, as in this early example from The Greensboro Daily News, January 1915:
“The rising tide lifts all ships.” The direct plan for improvement by every Christian Endeavor society is to identify itself with all union movements.
