I've been doing this for over a decade now and it seems these quotations aren't going away. Here is the latest use from WordNetDaily head honcho Joseph Farah:
Too many Americans have become convinced that we can, as a nation, have it both ways – denying God and still somehow hanging on to our liberty, prosperity and security. It just doesn’t work that way.The problem is Madison never said it. It's a fake quote. America's Founders -- notably the Founders who played leading roles like James Madison -- did engage in God talk and spoke of "blessings" and "Providence" and so on. However, they tended to be much more general in how they described God.
A quote from James Madison is very relevant here: “We have staked the whole future of the American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future … 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.”
He chose his words carefully, and they were accurate and to the point.
18 comments:
This pseudo-quotation goes back at least to 1958, when Frederick Nymeyer used it as column-filler on p. 31 of Progressive Calvinism: Neighborly Love and Ricardo's Law of Association, January 1958:
"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, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."
Nymeyer said he got it from the 1958 calendar of Spiritual Motivation, whatever that was.
This appears to be derived from an interpretation of a genuine Madison phrase, "the capacity of mankind for self government," expounded by Clarence Manion in various versions of his speech "The Key to Peace". Here is a 1950 example:
"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]
Madison's use of the phrase was different. Here's what was written 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 reconcilable 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 I've put in bold is the only genuine bit in the pseudoquotation, and ironically it is often dropped from the various later forms.
And Voltaire never said
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Stuff happens. What amazes me [well not really, things being what they are] is David Barton and Sarah Palin get more flak than
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/10/obama-quotes-nonexistent-bible-verse-during-speech/
I can see why you would no longer want "to pin them on him anymore." It's not very convincing to accuse someone of bad scholarship whose research has enabled him to confirm 5 of the 8 questionable quotations. But on the flip side, Tom is absolutely correct. I've pointed out misquotes from the other side far more times than I count, but I don't go around touting the superiority of my position just because a few of the other side's quotations are erroneous.
Well Bill I'm thoroughly UNIMPRESSED by David Barton's newest edition of "Confirmed Quotations" which attacks Drs. Noll, Hatch, Marsden, Frazer, Fea, Kramnick & Moore.
Some of his "confirmed quotations" Barton admits are hearsay. I have no problem with noting things like "David Webster said Thomas Jefferson said to him 'asdf jkl;'" provided the hearsay context is always noted.
So, no, it's not okay to say
"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"
is an accurate quotation of Jefferson's. The exact words are from Daniel Webster.
Likewise I've read "The Godless Constitution," and whatever the book's inadequacies it's bogus to assert they have "no sources."
"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."
Webster was quoting Jefferson.
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015078228122;seq=704;view=1up;num=656
First of all, there were 14 quotations, not 8 on the original list. Second, Barton's standard for "confirmation" is ridiculously low. Third, his "research" had been anticipated (by Chris Rodda and me, among others).
One of the quotations (#11 on the original list, #5 on the new), the bit from Samuel Adams to James Warren on 12 February 1779, should never have been there in the first place. It's a well-known passage, easily findable. It's confirmed, all right, but it shouldn't have taken any research to run down.
Another quotation, the piece from an 1883 decision by the Supreme Court of Illinois, likewise should never have been there, simply because the case is well-known. Barton absurdly attributed it to Holy Trinity v. U.S., but I recognized the quotation from my college days. I don't know why Barton counts it as confirmed; by normal scholarly standards it is a solid misattribution--wrong case, wrong court, and he left out the key words “a total severance of church and State is one of the great controlling foundation principles of our system of government” to boot.
On 24 July 2009 I sent David Barton information on where three of his "unconfirmed quotations" came from. Two of them, I see, he is now claiming as confirmed--the Daniel Webster recollection of an afternoon spent with Thomas Jefferson, and Jacques Mallet du Pan's hostile caricature of Benjamin Franklin. (Chris Rodda had previously written up the Webster piece, and I had turned up the du Pan saying.) Neither of these are really "confirmed"; the one is somebody's recollection after the passage of a quarter of a century; the other does not even pretend to be Franklin's words, but only du Pan's sneering summary of something he claims Franklin used to say. David Barton's "research", I notice, did not go any further than Chris Rodda's and mine, which I had sent him.
I did not tell him where another of his "unconfirmed" quotations (#14 on the original, #3 on the new version) might be found, and his current list doesn't reflect it, although he's claiming confirmation on the basis of having found similar sentiments in another piece by John Quincy Adams. Nonetheless Adams actually wrote in a letter to an autograph hunter "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," which are almost exactly the same words Barton originally used, without the need for assuming clumsy paraphrases. And yet somehow his "research" missed it. I wonder why.
The third quotation I did write him about (#1 on the original, #2 unconfirmed on the new) was the fake Patrick Henry "religionists" quotation that I ran down to a writer in The Virginian. It is not merely unconfirmed, it is disconfirmed, as we now know its true origin as a comment about, not by, Patrick Henry.
For the rest of them, the fake George Washington "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible" quotation was concocted by Howard Hyde Russell in 1893. It was ultimately based on an out-of-context bit from an undocumented story by James Kirke Paulding (as Barton correctly notes); Paulding of course never "actually heard Washington say these words" because he didn't know Washington. As Paulding states in the introduction to his book his anecdotes came from others who had known Washington.
Of the other quotations from the original list, both Madisons are known fakes (that is, their actual origins are known); the Lincoln attributions are modern; and the de Tocqueville "quotation" is actually a misquotation from an English traveller, Andrew Reed.
I don't know why the two Noah Webster quotations on the original list are listed as unconfirmed; they are excerpts from a letter he supposedly wrote to a New York newspaper around 1837 and which circulated as his during his lifetime. The letter is consistent with Webster's known sentiments. I assume that somebody has raised doubts about it, but I don't know on what basis. It looks genuine to me.
sbh,
I don't follow Barton other than to look up statements presented here at American Creation and a few other blogs, so I'm not familiar with the original list. Do you have a link to it, or could you copy it here?
SBH: Great work as usual.
Blogger Tophet said...
"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."
Webster was quoting Jefferson.
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015078228122;seq=704;view=1up;num=656
So we have the left wing calling real quotes fake. Hilarious.
Great catch, Toph.
The real quote is from Daniel Webster not Jefferson. I don't think it's accurate to say Webster was quoting Jefferson.
The point is that our only authority for this Thomas Jefferson "quotation" is the recollection of Daniel Webster at least twenty-seven years after the event. Daniel Webster is known to have visited Monticello for five days in December 1824, not long before Jefferson's death, and to have recorded Jefferson's views on luminaries past and present (Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, Andrew Jackson) at that time; the Monticello site seems to assume that this visit is meant, but that seems unlikely, since Webster refers to it as occurring in June. Presumably this was some earlier visit, so the lapse of time is likely to be even longer. How plausible is it to suppose that Webster remembered the exact words from a long conversation after (say) three decades or so?
There are a lot of unanswered questions about this letter. How did it come into the hands of newspaper or magazine editors in 1858? What happened to the original? When was it first published? (The Monticello site says it first appeared in the 2 June 1875 issue of the Christian Union, but David Barton and I both claim it appeared earlier, in the National Magazine of August 1858. This however was only an excerpt from the letter; the full letter had previously appeared in the 10 July 1858 issue of The Musical World. Was this the first publication? The version printed in the volume referenced at Hathitrust is taken from a newspaper clipping of unknown date; subsequent reprintings come from that volume.) Under the circumstances, how sure can we be that we have Webster's exact words, let alone that he accurately recalled Jefferson's?
David Barton deleted the original version of his list; here is a link to a copy at the Internet Archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070928060639/http://www.wallbuilders.com/LIBissuesArticles.asp?id=126
And here is a link to a piece I wrote some years ago giving sources and further information about each of the original quotations:
http://rationalrant.blogspot.com/2011/11/david-bartons-unconfirmed-quotationsthe.html
The gatekeepers who run debunking sites are the same people that killed me for issuing greenbacks in defiance of the Fed and the Rothschilds. - Abraham Lincoln
Forgive me, Lord! - Thomas Paine
May God bless this new theocracy - George Washington.
Thanks for the link. In that article, Barton claimed that he did not use any fake quotes in his book [i]Original Intent[/i] which arrives at the same conclusion as [i]Myth of Separation[/i]. Do you know if anyone has found any fake quotes in [i]Original Intent[/i]?
Mr. Rowe,
You said,
"The real quote is from Daniel Webster not Jefferson. I don't think it's accurate to say Webster was quoting Jefferson."
Is it therefore your position that Webster was lying?
Mr. sbh,
You said,
"The point is that our only authority for this Thomas Jefferson 'quotation' is the recollection of Daniel Webster at least twenty-seven years after the event."
Is it your position that Webster was quoting Jefferson but that his memory was faulty?
No I don't think he was lying. I think sbh's context explains my point. It has more to do with use of quotations when attempting to "remember" a conversation that occurred many years ago.
If I tried to remember a conversation I had years ago I would preface it with something like "I seem to remember" and then before I put quotations around the person's words I'm attempting to remember I would note that "I'm paraphrasing."
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