Impossible to Verify

I stumbled onto an internet meme involving an odd use of the phrase “natural history” that led me here, to a weblog entry entitled simply “Natural History is Not Science” by somebody calling himself Dr. David Shormann. The piece turns out to be the usual claptrap about how geology and astronomy and the like are “interesting, fun, and adventure-filled pursuit[s]” but not “real science” because you can’t examine a supernova in a laboratory or watch the continents drift in real time or whatever the nonsense of the day is—as it’s retread stuff I didn’t really pay attention. The thing that did catch my attention, however, was the author’s bizarre claim that it is impossible to ever verify a historical event. Speaking about the past he says “you can theorize all day long, but unless you have a time machine, you can never verify your ideas”.

WTF? Where’d that come from? Of course you can verify your ideas—or disprove them, for that matter. Here’s an example from something I’m working on right now. I have a narrative in front of me, a narrative that purports to be the true story of a man’s life in nineteenth century America. It has some quite interesting material in it, if true. But is it? According to Dr. David Shormann there is no way on earth that I can determine this, since I don’t happen to have a time machine. I guess I just have to take it at face value.

Or do I? The author claims to have been raised by a man named Drake on a farm adjoining the land owned by former President Andrew Jackson. No way I can test this, right? Think again. Our narrator supposedly lived there from say 1836 to 1847. This means that if I look at the 1840 census I should find an entry for a man named Drake somewhere near the entry for Andrew Jackson, and there should be at least one male inhabitant in the correct age range for our narrator. Finding that would tend to confirm our narrative; not finding it to disconfirm. (No evidence of this sort of course proves or disproves a claim; proof belongs to logic and mathematics, not to history.) There was no such man, by the way, not a good sign.

Our narrator claims to have met Kit Carson in a St. Louis hotel in 1847, and to have accompanied him thereafter to Bent’s Fort in Colorado. Well, Kit Carson’s activities are well-documented for this time-period. If the narrative were true we would expect to find other records of Kit Carson staying at a St. Louis hotel, and leaving town with a fifteen-year-old boy in tow. The records do indicate that Carson was in St. Louis in 1847, but he stayed at a private residence, not a hotel, and he went from there to Arizona with an army regiment and went on from there to California—not to Bent’s Fort. And no fifteen-year-old boy puts in an appearance. Not conclusive, but a bad sign.

Again, he claims to have bought land on the Sacramento River and ranched there from 1867 to 1872. If he did, there should be a title transfer recorded in the land records there (and there isn’t). And he should have shown up in Sonoma county or thereabouts in the 1870 census. Instead he shows up in that census at the opposite end of the state, in Santa Barbara county, landless and breaking horses for a living.

And again he spent time in the 1860s fighting the Apaches with General Crook—when General Crook according to army records, newspaper accounts, and a host of other documents was fighting the Shoshones in Idaho. He was the scout who brought in the Modoc leader Captain Jack in 1873 according to his own account—but reporters on the scene make no mention of him, assigning that feat to a regular army detachment, assisted possibly by some Warm Springs Indians. This is supported by the military records, by recollections of participants, and by contemporary references, none of which so much as allude to our narrator’s participation in events.

Now, not everything in this guy’s narrative failed to pan out. He claims for example to have been in Seattle in 1888, and sure enough, his name appears there in the city directory, just as it should. He claimed to have known Buffalo Bill Cody—and there are witnesses who saw Buffalo Bill embrace him and give him a seat of honor when he showed up as an old man at one of his wild west shows. But when so many records of the time fail to bear out his story, or worse yet, place him elsewhere from the place he claimed to have been, it’s impossible to take his account very seriously.

My point is this: contrary to Dr. Shormann’s claims, it is entirely possible to verify, or to controvert, historical hypotheses. Police investigators do it every day. So do epidemiologists. Realtors. Lawyers. Accountants. It’s part and parcel of the way we do business in the world. And we don’t need time machines to do it.

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]

Standard Rant #415

One thing that irritates me no end—and I've seen this all my life in letters to the editor, heard it from callers on talk radio, and now read it in comment threads—are people who recycle talking points and then pretend that these are their own notions, wisdom distilled from a lifetime's experience, or from wide reading, or from personal research. You know, the other day when I was casually thumbing through the writings of Lincoln (some guy will claim), I was struck by his prophetic words, "You cannot raise up the poor by pulling down the rich." Or as Patrick Henry put it (some earnest young woman will write) America was founded by Christians, not by religionists (and then act offended if you point out that Barton or Kennedy are hardly reliable sources). Well I never heard of this Barton (she will claim), I just like to read what our American Founders actually wrote.

You know why I call bullshit on these kinds of claims? Because you, Mr. Strawman, never got that from reading the writings of Abraham Lincoln; you got that from the misattribution of some ideologue. And you, Ms. Chimera, didn't get that religionists line from a lifetime reading the Founders; you picked it up from some fool with an ax to grind. How do I know that? In these cases it's easy; they're fake. You won't find the one in the writings of Abraham Lincoln, or the other in the speeches of Patrick Henry, because they're made up.

And even when they're genuine, you guys give yourselves away again and again by quoting Adams, say, with the same sentence omitted, or by citing rule number two of the 1642 Harvard student rules as rule number one. Copying from an anonymous e-mail is not doing your own research, and pretending that it is is not only dishonest, it makes you look as much of an ignorant fool as the ignorant fool whose work you're stealing.

For those who wish to pass off other people's work as their own I do have some suggestions. First, steal from the best. The more accurate the work you're stealing from, the harder it is to prove theft. It's the mistakes and misrepresentations that give you away.

Second, cross-check your material. If the material you're stealing cites a source, check it out. Maybe you can find something a bit different from that source that you can use that will at least give the appearance that you came to it on your own. If more than one writer is making similar points, blend them. That will muddy the trail. And if you can find somebody writing in opposition, check them out. If there was a mistake in the material you're stealing they will be likely to find it out, and at the very least it will enable you to anticipate likely objections.

Third, if at all possible add some original touch to your theft. A quotation, observation, or other bit of hard data that hasn't already been circulating with your stolen talking points will go a long way toward giving the impression of originality.

And fourth, don't repeat your talking points in the same order as everybody else. It's a dead giveaway. Two people looking at the same material independently are not very likely to come up with the same exact talking-points in the same exact order. And for God's sake vary the wording. Nothing is so fatal to the impression of originality as repeating the same wording as every other writer on the subject.

And last, leave the bogus points out. If your source says, for example, that the fossil Lucy is a known fake, drop that point. It's poison. There's a lot of made-up shit out there, and nothing is so fatal to the impression of originality as repeating a bogus "fact."

Of course you could sidestep the whole problem by not stealing in the first place. If you're using somebody else's research, say so. It really looks better than a transparently baseless claim of originality. And if you're too embarrassed to admit your source, maybe you're better off not using the stuff in the first place.

Freedom is a Gift Bestowed by God

I saw at ERV a reference to this story at Lost Ogle about The Baptist Messenger forging the signatures of Governor Henry and Secretary of State M. Susan Savage to Sally Kern's idiotic "Proclamation for Morality" in their display of the document. The story, about a shameful promotion held 2 July 2009 in which a group of "state leaders" prominently signed this crazy concoction which nobody reputable would touch with a ten light-year pole. Apparently attempting to give it a veneer of respectability the Messenger added the signatures of the Governor and Secretary of State (via Photoshop or the like) to a reproduction of the document. The Baptist Messenger has since printed the following retraction:

In the July 16 Messenger, the graphic representation of the Oklahoma Citizen’s Proclamation for Morality was misleading, indicating that Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry and Secretary of State Susan Savage had signed the document. This is not the case, and the Messenger staff apologizes for the oversight and error.

Now personally I wouldn't call deliberate forgery an "oversight and error," but it's better than nothing. I suppose. I noticed also that that the Baptist Messenger said nothing about the numerous forgeries and false statements that permeate the document, two of which were mentioned in an earlier entry here.

As I was staring at the bogus "graphic representation" another quotation caught my eye. It was a saying attributed to Benjamin Franklin, "Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God." It rang a bell, but something about it didn't seem right. Where had it come from?

William J. Federer, a notorious purveyor of fake quotations, has it in America's God and Country in the form "Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature." (Note the key words omitted in the proclamation.) And he attributes it to a 1927 book by William S. Pfaff, entitled Maxims and Morals of Benjamin Franklin.

So where did Pfaff get it? Well, I don't have the book, and as far as I can tell it isn't available online (it may well still be in copyright in the US, thanks to our archaic copyright laws), so I decided to start at the other end and see if I couldn't find it in Franklin's own writings. And it is, in fact, there, sort of:

The great deference, which Cicero paid to the judgment of the Roman people, appears by those inimitable orations, of which they were the sole judges and auditors. That great orator had a just opinion of their understanding. Nothing gave him a more sensible pleasure than their approbation. But the Roman populace were more learned than ours, more virtuous perhaps; but their sense of discernment was not better than ours. However, the judgment of a whole people, especially of a free people, is looked upon to be infallible; so that it has become a common proverb, that the voice of God is the voice of the people, Vox Dei est populi vox. And this is universally true, while they remain in their proper sphere, unbiased by faction, undeluded by the tricks of designing men.

Thank God! we are in the full enjoyment of all these privileges. But can we be taught to prize them too much? or how can we prize them equal to their value, if we do not know their intrinsic worth, and that they are not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature?

The point of the piece is that political power rightfully belongs to the people, not to a monarch, and the author draws on the example of the Roman republic:

We find that their dictator, a magistrate never created but in cases of great extremity, vested with power as absolute during his office (which never exceeded six months) as the greatest kings were never possessed of; this great ruler was liable to be called to an account by any of the tribunes of the people, whose persons were at the same time rendered sacred by the most solemn laws.

This is evident proof, that the Romans were of opinion, that the people could not in any sense divest themselves of the supreme authority, by conferring the most extensive power they possibly could imagine, on one or more persons acting as magistrates.

All this is taken from an essay entitled "On Government No. I" that was published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on 1 April 1736 as it appears on pp. 278-282 of the second volume of the Jared Sparks edition of The Works of Benjamin Franklin (1882). (Sometime I hope to do a piece about Jared Sparks as editor of the writings of the Founders; he was industrious, but he had his limitations, and was not above rewriting a text to improve on the words of the original.) But here's an interesting anomaly—this work does not appear in Alfred Henry Smyth's edition (1906-1908). Is there a reason for this?

Well, let's see. As Sparks notes in a footnote to this very item:

What proof there is, that the two essays on Government were written by Franklin, except that they appeared in his Gazette, I have no means of determining. The internal evidence does not appear very strong. They are included in Duane's edition. — Editor.

You see, the original essay was anonymous. The Pennsylvania Gazette, of course, was Benjamin Franklin's paper, but not everything that appeared in it was his. And as we learn from the first volume of Smyth's edition, "'The Essays on Government' which were published by Sparks and Bigelow, are acknowledged in a later issue of the Gazette to have been written by John Webbe." John Webbe was then an associate of Franklin's, later a bitter rival.

So this quotation, slightly mangled, comes not from Benjamin Franklin, the guy whose picture is on the quarter and whose name is known throughout the world, but rather to John Webbe, an obscure lawyer and newspaper publisher.

If Sally Kerns was really determined to use this quotation, it should have read:

Whereas, [the privileges of representative government] are not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature (John Webbe)...

And so on. Of course that wouldn't have had the same ring to it, the same sense of authority. It would have been better left out, along with the fake Patrick Henry and James Madison quotations previously alluded to.

So, what is the upshot of this tale of chicanery and forgery? Well, first, shame on the Baptist Messenger for adding the signatures of public officials to a very unofficial document. And also, shame on the Baptist Messenger for calling the protesters at this event "pro-homosexual". Again, shame on them for not mentioning the many distortions, lies, and forgeries in this tinkertoy document. Shame on Sally Kerns for spicing it with bogus quotations. And finally, a double helping of shame on each and every signer of this vile thing (over a thousand as of this date). Traitors to America, all of you.

Still More New Sightings of Old Fakes

Still flogging away at those same old dead horses, sbh? Well, yeah. How dead can they be when they keep turning up again and again in new documents?

From Abbie Smith's country comes an insane "Oklahoma Citizen's Proclamation for Morality," sponsored and perhaps written by local legislator Sally Kern. (See Ed Brayton for the details.) It is brim-full of crazy, but I'm only going to examine two of her seventeen Whereases, the two Ed Brayton conveniently put in bold. The first of the two is the pseudo-Madison "ten commandments" quotation, and the second is the pseudo-Henry "religionists" quotation.

About the pseudo-Henry quotation I have written ad nauseam; the language alone shows it could not have been by Patrick Henry (or his uncle as one ludicrous suggestion has it); it was of course written in 1956 for The Virginian, a short-lived pro-segregation periodical. (See here for a summary view.) Only a fool or a liar would continue to quote this after it has been so thoroughly debunked. (The entire "proclamation" suggests that the author may well be both.)

About the other fake quotation, the pseudo-Madison, I've written relatively little, partly because I am aware that Chris Rodda is going to do her usual thorough demolition on the thing, and I'd really like to see what she's turned up before engaging in my own observations. Still, my research gives us a picture of the course of events in the development of this fake, and I'm going to make a few notes on it here.

First, the forger has taken for his inspiration something Madison actually did write in the Federalist Papers (XXXIX):

The first question that offers itself is, whether the general form and aspect of the government be strictly republican? It is evident that no other form would be reconcileable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the revolution; or with that honourable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government. If the plan of the convention, therefore, be found to depart from the republican character, its advocates must abandon it as no longer defensible.

The portion in bold above became the basis for a new quotation that surfaced some time in the 1930s. (My notes show that I had found an example from 1933; today's Google book search only came up with examples from 1954.) Here is the new creation:

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.

The portion in bold the forger boldly lifted from the genuine bit given above. I have previously noted objections to the words future and civilization as used here; Madison preferred to use future as an adjective rather than as a noun, and typically used civilization in its sense of the process of becoming civilized, rather than as here the result of that process. However.

A second, seemingly independent version of the saying also circulated. In this case the circulator, and possibly the author, was Dean Clarence Manion, one-time right-wing radio commentator. In a 1950 speech he said:

"The Founding Fathers of the American Republic remembered this when they wrote our Declaration of Independence, and The First American state and Federal Constitution. As soon as these documents had been promulgated, one of the most erudite of the Founding Fathers, James Madison, said that 'we have staked the whole future of our American Political Institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self government'. He meant the Constitutional freedom of the American citizen will last just so long and only so long as that citizen keeps the capacity to govern himself according to the moral and legal standards of personal conduct that run through the Christian era all the way back to the time of Moses. [Cleveland Bar Association Journal, 1950, page 21]

Of particular interest is the reference to "our American Political Institutions," the words perhaps suggested by Madison's original "all our political experiments". Were it not for the part about staking the whole future this might pass as a misremembered version of the genuine quotation. With this Dean Manion version, however, we can see the "ten commandments" fake quotation in embryo. Note that the sense of the "ten commandment" version is found in Manion's interpretation immediately following the fake quotation. Indeed, making it even tighter, Manion earlier defined self-government as "the government of each individual person by himself according to the set-standards of the Ten Commandments". With this the stage was set for what would be the definitive version of this fake Madison quotation.

That came when some unknown person took the two versions and melded them together into a single Frankenstein quote, adding material to the end very like Manion's commentary. To make the process clearer I have placed the words taken from the first version in blue, those from the second (Dean Manion) version in orange (the struck-out words were not used by the forger), and the part seemingly suggested by Dean Manion's commentary in red:

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the whole future of our American 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.

It is notable that in all this verbiage one fragment of genuine Madison survives: the phrase "the capacity of mankind for self government." All the rest is completely bogus.

As far as I've been able to determine this version first appeared in the 1958 calendar of Spiritual Motivation, a source I personally have never seen. At least this is where Frederick Nymeyer says he got it in a piece of column-filler on page 31 of the January 1958 issue of Progressive Calvinism: Neighborly Love and Ricardo's Law of Association (PDF). From here we find it showing up in works by the usual suspects: The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) by Rousas John Rushdoony p. 541; Listen America! (1980) by Jerry Falwell p. 51; America's God and Country (1994) by William J. Federer p. 411, and so on. Liars for Jesus, all of them.

These two tired fakes (the pseudo-Patrick "religionists" and the pseudo-Madison "ten commandments" quotations) have been repeatedly debunked, and even some in the lunatic fringe have begun distancing themselves from them. Isn't it time to retire them permanently? I know I'm ready to see them shipped out to the south forty of the old propaganda homestead, plowed under, and used for organic fertilizer.

More Fake History from David Barton

Sorry I have been slow about blogging recently; I have some posts in preparation that should be ready soon, Allah willing. In the meantime, however, check out this post at American Creation, an actual historical site devoted to "the religious aspects of America's founding". It takes David Barton apart on such subjects as the Mayflower Compact and "In God We Trust". It's brief, but definitely worth reading.

Should a class focusing on the Bible be taught in public school?

The Roanoke Times asks this question in an online "poll" to which, as asked, the only correct answer is "no". Why do I say that--I, who am an advocate of teaching the Bible as one of the great classics of western civilization? I who believe that all our classics are being sadly neglected in an educational system intent on supplying factory workers for the gigantic assembly lines of yesteryear? Especially when the class in question is to be taught by a "20-year veteran, properly licensed, one of our most praised and most valued faculty members," according to school board chairman James Stephens. "She has the good judgment to make sure she does not get into proselytizing and keep it in an academic format," he claims.

The answer: This class is based on the course put out by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, a known purveyor of fake history. Check out their website. Try the Founding Fathers page, for example. What do we find there? Well, first there's the bizarre assertion that "The Bible was the foundation and blueprint for our Constitution, Declaration of Independence, our educational system, and our entire history until the last 20 to 30 years." This is at the very least a considerable overstatement; in point of fact the Bible was neither the foundation or the blueprint for any of those things, ever. Not in the last twenty to thirty years, not in the last century, not at all. This is crazy talk--but not just crazy talk. It is far worse than that. It is Christian Nation talk.

Next we have a quotation attributed to Patrick Henry. No, it isn't the one I trashed the other day; this is a different one. "The Bible is a book worth more than all the other books that were ever printed," said Patrick Henry, according to this site. Well, not exactly. What Patrick Henry allegedly said of the Bible--and what we have is only a third-hand report--"Here is a book worth more than all the other books that were ever printed : yet it is my misfortune never to have found time to read it, with the proper attention and feeling, till lately. I trust in the mercy of Heaven, that it is not yet too late." This anecdote first appeared in William Wirt's Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (1818; p. 402); his source, apparently, was a letter from George Dabney. In other words what we have here is not something actually written by Patrick Henry, but only something that somebody else said he said--and lacking the letter, we don't even know if Dabney heard this himself, or only reported what somebody else had told him.

After this we come to a quotation attributed to, of all people, Horace Greeley. Apparently it has somehow escaped the NCBCPS's notice that Horace Greeley was not one of the Founding Fathers. He was a newspaper editor who belonged to the Civil War generation, an anti-slavery advocate, a contemporary of Lincoln, the Let The Erring Sisters Go Their Ways guy. Still, what is he supposed to have said? "It is impossible to enslave mentally or socially a Bible reading people. The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom." Is this a genuine quotation? No source is given, either here, or in any of the other works quoting this that I could run down. It sounds like the sort of thing Greeley might have written. He liked the word groundwork and the expression human freedom. He was a Bible-reader from way back, having learned to read from it at the age of four. He was no doubt aware of the way the story of Moses was read by the slaves as a metaphor for their own liberation, and could well have had this in mind. But I couldn't find it, in spite of going through a number of Greeley's works. The oldest source I could locate (and this thanks to Google search) was an 1889 volume entitled Vital Questions: The Discussions of the General Christian Conference Held in Montreal, Que., Canada, October 22nd to 28th, 1888. On pp. 197-98 we read:

And so of our own and all other lands. Romish dogma we know to be a source of religious, social, and national peril. "But it is impossible," said one of the great leaders of public thought in America, " to mentally and socially enslave a Bible-reading people, for the principles of the Bible are the ground-work of human freedom."

The "great leader of public thought in America" isn't named, but Greeley would certainly qualify. However, neither this nor any other work that gave this alleged quotation gave any source, beyond attributing it to Horace Greeley. The burden of proof, remember, is on the person who would claim this as genuine.

Moving on, we have "I have always said, and will always say, that studious perusal of the sacred volume will make us better citizens." This is attributed to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, at least, actually was a Founding Father, but the quotation isn't much to boast of. In this case the source is known, thanks to Chris Rodda, and it is both misquoted (surprise) and second-hand. It appears in a letter written by Daniel Webster describing a conversation he had had with Jefferson a quarter of a century earlier. Supposedly Jefferson told 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." Unfortunately, that same letter shows Jefferson's opinion of church-state relations: he said that "Sunday schools ... presented the only legitimate means, under the constitution, of avoiding the rock upon which the French republic was wrecked." Not public schools, if you please, but Sunday schools.

Finally we have a few random assertions.

While President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was elected the first president of the Washington, D.C. public school board, which used the Bible as a reading text in the classroom.

I'll let Chris Rodda handle this one:

This myth about Jefferson and the Washington D.C. schools was created by combining two things. One is that, in 1805, Jefferson was elected president of the Washington City school board. The other is an 1813 report by the teacher of one of the city's early public schools, showing that the Bible and Watts's Hymns were used as reading texts in that school. The problem with the story is that the school that these books were used in didn't exist until several years after Jefferson left Washington and the school board.

In other words, this one is just a plain, or garden, lie. Next.

There was a secular study done by the American Political Science Review on the political documents of the Founding era, which was 1760-1805.

This study found that 94% of the documents that went into the Founding ERA were based on the Bible, and of that 34% of the contents were direct quotations from the Bible.

Why people pay attention to preposterous statistics would probably make a fascinating study for somebody to undertake, but I'm not going to worry about it right now. Ninety-four percent of Founding era documents are based on the Bible? Come on...that's just not credible. The fact is that the study says nothing about ninety-four percent of Founding Era documents being based on the Bible--nothing. What the study actually says is that thirty-four percent of the citations in Founding Era documents are from the Bible. The study also says that three quarters of these citations are from printed sermons; if we leave these out of the picture, then the figure for Biblical citations drops to eight and a half percent.

The thing is, why should we trust a curriculum designed by people who use dubious quotations (and then can't even get them right), who think that Horace Greeley was one of the Founding Fathers, who get even simple facts wrong, and who cite preposterous (and bogus) statistics without any sense of shame? These people are either blitheringly incompetent, or shameless liars. Either way they have no business putting together a course on anything whatsoever, and no teacher, no matter how well-intentioned, ought to have to use such a steaming pile of horse manure. Selah.

This Great Nation Was Founded Not By Religionists

There are few people that I personally despise more than canonical critics, but Christian Nationites are almost certainly among them. David Barton and his gang of loony liars have done more than a small part in undermining American values and destroying the fabric of this once great nation--and continue to today, thanks to the National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools, the late D. James Kennedy, and other unscrupulous types more concerned about making a buck off the gullible than about the survival of the nation that brought them up. One of the tricks of their nefarious trade is the invention of fake quotations from the Founding Fathers designed to make them look like modern Christian Nationites. Many of them have been discredited; others lurk in the limbo of the unknown.

It is not always appreciated that the Founding Fathers were a diverse lot with differing opinions on exactly how the new nation ought to be put together. Some of them favored having a state religion, as all respectable nations had in their time. Others--Jefferson, Washington, Madison, for example--favored keeping religion out of government altogether. This was the winning faction.

Among the famous Founding Fathers on the wrong side of that particular issue was Patrick Henry, slave-owner and the reputed author of the words "Give me liberty, or give me death." He undoubtedly did write some pretty crazy stuff about church-state relations, but--did he say, as the Christian Nationites claim:

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!

Okay, it's tripe, but that's not really the point. Some people are obviously impressed with it. A quick check of Google Books reveals its popularity. One book is listed as having this quotation in 1994, another in 1996, and still one more in 2000. Starting with 2002, however, it begins to take off. Three books quote it in 2002, four in 2003, six in 2004, and seventeen in 2005. While that was a high point, ten books quote it in 2006, eleven in 2007, and two this year.

Well, you can't argue with success, right? If so many authors use it, well, then Patrick Henry must have said it. The market has spoken, as Stephen Colbert would say.

Still, there is one oddity at least. Nobody seems to have heard of this saying before 1994. Now Google books is a neat little tool, but it is far from infallible. However, if Patrick Henry had really said, or written, or muttered this little piece of garbage, you'd think it would show up somewhere. And in fact Patrick Henry scholars have searched his recorded words, and found--nothing.

Even though it doesn't show up in the Google books search, the saying apparently first appeared (at least as Patrick Henry's) in The Myth of Separation by David Barton in 1988. Barton himself has since repudiated it, describing it as "unconfirmed" in his WallBuilder's website. He does hold out hope that it will turn out to be genuine, however, citing some absolutely irrelevant quotations by and about Patrick Henry, a cheesy trick that used to be exploited by the brave Cold War liars who promulgated fake quotations attributed to Lenin, Stalin, and other Communist leaders. (Anybody else remember Stormer's None Dare Call It Treason?) Humorously Barton goes on to make the suggestion (without giving the slightest evidence to support it) that "there is a possibility that the unconfirmed quote came from Henry's uncle, the Reverend Patrick Henry. We find no record of the Reverend's letters or writings. Therefore," he suggests, "until more definitive documentation can be presented, please avoid the words in question."

Need I remind the Myth of Separation author that the burden of proof is always on the person who puts forth a quotation as genuine? Cite your source, damn it--cite it. That's all you have to do. The works of the Founding Fathers are not even that hard come by, for the most part. You usually can find them in multi-volume sets of speeches and letters and publications and all like that there. If you got took by a bum secondary source--well, them are the breaks. At least if you've cited it, people will know who to blame.

In this case, however, it should have been clear that something was off in the brew. The word "religionists"--it ain't right. The word's been around since the seventeenth century, and our patriot could have used it--but not in the sense it's used here. That's pure twentieth-century, not Patrick Henry's era in the least. In his time a religionist was a fanatic, somebody obsessed with religion. The author of this quotation, however, is using it in a strange generic sense, meaning apparently people of different religions joined together, or something of that sort.

Of course the answer to this riddle is simple--these words were not written or spoken by Patrick Henry. Nor did they come from Patrick Henry's uncle (a ridiculous idea, by the way). Here is the quotation in context:

"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 have been rich; and if they had not that and I had given them all the world, they would be poor."

Patrick Henry, Virginia,
His Will

"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."

I got this from the September 1956 issue of The American Mercury (p. 134) where it appears as a page filler. Their source: the April 1956 issue of The Virginian, a short-lived segregationist rag.

So dig this, all you dupes and pawns who mindlessly copied the crap that David Barton fed you. These jejune and insipid words you have enshrined in your books and on your websites are not pearls of great price delivered by one of America's patriots. They were written by some anonymous racist hack, the dregs of the era of McCarthy and George Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan. Enjoy the feast--and I hope you choke on it.

Dubious Documents: The Unlikely Life of William Drannan

While wandering about online looking for Dubious Document material I might have overlooked, I stumbled onto two different lists of the greatest literary hoaxes of all time (here and here). Neither broke any new ground, exactly, and both had some rather questionable entries. Secret Mark and a supposedly forged tragedy of Sophocles really don’t belong here, for example, and others—Clifford Irving's autobiography of Howard Hughes and Hitler's supposed diaries—were frauds so transparent that they really are more examples of publishers' impositions than literary hoaxes. Anyway, after thinking about it, I thought I'd put together my own list of, well, not necessarily the greatest literary hoaxes of all time, but, shall we say, the most interesting literary hoaxes of all time. I intend to start with the tenth item on my list and work my way up over the course of time to number one.

So first comes #10: William Drannan's Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains (1899).

When I was looking through my grandmother's friendship book—that's a book people used to keep their collection of people in—there was a space for each person to enter his or her favorite book. There was an interesting range of books there. The Bible put in an appearance several times, and Riders of the Purple Sage, and so did another, perhaps less familiar volume. It was nothing less than the true-life adventures of a frontier scout—the boon companion of Kit Carson, and the chief of scouts during the Modoc War. William Drannan may not have made much of an impression in the history books, but he definitely made an impression on the minds of boys growing up in the days before World War I changed everything. Little Robert E. Howard—later to be the creator of Conan the Barbarian and King Kull—read his account avidly, and years later recalled seeing the author "wandering about the streets of Mineral Wells … trying to sell the pitiful, illiterate book of his life of magnificent adventure and high courage; a little, worn old man in the stained and faded buckskins of a vanished age, friendless and penniless." Howard—a contemporary of my grandmother and her friends, by the way—would have been about five or six at the time. "God," he wrote H. P. Lovecraft, "what a lousy end for a man whose faded blue eyes had once looked on the awesome panorama of untracked prairie and sky-etched mountain, who had ridden at the side of Kit Carson, guided the waggon-trains across the deserts to California, drunk and revelled in the camps of the buffalo-hunters, and fought hand to hand with painted Sioux and wild Comanche. … Always the simple, strong men go into the naked lands and fight heroical battles to win and open those lands to civilization. Then comes civilization, mainly characterized by the smooth, the dapper, the bland, the shrewd men who play with business and laws and politics and they gain the profits; they enjoy the fruit of other men’s toil, while the real pioneers starve."

The thing is, it wasn't really like that at all. Thirty-One Years on the Plains is actually a work of fiction, with precious little in the way of facts to back it up. No biographer of Kit Carson has ever taken it seriously. Actual participants in the Modoc war—Major Frazier Boutelle, whose cool courage saved the troops in the Lost River Fight; "Colonel" William Thompson, a leader of the Oregon Volunteers and a legend in his own mind; Jeff Riddle, the son of the interpreters Frank and Toby Riddle—all of whom were unquestionably present—denounced the work as a pack of lies. And so it is. William Drannan told of his conversations with the Modoc leader, Captain Jack—who spoke no English. (He apparently understood it well enough, but always spoke through interpreters.) Drannan described two failed attempts to take the Modoc stronghold—one under Frank Wheaton and one under General Canby—when only one (the former) took place. He wrote of a "Mr. Berry" who came in to negotiate with the Modocs (when he, Drannan, could have done a better job)—a man unknown to the history of the war. And he cast himself as the Chief of Scouts—a rôle actually taken by a fellow named McKay—Daring Donald McKay, as he billed himself in a dime novel version of his life.

The real William Drannan continues to elude researchers. He apparently was involved in the hotel and restaurant businesses in Seattle and Portland during the 1890s, and he and his wife hawked his books—according to some his wife actually wrote them—around the country during the early years of the twentieth century. Not much else seems to have turned up on him.

Is there any truth in the book? As a student of the Modoc War, I was fascinated by the oddity that while Drannan was wrong on major events, his details were often correct. He had the right people at the right places—the obscure people, that is. Not the major players. I got the feeling that he must have at least lived in the area at some time. Even his mistakes could be interesting. The "Mr. Berry" he referred to, for instance. The real person who took the rôle assigned to "Mr. Berry" was a lawyer named Elijah Steele. He had two partners in his law practice: Rosborough (who also played a part in the Modoc War) and Berry (who didn't). Now, naming the wrong partner in a local law firm is the kind of mistake that only a local would make.

And another thing—he remembered a footnote to the war that made a local stir but barely attracted any attention outside the area. When the Modoc leaders were hanged afterward, the reporters present had a kind of race going to see who could first get the news to the telegraph station. Relays of horses and riders were set up by rival papers to see who could get to the Yreka telegraph first—some sixty or seventy miles away. The San Francisco Chronicle man even tried carrier pigeons. One reporter tried to get ahead of the others by sending his report to a telegraph station further off, in Ashland, Oregon. There was quite a bit of local excitement over these preparations, but little outside interest. Drannan, however, cast himself as one of the messengers carrying the news of the execution.

According to his story, he was the one who came up with the idea of trying the Ashland telegraph rather than the closer Yreka station. In his version of events his trusty horse—I forget his name—came through for him and Drannan carried the day, getting the news out first from Ashland. Needless to say, this is not how events actually worked themselves out. In point of fact the Ashland rider got drunk on the way, fell off his horse, and came in last in the race. Was Drannan that rider? Probably not, but the significant thing is that he remembered the event at all, when it was so quickly forgotten by everybody else. (His is the only version of the Modoc War to mention it until Oliver Knight's Following the Indian Wars came out in 1960.)

Some slight confirmation for his presence at the time comes from a note buried among the Applegate papers; according to this Drannan was a civilian contractor bringing supplies to the army during the Modoc War. So perhaps he was there, somewhere, at the edges of significant events. What about the Kit Carson stuff? Again, there is a slight confirmation in a relatively recently discovered inscription in Arizona. Kit Carson was there in 1849, and if this inscription is to be believed, so was William Drannan. The rock inscription reads "Killed Indians here 1849 Willie Drannan." So maybe, just perhaps, there was a grain of truth here as well. "What do you make of this?" an Elder of an Arizona tribe asked, on being presented with the evidence. He was told that it was a part of history. "Well, I call it murder," he responded. A far cry from the "life of magnificent adventure and high courage" Howard saw it as.

Next: #9--Chief Seattle's Speech.

Dennis James Kennedy (1930-2007) R.I.H.

Vibrations in the ether bring me glad tydings: Dennis James Kennedy no longer breathes and walks this earth among us. He has, as they say, gone on to his reward.

Charles Erskine Scott Wood, in Heavenly Discourse, revealed how such figures as Anthony Comstock and Teddy Roosevelt were received in heaven. When Billy Sunday, the first radiovangelist, showed up, St. Peter had to bleach him in a sulfurous pit to remove the stench.

In 1953, during the height of the McCarthy era, dance instructor Dennis J. Kennedy was inspired to wonder about his own potential reception in heaven by the question of a Philadelphia preacher: "Suppose that you were to die today and stand before God and he were to ask you, 'What right do you have to enter into my heaven?'—what would you say?" This improbable scenario apparently was the catalyst for the transformation of D J Kennedy, dance instructor, into D. James Kennedy, gay-basher, history-faker, and anti-science zealot.

The evil this man did lives on. The good, if any, appears to have died long ago. I spent some time scanning the obituaries for positive things to say about this Christ-monger, and all I could find were:

He was kind to a Baptist teenager... (Albert Mohler, Jr.)

and

Dr. Kennedy lived modestly and was never tainted by moral or financial scandal. (Washington Post)

On the other hand the work he did in promoting false stereotypes of gays and lesbians, in supporting putting AIDS victims in concentration camps, in opposing scientific research towards cures for certain diseases on lame theological grounds, in rewriting American history to support the Christian America lie, in rewriting biology, geology, and physics to support the crazy notions known as "Young Earth Creationism"--well, if Satan is truly the father of lies, then we know whose side "Dr." Dennis James Kennedy was on. And indeed, from The Daily Pulp, we learn:

According to sources close to the prince of darkness, the late Rev. D. James Kennedy, of Coral Ridge Power Hour fame, has been assigned a key position in hell.

"He's going to make a great addition and we've already made room for him," one of Satan's lieutenants reported to the Pulp. "The hard part was figuring out where to put the little devil. We considered the eighth circle with the frauds. I mean, c'mon, Kennedy was a "man of God"? Would Jesus sponsor a hate festival? As we say down in these parts, hell no. Then there's the fourth circle, for the materialists. Have you seen that gaudy palace he built on Federal Highway? Plus, he loved the rich and never gave two snots about the poor. But we decided he'd make a better addition to the fifth circle, where he'll fight with other wrathful hatemongers on the river Styx."

I suppose the excuse that might be made for him was that he was doing what was right in his own mind. It's a pretty poor excuse, if you ask me.