Advice from a Flounder

The Cranston prayer banner case has descended from low comedy to outright farce, with a group of Cranston citizens filing a brief to intervene in the case after it had already been decided. For those who aren’t familiar with the case, or maybe don’t remember it (the internet seems to have shortened people’s memories further than ever) let me observe that the city of Cranston, Rhode Island, erected an illegal prayer banner in a local high school half a century ago, and then had the gall to argue that it should be kept up because it had been hanging there (illegally) for a half century. The court ordered them to take it down.

Well now a group of Cranston citizens—the names of these jackasses are Michael Motaranni, Christian Frangos, Olivia Frangos, Carolyn Mesagno, Lori McClain, Jared McMullen and Ronald L’Heureux—are trying to argue that “compelling and dispositive arguments were presented to the Cranston School Committee at the public hearings that were not included in Defendants’ briefs to this Court. Movants believe that these arguments, if considered by this Court, would have resulted in a different ruling.” The judge tersely added, “They are wrong.” Relying on “the Aitken act of 1872 authorizing the use of bibles in all schools in America” Michael Motaranni and his associates argued that virtually every school prayer case has been wrongly decided at least since 1947.

There is an obvious problem with this—several of them, actually. First there is a category error involved here—“authorizing the use of bibles in all schools in America” is not the same thing as authorizing prayer. The bible is a religious text—or rather a collection of religious (and secular) texts held to be sacred by a variety of religious groups. The bible can, in fact, be used in government schools today, as a historic or literary document. Use of the bible in school is not necessarily endorsing one particular religious viewpoint over another.

Prayer, on the other hand, is a religious exercise. There is no such thing as a secular prayer. Any school-sponsored prayer crosses the line that separates spiritual and temporal affairs. Even if “the Aitken act of 1872 authorizing the use of bibles in all schools in America” were in force, it would not be relevant to the issue at hand—state-sponsored prayer.

But where on earth did this crackerjack legal team get the impression that there was an “Aitken act of 1872 authorizing the use of bibles in all schools in America”? What was their source for this erroneous belief? This is what cracks me up about this—this notion goes back to the anonymous internet document sometimes called “History Forgotten” or “Forsaken Roots”. Its author, apparently remembering in a vague and confused way the story of the Aitken Bible, claimed that Congress passed this resolution in 1782:

The Congress of the United States recommends and approves the Holy Bible for use in all schools.

Now when Robert Aitken printed the King James Bible in America for the first time (until the revolution printing it was a Crown monopoly) Congress did in fact pass a resolution approving it and recommending it “to the inhabitants of the United States”. It also authorized him to publicize its recommendation “in the manner he shall think proper.” It did not however authorize “the use of the bible in all schools in America”. That was an error made by the anonymous author of “Forsaken Roots”. He probably had in mind Aitken’s own description of his bible being “for use in schools.” Congress at no time echoed this language, however.

Please note, this is one step lower than relying on the likes of David Barton for ammunition; this is relying on an anonymous internet document, sans documentation, that mistakenly recycled bad Christian Nation arguments into an imaginary act of congress. Pathetic doesn’t begin to describe the case.

David Barton’s “Unconfirmed” Quotations—The Current Score

As yesterday's observations moved one of David Barton’s “unconfirmed” quotations from the Fake to the Slightly Mangled column, I thought it might be fun to see how the entire group stacks up so far. Here they are, in his order:

1. It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ!—Patrick Henry

Fake. This one has been done to death; it’s an obvious fake—actually written in 1956, and misattributed to Henry in the 1980s.

2. It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.—George Washington

Fake. This is a misquotation of a saying attributed to Washington by James K. Paulding in a children’s biography of Washington: “It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being”. Paulding insisted in his preface that he got his material from people who had known Washington, and maybe he did, but as he chose not to give his sources, it remains an unverified claim. In any case this rewritten version is manifestly fake.

3. Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise. In this sense and to this extent, our civilizations and our institutions are emphatically Christian.—Holy Trinity v. U. S. (Supreme Court)

Fake. The actual author of this quotation is not the United States Supreme Court, but the Illinois Supreme Court (Richmond v. Moore, 1883): “Although it is no part of the functions of our system of government to propagate religion, and to enforce its tenets, when the great body of the people are Christians, in fact or sentiment, our laws and institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise. And in this sense, and to this extent, our civilization and institutions are emphatically Christian, but not for the purpose of compelling men to embrace particular doctrines or creeds of any church, or to support one or another denomination by public burthens, but simply to afford protection to all in the enjoyment of their belief or unbelief.”

Barton’s response on learning this shows that he is still far from embracing scholarly standards on evidence, in spite of his claims—he moved the quotation from the unconfirmed to the confirmed column, apparently on the ground that somebody somewhere had said it, or something like it. If that’s his standard, then all of these quotations should be moved to the confirmed column forthwith, since every one of them was said by somebody on some occasion. The issue, of course, is whether they were said by the person (or in this case court) to which they are attributed. This one isn’t. EOD.

4. We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves . . . according to the Ten Commandments of God.—James Madison

Fake. The only genuine portion of this passage were the words “the capacity of mankind for self-government”—and Barton left them out of his mangled version of the pseudo-quotation. The quotation appears to have originated around 1958 and may be based on Dean Clarence Manion’s exposition of this Madison phrase in The Key to Peace. In any case, it’s not Madison’s.

5. Religion . . . [is] the basis and foundation of government.—James Madison

Fake. Barton prefers to call this one “inaccurate” for some reason, but it’s a fake pure and simple. The word “religion” comes from a passage Madison was quoting, and the words “the basis and foundation of government” are from the title of the piece being quoted. They aren’t Madison’s, and they don’t belong together. EOD.

6. Whosoever shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world.—Benjamin Franklin

Fake. The words are Jacques Mallet du Pan’s, not Franklin’s, though du Pan claims they represent Franklin’s sentiment. He didn’t say where he got this idea.

7. The principles of all genuine liberty, and of wise laws and administrations are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority. The man therefore who weakens or destroys the divine authority of that book may be assessory to all the public disorders which society is doomed to suffer.—Noah Webster

Unconfirmed—probably genuine. The passage supposedly comes from a letter Noah Webster wrote to an unnamed New York newspaper around 1837.

8. There are two powers only which are sufficient to control men, and secure the rights of individuals and a peaceable administration; these are the combined force of religion and law, and the force or fear of the bayonet.—Noah Webster

Likewise unconfirmed—probably genuine. It is the next paragraph from the same supposed letter, minus the introductory phrase “In my view”.

9. The only assurance of our nation’s safety is to lay our foundation in morality and religion.—Abraham Lincoln

Unconfirmed—likely fake. It can’t be traced earlier than the mid-1970s.

10. The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.—Abraham Lincoln

Unconfirmed—likely fake. This one also can’t be traced earlier than the late twentieth century.

11. A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.—Samuel Adams

Genuine. Samuel Adams wrote to James Warren on 12 February 1779, “A general Dissolution of Principles & Manners will more surely overthrow the Liberties of America than the whole Force of the Common Enemy. While the People are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their Virtue they will be ready to surrender their Liberties to the first external or internal Invader.”

12. I have always said and always will say that the studious perusal of the Sacred Volume will make us better citizens.—Thomas Jefferson

Attributed. On 15 June 1852 Daniel Webster wrote a letter to “Professor Pease” concerning the sabbath-school movement in which he recalled an afternoon spent with Thomas Jefferson a quarter of a century or so before. In it he quotes Thomas Jefferson as having said to him “I have always said, and always will say, that the studious perusal of the sacred volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands.” This letter was published in 1858 and these lines have been quoted from it ever since.

13. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.—Alexis de Tocqueville

Fake. This line is a misquotation from another foreign visitor to the United States, Andrew Reed, who along with James Matheson visited the United States from Great Britain during the Jackson administration. In one of his letters he wrote back home “Universal suffrage, whatever may be its abstract merits or demerits, is neither desirable nor possible, except the people are the subjects of universal education and universal piety. America will be great if America is good. If not, her greatness will vanish away like a morning cloud.” Quoted a number of times during the nineteenth century, it was garbled early in the twentieth and misattributed to Alexis de Tocqueville.

14. The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.—John Quincy Adams

Genuine. Almost. What John Quincy Adams wrote to an autograph collector on 27 April 1837 was “The highest, the transcendent glory of the American Revolution was this—it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the precepts of Christianity. If it has never been considered in that light, it is because its compass has not been perceived.” John Wingate Thornton attributed the version above, sans quotation marks, to John Quincy Adams, making a couple of trivial changes. Perhaps he was quoting from memory, as the changes seem pointless. In any case it has been quoted in the Thornton version ever since.

By my count we have seven fakes, two probable fakes, two possibly genuine items, one attribution, and two legitimate quotations. It could be worse, I suppose. Some of them are plausible, anyway. But at least three of the fakes (the Patrick Henry and the two James Madisons) are so egregious as to make you wonder how anybody could have been deceived by them. And the Illinois Supreme Court decision is grotesque, an out-of-context quotation at its worst. (And three guesses as to why he didn’t quote this line from the same decision: “a total severance of church and State is one of the great controlling foundation principles of our system of government.”) The Washington strikes me as iffy at best, especially in Barton’s form (which goes back to 1893 at any rate), but there’s nothing impossible about it, as there is with the Henry, for example.

With the remaining unconfirmed items keep in mind that the burden of proof is always on the person citing the quotation as genuine. Once again let me invoke Martin Porter’s first principle of quotation: “Whenever you see a quotation given with an author but no source assume that it is probably bogus.” It’s not a bad basis to work from.

The Indissoluble Bond Revisited

The highest, the transcendent glory of the American Revolution was this—it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the precepts of Christianity. If it has never been considered in that light, it is because its compass has not been perceived.—John Quincy Adams, 27 April 1837

All right, I’m going to skip the obvious question—are you nuts? Didn’t you just say the other day that this quotation (or something close to it) was a fake, the words of John Wingate Thornton? Well, yes I did, and as it turns out, I was wrong.

This quotation, in the form “The highest glory of the American Revolution was this—that it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity”, has been very popular in Christian Nation circles, and has circulated widely on the internet. It can be traced back fairly readily. We find it, for instance, in Daniel Dorchester’s Christianity in the United States from the First Settlement Down to the Present Time (Hunt & Eaton, 1888), pp. 262-3, and on the title page of B. F. Morris’s Christian Life and Character of the Institutions of the United States (Philadelphia, 1864), and ultimately in the introduction to John Wingate Thornton’s 1860 The Pulpit of the American Revolution, p. xxix. Thornton, however, does not present it as a quotation, but rather as a paraphrase or summary of John Quincy Adams’ views. The obvious question then is, what was the original that Thornton had in mind?

Evangelist David Barton thought he’d found the answer in an 1837 oration in honor of Independence Day, in which Adams drew extensive parallels between Independence Day and Christmas. On this one I agreed with him, and as it turns out, he was on the right track. Wrong, but on the right track nonetheless. Because earlier that year, on 27 April, Adams had written the words quoted above to an autograph hunter in a cover-letter for a couple of notes, one from his father and the other from Thomas Jefferson. Comparing the genuine version to the Thornton version we find (omitted words in bold, added words struck out)

The highest, the transcendent glory of the American Revolution was this—it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the precepts principles of Christianity. If it has never been considered in that light, it is because its compass has not been perceived.

So where did Thornton get the letter? Well, he could have found it (and probably did find it) in the July 1860 issue of The Historical Magazine (pp. 193-194), where the letter in question was published in full. As far as I can tell none of the other crack researchers who quoted this (Morris, Dorchester et. al.) ever looked at it, as shown by their version being lightly mangled the same way as Thornton’s (omission of transcendent sans ellipsis, principles for precepts). I would have thought Thornton’s lack of quotation marks might have given them pause—but apparently not.

In any case, here is the original quotation, in context, in all its transcendent glory.

The Impotent Rage of the Clueless

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?

Psalms 2:1

As robots insist on spamming my posts I’ve made it a policy to close comments down after a couple of weeks, so I only have to tend to a few recent entries. If a friend of the blog stops by an older post, as sometimes happens, or somebody else contributes something valuable and I happen to notice it, then I’ll okay it. If somebody decides to unload a bucketful of bile at an old post, it will probably go down the toilet without being read. I’m sorry, but my time is reasonably valuable, and I have better things to do as I prepare to be finally pigeonholed in that great archive in the sky.

But the squawk of a complacent gull when he realizes he’s been had by some fast-talking con-artist is music for my soul. One of this breed—a character going by the handle TSVDP—saw fit to spam an earlier post with his inane jibber-jabber. Apparently his feelings were hurt on learning that his favorite Patrick Henry quotation—the one about “this great nation” being founded on Christianity, not religious freedom—is a piece of modern tripe, concocted in living memory and disseminated by sleazy hucksters out to fleece such gullible lambs as he. “You don’t make a point at all,” he squeals, “If not it confirms what Henry said and that he was a Christian.” Well, yeah, not that anybody has ever denied that Henry was a Christian, or a slave-owner, or a father, a lawyer, a legislator, an orator. None of that’s at issue here. The only question before us is the author of that “this great nation” and “religionists” quotation—and fortunately that’s a fact easily determined.

Let’s review, shall we, the bizarre history of this quotation. It begins, in a way, with something Patrick Henry actually did write. On 20 November 1798 the once-fiery orator and successful lawyer sat down to write his last will and testament. After carefully dividing up his lands, money, and slaves amongst his wife and children, he added a pious afterthought:

This is all the Inheritance I can give to my dear family, The religion of Christ can give them one which will make them rich indeed[.]

The founder passed away in June of the next year, leaving damn little behind him as a legacy to the nation. His words, that had inspired a revolution, were for the most part lost. When William Wirt attempted to collect them for his sketch of Patrick Henry’s life (issued 1816) he had to do for the most part with recollections, fragments, and speeches patched together from the fading memories of those who had been present.

Around 1823 somebody thought it worthwhile to excerpt the “religion of Christ” passage from Henry’s will, and it went the rounds of various periodicals. It wasn’t quite the way Henry had written it, however. Somehow it had undergone a strange metamorphosis:

I have now disposed of all my property to my family; there is one thing more I wish I could give them, and that is the Christian Religion. If they had that, and I had not given them one shilling, they would be rich; and if they had not that, and I had given them all the world, they would be poor.

This version was reprinted in numerous sources up to the present time, but not without challenge. Some time in the early 1840s James W. Alexander, a Presbyterian minister, went to Charlotte county, Virginia, and obtained the actual words direct from the will. He published them in 1847 as part of a volume called Thoughts on Family Worship. The two versions have remained in competition ever since.

In 1956 a historical revisionist writer for The Virginian used the passage—the fake version—as a springboard for his own thoughts on religion in America. This author wrote:

There is an insidious campaign of false propaganda being waged today, to the effect that our country is not a Christian country but a religious one—that it was not founded on Christianity but on freedom of religion.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by “religionists” but by Christians—not on religion but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom of worship here.

In the spoken and written words of our noble founders and forefathers, we find symbolic expressions of their Christian faith. The above quotation from the will of Patrick Henry is a notable example.

Several people thought this piece of revised history was worth quoting on its own, but it wasn’t until 1988 that somebody had the bright idea of crediting part of the 1956 comment to Patrick Henry himself. It appeared as his (according to David Barton) in a book called God’s Providence in American History by Steve C. Dawson, and was almost immediately picked up and popularized by Barton himself in his Myth of Separation. From there it spread far and wide. Somebody even added that it was from a speech to the Virginia House of Burgesses in May 1765, despite the fact that Henry was first seated there late that month and no speeches of his are recorded for that time except the famous one in support of his Stamp Act resolutions, reconstructed from memory years after his death. The incongruity of Henry’s speaking of “this great nation” before it even came into existence, and his foreknowledge that “peoples of other faiths” would be “afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom of worship here” at a time when religious freedom was nonexistent in most of the colonies apparently shot by the oblivious transmitters of Barton’s fantasies. The thing is, like Chief Seattle lamenting the demise of the buffalo, Henry just plain knows too much. It’s a dead giveaway.

But Christian nation fantaisists apparently have no sense of history whatever. Like their idiot founder, history is whatever suits their fancy. You like the Fifth Monarchy slogan, no king but king Jesus? Why not give it to John Hancock and John Adams and have them say it at the beginning of the battle of Lexington? Does it matter that they weren’t there? Does it matter that there is no record of it’s being said? Not in the least. History by this logic can be whatever you want it to be. If it feels right, then it’s history. Much easier to go by your gut than to do, oh, say, actual research.

Evidence? The Christian Nationites don’t need no stinking evidence when they set out to invent new legends about the past. Or as TSVDP puts it, “No one has to prove anything that has been around and in books for hundreds of years to Atheist Scum trying to rewrite history.” I love the way he turns the world upside down. It’s not Rushdoony and Barton and that gang out to rewrite history—no, it’s the generations of historians that came before them who are doing the rewriting—via time machine, I suppose. And by the way 1988—the date this “religionists” nonsense first appeared as Henry’s in any book—is hardly “hundreds of years” ago, though maybe it seems that way to Ahistoricist Scum like TSVDP. Neither is 1956, the date it was first written, for that matter. Yeah, okay, I know it’s the twenty-first century now, and 1988 is so twentieth century, but that hardly adds up to “hundreds of years”. Or maybe TSVDP has a numerancy problem. Maybe all big numbers look alike to him. Maybe he meant to say “dozens” instead of “hundreds”. He might as well have said “millions”—it would have been just as accurate.

There is one point I do agree with our clueless comment-slinger about, though. “…your boogey man David Barton is a joke,’ he writes, “most people don’t even know who he is…” I don’t know about that last comment, seeing as he’s giving lessons on constitutional law (believe it or not) to congressmen and being featured on popular shows in the mainstream media and advising the Texas Board of Education on history (despite his complete lack of any qualification for the task), but he definitely “is a joke”. Which makes it all the more puzzling, if TSVDP feels that way, that he feels obliged to go way out on a limb to support one of Barton’s, uh, errors—to put it charitably. Nobody ever heard of this Patrick Henry “quotation” before Barton put it in a book—and if it weren’t for his footnote, nobody would even know that he wasn’t the one who first came up with it.

As a parting shot our feckless friend returned a third time to add, “Your comment FAILS in all possible ways that Henry did not say this. The burden of proof is for you to prove he did not say this.” Well, no. Mind you, even if it were I have amply shown that this alleged observation cannot belong to Henry’s time, that it is not found in his writings, and that it was written by somebody else more than a century and a half after Henry’s death. That’s pretty conclusive, really. But it’s all window-dressing, and entirely unnecessary—done only for my own satisfaction. It is always up to the person making a positive assertion to show evidence that what he says is true. In the case of a quotation, fortunately, that burden of proof is easily met. All it takes is a citation to a primary source. Martin Porter’s first principle of quotation is a good rule to follow here: “Whenever you see a quotation given with an author but no source assume that it is probably bogus.” If no source is given, or a nonsense source like “May 1765 Speech to the House of Burgesses”, then—lacking other evidence, or the time or inclination to follow up on it by doing actual research—a reader is entirely justified in assuming that the alleged quotation is fake.

Notes
A transcription of Patrick Henry’s will is found at the Red Hill Patrick Henry National Memorial website. An earlier transcription appears in George Morgan, The True Patrick Henry (Philadelphia, 1907), pp. 455-7.

The oldest example of the fake version of the quotation from Patrick Henry’s will I could find was in the 29 November 1823 issue of The Manchester Iris, a Weekly Literary and Scientific Miscellany, vol. II, p. 387.

The Self-Blinded Leading the Sighted

God, it’s St. Lucy’s Day already, meaning that the holiday season is considerably advanced, and I don’t have a thing to wear. St. Lucy—bah. You may remember Lucy as the psychotic medieval woman who ripped her own eyes out and sent them to an admirer as a gift. Apparently the guy said he liked them, or something like that. Those were the days, my friend. One of those gay little old-time legends that brighten the spirits in this dark time of year.

Well, my spirits were brightened, anyway, by this strange piece—an instance of the blind presuming to instruct the sighted on the meaning of color. Some Yakima lady named Kara L. Kraemer, it seems, was so incensed by somebody daring to observe that US law was not based on the Bible and never should be, that she set out to instruct him by delivering a few choice quotations from the Founders that she’d apparently dug up from some moldering trash heap somewhere, and—you guessed it, knowing me—she’s included a couple of familiar fakes among them. And, no surprises here either, those that aren’t fake are absolutely irrelevant to the point. Nice job, lady.

She’s got John Dickenson comparing the proposed Constitution to the Bible, in that both have come under attack; she’s got James Wilson repeating the old legal maxim (shot down by Jefferson) that Christianity is part of the common law, and James McHenry pleading for the establishment of a private Bible society in Maryland. She’s got Carroll of Carrollton arguing that people won’t be virtuous on their own without the threat of “wicked eternal misery” or the promise of “good eternal happiness” to goad them on. (He was taking a swipe at the excesses of the French Revolution, by the way.) She’s got Sam Adams comparing the American revolution to the Reformation: “Our Fore-Fathers threw off the Yoke of Popery in Religion; for you is reserved the honor of levelling the popery of Politicks” (a portion of the passage that she omits, incidentally). And she’s got two fakes and one dubious entry: the Washington “god and the bible” concoction, the Patrick Henry “religionists” misattribution, and the dubious Patrick Henry story about the Bible being worth more than all the other books put together that rests on third-hand testimony from an anonymous source. Not a good showing from somebody who pretends to be combating ignorance.

If I were to make a recommendation to Kara Kraemer, it would be that if she wants to combat ignorance she should start with the person closest to her—herself. But like St. Lucy, I’m sure she knows better.

[Update: The article linked to here has changed since I first wrote and then replied to a comment here. The original introduction read only:

In honor of National Bible Week and to combat Stiefel's statement of ignorance, I offer the following quotes from our founders in regard to the Bible:

This is what I was making fun of, not the present more elaborate introduction that gives a coherent (though flawed) explanation for the quotations that follow. The author has also corrected the information about the one Patrick Henry statement, though she has incorrectly attributed the fake Washington "God and the Bible" quotation to Paulding's book (which even if correct would not be a reliable source, what with it being an undocumented children's book and all). Had I first seen the article in its present state I wouldn't have responded as I did, or indeed at all. sbh]

And So It Goes On and On and On

Another clueless clown, calling himself GTAVC5947, posted this message today:

Disclaimer: I am an agnostic, and have been so for several years. However, I feel a pressing need to put delusional liberals in their place:

James Madison and John Hancock:
“We Recognize No Sovereign but God, and no King but Jesus!”

John Adams:
“The general principles upon which the Fathers achieved independence were the general principals of Christianity… I will avow that I believed and now believe that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.”
“[July 4th] ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.”
“I have examined all religions, as well as my narrow sphere, my straightened means, and my busy life, would allow; and the result is that the Bible is the best Book in the world. It contains more philosophy than all the libraries I have seen.”
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Benjamin Franklin:
“God governs in the affairs of man. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured in the Sacred Writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. I firmly believe this. I also believe that, without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel.”

Alexander Hamilton:
“For my own part, I sincerely esteem it [the Constitution] a system which without the finger of God, never could have been suggested and agreed upon by such a diversity of interests.”
“I have carefully examined the evidences of the Christian religion, and if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity I would unhesitatingly give my verdict in its favor. I can prove its truth as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.”

James Madison:
“We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We’ve staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity…to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”

It goes on and on and on and on....

And so it does. Regular readers will notice some familiar frauds here—the Madison “ten commandments” concoction for one, and the “No king but Jesus” invention for another—though the addition of James Madison is a nice touch. When somebody else asked for the source of the quotations he was referred to the Eads Home Ministry site (not exactly a primary source) and was advised to google them. And somebody else said that they couldn’t be fake because they turned up in more than one source.

That’s not the way to do it, people. If you aren’t prepared to cite the actual source of your quotation, you shouldn’t present it at all. The burden of proof, remember, is always on the claimant. And that does mean a primary source, not a conveniently unavailable book (say Liberty, Cry Liberty) or a collection of unsourced quotations on somebody’s website. Remember, anybody can set up a website, and as far as I can tell, just about anybody actually does. And multiple sources? Give me a break. You only need one source, the place where (say) James Madison actually wrote it—otherwise you’re just pissing into the wind.

But, as a public service, I’ll provide the sources for the above collection of random quotations, with the portions used by our quoter bolded. Let’s start with the genuine ones. First, John Adams:

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, forevermore. [Letter to his wife, 3 July 1776]

A little cherry-picking here, but the quotation is essentially legitimate. John Adams was mistaken as to which day would be celebrated; we’ve decided on the fourth rather than the second, but Adams was no prophet. He certainly came close enough with his “shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations”, right?

And a second John Adams quote is close enough for jazz, maybe:

Philosophy is not only the love of wisdom, but the science of the universe and its cause. There is, there was, and there will be but one master of philosophy in the universe. Portions of it, in different degrees, are revealed to creatures. Philosophy looks with an impartial eye on all terrestrial religions. I have examined all, as well as my narrow sphere, my straitened means, and my busy life would allow me; and the result is, that the Bible is the best book in the world. It contains more of my little philosophy than all the libraries I have seen; and such parts of it as I cannot reconcile to my little philosophy, I postpone for future investigation. [Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 25 December 1813]

Again, a little fakery, but all things considered, I’m inclined to forgive GTAVC5947 as a fellow agnostic. And a third John Adams quotation is pretty much dead on, though stripped of its vital context:

But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. [Letter to the officers of the First Brigade of The Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 11 October 1798]

And now GTAVC5947 draws from Benjamin Franklin’s famous plea for prayers at the Constitutional Convention:

I have lived, sir, a long time, and, the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings, that “except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed, in this political building, no better than the builders of Babel. We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded; and we ourselves shall become a reproach and by-word down to future ages.

Interestingly GTAVC5947 doesn’t bother to mention that virtually nobody went along with Franklin on this, and that group prayers were not a feature of the convention.

The next legitimate one comes from a letter Alexander Hamilton wrote in defense of the proposed Constitution:

For my own part, I sincerely esteem it a system, which, without the finger of God, never could have been suggested and agreed upon by such a diversity of interests. I will not presume to say that a more perfect system might not have been fabricated; but who expects perfection at once? [17 October 1787]

No complaint here, except perhaps as to what relevance it has.

The next couple of quotations are borderline-fake. The first consists of a few phrases cherry-picked from one of John Adams’ letters that give a misleading impression of what he wrote, and the second consists of some mangled second-hand reminiscences long after his death of things Alexander Hamilton supposedly said.

Could my answer be understood by any candid reader or hearer, to recommend to all the others the general principles, institutions, or systems of education of the Roman Catholics, or those of the Quakers, or those of the Presbyterians, or those of the Methodists, or those of the Moravians, or those of the Universalists, or those of the Philosophers? No. The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence, were the only principles in which that beautiful assembly of young men could unite, and these principles only could be intended by them in their address, or by me in my answer. And what were these general principles? I answer, the general principles of Christianity, in which all those sects were united, and the general principles of English and American liberty, in which all those young men united, and which had united all parties in America, in majorities sufficient to assert and maintain her independence. Now I will avow, that I then believed and now believe that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God; and that those principles of liberty are as unalterable as human nature and our terrestrial, mundane system. I could, therefore, safely say, consistently with all my then and present information, that I believed they would never make discoveries in contradiction to these general principles. [Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 28 June 1813]

It was the tendency to infidelity he saw so rife that led him often to declare in the social circle his estimate of Christian truth. “I have examined carefully,” he said to a friend from his boyhood, “the evidence of the Christian religion; and, if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity, I should unhesitatingly give my verdict in its favor.” To another person, he observed, “I have studied it, and I can prove its truth as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.” [John Church Hamilton, History of the United States, volume 7]

For more on the first see this entry at Fake History, and for more on the second see my previous entry here, "Posing in the Moonlight." [Update: Or this entry at Fake History.]

And finally the two out-and-out fakes. The first, usually attributed to either an unnamed minuteman or to John Adams and John Hancock, is apparently a very modern invention:

We Recognize No Sovereign but God, and no King but Jesus!

Almost certainly no older than the twenty-first century, there is not the slightest evidence that John Adams, James Madison, or John Hancock ever said such a thing. It was a slogan of the Fifth Monarchy Men, a century before the American revolution. (Though an unknown demonstrator is said to have shouted something like it during the Stamp Act riots in Philadelphia.) For more, see this entry at Fake History.

The last is the classic fake quotation so much beloved by Christian Nationites and popularized by David Barton:

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government: upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.

The words the capacity of mankind for self-government come from Madison, the rest is an interpretation of what Madison supposedly meant by it, as expounded (for example) by Dean Clarence Manion in a pamphlet from the early fifties.

So now let me bid a fond farewell to one more clueless clown, whose failed attempt to "put delusional liberals in their place" ran aground on the shoals of a heap of out-of-context, second-hand, misquoted, badly-researched bits of wreckage dumped by bamboozled zombies who accidentally created a snare for the unwary. Thanks for playing, my fellow agnostic, and better luck next time.

Picking on the Clueless pt XXX

Picking on the Clueless

Over at my other blog, Fake History, I get a certain amount of traffic, and even an occasional commenter. Yesterday some guy calling himself “David d” left a comment on my entry about a quotation falsely attributed to George Washington:

What students would learn in American schools above all is the religion of Jesus Christ.

I pointed out there that the fake is based on something George Washington did say during a difficult meeting with a delegation of Delawares intent on preserving the peace with the Euro-American colonists:

You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ.

Nothing here about students, American schools, or the like of course. As I pointed out in my entry it would be an unlikely topic for George Washington to have commented on, given the circumstances of his time and place. I noted that as the “American schools” quotation is fake, and apparently recent, I felt no need to research its actual provenance, beyond noting that the earliest source Google Books could come up with was a 2006 book by a guy named Bob Klingenberg.

Now this David d got all bent out of shape about this simple declaration, and he showed up crowing:

You really need to learn to perform some due diligence before you write of things you no [sic] very little about.

You misleadingly wrote, “The fake quotation is very modern, probably twenty-first century in origin. I’ve made no special effort to run down its history; the oldest reference Google Books turned up was from 2006, in a book called Is God with America? by Bob Klingenberg (p. 188)”

That set off the “truth alarm”. So I did just a little research NOT using google which many believe has a liberal bias programmed into its search engines. And found a reliable source going back over 70 years. Nice try.

Now I have to say that that would have been interesting. Not impossible by any means, but interesting. Some fake quotations do indeed lurk for long periods of time in obscure corners of the intellectual web, before springing out to ensnare the unwary. And reliable sources sometimes do transmit unreliable information.

But this was not such an example, alas. No, David d was so colossally inept that he got caught in a trap of his own making. His reference for the fake quotation? It was Fitzgerald’s edition of Washington’s papers, the very source I linked to in my entry, and it did not contain the fake quotation at all, but only the genuine one, as I’d already explained ad nauseam.

What the hell was David d thinking (assuming that that isn’t giving him too much credit)? Did he suppose that nobody would check up on him? Fitzgerald’s edition is actually online, so there is no difficulty in checking it out. I can only assume that our clueless clown was just making things up and hoping nobody would actually call him on his bluff. Clearly his claim to have done “just a little research” was a vast overstatement, unless his definition of “research” is “bullshitting”.

Now David d adds a crowning touch to his display of ignorance and incompetence. Allow me to let him hang himself with his own words:

You know a big problem I have with many skeptics and naysayers is their willful ignorance on many topic that they pretend to know something about.

Read the facts man!

http://www.wallbuilders.com/libissuesarticles.asp?id=8755

Peace out.

Ah, yes, the infamous Wallbuilders site, the source of so many lies and misinterpretations. That’s really convincing.

But—and this is the cream of the jest—David d apparently never bothered to check out his own link. Because Wallbuilders does not back him up on this fake, not in the least. What’s given at his link is the same genuine quotation given by Fitzgerald and by my own site, and not the fake quotation at all.

Epic fail, David d—and, by the way, I don’t believe for a moment that you are really the homeschooling advocate whose name and email address you’re using. I took a brief look at his site and I doubt that he’d be either as incompetent or as, well, illiterate as your comment is.

Peace off, man.

Posing in the Moonlight

Ah, yes, another rant against the clueless. I’m sorry about that—but this guy illustrates something that really bothers me about this whole tribe. I’ve noted previously how people in comment threads who claim to rely on primary sources give themselves away by citing fake quotations, and the other day a perfect example of the species made an appearance in a thread at a topix.net forum. Calling him- (or her-) self Akpilot, he (or she) made a set of assertions so blindingly ignorant that one commenter suggested he should “read a few biographies of our first presidents as well as the members who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.” Akpilot claimed in reply:

Actually, biographies are riddled with errors and the personal opinions of the writter [sic]. I much prefer reading the actual writtings [sic] of the founders, I find you get a much clearer picture of them that way... You may want to try this yourself as well. [ellipsis in original]

What makes this claim absolutely hilarious is that he had given examples of his “reading the actual writtings of the founders” some comments earlier, and, as you might expect, they included a number of fake quotations—the 1956 “religionists” quotation falsely attributed to Patrick Henry, for one, and the “ten commandments” quotation falsely attributed to James Madison, for another. His use of these shows Akpilot for the poseur he is—he sure as hell didn’t get them from “reading the actual writtings of the founders”.

So, just for the fun of it, let’s see what else our poseur has to offer. He starts off with an alleged John Adams quotation:

The general principles upon which the Fathers achieved independence were the general principals of Christianity… I will avow that I believed and now believe that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.

While our poseur doesn’t give a source, it’s a mangled section from a letter Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson (28 June 1813), part of a famous series. Quite a bit has been silently omitted in this twisted version. Here’s what Adams wrote:

Could my answer be understood by any candid reader or hearer, to recommend to all the others the general principles, institutions, or systems of education of the Roman Catholics, or those of the Quakers, or those of the Presbyterians, or those of the Methodists, or those of the Moravians, or those of the Universalists, or those of the Philosophers? No. The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence, were the only principles in which that beautiful assembly of young men could unite, and these principles only could be intended by them in their address, or by me in my answer. And what were these general principles? I answer, the general principles of Christianity, in which all those sects were united, and the general principles of English and American liberty, in which all those young men united, and which had united all parties in America, in majorities sufficient to assert and maintain her independence. Now I will avow, that I then believed and now believe that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God; and that those principles of liberty are as unalterable as human nature and our terrestrial, mundane system.

The words in bold were those cherry-picked to give a false impression of what John Adams was saying. If our poseur in this case was also the cherry-picker, then he is guilty of deliberately misrepresenting Adams; if not he remains a mere poseur, guilty only of passing off somebody else’s misrepresentation as his own.

Next our poseur quotes part of a famous quip John Adams wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson (19 April 1817)—an item so well-known that no special research in “the actual writtings of the founders” is required:

Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!” But in this exclamation I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite society, I mean hell.

This is a great passage for quote-miners; anti-religion types can quote the “no religion” portion, and Christian Nationites the “not fit to be mentioned” piece, but either way, they’re distorting the meaning of the original. Thomas Jefferson’s reply is not as often quoted. He wrote (5 May 1817):

If by religion we are to understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your exclamation on that hypothesis is just, “that this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.” But if the moral precepts, innate in man, and made a part of his physical constitution, as necessary for a social being, if the sublime doctrines of philanthropism and deism taught us by Jesus of Nazareth, in which all agree, constitute true religion, then, without it, this would be, as you again say, “something not fit to be named even, indeed, a hell.”

Having quote-mined Adams Akpilot moves on to Benjamin Franklin's well-known speech in favor of prayers at the Constitutional Convention:

In the beginning of the contest with Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayers in this room for Divine protection. Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered… do we imagine we no longer need His assistance?

This (for once) appears to be fairly quoted, as the larger context shows:

In the beginning of the Contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the divine protection.—Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a Superintending providence in our favor. To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? or do we imagine that we no longer need his assistance? I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?

The vote arose during a critical point at the Constitutional convention, and there was some discussion of the question, but no vote was actually taken, and the matter was allowed quietly to die. Franklin’s manuscript notes:

The Convention, except three or four persons, thought Prayers unnecessary.

I wonder why our poseur left out that item of information.

Next up Akpilot cites a saying attributed to Alexander Hamilton—a quotation in which he cruelly betrays his limitations as a scholar and student of the Founders. His version reads:

I have carefully examined the evidences of the Christian religion, and if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity I would unhesitatingly give my verdict in its favor. I can prove its truth as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.

This item first appeared in this form (“evidences” instead of “evidence” and no ellipsis between the first and second sentences) in Stephen Abbott Northrop’s 1894 A Cloud of Witnesses (p. 208). Northrop in turn attributed to Famous American Statesmen by Sarah Knowles Bolton (1888, p. 126). She gave it like this:

To a friend he said: “I have examined carefully the evidence of the Christian religion; and, if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity, I should unhesitatingly give my verdict in its favor. … I can prove its truth as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.”

Note that evidence is singular, and especially note the ellipsis. That ellipsis was a bit dishonest; these are not parts of the same quotation, but two different stories jammed together. They come from John Church Hamilton’s voluminous account of his father’s life and times (volume 7, p. 790):

It was the tendency to infidelity he saw so rife that led him often to declare in the social circle his estimate of Christian truth. “I have examined carefully,” he said to a friend from his boyhood, “the evidence of the Christian religion; and, if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity, I should unhesitatingly give my verdict in its favor.” To another person, he observed, “I have studied it, and I can prove its truth as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.”

The first item is attributed to the “Reminiscences of General Morton” (presumably Jacob Morton, 1761-1836); the second is unattributed. As both anecdotes are related by his son, we may hope that they reflect Hamilton’s attitude as his son understood it, but they are second-hand at best. They are not Hamilton’s words directly, but only words attributed to him. And our poseur didn’t get them from the son—as his misquotation shows—but only from some late and derivative source.

Akpilot follows this with a mangled version of a resolution by the Massachusetts provincial congress for 15 April 1775 calling for a day of fasting and prayer. He has attributed this to John Hancock, possibly because Hancock was president of the provincial congress at that time. The actual resolution read:

Resolved, That it be, and hereby is, recommended to the good people of this colony, of all denominations, that Thursday, the eleventh day of May next, be set apart as a day of public humiliation, fasting, and prayer; that a total abstinence from servile labor and recreation be observed, and all the religious assemblies solemnly convened, to humble themselves before God, under the heavy judgments felt and feared, to confess the sins that have deserved them; to implore the forgiveness of all our transgressions, a spirit of repentance and reformation, and a blessing on the husbandry, manufactures, and other lawful employments of this people; and especially, that the union of the American colonies in defence of their rights, for which, hitherto, we desire to thank Almighty God, may be preserved and confirmed; that the Provincial, and especially the Continental Congress, may be directed to such measures as God will countenance; that the people of Great Britain and their rulers may have their eyes open to discern the things that shall make for the peace of the nation and all its connections; and that America may soon behold a gracious interposition of Heaven, for the redress of her many grievances, the restoration of all her invaded liberties, and their security to the latest generations.

Another stunning example of Akpilot’s vast knowledge of “the actual writtings of the founders” follows, when he quotes (and slightly misquotes) a 1956 writer as Patrick Henry:

It cannot be emphasized too clearly and too often that this nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religion, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.

The story of this bit of trash appears elsewhere; in my view only an idiot would be taken it by it. I can guarantee that our poseur didn’t get it from reading the Founders; it was first attributed to Henry in the 1980s.

Now next our poseur actually gets something right—he quotes a portion correctly from John Jay’s well-known letter to John Murray, Jr., of 12 October 1826. The paragraph in question:

Almost all nations have peace or war at the will and pleasure of rulers whom they do not elect, and who are not always wise or virtuous. Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest, of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.

But our poseur returns to his old ways with the next one, and it’s a doozy. Yeah, it’s the tired old fake Madison quote about the Ten Commandments—and he manages to give it a bogus source as well: “1778 to the General Assembly of the State of Virginia”. (Actually the only genuine bit comes from the Federalist Papers.” He quotes it like this:

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We’ve staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity…to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God. [1778 to the General Assembly of the State of Virginia]

Now I’ve never seen it exactly in this form before, but it’s still the same old fraud publicized by libertarian economist Frederick Nymeyer in 1958. And Akpilot has actually omitted virtually all of the only genuine Madison phrase in the whole piece—“the capacity of mankind for self-government”. This is about as low as it could get. It looks bad for our self-styled expert on the Founders.

Still, he recovers a little ground with his final two (basically genuine) quotations from Dr. Benjamin Rush. Dr. Rush, you may recall, was the guy who thought that the dark skin of Africans was a form of leprosy, and looked forward to the day it could be cured. Dr. Rush’s essay entitled “A Defence of the Use of the Bible in Schools” (written before 1798) included this passage:

…I lament, that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes, and take so little pains to prevent them. We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government, that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of christianity, by means of the bible; for this divine book, above all others, favours that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws, and all those sober and frugal virtues, which constitute the soul of republicanism.

Other than mangling the end with a silent omission, our poseur did pretty well on that one. Earlier in the piece Rush had written about “the eternal and self moving principle of LOVE,” and our poseur now backs up to catch his comment there:

It concentrates a whole system of ethics in a single text of scripture. “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another, even as I have loved you.” By withholding the knowledge of this doctrine from children, we deprive ourselves of the best means of awakening moral sensibility in their minds.

By omitting the first sentence and substituting “[the Scriptures]” for “this doctrine” Akpilot makes it look as though Rush were talking about the Bible in general, rather than one doctrine in particular, but otherwise the text is fairly quoted.

Now I’ve got to say that for a person who spends a lot of time reading the words of America’s Founders, this is a piss-poor showing. Some of these quotations are now so putrid even the loons won’t touch them. Personally, I don’t think Akpilot is ready to read serious biographies of the Founders. Not up to speed, yet—far from it. I think he should start with some popular histories of the time, something that would give him the feel for the times. Then, maybe, he could move on to some light biographies, and start working his way through some of the key essays of the Founders—portions of Franklin’s autobiography, perhaps, and some of the Federalist Papers. Once he knows his way around a bit, then he could start on some serious works. And then at last, if all goes well, he’ll have some chance of making sense of whatever out of the vast array of papers left us by the Founders he chooses to read.

Anyway, it’s worth a shot.

There are a lot of people out there who have actually spent their time reading the actual writings of the Founders and Framers and (for that matter) their opponents. Not only reading them, but locating them, editing them, and making them available for people to investigate and learn from. Akpilot would do well to actually learn from them, and not just pose as somebody who has. Especially with an effort so lame as that one.

Further Fake Quotation Sightings

This site is a bit unusual for the large number of fake quotations it presents on one page. On the assumption (perhaps over-optimistic) that they are merely misinformed and not actively trying to deceive, I sent them the following statement:

I would like to recommend the elimination of manufactured quotations from your site. The following quotations are all fake:

“What students would learn in American schools above all is the religion of Jesus Christ.”
- George Washington

“It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.”
- George Washington

“Oh, eternal and everlasting God, direct my thoughts, words and work. Wash away my sins in the immaculate blood of the Lamb and purge my heart by Thy Holy Spirit. Daily, frame me more and more in the likeness of Thy son, Jesus Christ, that living in Thy fear, and dying in Thy favor, I may in thy appointed time obtain the resurrection of the justified unto eternal life. Bless, O Lord, the whole race of mankind and let the world be filled with the knowledge of Thee and Thy son, Jesus Christ.”
- George Washington, Prayer

“ ... a neat edition of the Holy Scriptures for the use of schools.”
- United States Congress 1782

“The Congress of the United States recommends and approves the Holy Bible for use in all schools.”
- United States Congress 1782

“The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.”
- John Adams

“There is a book [the Bible] worth all the other books ever printed.”
- Patrick Henry

“It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great Nation was founded not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
- Patrick Henry

“We recognize no sovereign but God, and no King but Jesus.”
- John Adams and John Hancock

“We have staked the whole future of our new nation, not upon the power of government; far from it. We have staked the future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.”
- James Madison

“Religion [is] the basis and foundation of Government”
- James Madison

There are plenty of genuine quotations available without adulterating history with these transparent frauds.

More Fake Quotation Sightings

Over at A Simple Prop John M. Lynch gives us an account of a double screw-up by one Anna Falling, who is running for mayor of Tulsa. In the course of a piece about putting a creationist exhibit in the local zoo she finishes off with the following inanity:

Thank you again for your prayers as we proceed to bring God back to our seat of government. As George Washington stated on Feb. 22, 1732, “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible”

Of course you'll recognize that this "quotation" is nothing of the sort; it is in fact a misquotation of a misquotation of something attributed to Washington by an 1835 biographer on the basis of the recollection of an unknown person. (See here for the references.) But the classic touch is that the Father of his Country was himself a squalling infant on the day he is supposed to have said this, being either just born (if the Gregorian calendar is meant) or eleven days old (by the Julian calendar then in use). Epic fail, Anna. Maybe you could use a little refresher course in American History.

From the idiotic we move to the ought-to-know-better class of writer. J. Grant Swank, Jr. of Portland Maine is no backwoods bumpkin, having attended classes at Harvard Divinity School, where the standards are high. And yet, a column attributed to him at the somewhat shadowy Post-Chronicle contains no fewer than three fake quotations. First up, a fake George Washington prayer. Swank wrote:

President George Washington wrote a prayer addressed to "O most glorious God, in Jesus Christ" and ended it with this: "Let me live according to those holy rules which thou hast this day prescribed in Thy Holy Word. Direct me to the true object, Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth and the Life. Bless O Lord all the people of this land."

This is actually from the Sunday evening prayer in the notorious Washington prayer book, a well-known literary hoax. (The handwriting in the document bears no resemblance to that of Washington, for one thing.) Also, the passage given as the ending is in fact taken from the middle of the piece. The fraud was exposed in 1926, not long after the document's "discovery" in a trunk (shades of William Henry Ireland) belonging to a later member of Washington's family.

Next up (after a Jefferson quotation I'll deal with later on, as it's not entirely fake) comes a familiar Madison fake:

Religion is the basis and foundation of government. We have staked the whole future of American civilization not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.

Oh mighty Jehovah, where to begin with this one? This quotation is a little like a snowball rolling down a hill, gathering bits and pieces of extraneous material along the way. There are two genuine phrases in it. Well, more-or-less genuine. The first is "the basis and foundation of government." Madison quoted these words from the title of the 1776 Virginia Bill of Rights: "A DECLARATION OF RIGHTS made by the representatives of the good people of Virginia, assembled in full and free Convention; which rights do pertain to them, and their posterity, as the basis and foundation of government." It will be noted that the words refer here to individual rights, and not to religion. Madison only used them to indicate the source of his claim that "'the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his religion, according to the dictates of conscience,' is held by the same tenure with all our other rights." For more on how the fake quote was manufactured take a look at this cool exegesis by Jim Allison.

The second genuine phrase is "the capacity of mankind for self government". Madison in fact used that phrase in The Federalist Papers (XXXIX), but nothing else in this is genuine. At some point in the mid-twentieth century somebody used the phrase as the basis for a new concoction: "We have staked the whole future of American civilization not upon the power of government, far from it, but upon the capacity of mankind for self-government." A variant version also circulated; by 1958 the two were combined into a single frankenquote with some nonsense about the Ten Commandments tacked on to the end. A more extended explanation is available here.

Other than these two phrases, the entire quotation is a fake.

Next up we have this from Patrick Henry:

It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not religionists, but by Christians, not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, property, and freedom of worship here.

Regular readers of this web log will recognize this as a 1956 comment from The Virginian. There is nothing of Patrick Henry in this at all.

So, these are the three out-and-out fakes. In addition, however, at least two of the others have serious problems as quotations. First, let's take a look at his Jefferson quotation:

God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis—a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.

You probably recognize the bulk of this as coming from Notes on the State of Virginia. But what about the opening sentence, "God who gave us life gave us liberty"? It doesn't belong here. Where did it come from? Well, it's a fragment from A Summary View of the Rights of British America: "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them." It has been forcibly joined to the Notes on the State of Virginia passage without any indication that that the two quotations do not actually belong together. The actual leading sentences ran in the original: "For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labor." This juxtaposition may have been suggested by the quotations on panel 3 of the Jefferson Memorial; it is still sloppy work.

And second comes an alleged Lincoln quotation:

The ways of God are mysterious and profound beyond all comprehension. 'Who by searching can find Him out?' God only knows the issue of this business. He has destroyed nations from the map of history for their sins. Nevertheless, my hopes prevail generally above my fears for our Republic. The times are dark, the spirits of ruin are abroad in all their power, and the mercy of God alone can save us.

Now first, I have to note once again that we are dealing with words not actually written or spoken by the alleged author, but rather words put into his mouth by the recollection of another person. In this case they are words attributed to Lincoln by the Reverend Byron Sunderland (occasional Senate chaplain) some ten years (1872) after Lincoln allegedly said them (late 1862). In a letter Sunderland recalled the visit with President Lincoln, and produced a passage of over five hundred words that he attributed to him. Is this likely? I'm going to ask the reader to engage in a little thought exercise. Think back to a speech you heard in 1999. Do you think you can recall accurately a passage of five hundred words from it? How much of it do you think you would recall accurately? A short passage, yes, a story, maybe, but much more than that? No, it's not bloody likely. The editors of Recollected words of Abraham Lincoln likewise note: "The length of this recollection alone makes it dubious as anything more than a Sunderland sermon based on a certain amount of Lincoln text."

Oh, and another thing—this is actually two sections of Sunderland's recollected speech jammed together. The first two sentences are the opening; the remainder is the closing. A great many words have been silently omitted.

All in all not a bad showing of dishonesty or ignorance. Three fakes and two problematic quotations. Swank could hardly have done better if he were trying to provide me with an object-lesson on the use of fake quotations. I do wish he could have seen his way clear to use the Franklin "primitive Christianity" quotation; it would have rounded out the fakes he did use nicely.

So we have a would-be mayor and a religion columnist each doing their bit to make sure that fake history marches on. It's hard to know what to say. Is there any likelihood that either of them will, oh, say—mend their goddamn ways? It's probably too much to hope for. Each of them made a conscious decision to abandon their principles to pimp for their faith, or so it would appear. Like all good advertisers they put their product above truth.

Update: Anna Falling fixed the minor error of attributing a fake quotation to the day Washington was born, but she left the fake quotation intact. I left this comment at her site:

Okay, cool, you fixed the minor error. What about fixing the major one? The fact is, Washington never said these words. They are an 1893 misquotation of an 1867 misquotation of words attributed to him by a biographer in 1835 on the strength of a recollection by an anonymous person. See http://fakehistory.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/fake-quotations-washington-and-governing-without-god/ for the gory details.

Will this make it through comment moderation? I suspect not. [14 August 2009]

As Thyme Goethe Bye

When I did a series a while back on "Forsaken Roots" (or whatever you want to call it) I ended up establishing a text for it, mostly because there was no authoritative source, and I'm picky about my texts. If I'm going to take the time to write a commentary on something, I want to be sure that I have something resembling a definitive text to work with, else what's the point? For my purposes at the time I simply picked four texts sort of at random—but not quite. I looked for older examples, and I wanted examples that were textually divergent. If the textual tree had branches, I wanted samples from as many as possible.

Actually I already knew that the tree had at least two branches, a longer recension and a shorter one. I'd picked that up pretty quickly when I went to Ed Brayton's commentary with questions from the longer recension only to find he didn't cover them; his commentary was based on the shorter recension. I suspected the most likely explanation was that the longer recension had grown by accretion from the shorter recension, but I didn't assume anything, which was just as well, as that hypothesis proved incorrect.

Since for technical reasons (the width of my screen mainly) I wanted to restrict my comparison to four versions, I decided to pick two from the longer recension and two from the shorter. If I could construct something resembling a reasonable text from them then I'd be off and running with my real purpose—doing the commentary. Close enough for jazz.

When my laptop died one of the things I lost—I'd never bothered to copy it—was the "Forsaken Roots" synopsis I'd used to construct the text. I figured I was done with it. But as I see new versions of it surface again like a goddamn hydra my textual sleuth keeps being activated—there's another one of those, I say to myself, noting the missing word "Supreme" in front of "Court" and the telltale period after "first" and before "Harvard". Where are they coming from? Idle Googling produced some answers (those missing-Supreme copies for example all go back to a website published by one Mary Jones), but I kind of wanted to know a bit more. I didn't particularly want to repeat the work I'd done, but I wanted something. I decided to see if I could establish a text for the longer recension.

So I went back to hunting for these things, examining example after example, looking for particular textual characteristics. Most examples turned out to be either from the shorter recension or from the Mary Jones family, neither of which were any use to me. A kind of sadness came over me as I examined these things in their original context, often a blog entry or a comment thread. First the text itself would appear, typically cut-and-pasted from the Mary Jones or some other familiar site. Next would come the admiring comments. This one is pretty typical:

Thanks for sharing. This was very informative. Neither in my secondary or college education, do I recall this information be read, taught or discussed. It shines a brighter light on the foundation of America for me.

(If you're wondering about the text of the version immediately above this comment, it's from the longer recension, but not part of the Mary Jones family, which, if the date is correct, had yet to be established.) All the elements are there—gratitude, admiration for the research, enthusiasm for the Christian light on early America, and curiosity (or anger) about why this information had been suppressed. Missing is the clear light of common sense which, for some reason, nobody ever seems to think to switch on. Is it bloody likely that these guys would have said or written the sorts of things attributed to them here? Would Patrick Henry really refer to this "great nation" before it had been established? What conceivable set of circumstances would have prompted Congress to pass a resolution recommending the Holy Bible for use in all schools? (The "1782" is a particularly nice touch on this one.) What on earth does it mean for the Bible to be quoted 94% of the time?

Sometimes the next question will be, Did you write this? And the reply comes (if at all) No, I got it from the internet. From the internet. Words from on high, I guess, supplied by the Internet Genii for the benefit of us lesser mortals. What do you mean, you got it from the internet? You might as well have said you found it blowing in the wind alongside the road one day, or you found it scurrying through the fields of Elysium. The internet? Somebody wrote those words, and somebody did the research behind them, and, you know, that somebody deserves credit.

Now, in all fairness, in this case not a lot of credit. The writer/researcher here has simply bundled together a clutch of remaindered misinfo, and retailed the package to the gulls. He or she may even be quoting from memory for some of them; there are pointless variations in them from the authentic text (though speaking of the authentic text of a forged passage seems a bit on the paradoxical side). The fake Madison is a case in point:

We have staked the future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments

sounds more like a fuzzily-remembered

We have staked the future of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government: upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God

than a poorly-copied one. (It is quite possible that a skip of the eye from the first capacity to the second caused the omission of the one genuine bit of Madison in this whole farrago—the capacity of mankind for self-government; that wouldn't explain the mangling of what follows, however.)

Occasionally—not often, but occasionally—somebody will question the item. Once I noted somebody actually asking the key question—what are your sources? More often it will be a remark to the effect that this can't be true, since the Founders were all deists, and anyway, what about the treaty of Tripoli? or something like that. And then maybe somebody will contribute a story about some kid they heard of from a friend of a friend who wasn't allowed to bring her Bible to show-and-tell, or some such idiocy. (Okay, I made that one up, but it's always something in that vein.)

But the thing that really gets me is the pitiful sense of gratitude emanating from these comments. Children picking up pretty pieces of broken glass and telling themselves they are diamonds. Playing with them, passing them around. The pathos of it all starts to overcome me. I almost want to depart from my rôle as observer and help out. The "Forsaken Roots" I could write for them! Oh, it probably wouldn't have Madison in it, but there are many famous names among the Founders, and I can cherry-pick with the best of them. Of course that would only be what Archie Goodwin calls fancy lying, rather than Forsaken's plain lying—a matter of taste, really, I suppose.

But, getting back to the textual issues at hand—the one thing that really bothers me, and for which I can see no answer whatsoever, is—what on earth created the shorter recension in the first place? Some horrible and malign force, early in the transmission history of this bagatelle, blew two large holes in it, seemingly at random. And yet, and yet, the disseminators of this savagely shattered version went right on distributing it, never noticing its broken condition, as mindless as those ants who, upon running out of food, start cutting off the back ends of their larvae to try to keep the front ends fed. And the hosannas of joy were just as heartfelt, regardless of the presence of palpable nonsense like

Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed ... to lay Jesus Christ as the only foundation for our children to follow the moral principles of the Ten Commandments?

(And that question-mark is part of the original text.) Did they not read what they were writing? How do you go about instructing a student to lay Christ as a foundation for our children to follow anything at all, let alone the moral principles of the Ten Commandments? It's madness—but nobody seems to notice.

And the other hole that makes it look as though Thomas Jefferson, rather than John Quincy Adams, was an officer in the American Bible Society—this is greeted as a welcome new discovery, rather than as a sign of the corruption of the text. And they say random mutation can't generate new information! Tell Jefferson! He never would have made president of the ABS without it.

The whole thing reeks of corruption. Fake quotations, themselves misquoted, and then further mangled through copying errors. False interpretations given new false twists, without anybody apparently bothered enough by any of it to even check the goddamn internet, their source for it all. Random holes fixed by random guesses—

Seriously, how much trouble is it to Google something? No, it looks like it's easier to just plain guess. Here's an example. The original text read:

However, in 1947, there was a radical change of direction for the Supreme Court. It required ignoring every precedent of Supreme Court ruling for the past 160 years. The Supreme Court ruled in a limited way to affirm a wall of separation between church and State in the public classroom. In the coming years, this led to removing prayer from public schools in 1962. Here is the prayer that was banished: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on Thee. We beg Thy blessings upon us and our parents and our teachers and our country. Amen.”

The Mary Jones version dropped a piece of it here, producing:

However in 1947, there was a radical change of direction in the Supreme Court. Here is the prayer that was banished: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on Thee. We beg Thy blessings upon us and our parents and our teachers and our country. Amen."

(Note also the change of "direction for" to "direction in"; this is one of the seven distinguishing characteristics of the Jones text. Of course the omission that follows is another.) And here's how one transmitter "fixed" the problem:

In 1947, it all changed! The Supreme Court removed the prayer that had been used for over 100 years at the opening of each session of the Court. "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on Thee. We beg Thy blessings upon us and our parents and our teachers and our country. Amen."

Again, is it likely that the Supreme Court began each session with a prayer begging the blessings of God upon parents and teachers? Doesn't this sound more like a school prayer? Hello? Is nobody awake in there? And this version is supposedly reprinted from the February 2005 edition of the Liberty Tree newsletter. No checking, even with the quasi-immortality of print in view? Just guesswork?

I guess. Sometimes my sense of exasperation overcomes my feelings of pathos. People this unreflective deserve to eat garbage.

But nobody deserves this. Not even those poorly-informed clowns who blather on about how Jefferson invented the concept of separation of church and state when he wasn't even in America at the time the Constitution was being written—how would he know anything? And besides, wasn't it some unknown justice named Hugo Black who decided to pull it out of an old forgotten letter written to the Danbury Baptists, of all people, and foist it off on all of us as settled law?—yeah, not even these crackers deserve this kind of treatment. Even canonical critics and flat-earthers deserve better.

Well . . . maybe not canonical critics.

Some Old Fart Doesn't Know

I'm in a nasty mood right now, so I say thank the gods for the Alvin Sun-Times of Alvin Texas. Under the title "Young People Don't Know" the Alvin Sun-Times presents a screed by one W. Edward Murphy so stunningly clueless, so absolutely idiotic, as to be my perfect punching-bag for this session. Of course it's not going to surprise you that I'm off yet again in pursuit of some poor clown who used some fake quotations to enliven his pitiful attempt at an editorial. But this is even more priceless. Here's a list of his fake quotations in order:

1. The Patrick Henry "religionists" quotation.
2. The George Washington "God and the Bible" quotation.
3. A George Washington "personal prayer-book" hodge-podge.
4. The Jefferson well-worn Bible frankenquote.
5. The Jefferson "best friend of government" quotation.

Are you beginning to get the picture? What if I added that he begins with the following claims:

1. "Of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, 52 of 55 were deeply committed Christians."
2. "The congress formed the American Bible Society..."
3. "The congress ... voted to purchase and import 20,000 Bibles for the people!"

Yes! Not only is this guy so pig-ignorant that he mistakes a 1956 newspaper for Patrick Henry, and a fake prayer-book for Washington's that isn't even in his handwriting, he gets the number of signers of the Declaration of Independence wrong and fancies that congress formed the American Bible Society! Yes, you guessed it—this W. Edward Murphy lifted his "facts" straight from that "America's Christian Roots" e-mail that was circulating a few years back.

Unbelievable. And Murphy wonders why we don't find these fake quotations in schoolbooks. Could it be, oh, say, because they're all fakes? No, it has to be some sort of crazy conspiracy.

It occurred to me, like a lightning flash, reading the quotes of these great men, that the degradation of our morality, of our political corruption, can be laid at the feet of our public educational establishment.

In the next column I will be specific about the history and decline of our educational establishment, and the ravages it has wreaked on our nation, particularly our children.

Okay, fine, but I believe I'll pass on that somewhat dubious pleasure, W. Edward Murphy. Quasi-plagiarism and fake quotations do not inspire me with any confidence in anything whatsoever you might have to say. Get your facts straight, and do your own damn research instead of lifting it from some idiotic e-mail, and then maybe you might have something to say that's worth listening to. Until then, forget about it.